#false master

KH Heartless SoP #395

‘Beloved master, over the past five years I’ve spent many weeks in isolation at Dharmagiri, practicing Vipassana meditation as taught by S.N. Goenka. I’ve never experienced such pain, suffering and doubt ever before. Presently I feel very exhausted, tired, yearning deeply to connect with my heart. My interest in the meditation practice is passing away. Beloved master, is this type of meditation practice necessary? Is it helpful? Can awareness and celebration alone pierce to the depth of the mind and dissolve the darkest nights?’ Sagaresh, the Vipassana meditation was invented by Gautam Buddha, and for twenty-five centuries Buddhists have been torturing themselves. Now, who told you to go to Dharmagiri to S.N. Goenka, to learn a meditation for which the whole context is missing? The meditation was perfectly right for a man like Gautam Buddha. Always remember, everything is related, interdependent with a certain context. A German poet, Heine, was lost in a forest for days. Utterly tired, exhausted, hungry, he could not find the way; neither could he find anyone who could show him the way. In the nights he was resting up on the trees; otherwise wild animals would destroy him. And there came the full-moon night. He had written many poems… the moon had been one of his most loved objects, and he had written beautiful songs about it. But that night, tired and hungry and afraid, he looked at the full moon and he could not believe it—what he saw in the full moon he had never seen before. And he had been a lifelong moon gazer. That night he saw a loaf of bread! What you see depends on you. People see the faces of their loved ones, people see their dream girls in the moon, but nobody has ever seen a loaf of bread. But his experience was absolutely authentic—but only in his context. I am reminding you of this because people tend to forget that life is a very interwoven, interdependent, cosmic whole. You cannot take a part out of it and keep it alive, meaningful. I will not tell you to do Vipassana unless I can also give you the experience of Gautam Buddha. Poor Goenka cannot understand this. He is just a businessman. What does he understand about the context in which Vipassana arose? Gautam Buddha had lived in tremendous luxury, surrounded by beautiful girls, beautiful palaces. The whole night was a celebration; the day was for rest, the night for dances and drinking. Out of this experience he became tired. He had seen all the beautiful girls; there was nothing more to be seen. He had seen that every man and woman is just a skeleton, covered with a thin skin. Just think for a moment: here all of you are skeletons covered with thin skin! This body and its beauty fades very soon. He had seen all that was possible in those days for a man of power and riches to see, but he could not find peace, contentment, silence. He could not find himself. Utterly frustrated, he moved out of the palace one night—because this life is going to end in a few days, or in a few years. It is not something to cling to. Each moment death is coming closer; before death grabs you, you have to figure out something which is eternal, which is immortal. All that you see around you is made of the same stuff as dreams are. Do you think you are for the first time on the earth? On the same earth millions of people have come and simply disappeared into thin air. Scientists have calculated that the place you are occupying has been occupied by at least ten people before you. You are sitting on ten corpses! And don’t think much of yourself, because you cannot get out—you will be the eleventh. And remember, it is not a laughing matter for you. Those ten corpses will laugh at you: ‘Look, the poor fellow was thinking of great things and finally is flat on the pile of corpses.’ Gautam Buddha’s search for truth, for himself, for the source of life which is eternal, cannot be the search of a poor man who is hungry, who is searching for a loaf of bread. But people have completely forgotten Gautam Buddha. They have taken his meditation out of context. He could meditate because there was nothing else in the world to think about, to desire, to be ambitious for. The world was, in a way, finished the day he left his house; he never looked back. I am reminded of a beautiful story… Buddha was afraid that if he went into the mountains of his own kingdom, his father’s armies would find him; he would not be able to escape. He was the only son of an old king, who was hoping that he would succeed him. And he had made a big kingdom for him. So he immediately passed beyond the boundaries of his kingdom to the neighboring kingdom. And the king was very furious. He ordered the armies not to leave even a single inch unsearched: ‘Look around, all over the country.’ Gautam Buddha was not found, but he was not aware that the kingdom he had entered belonged to a friend of his father. So the father informed this king and other kings surrounding his kingdom, ‘You have to find my son. In my old age at least you can do this much for me; we have been friends.’ The neighboring king found Gautam Buddha and he said, ‘If you are angry, if you have fought with your father… It happens. It is not something strange or unfamiliar; fathers and sons have always been fighting. Don’t be worried. I have only one daughter and no son—get married to my daughter and you will have two kingdoms together. Your father is old; he cannot live long. And my kingdom is far bigger than your father’s. He is my friend and I have come with a request. You have everything to gain, nothing to lose. You get a beautiful wife, a great kingdom, and of course your own kingdom is there. You will be a greater king than me or your father because your kingdom will be bigger than the kingdoms we have. You will have two kingdoms together.’ Gautam Buddha said, ‘You don’t understand the point. I have not fought with my father, I have not been angry with him, and I have not come here in search of a girl. I am not interested in a kingdom, howsoever big it is. But I would like to ask you a few questions; you are my father’s friend. First tell me, you say your girl is very beautiful—is this beauty going to remain forever? Will she not one day be old?’ The king said, ‘You ask strange questions. Everybody becomes old.’ ‘And do you think,’ Gautam Buddha asked, ‘she will never die?’ The king laughed. He said, ‘You are hilarious. Everybody dies.’ Gautam Buddha said, ‘I don’t want to get married with someone who is going to die.’ The king said, ‘She is not going to die tomorrow.’ Gautam Buddha said, ‘You cannot give any guarantee. Are you sure you will be alive tomorrow?’ The king said, ‘I have never thought about it. I hope that I will be alive, but I cannot be certain. But you are creating anxieties in my mind. I had come to take you to the palace and it seems you are trying to convince me to follow you to the mountains.’ Gautam Buddha said, ‘It is better—there is still time, it is still light; maybe you have a few days more to live. Devote these few days to a search for something which cannot be taken away from you. Your youth will disappear, your beauty will disappear, your kingdom will one day belong to somebody else. And what does it matter, when you are dead, to whom your kingdom belongs, whether he is your son or somebody else’s son?’ The king said, ‘You are a dangerous fellow. I don’t want to talk to you.’ He informed Gautam Buddha’s father, ‘I have met your son; he is in the mountains in my kingdom. I tried hard, but he is very convincing. And he has created such anxiety in me that I have not slept since. I am continuously thinking of death—what is going to happen after death? What have I gained by having this big kingdom? I am a poor man inside. I have never looked into my own being; I am not even acquainted with myself. I request to you: don’t try to prevent him, let him go and let him search. What we have missed, perhaps we can hope he will find it.’ Gautam Buddha could sit silently, desireless, thoughtless, moving inwards, because the outside had lost all interest. He had seen it—that it is just a phenomenon, the way you see a film. But there are idiots who even seeing a film will cry, will weep, will laugh, because they will become identified and they will forget that there is nothing on the screen, it is just a projected film. Our whole life is not much more than that, but to know it you have to go through it. Gautam Buddha had a great chance to experience life and see its futility. This gave him the opportunity to sit in deep silence, undisturbed. Vipassana was discovered in these moments. My own effort here is not to give you, Sagaresh, any meditation like Vipassana directly. This place is not a place of ascetics—people are enjoying everything. I want you to enjoy and to see the futility of it. I want you to see how many times you become enlightened and how many times you become unenlightened. I know one day you will simply get tired and you will say, ‘Finished!’ Not finished like Nandan—she has started again. But she is going to be finished one day. When she says goodbye to her last boyfriend it will be possible for her to meditate; particularly a meditation like Vipassana. Otherwise you can sit with closed eyes and beautiful girls will harass you. That has been the experience, down the ages, of thousands of meditators: it is strange, the moment you sit to meditate, suddenly, from nowhere, such beautiful girls start coming. And you open your eyes and there is nobody. And not only girls. If you have not known money, thoughts of money; if you have not known power, thoughts of power; if you have not known what it means to be a celebrity, then a deep desire to become famous… And the mind will go on weaving a thousand and one thoughts and desires. And so-called teachers like Goenka will go on teaching you, ‘Don’t allow these thoughts in your mind.’ And the more you push them away, the more they will come close to you. You will throw away one girl and you will find there is a queue of girls, and at the end of the queue is standing Sophia Loren. Now, naturally you think, ‘Vipassana can be done later on.’ A man said to his friend, ‘Last night was just the greatest experience of my life.’ The other asked, ‘What happened?’ He said, ‘I went fishing and I caught such big fish that I could not believe it. Even to carry one fish to the shore was difficult. And the whole night I was fishing.’ The other said, ‘This is nothing. You are saying you had the greatest experience—the greatest experience happened to me. Last night when I dreamt, what I saw I could not believe. On one side was Marilyn Monroe, utterly nude; on the other side was Sophia Loren, utterly nude.’ The other man could not contain himself. He said, ‘Stop. Why did you not call me? At such a moment! And what were you going to do with two such women? One is enough for you; one you should think of for your friend. You call me your best friend?—this is great friendship.’ The man said, ‘You haven’t heard the whole thing. I had gone to your home to find you, but your wife said you had gone fishing!’ If life has not been a rich experience—if it has been a repressive, religion-dominated, conditioned phenomenon—you cannot do Vipassana. In twenty-five centuries, millions of people have been doing Vipassana. How many have become Gautam Buddhas? My own analysis is very simple, but very significant: you should not repress anything in your life. Live a non-repressive, joyous life. Soon you will find all those joys and all those pleasures are empty. Unless you have found through your own experience that pleasures are not pleasures, but simply toys to keep you ignorant, to keep you engaged… Once you have found that through your own experience—remember that is most fundamental; it has to be your own experience—then Vipassana is the simplest meditation. You don’t have to go to any businessman to learn it. Buddha had never gone to any S.N. Goenka. These kinds of people existed at that time too—businessmen who were ready to teach you at a certain price. I have never met or seen Goenka, but I saw one of his interviews. He says that he met me in Madras. In my whole life I have been only once in Madras, and I remember perfectly, I have not met any Goenka. He is simply lying. And his Dharmagiri is not very far away from here. If he wants to meet me he can come any day—perhaps a five-hour drive. But he does not have the guts, because I am very merciless. When I see a fox pretending to be a lion, then I do what needs to be done: expose the fox, take away the hypocrisy. He has not lived a life of love, he has not lived a life of pleasures; he has not lived at all that which can create the context in which Vipassana is possible. He is simply a refugee from Burma. And because Burma is a Buddhist country, everybody knows what Vipassana is; just as every Christian knows the Christian prayer, every Buddhist knows Vipassana. Coming from Burma he knew the structure, intellectually, of what Vipassana is. And here he found many people searching for meditation. And he does not create a situation in which to be associated with him becomes dangerous for you. He is a non-controversial businessman. You will not offend anybody if you go to Dharmagiri. But if you come here, you don’t see many Indians here. The reason is clear: to be associated with me in any way is to be condemned by the outside society. People start saying that you have also been hypnotized, you have also become corrupt. Dharmagiri is safe, because he does not say to you, ‘You have to drop tradition, you have to drop your conditioning, you have to get out of all the knowledge that has been forced upon you. Unless you are so clean, unconditioned, unorthodox—neither Hindu nor Mohammedan nor Christian—you will not be able to enter the world of meditation.’ He does not say anything like that. You just enter Vipassana as you are. Nothing is demanded from you, that you are first to go through a fire to be purified, that you have to get rid of the society which is utterly polluted. People like Goenka are non-controversial, kindergarten school teachers. They don’t understand the complexity of meditation. Vipassana comes in the end; you cannot begin with Vipassana. To begin with Vipassana you will have to go through what you are saying—the dark night of the soul. And you will not find the dawn anywhere. The dark night will go on becoming longer and darker. It is a simple psychology: you are not prepared, you have not done your homework, and you have started a work which needs a tremendous background of experience. They are all against me because I want you to live first as hotly as possible. I used to go to Allahabad. One of my sannyasins, Jayantibhai, would take me from the airport or from the railway station, and suddenly on a bridge he would accelerate the speed of the car. And I would say, ‘What is the matter?’ He said, ‘The matter is that board.’ Because I had been telling him again and again, ‘That board is very religious. You should once in a while go near the board and look at it.’ It was an advertisement, but very beautiful. It said, ‘Live a little hot. Sip a Gold Spot.’ I said, ‘I am not concerned about Gold Spot, but live a little hot!’ People live lukewarm. They live just at the minimum, because from that minimum they are protected from many dangers. If you don’t want to fall, crawl—you are safe! And that’s what you are doing in your life. I say live hotly while the season lasts. And this season will not last forever. Don’t hesitate, because in that hesitation you are losing time. A roseflower does not hesitate to open in the early morning sun, knowing perfectly well that by the evening the petals will fall and not even a mark will remain behind. Whether that roseflower ever existed or not, it will be the same. But while the sun is rising and the morning breeze is welcoming to dance, the rose dances. All the religions have destroyed your dance. They have made you crippled, they have destroyed your sensitivities. They have dulled your intelligence and then they say, ‘Do Vipassana.’ A man who has lived hotly is bound to do Vipassana—but in the evening. He has seen the day. It was beautiful, but it was ephemeral; it is gone. Now begins the search for that which comes and never goes. One of the great Hindu scriptures is Badarayana’s sutras. The first sutra is: ATHATO BRAHMA JIGYASA—Now the enquiry into the ultimate. That ‘now’ has been for almost two thousand years or more a problem—how to interpret it? Because this is the beginning. Books don’t begin from ‘now.’ It seems as if something has preceded it. And now there are many commentaries on Badarayana’s Athato, but no one has got the point. The man was saying, ‘You have lived hotly, you have loved deeply. You have done everything that you wanted to do, unrepressed, uninhibited. Now it is time for the enquiry into the ultimate. But only now. If you have not lived at the maximum, that which has been left unlived will go on lingering in your mind. That which has been repressed will go on asking for your attention. Your heart and your mind will be pulled by the unlived, the repressed, the denied, the condemned, and you cannot sit silently.’ Otherwise Vipassana is not an effort, it is a very simple experience. After the whole hot day of life, when you see the futility of it all… you have to see. You cannot see from other people’s eyes; you have to see the futility with your own eyes. Then what is the problem? You sit silently, you settle silently within yourself, into your very interiority. The word ‘Vipassana’ simply means perceptivity, clarity, seeing directly into truth. But if something you always wanted—it may be a small thing—is there in your unconscious, it won’t allow your perception to be pure. It will try again and again, ‘I am still unfulfilled.’ First have the experience that you have denied yourself. And all these religions have been teaching you to deny this, to deny that. They have driven the whole of humanity bananas; otherwise human beings are beautiful as they are. If they live naturally, one day they are going to ripen, one day they are going to mature. One day they are going to graduate from this so-called world of desires, ambitions, jealousies. After that graduation, Vipassana is not a doing. It is a non-doing. You simply sit silently and it starts showering over you as if the whole sky is rejoicing in your silence. One of the stories about Manjushri, a disciple of Gautam Buddha who became enlightened, depicts it correctly. He is sitting under his tree, silently, and flowers start showering on him. Those flowers are not visible, but they are fragrant, and they have tremendous power to transform your whole being. Sagaresh, it was in a way good that you went into isolation at Dharmagiri practicing Vipassana meditation as taught by S.N. Goenka. It has been a good experience. You say, ‘I have never experienced such pain.’ You deserved it. Why did you go there? You say, ‘I have never experienced such suffering and doubt ever before. Presently I feel exhausted, tired.’ Very good. At least you are alive! Just a few days rest, a few days nourishment in my commune and all pain, all suffering, all doubt and all tiredness will disappear. If you have understood me correctly it has already disappeared. You will be dancing and singing and rejoicing. We have so many meditations here, but I have put Vipassana at the very end. First go through all other kinds of experiences, purifying, so that you can become capable of entering Vipassana. People want to jump into paradise directly, and they don’t see the place where they are standing, that if they jump from there they will have multiple fractures. One has to reach to the steps and one has to move step by step, consciously, cautiously. It is a pilgrimage.

‘How can one know that the spiritual search in which one is involved is not an ego-trip, but is an authentic religious search?’ If you don’t know, if you are confused, then know well that this is an ego-trip. If you are not confused, if you know well that this is authentic, if there is no confusion at all, then it is authentic. And it is not a question of deceiving someone else. It is a question of deceiving or not deceiving oneself. If you are confused, in doubt, it is an ego-trip, because the moment the authentic search is there, there is no doubt. Faith happens. Let me put it in some other way. Whenever you phrase such problems, the very confusion exactly shows that you are on the wrong path. Someone comes to me and he says, ‘Tell me. I don’t know whether my meditation is going deep or not.’ So I say, ‘If it is going deep, there is no need to come and ask me. The depth is such an experience, you will know it. And if you cannot know your depth, who is going to know about it? You have come to ask me only because you are not feeling the depth. Now you want someone else to certify you. If I say, ‘Yes, your meditation is going very deep,’ you will feel very good—this is an ego-trip.’ When you are ill, you know that you are ill. It may sometimes happen that illness may be very very hidden. You may not be aware of it. But the reverse never happens: when you are perfectly healthy, you know it. It is never hidden. When you are healthy, you know it. It may be that for your illness you may not be so aware, but for health—if health is there—you are aware of it, because the very phenomenon of health is a phenomenon of well-being. If you cannot feel your health, who is going to feel it? For your ill-health there may be experts to tell you what type of disease you have; there is no expert to tell you about your health. There is no need. But if you ask whether you are healthy or not, you are unhealthy; that much is certain. This very confusion shows it. So when you are on a spiritual search, you can know whether it is an ego-trip or an authentic search. And the very confusion shows that this is not an authentic search; this is a sort of ego-trip. What is the ego-trip? You are less concerned with the real phenomenon; you are more concerned with possessing it. People come to me and they say, ‘You know, and you can know about us. Tell us whether our kundalini has arisen or not.’ They are not concerned with kundalini, not concerned really; they need a certificate. And sometimes I play and I say, ‘Yes, your kundalini has arisen,’ and immediately they are so happy. The person came very very gloomy and sad, and when I say, ‘Yes, your kundalini is awakened,’ he is happy like a child. He goes away happy, and when he is just going out of my room, I call him back and I say, ‘I was just playing. It is not real. Nothing has happened to you.’ He is again sad. He is not really concerned with any awakening; he is simply concerned with feeling good: now his kundalini has awakened, now he can feel superior to others. And this is how many so-called gurus go on exploiting, because you are for your ego. They can give you certificates, they can tell you, ‘Yes, you are already awakened. You have become a Buddha.’ And you are not going to deny. If I say this to ten persons, out of ten, nine are not going to deny it. They will just feel happy. They were in search of such a guru who would say that they are awakened. False gurus exist because of your need, because no authentic guru is going to say this to you, or give you any certificate—because any certificate is a demand from the ego. No certificate is needed. If you are experiencing it, you are experiencing it. If the whole world denies it, let them deny. It makes no difference. If the real experience is there, what does it matter who says that you have achieved and who says you have not achieved? It is irrelevant. But it is not irrelevant, because your basic search is the ego. You want to believe that you have achieved all. And this happens many times: when you become a failure in the world, when you are in misery in the world, when you cannot succeed there and when you feel that your ambition remains unfulfilled and life is passing, you turn to spirituality. The same ambition now asks to be fulfilled here. And it is easy to be fulfilled here—easy, because in spirituality you can deceive yourself easily. In the real world, in the world of matter, you cannot deceive so easily. If you are poor, how can you pretend that you are rich? And if you pretend, no one is deceived. And if you go on insisting that you are rich, then the whole society, the whole crowd around you, will think you have gone mad. I once knew a man who started thinking that he was Pundit Jawaharlal Nehru. His family, his friends, everyone tried to persuade him, ‘Don’t talk such nonsense, otherwise you will be thought to be mad.’ But he said, ‘I am not talking nonsense. I am Pundit Jawaharlal Nehru.’ He started signing ‘Jawaharlal Nehru.’ He would send telegrams to circuit houses, to officials, to collectors, to commissioners saying that, ‘I am coming—Pundit Jawaharlal Nehru.’ He had to be caught and chained in his house. I went to meet him. He lived in my village. He said, ‘You are a man of understanding. You can understand. These fools, no one understands me—I am Pundit Jawaharlal Nehru.’ So I said, ‘Yes, that’s why I have come to meet you. And don’t be afraid of these fools, because great men like you have always suffered.’ He said, ‘Right.’ He was so happy. He said, ‘You are the only man who can understand me. Great men have to suffer.’ In the outer world, if you try to deceive yourself you will be thought mad, but in spirituality it is very easy. You can say that your kundalini has arisen. Just because you have a certain pain in your back, your kundalini has arisen. Because your brain is feeling a little unbalanced, you think centers are opening. Because you have a headache constantly, you think the third eye is opening. You can deceive and no one can say anything, and no one is interested. But there are false teachers who will say, ‘Yes, this is the method.’ And you will feel very happy. An ego-trip means that you are not interested in really transforming yourself; you are only interested in claiming. And the claim is easy, you can purchase it cheaply. And it is a mutual thing. When a guru, a so-called guru, says that you are an awakened man, of course he has made you awakened, so you have to pay respect to this guru. This is a mutual thing. You pay respect to him. And now you cannot leave that guru, because the moment you leave that guru what will happen to your awakening, your kundalini? You cannot leave. That guru depends on you because you give respect and honor to him, and then you will depend on him because no one else is going to believe that you are awakened. You cannot leave. This is a mutual bluff. If you are really in search it is not so easy. And you don’t need any witness. It is difficult and arduous; it may take even lives. And it is painful, it is a long suffering, because much has to be destroyed, much has to be transcended, long-established chains have to be broken. It is not easy. It is not a child’s play. It is arduous, and suffering is bound to be there because whenever you start changing your pattern, all that is old has to be dropped. And all your investments are in the old. You will have to suffer. When you start looking inwards for your ego and you don’t find it, what will happen to your image that you have lived with? You have always thought you were a very good man, moral, this and that—what will happen to that? When you find that you are nowhere to be found, where is that good man? Your ego implies all that you have thought about yourself. Everything is implied in it. It is not something that you can throw easily. It is you, your whole past. When you drop it you become like a zero, as if you never existed before. For the first time you are born; no experience, no knowledge, no past—just like an innocent child. Daring is needed, courage is needed. Authentic search is arduous. Ego-trip is very easy. And it can be fulfilled very easily, because nothing is really fulfilled. You start believing; you start believing that something has happened to you. You are simply wasting time and energy and life. So if you are really with a master, he will constantly pull you back from your trip. He will have to watch that you don’t become mad, that you don’t start thinking in dreams. He will have to pull you back. And it is a very very difficult thing, because whenever you are pulled back you take revenge on the master. ‘I was going so high, and was just on the verge of exploding, and he says, ‘Nothing is happening. You are just imagining.’’ You are pulled back to the earth. With a real master it is difficult to be a disciple. And disciples almost always go against their masters, because they are on their ego-trips and the master is trying to bring them out of that. And these disciples create false masters. They have a need, such a great need, that anyone who fulfills their need will become their master. And it is easy to help your ego grow, because you are for it. It is very difficult to help your ego to disappear. Remember well, and check every day and every moment that your search is not an ego-trip. Go on checking it. It is subtle, and the ways of the ego are very very very cunning. They are not on the surface. The ego manipulates you from within; deep down from the unconscious. But if you are alert, the ego cannot deceive you. If you are alert, you will come to know its language, you will come to know its feeling, because it is always going after experience. This is the key word. The ego is always looking for the experience—sexual or spiritual, it makes no difference. The ego is greedy to experience this and to experience that: to experience kundalini and to experience the seventh body. The ego is always after experiences. The real search is not a greed for any experience, because any experience is going to frustrate you, is bound to frustrate you—because any experience is going to be repetitive. Then you will get fed up with it; then you will again demand some new experience. The search for the new will remain with the ego. You will meditate, and if you are only meditating just to get a new thrill, because your life has become boring—you are fed up with your ordinary routine life, so you want to get some thrill… You may get it, because man gets whatsoever he tries to find. That is the misery—whatsoever you desire, you will find. And then you will repent. You will get the thrill. Then what? Then you get fed up with it also. Then you want to take LSD or something else. Then you go on moving from this master to that, from this ashram to that, just in search of a new thrill. The ego is a greed for new experiences. And every new experience will become old, because whatsoever is new will become old—then again… Spirituality is not a search for experience really. Spirituality is a search for one’s being. Not for any experience—not even for bliss, not even for ecstasy—because experience is an outer thing; howsoever inner, it is outer. Spirituality is the search for the real being that is inside you: I must know what my reality is. And with that knowing, all greed for experiencing ceases. And with that knowing, there is no urge—no urge to move for any new experience. With the knowing of the inner true reality, the authentic being, all search ceases. So don’t move for an experience. All experiences are just tricks of the mind, all experiences are just escapes. Meditation is not an experience, it is a realization. Meditation is not an experience; rather, it is a stopping of all experience. Because of this, those who have really tried to express the inner happening—for example, Buddha—they say, ‘Don’t ask what happens there.’ Of, if you insist, they will say, ‘Nothing happens there.’ If I say to you that nothing will happen in meditation, what will you do? You will stop meditating. If nothing is going to happen there, what is the use?—that shows you are on an ego-trip. If I say nothing happens there, and you will say, ‘Okay, I have known many happenings and I have known many experiences, and every experience proved to be frustrating…’ You pass through it and then you know it was nothing. And then an urge to repeat, and then repetition also becomes a boredom. Then you move to something else… This is how you have been moving for lives and lives; for thousands and thousands of lives you have been moving for experience. You say, ‘I have known experience. Now I don’t want any new experience. I want to know the experiencer.’ The whole emphasis changes. Experience is something outside you. The experiencer is your being. And this is the distinction between true spirituality and false: if you are for experiences, the spirituality is false; if you are for the experiencer, then it is true. But then you are not concerned about kundalini, not concerned about chakras, not concerned about all these things. They will happen, but you are not concerned, you are not interested, and you will not move on these by-paths. You will go on moving towards the inner center where nothing remains except you in your total aloneness. Only the consciousness remains, without content. Content is the experience. Whatsoever you experience is the content. I experience misery—then the misery is the content of my consciousness. Then I experience pleasure—then pleasure is the content. Then I experience boredom—then boredom is the content. And then you can experience silence—then silence is the content. And then you can experience bliss—then bliss is the content. So you go on changing the content. You can go on changing ad infinitum, but this is not the real thing. The real is the one to whom these experiences happen—to whom boredom happens, to whom bliss happens. The spiritual search is not WHAT happens, but to WHOM it happens. Then there is no possibility for the ego to arise.

‘Beloved Osho, need one be absolutely sure about a guru to become his disciple?’ You can never be absolutely sure about a guru, and that is not needed. What is needed is that you should be absolutely sure about yourself. How can you be sure about a master? You exist on two different levels, two different states of mind. Whatsoever you can see, whatsoever you can understand, whatsoever you can interpret, will not be of much use—and there is more possibility of your going wrong than right. But there is no need, so don’t be worried about it. You have to be sure about yourself, about your search, and if you are sure about yourself then you can devote yourself to a master totally. Remember, the totality of surrender is not going to come from the surety about the master; it is going to come from your own surety, your own totalness. The master is bound to remain paradoxical for you unless you yourself become enlightened, because only the same can understand the same. Only when you have become a buddha will you be able to understand Buddha—never before. When you have become a christ, when Christ is known to you, you can understand; never before. Christ is bound to remain a mystery, and a mystery means paradox. Christ will appear to you as irrational, not because he is irrational but because he is supra-rational, he is beyond reason—and you don’t know anything about beyond reason. At the most you can think he is below reason, he is not rational. And the ways of a master are so secret that sometimes he will create a situation in which he will not allow you to be sure about himself, because if you can be absolutely sure about the master then your surrender is meaningless. Then what is the meaning of it? When you are absolutely sure of the master then it is a bargain, then you cannot do anything else other than surrender. But when you are uncertain, then surrender is a device. When in your uncertainty, hesitation, still you decide, that decision changes you. The more mysterious a master, the more is the possibility of transformation through surrender. If the master is known to you, just as two plus two makes four, then there is no mystery. Sufi masters particularly will create rumors about themselves, so the new ones who come to them can only enter not because they are sure about the master, but because they are sure about their search—and they are ready to take a risk. Why do you want to be sure about the master?—because you don’t want to take the risk. Your mind is a business mind. When a master is something mysterious… One old woman came from England to see Gurdjieff. She had heard Ouspensky, Gurdjieff’s disciple, and Ouspensky was a mathematician, a logician. He was not a master, he was not enlightened, but he was a perfect rationalist and he could explain Gurdjieff better than Gurdjieff himself. Gurdjieff would have remained unknown to the world if there had been no Ouspensky. He was nowhere near Gurdjieff, but he could think in a logical way, express in a logical way. He was professionally a mathematician. Many people were attracted to Ouspensky, and when they were attracted to Ouspensky they would start thinking about going to Gurdjieff—and then they would return frustrated, disappointed. One old woman became very much impressed by Ouspensky, and then she went to see Gurdjieff. Within just a week she was back, and she told Ouspensky, ‘I can feel that Gurdjieff is great, but I am not certain whether he is good or bad, whether he is evil, devilish, or a saint. I am not certain about that. He is great—that much is certain. But he may be a great devil, or a great saint—that is not certain.’ And Gurdjieff behaved in such a way that he would create this impression. Alan Watts has written about Gurdjieff and has called him a rascal saint—because sometimes he would behave like a rascal, but it was all acting and was done knowingly to avoid all those who would take unnecessary time and energy. It was done to send back those who could only work when they were certain. Only those would be allowed who could work even when they were not certain about the master, but who were certain about themselves. And to surrender to a Gurdjieff will transform you more than surrendering to Ramana Maharshi, because Ramana Maharshi is so saintly, so simple, that surrender doesn’t mean anything. You cannot do otherwise. He is so open—just like a small child—so pure, that surrender will happen. But that surrender is happening because of Ramana Maharshi, not because of you. It is nothing as far as you are concerned. But if surrender happens with Gurdjieff, then it has happened because of you, because Gurdjieff is in no way going to support it. Rather, he will create all types of hindrances. If still you surrender, that transforms you. So there is no need to be absolutely sure about him—and that is impossible—but you have to be sure about yourself. Just today one friend came to me and said about himself, ‘I am just fifty-fifty: fifty percent with you and fifty percent with Subud’—a very good Indonesian technique of meditation. So, ‘I am fifty-fifty, divided.’ I asked him, ‘What do you mean by fifty-fifty?’ and told him one anecdote. It happened once that Mulla Nasruddin owned a hotel. Then he was arrested and brought to the court of the town, because he was caught mixing horsemeat in chicken cutlets. But he confessed and he said, ‘I have been committing this crime,’ and he pleaded guilty. The magistrate asked, ‘Nasruddin, will you tell me what the proportion was? How much horsemeat were you mixing into how many chicken cutlets?’ Nasruddin said, very truthfully, ‘Fifty-fifty.’ But the magistrate was not convinced so he asked, ‘What do you mean by fifty-fifty, Nasruddin?’ Nasruddin said, ‘It is so obvious. Fifty-fifty means fifty-fifty—one horse to one chicken.’ So it is not certain. What do you mean by fifty-fifty? Your mind is confusion, but division will not help, a divided mind will not be of much help. Go to Subud or come to me, but be a hundred percent. And that hundred percentness is needed about you—not about me, or about Bapak Subud, or about anybody else. You must be a hundred percent here, then work becomes possible. Your mind is cunning—clever, you call it, but it is cunning. It calculates, it cannot take a risk. That’s why you have been wandering for so many lives. You were near Buddha, you were near Jesus, you have seen Mohammed—you have seen many masters, but you bypass them just because of your cleverness. Your cleverness is your stupidity. Even with a Buddha you calculate—and what can you calculate? Life is such a mystery; it cannot be explained in terms of logic. And a person like Buddha is so mysterious that whatsoever you come to conclude will be wrong, and by the time you have concluded Buddha will have changed. By the time you have come to a decision, Buddha is not the same—because Buddha is a river, a riverlike phenomenon, flowing. Conclusion will take time, and you will miss. Religion is for those who are like gamblers, who can take risks. If you are a gambler then something can happen, but if you are a businessman then nothing is possible. Be certain about your search. If you are really in search, then don’t be afraid. And I say again: even with a master who is false, pseudo, you are not going to lose anything. It happened that one of the Tibetan mystics, Marpa, was in search of a master. He reached a master who was not really a master, who was a pseudo-teacher, who was not himself enlightened. Marpa asked him, ‘What am I supposed to do?’ The pseudo-master said, ‘You will have to surrender to me. Surrender totally.’ Marpa said, ‘Surrendered! I am surrendered. Now what is to be done?’ Other disciples became jealous, because this Marpa seemed to be a dangerous man: immediately, without arguing, without discussing, he said, ‘I have surrendered. Now tell me, what is to be done?’ He would become the leader, he would become the chief disciple—he had already become it. He had just arrived, and they had been serving the master for many years, and he had superseded them. They became jealous, and they said to the master, ‘This is not easy; surrender is such a difficult thing. For many years we have been working, and yet we have not surrendered totally. This man seems to be deceiving. So we must examine whether the surrender is true or not.’ The master asked, ‘How can it be examined and tested?’ So they said, ‘Tell him to jump from this hill into the valley. If he jumps, then he is surrendered. If he doesn’t jump, then he is deceiving.’ In both ways they were thinking that they were going to be the winners. If he jumped he would be dead; if he didn’t jump he would be thrown out of the ashram. But they didn’t know Marpa—he simply jumped. And they were wonderstruck. He jumped—and then he was sitting in the valley! When they reached him they could not believe it; even the master could not believe that this could happen. So he thought, ‘It must have been just an accident that he is saved.’ He asked Marpa, ‘How did it happen?’ He said, ‘I don’t know. You must know; I have surrendered to you. Now it is up to you. I don’t know what has happened—but a miracle has happened. You have done this!’ The master knew well that he had not done anything—he did not know any ABC—this must have been by accident. So another situation had to be created. Then they saw a house that was on fire, so they said, ‘Enter!’ Marpa entered immediately. The whole house burned, and they could not know what had happened until the fire disappeared. Then they went inside. All over the place everything was burned, everything was destroyed and Marpa was sitting in meditation, not even perspiring. So the master asked, ‘Marpa, how did you do it again?’ He said, ‘I don’t know, master. It is you. And my trust is growing; you are a miracle!’ But it is possible that even an accident can happen a second time, improbabilities are also possible. So they thought, ‘It has to be tried again, a third time.’ So they told Marpa to walk on a river. The river was in flood and they said, ‘Walk on water!’ And Marpa walked. When Marpa was walking and was just in midstream, the master thought, ‘It seems as if I am doing something, because how can this happen? It must be my power.’ He thought, ‘If just by surrendering to me Marpa can walk on water, why cannot I walk?’ So he started walking—and he was drowned. No one has ever heard about what happened to that master, but Marpa became enlightened. So it is not a question of the master, it is a question of your totality. Even with a pseudo-master you can become enlightened. And the reverse is also true: even with an enlightened master you may remain ignorant. Remember, my emphasis is on you. That’s why I never say: ‘Don’t go to Sai Baba,’ or: ‘Don’t go to Bapak Subud.’ That is immaterial. Go anywhere. Go totally.

‘Beloved master, how did you become enlightened?’ Prem Christo, one never becomes enlightened—one IS enlightened. One simply remembers it. It is not an achievement, but only a recognition. You are as much enlightened as I am, nothing is missing. You have not lost your god, it is impossible to lose him. He is our very life; without him we cannot exist for a single moment. So the question is not how to find him. The question is how to become more alert, aware of that which already is the case. Enlightenment is not a process of becoming, it is a discovery of being. You don’t grow towards enlightenment; hence it is never gradual—growth is gradual. It is an explosion—sudden, instantaneous. It happens in a single moment… it can happen any moment. You are only asleep, not unenlightened. You have to be awakened. So remember it: never think in terms of becoming. Becoming is desire, and desire is a hindrance, desire is a dream. If you want to become enlightened you will never be enlightened. Don’t make it a goal, an object for desire, because all goals bring future in. And when the future comes in you are in a turmoil. That is what your so-called unenlightenment is. When there is no goal there is no future. When there is no desire, there is no possibility of dreaming. And the moment dreaming stops, sleep disappears. The state of that no sleep, no desire, no dreaming, no goal, IS enlightenment. Suddenly you find yourself utterly perfect. And one starts laughing, because one was searching for something which was never lost; one was seeking something which one has already been. How can you find that which you already are? It is impossible to find it. That’s why enlightenment seems to be such a difficult process—because it is not a process at all, hence the difficulty. The masters down the ages have simply been devising methods to wake you up, to shake you up, into enlightenment. They have used all kinds of methods, all kinds of devices. But all those devices are arbitrary; they have no intrinsic value of their own. Their value depends on the master and his artfulness, his skill. If somebody else is going to try those devices they won’t work. It is not a science, it is an art, a knack. The Zen master may slap you, may throw you out of the door, may jump upon you and beat you, but it works only in the hands of a Zen master. If YOU do it you will find yourself beaten, that’s all, or in jail. A Zen master has a totally different vision of life, and slowly slowly, he creates a certain energy field around himself where the device starts functioning. It cannot function anywhere else. The Sufi master uses his own devices, they were great device-makers. The most important Sufi tradition is called Naqshbandi; NAQSHBANDI means the designers, the devisors. And strange devices they have invented. For example, Jalaluddin Rumi’s Sufi dance, whirling, a very strange device. In his hands it worked tremendously, because when you really whirl you become disidentified with the body. That’s why children enjoy whirling very much; they feel a great upliftment. But for that, certain preparations are needed; certain food, certain patterns of sleep, certain exercises have to precede it. Otherwise, if you start whirling suddenly, you will simply feel nausea and nothing else; you may fall sick. No enlightenment is going to happen through it. Everybody cannot do it. A preparation is needed for the device to work, because the device is arbitrary, it is a hothouse plant. When the master is alive he gives his life to his devices. The moment he is gone, only dead formulas are left. And people go on repeating those formulas for centuries. All those formulas appear stupid later on. In the hands of the master they had a golden touch; without the master, without the awakened one, they are just empty exercises. Remember it: that the great masters cannot be imitated. They are unique and they should not be imitated. A diplomatic dinner was being held at the embassy in Paris. Among the guests was an elderly dowager. She had overindulged in food, as was her wont, and as a result belched loudly. In the embarrassed silence that followed, an Englishman, seeing a countryman in difficulty, gallantly pretended that he was the offender and apologized for the faux pas profusely. The difficult moment passed, but not for long. Once again a hearty belch rose through the murmur of polite conversation. This time a Frenchman, not to be outdone by the suave Englishman, apologized for the offensive interruption and received admiring glances for his quick thinking. An American observing all this determined not to be outdone and placed himself in the vicinity of the dowager so that he could do honor to HIS country. Inevitably, the poor lady belched again and the American cried out, ‘That’s alright, lady, this one is on me!’ Avoid imitation! That’s what has happened to all the great devices invented by the masters. People go on imitating literally, not understanding the spirit—and the spirit is the real thing to understand, not the letter. Hindus go on repeating methods invented by people like Patanjali, Manu, Yagnavalka. Thousands of years have passed, but the orthodox mind clings to the letter; it is afraid to change anything. And without understanding the spirit of it, it goes on repeating like a parrot. And situations go on changing. Now Patanjali cannot be applied to modern human beings exactly as he has taught to HIS disciples. Five thousand years have passed, man is no longer the same. If you want to apply Patanjali you will need another Patanjali to shift many things, to change many things, to drop many things, to add many things. He will have to create the whole methodology again, because man does not exist for any methods—all methods exist for man. No system is so valuable that man can be sacrificed to the system; all systems have to serve man. If they serve, good; if they become useless, out-of-date, irrelevant, they have to be dropped—with deep reverence, with gratitude—they have done their work. But the human mind is such, it always loves the past. The more ancient a method is, the more it is loved. In fact, the more useless it is: it can’t change you, it can’t help you to change. Each time a new person becomes aware of his innermost being, listen to him, and while he is alive be available to him. It is going to be hard to be available to the alive master, because he will not only be teaching you words, he will be cutting chunks of your being. It hurts, because you have gathered so much unnecessary garbage around yourself; it has to be cut, mercilessly cut. Only then can your essential being be revealed in all its beauty. A farmer gathered his sons around him and demanded, ‘Which one of you boys pushed the outhouse into the creek?’ The culprit did not step forward. ‘Now, boys,’ said the farmer, ‘remember the story of George Washington and the cherry tree. It is true that young George chopped down that tree, but he told his father the truth and his father was proud of him.’ Whereupon the farmer’s youngest son stepped forward and admitted that he had pushed the outhouse into the creek. The farmer picked up a switch and proceeded to whip his son soundly. ‘But Pa,’ protested the boy tearfully, ‘you told me that George Washington’s father was proud of him when he confessed to chopping down the cherry tree.’ ‘He was, son,’ replied the farmer, ‘but George Washington’s father was not sitting in the cherry tree when his son chopped it down!’ The situation has changed… and you go on repeating old formulas. First watch the situation. Hence, methods that have worked before are not going to work now. Enlightenment is the most simple thing, but because man is very complex—and as time passes man becomes more and more complex—he will need more and more complex methods. I must be the first enlightened person who is using therapeutic groups as a help to meditation, for the simple reason that in the past man was so simple there was no need for him to pass through therapies first. He was healthy in a way, saner in a way, authentic, truer, sincere and honest. Modern man is cunning, very cunning, and very repressed, so much so that he himself is not aware what he has repressed in his being. And modern man is very clever, he is not simple. He is so clever that he can go on deceiving even himself. By deceiving others continuously he has become skillful in deceiving. The skill has become so ingrained that now no conscious, deliberate effort is needed for him to be cunning. He can simply be cunning without any effort on his own. This changed situation demands new methods, new approaches, new windows, so new that your mind is at a loss what to do. If your mind knows what to do, the device cannot be of any help. The mind, when it is unable to find a way out, is at a loss—that is the great, precious moment when something of the beyond can happen. A little old bearded Jew accidentally brushed by a Nazi officer and knocked him off balance. ‘Schwein!’ roared the German, clicking his heels. ‘Solomon,’ said the Jew, bowing politely. ‘Pleased to meet you.’ You see the cunningness, the cleverness! Liddell walked into a Chinatown tavern and said to the Oriental behind the bar, ‘Hey, Chink, give me a drink!’ Ten minutes later Liddell called out again, ‘Alright, Chink, give me a drink!’ A short time passed and once again Liddell shouted, ‘Say, Chink, give me a drink!’ ‘Listen,’ said the Chinese bartender, ‘I have held my temper, but you come behind the bar and see how you like to be insulted.’ The two men exchanged places. ‘Okay,’ said the Oriental. ‘Now, you Nigger, give me a jigger!’ ‘Sorry,’ said the black, ‘we don’t serve Chinks in here.’ The modern man cannot be helped by Patanjali or Moses. It will need a totally new approach. That’s exactly what I am doing here. You need therapies so that much garbage can be thrown out of you. Therapy is catharsis; it brings you face-to-face with your own unconscious. No old method has ever been able to do it—it was not needed in the first place, it was unnecessary. Sitting silently, doing nothing was enough. But now, if you sit silently doing nothing, that is not going to help. In the first place, you can’t sit silently—so much turmoil is inside. Yes, from the outside you can manage to sit just like the Buddha, a marble statue, still, but deep down are you still? The body can learn the trick of being still, but the mind is not so easily overcome. In fact, the more you force the body to be still, the more the mind rebels against it, the more the mind will try to pull you out of your so-called stillness. It takes the challenge and explodes on you with a vengeance, and all kinds of thoughts, desires, fantasies, erupt. Sometimes one wonders where all these things go when you don’t meditate. The moment you sit for a few moments’ silence, all kinds of nonsense things start floating in your head, as if they were just waiting; when you sit for meditation they will come. It was not so in the past. The primitive man was simple, the primitive man never needed anything like a Primal Therapy group. He was already primitive! You have become so civilized that first your civilization has to be taken out of you. That is the function of Primal Therapy: it makes you again primitive, it brings you to the point of innocence. No primitive man ever needed anything like Encounter; his whole life was an encounter! But now, when you want to hit, you say hello and when you want to kill, you smile. And not only is the other deceived, you also believe that your smile is true. And people are so polite that they tolerate you, they accept you, they don’t look at what you are doing. If you don’t interfere with them they leave you alone. Everybody is living a double life: the social life, which is formal, and the private life which is just the opposite. You will need some processes in which you are brought to your authentic self so your duality is dropped, so that you can for the first time see who you are. Your morality, your so-called religions, they all teach you a kind of duality, they all make you pseudo. They talk about truth, but that is mere talk. They don’t make you true, they make you polished, polite, civilized. They teach you how to be formally good. They give you a beautiful surface and they don’t take any care of your inner being which is your real you. And you tend to forget your real you. Enlightenment is seeing your real being. And you have become so accustomed and attached to the unreal. You have to be hammered back into your reality. I have devised dynamic, chaotic methods just to give you again a glimpse of your pure childhood when you were as yet uncontaminated, unpolluted, unpoisoned, unconditioned by the society; when you were as you were born, when you were natural. The society molds you into certain patterns. It destroys your freedom. It takes all other alternatives from you; it forces a certain alternative to you. It forces and pressures you in so many subtle ways that you have to choose it. Of course, it also gives you the idea that you are choosing it. I have heard: When Ford started manufacturing cars he had only one color, black. He would show his cars to the customers and he would say, ‘You can choose any color, provided it is black!’ That’s what people are doing to their children. You can be anybody you like, provided you are a Hindu or a Mohammedan or a Christian. Provided you behave like this, you are free, you are absolutely free. They go on creating a facade of freedom and go on creating simultaneously a deep slavery. You need to be thrown back to your reality. And sometimes even cruel methods are needed. Zen masters beating their disciples: you can’t say this is a very compassionate method. It is a cruel method, but it is arising out of great compassion. And sometimes what cannot be taught can be provoked by the master by slapping your face. A man went into a store to buy his wife a gift. When he received the package from the clerk he started to leave, but then turned suddenly and slapped the clerk across the face. No sooner had he done it than the man began to apologize profusely. The clerk was naturally taken aback, but he could not doubt the sincerity of the man’s apologies. ‘Perhaps,’ suggested the sympathetic clerk, ‘you ought to see a psychiatrist.’ A few months later the man reappeared at the store. He made a purchase but made no attempt to do the clerk any harm. ‘I took your advice, young man. I went to see a psychiatrist.’ ‘How did he cure you?’ inquired the clerk. ‘Well,’ replied the man, ‘right after I paid him for my first visit I slapped him in the face.’ ‘Then? Then what happened?’ ‘He slapped me back.’ You get it? And that cured him, that was the treatment. That brought him back to his senses. Sometimes it is needed, and only a cruel method can become a breakthrough. A chaotic, a dynamic meditation, is a very cruel method. It is not like sweet prayer, it is bitter, but it can cleanse much dust off your being. It can bring great awakening to you. It can become your first satori. Just a hundred-percent commitment is needed. Christo, you ask me, ‘How did you become enlightened?’ The first thing: I never became enlightened. I had always been enlightened just as you are, just as everybody is. All that happened is, I recognized it. And the journey was as arduous as you can imagine. It was more arduous than it is for you, because I had no master to guide, to indicate. In India there are thousands of pseudo teachers. Masters have disappeared long ago. India has become so pseudo a country that today there exists no other country which is as pseudo. India is unique, incomparable! But this was going to happen for a certain reason, for a certain historic inevitability it was going to happen. India has produced Patanjali, Gautam Buddha, Mahavira, Nagarjuna, Bodhidharma, great masters, and when you produce great masters, naturally imitators arise. Imitators can arise only when the real exists; when the real is not in existence you cannot have the false. If there is real currency, then you can have false notes, but if there is no real currency at all then you cannot have false notes. The false is possible only because of the real. And economists say that there is a law: the false currency tends to put the real currency out of work. It pushes the real currency out of its function. You can observe it, it is a simple law. If you have two ten-rupee notes in your pocket, one real and one false, first you will try the false because you want to get rid of it first—the sooner the better. The real can be used any time, but the false, who knows? Somebody may catch hold of you. So you will be in a hurry to push the false into circulation so it moves away from you and you are freed from the burden. If all the people have false notes, they will hide the real notes in their treasures and the false will become the currency. And that’s exactly what happens in the world of spirituality too: the true masters become nonexistential, nonfunctioning, and the untrue become leaders of men… for simple reasons. One is that the true master will never fulfill your expectations; hence you will like more to be with a false teacher because he will fulfill your expectations. He will be more than willing. He wants to catch hold of you, he wants you to be his disciple. He will be ready, very much ready, to fulfill your expectations so that you don’t leave him. The true master lives according to his light. You cannot expect anything from him. Unless you are ready to drop all your expectations you can’t live with the true master. The false master will always buttress your ego. He will say, ‘You are great, you are virtuous.’ He will give you small tricks to feel virtuous: ‘Go every Sunday to the church and you will be virtuous, religious, spiritual.’ Now, just by going to the church every Sunday do you think you become spiritual? Is spirituality so cheap? But he will give you cheap things which you can easily purchase and feel great. With the true master, real work has to be done. The real master works on you just like a sculptor, with the chisel and hammer in his hand. He starts dismantling you, because that is the only way to transform you, to give you a new birth. He starts killing you! A real master is a death, because only after death is there a possibility of resurrection. I was without a master. I stumbled in darkness on my own. It was hard work, it was maddening, because nobody was there even to give me hope, any guarantee—even to give me just simple sympathy that I am on the right track. I was moving into the uncharted sea without anybody encouraging me. You are far more fortunate. I can tell you when you are right and when you are wrong. I can tell you, ‘Go on, you are on the right track, the moment is not far away when things will start changing; the spring is just on the way. Any moment it will be here. In fact, the first flowers have started appearing. You may not be able to see those first flowers. I can see.’ Now in medical circles there is great discussion and great hope that sooner or later we are going to find ways in which a disease that is going to happen after six months can be predicted beforehand. It has become possible through Kirlian photography. It gives the photograph of your body energy, and it shows where the body energy is going wrong. Six months before you may actually fall ill, Kirlian photography starts giving you indications. If those indications can be well understood, you can be treated before you are ill. Then you will never be ill. A master can see flowers which are going to happen to you after a few days, which are not yet visible to you or to anybody else—but can be visible to the master. He can recognize the signs, the invisible indications. He can decipher the language of the unknown and the unknowable. He can tell you, ‘Go on!’ Buddha says to his disciples again and again, ‘CHARAIVETI! CHARAIVETI! Go on! Go on! Don’t be worried. I can see the dawn is not far away.’ You can only see that the night is becoming darker and darker, but when the night is really dark, that is only an indication that the dawn is very close, that soon on the eastern horizon the sun will rise. But this can be seen only by one who has seen the sunrise before. I worked hard in every possible way, but the day I came to know who I am was a great surprise. I had never thought about it, that it was going to be so. God was never missed, I had only forgotten the language. God was already there, always has been there; god is our innermost nature. The day I recognized it I started laughing. That day I knew that life is a great joke—god playing a great joke, a great game of hide-and-seek; but a game all the same. Don’t take it seriously. Christo, don’t take enlightenment seriously. Take it playfully. And the more playful you are, the closer you will be to it.

Gautam Buddha has a statement: ‘Don’t prevent people from reading scriptures; don’t prevent people from listening to teachers who don’t know anything, because sometimes it has happened that the teacher was only a teacher but the disciple turned out to be a master.’ There is a beautiful story about one Tibetan monk, Marpa. Tibet has known only two great monks—Marpa and Milarepa. Milarepa is already here; Marpa will be coming sooner or later! There was a great teacher with profound knowledge but no experience. He had thousands of students around him. He was influential. Marpa was in search of a master. Seeing that so many people were around this man—he was the most celebrated teacher of those days… Marpa was a very simple man. He went and surrendered himself at the master’s feet and said, ‘I have come here. Now it is up to you; whatever you want to make of me you can make. I will not have my own will other than you, and I will not have any thought other than you. I will not have my life in any way separate from you; I want to be just a shadow to you.’ Amongst thousands of disciples, the teacher became even more egoistic. When Marpa said this he initiated him into sannyas. Marpa was immensely innocent and trusting. Just within a few days there was great trouble. Sannyasins saw him jumping from high mountains into the valley. They had to go down and it took hours to reach him. He would simply take a jump. It was almost impossible to survive that jump. But they always found—after three hours going round and round down the mountain—that when they reached the valley he was sitting under a tree, unscratched. They could not believe it: ‘What kind of man is this?’ And they became jealous also. They started reporting to the teacher: ‘This Marpa is not good to keep around. He is trying to influence your students; many have become his disciples. Soon everybody will desert you if you don’t throw him out.’ The teacher said, ‘But what is the quality in him that people are so much interested in him?’ And they said, ‘Quality? He is a miracle. He goes through fire and he is not burned. He sits naked when the snow is falling and it seems he does not feel the cold. He jumps from mountains thousands of feet high into the valley. Just to go into the city for begging we have to take a three hour route; coming and going it means six hours just for one meal. The whole day is lost. And that fellow does it within minutes! And yesterday it was too much: he was walking on water!’ The master… the teacher said, ‘Call him!’ And he asked Marpa, ‘What is your secret?’ Marpa said, ‘My secret? I am just your shadow. Your name is my secret. Whenever I want to do something I simply take your name and pray to you: ‘Protect me’—and then I simply do it. Just by taking your name I can walk on the rivers, I can jump from the highest mountains, I can pass through fire—nothing is impossible. You are so great; just your name is enough!’ The teacher thought to himself: ‘If my name can do such miracles I must be a fool that I have never tried doing miracles myself. I could have been the greatest master in the whole of Tibet.’ So he said, ‘That’s very good. You have got the right secret.’ And he told all the disciples, ‘This is what trust is.’ And he tried to walk on water himself. When his name is enough… of course, for him, walking on water would not be a problem. But just as he took a step he started drowning. Marpa had to jump in and pull him out. And the teacher said, ‘This is strange—that my name is working and I myself am drowning.’ Marpa said, ‘You have destroyed everything. Now your name will not work. It was not your name—it was my trust. And now seeing you drowning, how can I trust in your name? You have destroyed my innocence. I had come here to learn to be more trusting, to be more innocent. Rather than being a help, you have almost destroyed all my hope.’ But Marpa became a great master. His teacher’s name is not known. Marpa managed to transform the whole of Tibet to the path of the Buddha. So sometimes it has happened that the teacher may not know, but if the disciple trusts, his trust can create miracles. Buddha has said, ‘Let people read the scriptures, let them listen to teachers… the teachers may not know that the scriptures are dead words; but who knows, if these people have trust, their trust can resurrect the dead words. Their trust can get inspiration from people who don’t have anything that can inspire. Finally it is trust in yourself, but it takes a little time to find the trust in yourself. It is easy to trust in somebody else. But once you have understood that it is trust—then why trust in individuals? Why not trust in the whole existence? Then your whole life becomes a mystery, and things start happening around you which you are not doing.

‘Beloved master, I have felt a deep sadness all day long stemming from your remarks today about psychoanalysis and recalling your jokes over the years about psychiatrists. In my own life I have been blessed with encountering a few rare and wise psychiatrists, psychologists—one of whom led me to you. These people provided—and continue to provide—an oasis for me in an otherwise barren desert in the West. It is not so much their profession as the level of their being that attracts me. Why do you hit this profession so hard? And how can I trust myself and my experience when it conflicts with what you say? I feel caught in a paradox.’ Prem Sarjana, I hit people only when I love them, I don’t waste my hits on unnecessary people, on unworthy people. Psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, psychologists, are my targets. I am throwing my net to catch hold of as many as possible. It is said of Jesus: One day, early in the morning, he came to the lake; two brothers, both fishermen, were throwing their net into the lake to catch fish. Jesus puts his hand on one of the brothers; he looks back, looks into those eyes of Jesus which are far deeper than the lake, far more silent than the lake and far more beautiful… He understands only the lake; his whole life he has been working on the lake, fishing. Looking into the eyes of Jesus, for the first time he becomes aware that this is possible, that eyes can be so beautiful and can have such depth and such clarity and such blueness and such vastness. He is immensely attracted—he is a simple fisherman—and Jesus says to him, ‘Enough is enough, you have been catching fish your whole life, now come and follow me: I will teach you the art of how to catch men.’ And the fisherman followed Jesus, became one of his apostles. I am interested, immensely interested, in catching all kinds of psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, for the simple reason that they have the greatest potential. They can become the right soil for the new man to arrive; they are free of all religious nonsense, they are free from all political stupidity. They are the freest men in a way. Now there is only one thing left with them, a thin barrier: they have made psychoanalysis their religion, they have created their own trinity—Freud, Adler, Jung. They have created their own Bible, their own theology, now they are caught in it… it happens. When you have lived for centuries in prisons, even if you are allowed freedom you will soon enter into another prison because that has become your habit. You cannot live without chains. They have broken all the chains but they have now created new chains of their own making, and when you make your own chains, handmade, homemade, you are more attached to them. Who bothers about what Buddha said? Twenty-five centuries have passed. Who cares what Jesus said or did not say? In fact they have receded so far that nobody is really obsessed with them, except a few people—who are not contemporaries, who are still living twenty centuries back. But when you create your own chains and your own prisons… and psychoanalysis is the latest religion—it is very much easier to fall a victim to psychoanalysis, to Sigmund Freud than to Jesus Christ; it is easier to believe in Marx than in Mohammed, than in Mahavira, than in Manu, than in Moses, because he is so close to us, he speaks such a contemporary language. And that’s what has happened to the communists. The Kremlin has become their Kaaba, their Kashi, their Kailash; they also have their own trinity—Marx, Engels, Lenin; they have their own Bible—DAS KAPITAL. They have their own apostles—Stalin, Mao, Castro, Tito. And the same is happening to psychoanalysis, it has become a new religion. I hit psychoanalysts, Sarjana, because I love them. I am really interested in them. I would like them to come and experience me, and to come and to know what is happening here. And many have heard the call; out of all the professions, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, psychologists, have received me the most deeply, the most profoundly. Hundreds of them have come and become sannyasins. And certainly I go on joking about them; those jokes are also my love affair. That’s how I show my love, my interest. You say, ‘I have felt a deep sadness all day long stemming from your remarks today about psychoanalysis and recalling your jokes over the years about psychiatrists.’ You seem to have made a religion out of psychoanalysis yourself, that’s why you feel sad; otherwise you would have enjoyed the jokes, you would have loved them. They are so true. Psychiatrists are crazy people, I mean beautiful people. Whenever I say that somebody is crazy, I am appreciating them. You have to learn my language. Whenever I say that somebody is crazy I mean that somebody is valuable. To be normal is not a very great thing; to be normal is to be average. That is a condemnation, that somebody is just normal; that means he has nothing in him, he is just hollow. Don’t feel sad, I am not against psychoanalysis—although I would like psychoanalysts to go beyond it. It has to be a stepping-stone. And whenever I see somebody clinging to a stepping-stone I hit him hard to show him that there is something beyond. And you say, ‘In my own life I have been blessed with encountering a few rare and wise psychiatrists, psychologists—one of whom led me to you.’ You may have—there are a few people who are really intelligent, knowledgeable. But you don’t understand the meaning of the word ‘wisdom.’ It is impossible to find a wise psychoanalyst; if he were wise he would have already become a sannyasin, he would not be a psychoanalyst any longer. But they can be of great help; and particularly in the West where masters don’t exist, a psychoanalyst is the only possibility of gaining any help, a pure substitute for a master—because the master means one who is enlightened, one who has arrived, one who no longer has any problems to solve, any desires to be fulfilled—one who is already fulfilled. It is very difficult to find a master in the West. The next best is the psychiatrist, the psychoanalyst. But remember, he is only the next best. And when I say it is difficult to find masters in the West I mean that the Western tradition has fallen into the hands of the priests. For two thousand years the priests have not allowed masters to survive, to exist; or even if, in spite of them, a person became enlightened, he had to go into hiding. He could not declare his enlightenment, he could not share his enlightenment, or he had to share it in such a way that the priests didn’t become aware of what he was doing. So two things Western enlightened people have been doing: one was pretending to be part of the church, using the language of the church and pouring their enlightenment into it, because that was one of the ways not to get into conflict with the church and the state; that’s what was done by Meister Eckhart, Saint Francis, Jacob Bohme and others. They remained part of the church. It was just a device to survive and to share something. And they used the language of the church which is very unfitting. They could not be so free as Zen masters or Sufi masters; they could not express themselves totally; they had to force their experience into Christian jargon, which was dull, dead. Or those who were not ready to compromise had to go into hiding, they had to go underground; that’s how alchemy was born. Alchemists were not chemists; alchemists were not really trying to transform base metals into gold, that was just a device to hide behind. The alchemists were real masters but they pretended to be alchemists, and if you had seen them from the outside you would have seen them concerned with base metals and gold and silver. And many experiments were going on, but deep inside the real experiment was going on. Transforming unconsciousness into consciousness—that is the real transformation of base metal into gold. Gold represents consciousness, enlightenment. So this happened in the West: the priests were so powerful and the priests were in such a conspiracy with the state that either they burned people like Joan of Arc, who was a mystic—they killed many mystics—or forced mystics to go underground, or forced them to speak the language of the church. Hence in the West masters almost disappeared, and now from the East, particularly from India, there are many many so-called masters roaming all over the West—Mahesh Yogi, Muktananda, etcetera, etcetera. I call them ‘etceteranandas.’ These are all pseudo people, because a master waits for the disciple to come to him; there is no need for the master to go anywhere. If he has real magnetism he will attract people from the farthest corners of the world. If you don’t have any magnetism in you then you will have to go and sell whatsoever you can to foolish people. So now the whole West is full of these pseudo masters. It is better, Sarjana, to be with a psychiatrist than to be with a Muktananda, because the psychiatrist is at least moving in the right direction. He has not arrived yet but he is moving in the right direction. You can find a few very intelligent people in that profession. But wisdom is totally different: wisdom means enlightenment, wisdom means one who has known himself. But I can understand your difficulty: being in the desert of the West, an oasis becomes of tremendous importance, and that’s why you become very sad if I hit psychoanalysts. But without hitting them it is impossible to wake them up. I can understand your difficulty. But now that you are here, part of a buddhafield, you should get rid of your psychoanalysts and psychiatrists. Say goodbye to them; thank them for all that they have done for you, but say goodbye to them. In the West you were helpless and that was the only possibility of getting any help. ‘It was deep in the woods back yonder,’ began old Herbie, the guide. ‘I was plodding along minding my own business when suddenly a huge bear sneaked up behind me. He pinned my arms to my sides and started to squeeze the breath out of me. My gun fell out of my hands. First thing you know, the bear had stooped down, picked up the gun, and was pressing it against my back.’ ‘What did you do?’ gasped the tenderfoot. Old Herbie sighed, ‘What could I do? I married his daughter!’ In the West what else could you do? Helpless… But now that you are here don’t feel sad if I hit psychoanalysts. You say, ‘It is not so much their profession as the level of their being that attracts me.’ You don’t know what you are saying. What level of being are you talking about? I have seen hundreds of psychoanalysts—the commune is full of them, we have more psychiatrists than psychiatric patients. What level of being? There are not many levels of being in the first place. There are only two planes: either you are enlightened, or you are unenlightened. Do you think there are many many planes so that one man is ten percent enlightened, another is twenty percent enlightened, another is thirty percent enlightened? No, either it is one hundred percent or it is zero—zero percent or one hundred percent. You must have been attracted—that much I can understand—but your attraction is more because of you than because of the level of the person to whom you became attracted. The West is suffering from many mental illnesses; it is better to suffer from mental illnesses than to suffer from physical ones, it is at least something higher. It is better to be rich and frustrated than to be poor and starving. I have known both poverty and richness, and to be frank with you I must say, to be rich is better, because the rich person suffers from rich illnesses; the poor person suffers from poor illnesses. The poor person is concerned with the body, the rich person is concerned with the mind. And the psychiatrist, the psychoanalyst, can provide you with many consolations, many adjustments. And, certainly, when you are disturbed anybody who looks undisturbed, who looks very wise in his advice, who goes on analyzing your dreams, looks as if he has a different level of being. It is not so. All that psychoanalysis is doing is helping people to become adjusted. The Western modern mind has become very maladjusted—it is a good sign, it is the sign of a crisis, an identity crisis. All the old values have become invalid, new values are needed. The past has become irrelevant; we have succeeded so much in the West that we cannot live with the values which were created when people were poor. Remember it, a poor society needs different values, a rich society needs different values. When a poor society succeeds in becoming rich it becomes maladjusted, because it goes on teaching the old values which are no longer relevant, and it lives in the new society which is rich. So people’s minds are in a mess. What has been told to them by the priest, by the school, by the college and the university, belongs to the past. And the society has moved from there. It is as if you are taught the mechanism of a bullock cart and you have a car; you will be maladjusted, because you know the mechanism of a bullock cart and you have a Mercedes Benz. You are at a loss; your knowledge is irrelevant, but you cling to your knowledge because that is all that you know. That’s what is happening. People were told for centuries to be ambitious, to have all kinds of riches, to succeed in the world. Now it has all happened! Now to tell people to be rich, to be successful, is utterly futile. They will laugh at you, they will say, ‘What nonsense are you talking about!’ Hence the hippies. In the East they cannot happen; old values are still relevant—people know about bullock carts and people have bullock carts. They fit perfectly well. But Western technology, Western science, Western affluence, has gone far ahead of the Western mind and attitudes. So everybody is at a loss. A person’s knowledge does not fit with the situation he lives in. He cannot drop the knowledge because by dropping the knowledge he becomes almost ignorant. And there is no other knowledge available. The function of the psychiatrist is to help these maladjusted people to become adjusted again. This is not very revolutionary work; it is antirevolutionary, it is reactionary. That’s why I hit psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis has to herald the new age! And on the contrary, what it is doing is helping people to become adjusted to the old, rotten society, which is dying. Psychoanalysis has to help people towards the new man who is soon to arrive on the horizon. That’s my effort here. My work is multidimensional. It is not only religious, it is not only educational, it is not only psychological, it is not only artistic—it has all the dimensions; because the new man will be a multidimensional man. And psychoanalysis is helping the old, rotten society to survive better than it would survive without the help of psychoanalysis. Priests, rabbis, and ministers often face anxieties, fears, and frustrations. This was the case with Father Flannagan. The demands of his parish overwhelmed him. So he consulted a psychiatrist lest he might face a complete mental breakdown. The doctor encouraged him to lay aside his ecclesiastical vestments, then don civilian clothes, red tie, striped shirt, overalls, go out to a tavern and mingle with common people who frequent such places. There, incognito, he might readily overcome his frustrations. He accepted the prescription, changed his garments, and made his first trip to the tavern. As he sat at a table a go-go girl came tripping up to him to take his order. Said she, ‘Have I not seen you before? Your face looks familiar.’ A bit embarrassed he answered, ‘No, indeed, you have never seen me before. This is the first time I have ever been in this tavern.’ Finding the treatment encouraging, he returned to the tavern a second time. The same go-go girl rushed over to him to take his order. This time she said, ‘I am sure that I have seen you some place.’ More embarrassed, but still convinced that he was unrecognized, he exclaimed, ‘Of course you have never seen me before. This is only the second time I have ever come to this tavern.’ Some time later he visited the tavern for a third time. Immediately the little go-go girl ran to him with a big smile saying, ‘Now I know who you are! You are Father Flannagan from the church on Dublin Street!’ The shock of this recognition almost floored him, but the little girl tapped him on the shoulder with these sympathetic assurances: ‘Don’t fret, Father Flannagan! I am Sister Elizabeth from Saint Theresa Convent. I go to the same psychiatrist!’ The old ideas about life, the old morality, the old ideas of sin and repentance, all have become irrelevant. The old priesthood is absolutely maladjusted, and the people who live according to old religious ideas are feeling out of place. And the new people are also feeling out of place, hence the gap between the generations—it has never been so big as it is today. Parents can’t understand children, children can’t understand parents. They speak different languages, there is no communication; a China Wall has come between parents and children. All the old cherished values, cherished for centuries and centuries, look stupid. Things that we thought were spiritual are no longer spiritual. The world needs a new spirituality and a new kind of religiousness. I hit psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, more than any other profession for the simple reason that they are the ones who can understand what I am doing here. And if they understand rightly they will serve the future and not the past. They will help you to become more harmonious with yourself rather than become adjusted to an ill society which is just on its deathbed. That is where my work differs: I don’t help you to become adjusted to society. This society is bound to die, it is doomed to die, and the sooner it happens, the better, because it has become ugly. To go on carrying this rotten corpse does not allow people to live rightly. They have to take care of the corpse which stinks, and there are so many corpses in your house that there is no space for you to live. We have to get rid of the past. Up to now neither Freudian nor Adlerian nor Jungian psychology has been of any help; it has become part of the establishment. As priests have been doing in the past, psychoanalysts are now doing the same: helping people to compromise with society, helping people to be normal. Normality is not health! Health is very rebellious, and psychoanalysis is not yet courageous enough to be rebellious. Hence I hit it—because I know the potential; it can become rebellious. Once psychoanalysis becomes rebellious it will help the new man to arrive sooner, it will help the first real revolution in the world. Up to now all the revolutions were very tiny, pseudo, superficial, because the real revolution can happen only in the psyche of man, not in the social structure or the economic structure. A real revolution has nothing to do with politics; it has something to do with the spirituality of man. We have to create a new spirituality, a new vision. You say, Sarjana, ‘In my own life I have been blessed with encountering a few rare and wise psychiatrists, psychologists—one of whom led me to you.’ But where is he? Now it is your duty to lead him to me. Pay him in the same coin! What is he doing there? He should be here! He must have read, he must have heard about me, but that is not the way to know me. The only way to know me is to be a sannyasin, is to be part of my energy field, to vibrate with me, to pulsate with me, to synchronize with me. Now this is your duty, you owe this to him. Help him to come here; he may be afraid to come himself. Just the other day I received a letter from Hari Chetana in Germany saying that on the radio a very famous psychologist was asked by a woman, ‘It is now six years since my son went to Poona and there seems to be no possibility that he will ever come back. What do you say about it?’ And the famous doctor said, ‘I have heard much about Poona, I have read also. You need not be worried—your son is in the right place.’ But hearing about me and reading about me while I am alive here… And the distance between Berlin and Poona is nothing. Within hours you can be here—he has never come here. These people know only one way of becoming acquainted with anything—and that is reading, studying. These people are knowledgeable people, but not wise. We are helpless. We cannot do anything about Buddha—we have to read him because he is no longer present. But how many times, reading Buddha and his beautiful sutras, has not the idea arisen in millions of hearts, ‘How fortunate it would have been if we had been alive in the time of Buddha.’ Or reading the beautiful words of Jesus has not the idea occurred to you that, ‘How tremendously blessed were those people who followed Jesus while he was alive, walked with him, talked with him, dined with him, wined with him’? Reading about Krishna have you not heard the distant, distant call of his flute? Have you not felt a little sad that now there is no possibility of encountering this beautiful man? But when buddhas are alive you don’t use that opportunity. You may have been alive when Jesus was there—he may have passed through your village and you may not have gone to see him. You may have been alive while Buddha walked on the earth and you may not have ever encountered him. You may have been alive while Krishna was playing on his flute and a few courageous people were dancing around him; you may have passed and you may have thought, ‘These people are crazy and this man has hypnotized them with his music’—and you would have thought yourself very sane. But now you cry and weep and you feel sad. Sarjana, help your psychiatrists, your psychoanalysts to come here. Tell them a buddha is alive, a christ is back on the earth—tell them! And this is not only a message for Sarjana, this is for all of you. Jesus says: Go on the rooftops and shout so that people can hear. I say to you also: shout from the rooftops; help as many people as you can to come here, because right now the water is available, the water is flowing. It can quench the thirst of millions, but they will have to come to the river and they will have to bow down to the river; only then can they receive the gift. Don’t feel sad, feel happy that you are here. And I am going to hit again and again, so you have to become accustomed to my ways. I hit people only when I see great potential in them.