WHEN I AM AMONG PEOPLE, AFTER A WHILE I WANT TO BE ALONE. WHEN I AM ALONE, AFTER A WHILE I WANT TO BE AMONG PEOPLE. SO I CANNOT ENJOY ONE OR THE OTHER FULLY. SHOULD I LIVE ON THE INSIDE OR ON THE OUTSIDE?

Robert, this is one of the most fundamental questions every human being has to encounter; it is part of the challenge that life presents to us. The mind functions in duality; it is like a pendulum. When the pendulum moves towards the right, you see it moving towards the right, but at the very same time it is gathering momentum to go to the left. When it is moving towards the left it is gathering momentum to go to the right.

This inner duality in the pendulum represents your mind. The mind is a pendulum; hence, when you are alone you cannot enjoy aloneness, you start gathering momentum to be with people, and as you start thinking of people, aloneness turns into loneliness.

Aloneness is tremendously beautiful; it is like a sunlit peak, something beyond the clouds. But loneliness is ugly; it is a dark hole. If you cannot enjoy aloneness everything goes upside down: the peak becomes the valley, the light becomes darkness. You are bored, you don't know what to do with yourself; you feel empty, and you want to stuff yourself with something -- either with people or with food or with a movie. These are all different ways not to feel lonely. And when you are with people, the same will happen again from the other end. When you are with people you feel interfered with, trespassed upon, because others start encroaching on your space, they destroy your freedom. So being with others is no longer love; it becomes a bondage. And one hates bondage -- one wants to get rid of it as quickly as possible. It is a prison; you start feeling suffocated.

Even with the person you think you love, you start feeling fed up. You cannot enjoy love because suddenly you realize that to be alone is beautiful, because now you can see that aloneness is freedom. But when you are alone you see love as joy!

This is the dichotomy of the mind. It exists in every dimension. If you are poor you hanker to be rich; this is a well-known fact. But the other side has not been recognized:

everybody knows the beggar wants to be the emperor, but have you not watched Mahavira renouncing his kingdom, Buddha escaping from his marble palaces? What is that? It is the same phenomenon! The poor man wants to be rich, and the rich man wants to be poor. And when Buddha started initiating disciples he called them BHIKKHUS.

The word "bhikkhu" means beggar.

Alexander the Great, at the last moment of his life, realized that he had wasted his life in accumulating unnecessary, nonessential things, and now death would take everything away. Suddenly he remembered the great Greek mystic Diogenes whom he had met just a year before. Diogenes was naked and lived without any possessions, and Alexander had felt tremendously infatuated with him. He had told Diogenes exactly this, that "If I am to come back to the world I will ask God to make me Diogenes next time, and not Alexander."

This is the same dichotomy; there is no difference. When you are a child you want to be older, and when you are older you start thinking how beautiful were the days when you were a child. Everybody as he grows older starts fantasizing about his childhood; he starts decorating it in every possible way. And when he was a child he was in a hurry to grow up.

When you are alive you think of the life that is after death. People come to me and say, "Tell us something about what happens after death." And I am always intrigued with their question. Rather than answering them, I ask them, "First tell me what happens before death!" Nobody seems to be interested in that -- what happens before death; everybody is interested in what happens after death. And if you meet a ghost, it is absolutely certain he will tell you, "I am suffering very badly. I missed my life, now I am hankering for it. I would like to have the body again, the mind again, to have all the senses again."

Different aspects, but the problem is the same: you hanker for the opposite because the grass looks greener -- not your own grass but the grass beyond the fence in the neighbor's garden. It always looks greener. It is a simple phenomenon: whatsoever you have loses meaning -- the moment you have it, it loses meaning -- whatsoever you have not becomes immensely significant. The mind hankers for that which it has not got, and the mind gets bored with whatsoever it has got.

It is said about the great English poet Byron that he must have loved at least sixty women. He did not live so long; he died young -- and this number, sixty, is a very conservative estimate. This is from the known stories; there may have been other relationships which are not known. When he would go mad about a woman, he would risk everything. He risked his whole respectability. He was expelled from England for the simple reason that he was creating chaos. He was a beautiful man -- very beautiful, extraordinarily beautiful -- and a great poet. He had all those qualities which women are attracted to. He was a legend in his own time.

It had become a routine phenomenon that if he entered a restaurant the men would clutch the hands of their wives and run away! He was not allowed into clubs, he was not allowed into good society. Everybody was afraid of the man; he had some charm, some magnetism, some charisma. And for months he would go mad and chase a woman. And the moment he got the woman he would lose all interest, all interest would absolutely disappear. He represents mind in its purity, in its essential quality.

One woman forced him to marry her because she insisted that she would not allow him even to kiss her, or even to hug her, or even to hold her hand unless he married her. And he was so mad about her that he agreed to marriage. When they were coming out of the church, just married, and the guests were taking leave of them, standing on the steps, holding the hand of his wife, he saw another woman walking down the road and he forgot his wife. His wife immediately recognized it; she could see that he had forgotten all about her, and she told him so.

But he was a sincere man too. He said, "It is true, I have lost all interest in you. For six months I was mad -- day in, day out, I dreamed about you, fantasized about you, wrote poems about you. I was dying! I was thinking that without you I could not live a single moment longer. And now that you are mine and your hand is in my hand, I only feel perspiration! That woman for a moment caught my whole being. I simply forgot you." He apologized -- but apology is not love.

This is the way the mind functions: its whole interest is in that which you have not got.

Hence, Robert, your question is significant and it has tortured humanity since the very beginning. And people have been choosing, just as you are asking: "Should I live on the inside or on the outside?"

Wherever you live you will be in trouble. If you live on the outside, the inside will function like a magnet. If you live on the inside, the outside will go on sending invitations to you: "Come out! It is a beautiful morning. The flowers are blossoming and the air is fragrant," or, "It is a tremendously ecstatic sunset. Look, the starry night...." And if you are outside you will continuously worry, "What is inside me? Who am I? What is this consciousness?"

Science has become focused on the outside; religion has become focused on the inside.

Both are lopsided, because the inside and the outside are not two separate things, they are inseparably one. To separate them is arbitrary, artificial.

In the past the monks decided to be alone because they saw the misery of love, they saw that to be with someone is to suffer. What Jean-Paul Sartre said in this century, the monks all over the world -- Christian, Hindu, Jaina, Buddhist, Mohammedan -- have known all along; it is one of the most ancient experiences. Jean-Paul Sartre is not original at all; he looks original because nobody has said it in exactly that way. Jean-Paul Sartre says, "The other is hell" -- and this is the experience of all the monks, of all the mahatmas, of all the saints. Whatsoever denomination they belong to does not matter; on one point they all agree: "The other is hell -- escape from the other!"

They escaped to the Himalayan caves, they escaped to the monasteries, they escaped from the world -- they were really escaping from the other. But were they happy in their monasteries, in their caves? That question has not been raised. It has to be raised. Were they blissful? Maybe they were more silent than you are -- but silence is not bliss, silence is not a song. Silence has no warmth; it can be cold and dead. And it WAS cold and dead.

Your so-called monks have lived in such a suicidal way that they have become living corpses. They chose half of life, and whenever you chose half you will be in trouble, because what are you going to do with the other half? You will remain only fragmentary, and the other half will take its revenge.

The remainder of humanity has chosen to live in the world, and it is very rare to find a person in the world who does not feel once in a while the desire to escape from all this.

The world is too much; it is anxiety, anguish; it is nothing but suffering.

Psychologists say that the average person thinks at least four times in his life of committing suicide -- at least! Why do people think of committing suicide? And not only do people think of it, many commit suicide. That's also a way of escaping from the world, escaping totally, because if you go to a monastery you can come back. You know it yourself: if you go to the Himalayas, who can prevent you? -- you can come back again.

Suicide seems to be irreversible. Suicide is a total renunciation of life, and what you have called the renunciation of life is nothing but slow suicide, suicide in installments -- the American way, part by part!

My own observation is that both extremes have been wrong, and both have created a very ugly situation. There is no need to choose; we have to live both. Of course it is easier to be silent in a cave, but that silence will not give you a dance, and without a dance you will remain dead. If you are in the world it will give you a song, but the song will not have any depth; it will be superficial, formal.

One needs silence in the heart, and yet a silence which is not cold but warm, a silence which can sing and dance.

When silence and song meet, the man is whole.

When you are capable of moving between the inner and the outer easily, just as you move in and out of your house...in the same way as when it is too cold in the morning you simply move out of the house into the sun. You enjoy the warmth of the sun, and when it becomes too hot you move inside. There is no problem in it -- it is YOUR house! The inner is as much yours as the outer, and to be capable of moving from the inner to the outer and vice versa, in a flexible way, creates the whole man. And I call the WHOLE man the holy man.

My sannyasins have to be whole.

Robert, you are not yet a sannyasin. If you are really interested in solving this problem, my sannyas is the only way to solve it, because I teach flexibility. All the old ideas are rigid: "Either be extrovert or be introvert" -- but both are pathological. The introvert becomes moribund, the introvert becomes a little bit insane because he loses contact with objective reality; he starts hallucinating. That's why it is easy to experience God if you go to the Himalayan caves. There is no objective reality to hinder you from deceiving yourself. There is no objective reality to remind you that this is a dream, that what you are seeing is not there, it is a hallucination.

It is a well-known psychological fact that if you live in deep isolation for just three weeks you will start hallucinating. And you can hallucinate whatsoever you want: if you are a Christian you will see Christ, if you are a Hindu you will see Krishna, if you are a Buddhist you will see Buddha. This is very strange! No Christian ever sees Buddha, no Buddhist ever sees Christ! Whatsoever you have been conditioned for, your hallucination will be colored by it. You will start visiting heaven, but your heavens will be different.

The Tibetan heaven is very warm; it has to be -- Tibet suffers so much from cold. The Tibetan hell is cold, ice-cold, but the Indian hell is just fire. The very idea of ice to the Indian will give him great joy! The Indian idea of heaven is that it is very cool -- it is air- conditioned! The Indian will dream about his heaven, and the Tibetan will dream about his heaven.

In the Mohammedan heaven there are rivers and streams flowing with wine, because the KORAN is very much against wine. It is repression. When you repress you are bound to erupt in hallucination. The Mohammedan idea of heaven is that you will have beautiful women there, and not only beautiful women but beautiful boys too, because in the Arabic nations homosexuality has been one of the longest traditions -- repressed, very much repressed. But whatsoever is repressed is bound to assert itself somewhere. In heaven even homosexuality is allowed, available. Here it is condemned; there it is allowed.

Hindus go on saying that all desires are wrong, but in heaven you have wish-fulfilling trees. You just sit underneath the tree -- KALPATARUS, wish-fulfilling trees -- you desire anything, and immediately, instantly it is fulfilled. Instant coffee is a very new thing -- Hindus have known instant fulfillment for all desires! Just sit under the KALPAVRISKSHA. Here they go on talking against desires, and there the same desires are going to be fulfilled. Here they go on talking against women....

The Hindu saint goes on saying that the woman is the door to hell, and in their heaven there are beautiful APSARAS, beautiful women -- Uruvasi, Menaka...thousands.... They have golden bodies; they are always young. In fact, they have been stuck at the age of sixteen for millions of years; they have never grown beyond it. It seems they were born at exactly sixteen and they have remained sixteen. Here, the woman is the door to hell, and the saints are hoping that sooner or later all this austerity, asceticism will be finished and they will enjoy heaven forever and forever. And what are you going to enjoy there? -- the same women who are the doors to hell here!

The same money, the same gold which you go on calling dust...in heaven even the flowers are made of gold. I would not like such a heaven! Flowers made of gold cannot have any perfume. A roseflower made of gold will be ugly, it will be dead. Gold cannot be alive.

The extrovert is half: he is continuously running after things and continuously feeling guilty that he is missing the inner -- maybe the real bliss is there. Perhaps the Buddha and the Jina and the Christ are right, that the kingdom of God is within. And the person who is sitting silently, looking inside, is continuously wondering, "Am I wasting my time?

People are enjoying and I am foolishly sitting here, waiting for the spring to come and the grass to grow by itself! And who knows whether it grows by itself or not? And even if it does grow, so what? It will still grow whether I am sitting silently or not! The spring will come and the grass will grow, so let it grow! And there is some juicy party going on, and there are so many beautiful hotels and restaurants and clubs and nightclubs...."

Even a man like Morarji Desai...can you imagine Morarji Desai visiting a nightclub?

Now he has confessed that when he was the prime minister -- he must have been eighty- three at that time -- he went to visit a nightclub in Canada, of course without declaring it.

He has kept it a secret up to now. Why did he suddenly talk about it? He was bragging; he did not think that he was saying something wrong -- he was bragging. He was telling the Gujarat Vidyapeeth students in Ahmedabad, "I have attained to the ultimate celibacy.

For example, I visited a nightclub in Canada just to see what was going on there." But why should a man who has attained to ultimate celibacy even be interested to know what is going on there? Some rationalization, some strategy of the mind entering from the backdoor. He was not even being honest enough to say, "I wanted to see the naked women." No, he says, "I wanted to see what was going on there." But why should he be worried about it?"

And he says, "When I went there, knowing that I was the prime minister, the four most beautiful girls were sent to me and they started dancing around me, making all kinds of gestures -- very inviting, very appealing -- but I remained controlled! I was not affected at all." He emphasized it so much that it simply shows he must have been affected.

And those girls seem to have been far more intelligent than this poor guy. After a while they said, "We thought you were a man, but you are just a Morarji Desai!" Now do you know what Morarji Desai means? The girls said, "We thought you were a man, but you are nothing -- just a Morarji Desai!"

But he even brags about that -- stupidity is such! He thought they recognized that he was no ordinary person, he was Morarji Desai -- that he was not a man in the ordinary sense, he had transcended all human weaknesses.

The people who are living extrovertly will remain interested in the inner world, and the people who are living introvertly will remain interested in the extrovert world, and they will both be torn apart. That creates anguish, strain.

Robert, my own suggestion is to live a relaxed life. It is beautiful to be alone, it is also beautiful to be in love, to be with people. And both are complementary, not contradictory.

When you are enjoying others, enjoy, and enjoy to the full; there is no need to bother about aloneness. And when you are fed up with others, then move into aloneness and enjoy it to the full.

Don't try to choose -- if you try to choose you will be in difficulty. Every choice is going to create a division in you, a kind of split in you. Why choose? When you can have both, why have one? And it is a very natural process. It is just like when you are hungry you eat, and when you are full you stop eating. You don't start saying, "What should I choose? Should I always remain hungry or should I eat continuously?" When you are hungry, eat, and when you are full, stop eating and forget all about it; there are a thousand and one other things to do. There is no need to go on a fast, and there is no need to go on stuffing yourself continuously; both are pathological states.

The same is true about love and aloneness. Enjoy people because they are manifestations of God, but remember the other side is also there. So when you start feeling fed up there is no need to remain with people just out of politeness. Don't try to be British -- be authentic! It is very difficult not to be British, because we have always been told to be polite, to have certain manners, to follow a certain etiquette. Even if you are bored you go on smiling. Even if you don't feel good with somebody you say, "It is a blessing to meet you," and you are cursing them.

Why do you go on creating such strange splits in yourself? It is time -- man has come of age -- it is time to be authentic. When you are feeling good with somebody, say so and say it totally, and when you are not feeling good, then you can just say, "Excuse me...." I am not saying to be rude, but there is no need to suffer the presence of the other. Just say, "I would like to be alone, I would like my own space."

Up to now this has not been possible. If you love somebody you cannot say, "I would like to have my own space." This is sheer nonsense, inhuman! If you love somebody you should be sincere -- that is the indication of love -- you should be able to say, "Now I would like to have my own space." And you should allow the other also the same freedom to be with you or not to be with you.

It is good if two persons agree to be together for a time; it is beautiful. But it is also good to be alone. Aloneness will give you peace, silence, equanimity, meditativeness, awareness, a sense of integrity, centering, rootedness, groundedness -- all these are great values. And love will help you to learn compassion, prayer, service -- they are also great values, and they will enhance each other.

That's what I am doing here with my sannyasins -- letting them enhance each other, letting them become backgrounds to each other.

Let your love help your aloneness.

It is like...when you look at the sky in the day you will not see any stars. It is not that they have all died or disappeared or evaporated; they are still there, but the background of darkness is missing, that's why you cannot see them. The sky is always full of stars; day or night makes no difference, but in the night you can see the stars clearly. The darker the night, the brighter the stars look. They are not against each other; they are complementary, not contradictory.

So are the inner and the outer world: the outer is part of the inner, Robert, just as the inner is part of the outer. They are like two wings -- you cannot fly with one wing. Enjoy both, and don't create any rift, don't create any fight between them. Learn the art of being together AND of being alone.

Hence my whole teaching consists of two words, "meditation" and "love." Meditate so that you can feel immense silence, and love so that your life can become a song, a dance, a celebration. You will have to move between the two, and if you can move easily, if you can move without any effort, you have learned the greatest thing in life.

God is both the creator and the creation -- this infinite universe outside and this infinite consciousness inside. And he has to be tasted and known in both aspects.
Come Come Yet Again Come  - Chapter 9

Another Sunday

AS A CHILD, SUNDAYS HAVE BEEN SOMETHING VERY SPECIAL TO ME.
NOW, SINCE A FEW DAYS, I WAKE UP EVERY MORNING AND GO OUT, SEE THE SUN SHINING THROUGH THE TREES, HEAR THE BIRDS SINGING AND GET THIS FEELING, 'AH, ANOTHER SUNDAY.' I PUT ON MY BEST CLOTHES AND HAVE SUNDAY FOR THE WHOLE DAY. WHAT IS HAPPENING TO ME?

Don't make a problem out of it.

The mind is constantly searching for something to pounce upon -- even happiness. It makes a problem out of happiness also. If you are feeling happy, you ask, 'Why?' That question is dangerous.

If you are suffering it is good to ask 'why?' because the suffering has to be dissolved, transcended; ways and means have to be found to get out of it -- so the 'why?' is relevant.

But when you are happy, then to ask 'why?' is to disturb it. There is no need to ask any questions. When happiness surrounds you accept it totally without any questioning.

If you are ill, diagnosis is needed, analysis is needed, because the disease has to be found.

But if you are healthy you don't go to the doctor to ask, 'Why am I healthy? Diagnose my health. What is happening to me?' You don't go.

It is a habit of the mind because it has been always living in misery, unhappiness, and always the 'why?' has been relevant. So when clouds disappear for the first time and the sun shines in your life, the old question goes on persisting -- 'Why?' Learn to accept happiness, learn to enjoy it without any questioning, learn to trust happiness, don't doubt it, because the very doubt will be a poisoning. Happiness rarely happens. Those moments are very few and far between. When they come, welcome them, open your door, receive them with your full heart, don't withhold anything. Even a question will become a very, very strong wall between you and your happiness.

Every day is a Sunday. It should be so. Every day is a holiday. It should be so. Because all days belong to him. Each moment is holy. Once you understand it, you will stop asking questions like this.

Don't think that any particular day is needed for you to be happy -- only a particular mind. It has nothing to do with time; everything depends on the attitude, how you look at life. There are people for whom even a Sunday is not a Sunday. There is no light, no sun rising -- even on a Sunday. They are clouded in their own darkness, shrouded in their own misery. They carry their hell around them. Even if you force them into heaven, they will go on carrying their hell. They will live in their hell. Nobody can force them out of their hell unless they decide to drop it. It is your decision to be happy or to be unhappy.

I have heard about a Sufi mystic who was always happy, always and always. Nobody had ever seen him unhappy. It was as if he did not know that language, as if the only way he knew how to be was happy.

He became very old and one day a man asked him, 'Will you please tell me your secret?

How you remain so happy? How you remain so unperturbed? How each moment you can be so blissful? It is impossible. It is unbelievable. What is your secret?'

The old man laughed and he said, 'Long before, I found one simple thing: that each morning, when I opened my eyes, there are two alternatives to choose for that day -- either to be happy or to be unhappy. And I always chose to be happy. Simple is my secret: each day gives me only two alternatives to choose -- to be happy or to be unhappy.

And I always choose to be happy, that's all. There is nothing more to it.'

But you will not believe in this. You will say this old man is deceiving. He must have some other secret.

But I also tell you this is the secret. All great truths are simple truths, very simple. Try tomorrow morning. Before you open your eyes have a clear-cut vision of two alternatives: being in hell or in heaven. Visualise misery on one hand, visualise blissfulness on another hand. See deeply into both. Don't be in a hurry. Look into both as deeply as possible and wait -- then decide. If you want to be unhappy then decide, let it be your decision -- and then be truly unhappy the whole day. Be committed to your decision and don't try to escape from it. Whatsoever happens, you remain miserable. And if you decide to be happy, then stick to it and soon you will realise that your life is your decision.

You are suffering because you go on deciding in that way; you are suffering because you go on clinging to your suffering. You have made a habit out of it. It is just mechanical.

Good, you should feel grateful that it is happening to you -- that every day is becoming a holiday. Holidays are disappearing from the world. In the legal sense people have more holidays. Workdays are being reduced all over the world, from six to five, from five to four, and soon even that will not be so -- in the very highly developed technological societies, one day of the week will do and for six days people can have holidays. But 'holiday' is disappearing -- that quality of sacredness, that quality of holiness is disappearing.

I have heard about a very reformed temple. Of course it is in Southern California because everything in California is a little far-out, even religion.

There is a reformed temple in Beverley Hills that is so reformed that on the holiest of the days, Yom Kippur, there is a sign on the door saying: Closed for the Jewish Holidays.

That quality, that consciousness is disappearing from the world.

People have more leisure -- that is another thing. But what do they do with their leisure?

They create more misery for themselves or for others. Finding nothing to do, they do harm to themselves or to others. More accidents happen on the holidays -- more car accidents, more murders, more suicides. And after the holiday people are so tired that they need a whole week's rest to recuperate, to recover. They do a thousand and one things on holidays just to keep busy, because not to be busy is to be with oneself and that has become almost impossible.

To be with oneself and to be happy with oneself -- that dimension is completely lost.

That's what a holiday is, or should be. One is so full of God, so full of being, that there is no need to do anything, there is no need to be occupied. Occupation is just an escape. It is a good way to avoid encountering yourself, encountering life. Holidays are disappearing.

It is good that every day a feeling arises in you that this is a holiday. It is. If it was not so before, then you were missing something. Now it has started happening, don't make it a question.

I used to know a man who was an atheist. Once I heard that he had become a theist. I could not believe it. So when I came across him I asked him, 'How come you decided to become a theist?'

'Well,' he said, 'I used to be an atheist but I gave it up.'

'Why?' I enquired.

He said, 'No holidays.'

If you are an atheist then there are no holidays, then there is no God, then there are no Sundays. The Christian parable says that God created the world in six days and on the seventh day, Sunday, he rested. That rest was very beautiful, it was out of great creation.

He was feeling fulfilled. He had created the whole world and, on the sixth day, he looked and he said, 'Good, very good.' And he rested. He was happy, like a small child who has made something and looks from every side and says, 'Good. I have done it.' He rested on the seventh day. That rest-day was a fulfillment-day.

The parable has much significance. It says that you can have a rest-day only after creation. If you don't create anything, your life will be restless; you will not be able to have a holiday. Create something -- only then you can rest. Rest is a by-product. You cannot directly rest -- first you have to be so creative, you have to feel so good about yourself, so happy with yourself, so worthy, that you can allow rest for yourself, that you can allow a day just for fun.

Ordinarily people can't allow a day of rest for themselves because they feel so condemnatory about themselves, they feel so unworthy because they have not done anything worthwhile, that they have not experienced any fulfillment, nothing has happened, they have not blossomed. Hence continuous occupation, continuous activity is needed.

Many people go on working and working and working and one day they die...because their work is not creative. When is the work creative? The work is creative when you love it, the work is creative when you feel in tune with it, the work is creative when you enjoy it, the work is creative when you choose it, when it fits with your being and there is a great harmony between you and your work.

Once that happens, whatsoever you do is creative. And when after each creative moment you can relax, that relaxation is earned. Yes, God earned relaxation for the seventh day.

For six days he worked hard, he created the whole world; on the seventh day he had earned relaxation, he was worthy of it. That's the meaning of the parable.

If you are creative only then can you have holidays, not otherwise. If you want to have holidays become more and more creative. I am not saying be creative in the eyes of others -- that is irrelevant -- just be creative in your own eyes, whatsoever you do. If you love it then do it, otherwise don't do it -- choose some other way. Life is vast. Says Jesus, 'There are many mansions in my God's house.' There are many dimensions in life. There is enough opportunity to choose.

If you are not feeling fulfilled in something that you are doing, then don't do it, because this will be a sheer wastage and you will not have earned holidays. A man who has lived according to his being, who has done his own thing, earns death. Then he dies, but the death is a Sunday; then he dies, but he dies fulfilled. He has no complaints. He lived the way he wanted to live.

If I am going to die and God asks me, 'If I send you back, how would you like to live?' I will say, 'The same. I loved it. I enjoyed it. I would like to live the same way.' Just think about you. If you die and God asks you, 'If you are sent back to the world what changes would you like to make in your life?' Will you be able to say that you would like to live the same way, absolutely the same way? If not, then you are doing something wrong with your life. Then you are dragging your life, then you are not living it. Then you are simply killing time -- as they say. Then you are simply wasting your energies, they are simply dissipated. They will not become an integral force and there is not going to be any blossoming -- your tree is going to remain without any fruits and flowers. Then how can you be happy and how can you enjoy?

Time as holy opportunity, that is the meaning of holiday -- a holy day, a day which is not profane, a day which is not ordinary. And once you know how to be creative, each moment becomes holy.

Whenever you create something you participate with the creator -- you have become a small creator in your own right. If you write a small poem or you sing a song, maybe nobody likes it, nobody applauds it, but that is irrelevant. You enjoyed it. Singing, you were happy, you participated in that moment with God, you helped him to create a song, you became instrumental. In fact, whatsoever is created is created by him -- you allowed him to create a small song through you. Then you feel tremendously good, good about yourself.

And that is one of the basic qualities of a religious man: he always feels good about himself. He is not in any way guilty, guilt does not exist in him -- because he lived life as he wanted to live it; he loved his life the way it happened; it was the only life he wanted to live. Then there is no guilt. Remember, a guilty person is not a religious person. A guilty person is ill, a guilty person is neurotic, a guilty person needs psychiatric help.

A religious person feels tremendously good about himself; whatsoever he is doing, he is doing something intrinsically valuable. This should be insisted upon as much as possible:

worth in life arises only when you do something intrinsically valuable.

There are two types of values in life. One is intrinsic value. You sing a song -- it has an intrinsic value, it is the means and it is the end also. Or you sing a song in the marketplace to earn a little money. That money is not intrinsic to the song, that money is an outside value. And if you are singing your song only for the money, the activity is no longer holy, it is profane. If you are singing your song for the happiness that it brings to you.... Maybe as a by-product it brings money also, but that is irrelevant. If it brings, it is good, if it does not bring, that too is good -- but your activity has an inner glow to it, it is intrinsically valuable in itself. If you are happy that you could sing, you are happy that you had an opportunity to sing, then every day will become meditative, holy.

If you are doing the meditations here correctly, this is going to happen to everybody.

That's my whole effort here: to help you enjoy each moment as it comes.

Dang Dang Doko Dang  - Chapter 1

WHAT ARE THE DISTINGUISHING VIRTUES OF KRISHNA THAT MAKE HIM RELEVANT TO OUR TIME? WHAT IS HIS SIGNIFICANCE FOR US? PLEASE EXPLAIN.

Krishna is utterly incomparable, he is so unique. Firstly, his uniqueness lies in the fact that although

Krishna happened in the ancient past he belongs to the future, is really of the future. Man has

yet to grow to that height where he can be a contemporary of Krishna’s. He is still beyond man’s

understanding; he continues to puzzle and battle us. Only in some future time will we be able to

understand him and appreciate his virtues. And there are good reasons for it.

The most important reason is that Krishna is the sole great man in our whole history who reached

the absolute height and depth of religion, and yet he is not at all serious and sad, not in tears. By

and large, the chief characteristic of a religious person has been that he is somber, serious and

sad-looking – like one vanquished in the battle of life, like a renegade from life. In the long line of

such sages it is Krishna alone who comes dancing, singing and laughing.

Religions of the past were all life-denying and masochistic, extolling sorrow and suffering as great

virtues. If you set aside Krishna’s vision of religion, then every religion of the past presented a sad

and sorrowful face. A laughing religion, a religion that accepts life in its totality is yet to be born.

And it is good that the old religions are dead, along with them, that the old God, the God of our old

concepts is dead too

It is said of Jesus that he never laughed. It was perhaps his sad look and the picture of his physical

form on the cross that became the focal point of at traction for people, most of whom are themselves

unhappy and miserable. In a deep sense Mahavira and Buddha are against life too. They are in

favor of some other life in some other world; they support a kind of liberation from this life.

Every religion, up to now, has divided life into two parts, and while they accept one part they deny the

other, Krishna alone accepts the whole of life. Acceptance of life in its totality has attained full fruition

in Krishna. That is why India held him to be a perfect incarnation of God, while all other incarnations

were assessed as imperfect and incomplete. Even Rama is described as an incomplete incarnation

of God. But Krishna is the whole of God.

And there is a reason for saying so. The reason is that Krishna has accepted and absorbed

everything that life is.

Albert Schweitzer made a significant remark in criticism of the Indian religion. He said that the

religion of this country is life negative. This remark is correct to a large extent, if Krishna is left out.

But it is utterly wrong in the context of Krishna. If Schweitzer had tried to understand Krishna he

would never have said so.

But it was unfortunate that we did not allow Krishna to influence our life in a broad way. He remains

a lonely dancing island in the vast ocean of sorrow and misery that is our life. Or, we can say he

is a small oasis of joyous dancing and celebration in the huge desert of sadness and negativity, of

suppression and condemnation that we really are. Krishna could not influence the whole spectrum

of our life, and for this we are alone to blame. Krishna is not in the least responsible for it. We were

not that worthy, that deserving, to have him, to imbibe him, to absorb him.

Up to now, man’s mind has thought of and looked at life in fragments – and thought dialectically.

The religious man denies the body and accepts the soul. And what is worse, he creates a conflict, a

dichotomy between the body and spirit. He denies this world, he accepts the other world, and thus

creates a state of hostility between the two. Naturally our life is going to be sad and miserable if we

deny the body, because all our life’s juice – its health and vitality, its sensitivities and beauty, all its

music – has its source in the body. So a religion that denies and denounces the body is bound to be

anemic and ill, it has to be lackluster. Such a religion is going to be as pale and lifeless as a dry leaf

fallen from a tree. And the people who follow such a religion, who allow themselves to be influenced

and conditioned by it, will be as anemic and prone to death as these leaves are.

Krishna alone accepts the body in its totality. And he accepts it not in any selected dimension but

in all its dimensions. Apart from Krishna, Zarathustra is another. About him it is said he was born

laughing. Every child enters this world crying. Only one child in all of history laughed at the time

of his birth, and that was Zarathustra. And this is an index – an index of the fact that a happy and

laughing humanity is yet to be born. And only a joyful and laughing humanity can accept Krishna.

Krishna has a great future. After Freud the world of religion is not going to be the same as it was

before him. Freud stands as a watershed between the religions of the past and the religion of the

future. With Freud a great revolution has taken place and man’s consciousness has achieved a

breakthrough. We shall never be the same again after Freud. A new peak of consciousness has

been touched and a new understanding, an altogether new perspective, a new vision of life has

come into being. And it is essential to understand it rightly.

The old religions taught suppression as the way to God. Man was asked to suppress everything –

his sex, his anger, his greed, his attachments – and then alone would he find his soul, would he

attain to God. This war of man against himself has continued long enough. And in the history of

thousands of years of this war, barely a handful of people, whose names can be counted on one’s

fingers, can be said to have found God. So in a sense we lost this war, because down the centuries

billions of people died without finding their souls, without meeting God.

Undoubtedly there must be some basic flaw, some fundamental mistake in the very foundation of

these religions.

It is as if a gardener has planted fifty thousand trees and out of them only one tree flowers – and yet

we accept his scripture on gardening on the plea that at least one tree has blossomed. But we fail

to take into consideration that this single tree might have been an exception to the rule, that it might

have blossomed not because of the gardener, but in spite of him. The rest of the fifty thousand trees,

those that remained stunted and barren, are enough proof the gardener was not worth his salt.

If a Buddha, a Mahavira or a Christ attains to God in spite of these fragmentary and conflict-rid den

religions, it is no testimony to the success of these religions as such. The success of religion, or let

us say the success of the gardener, should be acclaimed only when all fifty thousand trees of his

garden, with the exception of one or two, achieve flowering. Then the blame could be laid at the

foot of the one tree for its failure to bloom. Then it could be said that this tree remained stunted and

barren in spite of the gardener.

With Freud a new kind of awareness has dawned on man: that suppression is wrong, that

suppression brings with it nothing but self-pity and anguish. If a man fights with himself he can

only ruin and destroy himself. If I make my left hand fight with my right hand, neither is going to win,

but in the end the contest will certainly destroy me. While my two hands fight with themselves, I and

I alone will be destroyed in the process. That is how, through denial and suppression of his natural

instincts and emotions, man became suicidal and killed himself.

Krishna alone seems to be relevant to the new awareness, to the new understanding that came to

man in the wake of Freud and his findings. It is so because in the whole history of the old humanity

Krishna alone is against repression.

He accepts life in all its facets, in all its climates and colors. He alone does not choose he accepts

life unconditionally. He does not shun love; being a man he does not run away from women. As

one who has known and experienced God, he alone does not turn his face from war. He is full of

love and compassion, and yet he has the courage to accept and fight a war. His heart is utterly non

violent, yet he plunges into the fire and fury of violence when it becomes unavoidable. He accepts

the nectar, and yet he is not afraid of poison.

In fact, one who knows the deathless should be free of the fear of death. And of what worth is that

nectar which is afraid of death? One who knows the secret of non-violence should cease to fear

violence. What kind of non-violence is it that is scared of violence? And how can the spirit, the soul,

fear the body and run away from it? And what is the meaning of God if he cannot take the whole of

this world in his embrace?

Krishna accepts the duality, the dialectics of life altogether and therefore transcends duality. What

we call transcendence is not possible so long as you are in conflict, so long as you choose one

part and reject the other. Transcendence is only possible when you choicelessly accept both parts

together, when you accept the whole.

That is why Krishna has great significance for the future. And his significance will continue to grow

with the passage of time. When the glow and the glamor of all other godmen and messiahs has

dimmed, when the suppressive religions of the world have been consigned to the wastebasket of

history, Krishna’s flame will be heading towards its peak, moving towards the pinnacle of its brilliance.

It will be so because, for the first time, man will be able to comprehend him, to understand him and

to imbibe him. And it will be so because, for the first time, man will really deserve him and his

blessings.

It is really arduous to understand Krishna. It is easy to understand that a man should run away from

the world if he wants to find peace, but it is really difficult to accept that one can find peace in the

thick of the marketplace. It is understandable that a man can attain to purity of mind if he breaks

away from his attachments, but it is really difficult to realize that one can remain unattached and

innocent in the very midst of relationships and attachments, that one can remain calm and still live

at the very center of the cyclone. There is no difficulty in accepting that the flame of a candle will

remain steady and still in a place well secluded from winds and storms, but how can you believe

that a candle can keep burning steadily even in the midst of raging storms and hurricanes? So it is

difficult even for those who are close to Krishna to understand him.

For the first time in his long history man has attempted a great and bold experiment through Krishna.

For the first time, through Krishna, man has tested, and tested fully his own strength and intelligence.

It has been tested and found that man can remain, like a lotus in water, untouched and unattached

while living in the throes of relationship. It has been discovered that man can hold to his love and

compassion even on the battlefield, that he can continue to love with his whole being while wielding

a sword in his hand.

It is this paradox that makes Krishna difficult to understand. Therefore, people who have loved and

worshipped him have done so by dividing him into parts, and they have worshipped his different

fragments, those of their liking. No one has accepted and worshipped the whole of Krishna, no

one has embraced him in his entirety. Poet Surdas sings superb hymns of praise to the Krishna

of his childhood, Bal. krishna. Surdas’ Krishna never grows up, because there is a danger with a

grown-up Krishna which Surdas cannot take. There is not much trouble with a boy Krishna flirting

with the young women of his village, but it will be too much if a grown-up Krishna does the same.

Then it will be difficult to understand him.

After all, we can understand something on our own plane, on our own level. There is no way to

understand something on a plane other than ours.

So for their adoration of Krishna, different people have chosen different facets of his life. Those

who love the Geeta will simply ignore the BHAGWAD, because the Krishna of the GEETA is so

different from the Krishna of the BHAGWAD Similarly, those who love the BHAGWAD will avoid

getting involved with the GEETA. While the Krishna of the GEETA stands on a battlefield surrounded

by violence and war, the Krishna of the BHAGWAD is dancing, singing and celebrating. There is

seemingly no meeting-point whatsoever between the two.

There is perhaps no one like Krishna, no one who can accept and absorb in himself all the

contradictions of life, all the seemingly great contradictions of life. Day and night, summer and

winter, peace and war, love and violence, life and death – all walk hand in hand with him. That is

why everyone who loves him has chosen a particular aspect of Krishna’s life that appealed to him

and quietly dropped the rest.

Gandhi calls the GEETA his mother, and yet he cannot absorb it, because his creed of non-violence

conflicts with the grim inevitability of war as seen in the GEETA. So Gandhi finds ways to rationalize

the violence of the GEETA: he says the war of Mahabharat is only a metaphor, that it did not actually

happen. This war, Gandhi says over and over again, represents the inner war between good and

evil that goes on inside a man. The Kurushetra of the GEETA, according to Gandhi, is not a real

battlefield located somewhere on this earth, nor is the Mahabharat an actual war. It is not that

Krishna incites Arjuna to fight a real Mahabharat, Mahabharat only symbolizes the inner conflict and

war of man, and so it is just a parable.

Gandhi has his own difficulty. The way Gandhi’s mind is, Arjuna will be much more in accord with him

than Krishna. A great upsurge of non-violence has arisen in the mind of Arjuna, and he seems to be

strongly protesting against war. He is prepared to run away from the battlefield and his arguments

seem to be compelling and logical. He says it is no use fighting and killing one’s own family and

relatives. For him, wealth, power and fame, won through so much violence and bloodshed, have no

value what soever. He would rather be a beggar than a king, if kingship costs so much blood and

tears. He calls war an evil and violence a sin and wants to shun it at all costs. Naturally Arjuna has

a great appeal for Gandhi. How can he then understand Krishna?

Krishna very strongly urges Arjuna to drop his cowardice and fight like a true warrior. And his

arguments in support of war are beautiful, rare and unique. Never before in history have such

unique and superb arguments been advanced in favor of fighting, in support of war. Only a man of

supreme non-violence could give such support to war.

Krishna tells Arjuna, ”So long as you believe you can kill someone, you are not a man with a soul,

you are not a religious man. So long as you think that one dies, you don’t know that which is within

us, that which has never died and will never die. If you think you can kill someone you are under

a great illusion, you are betraying your ignorance. The concept of killing and dying is materialistic;

only a materialist can believe so. There is no dying, no death for one who really knows.” So Krishna

exhorts Arjuna over and over again in the GEETA, ”This is all play-acting; killing or dying is only a

drama.”

In this context it is necessary to understand why we call the life of Rama a characterization, a story,

a biography, and not a play, a leela. It is because Rama is very serious. But we describe the life of

Krishna as his leela, his play-acting, because Krishna is not serious at all. Rama is bounded, he is

limited. He is bound, limited by his ideals and principles. Scriptures call him the greatest idealist: he

is circumscribed by the rules of conduct and character. He will never step out of his limits; he will

sacrifice everything for his principles, for his character.

Krishna’s life, on the other hand, accepts no limitations. It is not bound by any rules of conduct, it

is unlimited and vast. Krishna is free, limitlessly free. There is no ground he cannot tread; no point

where his steps can fear and falter, no limits he cannot transcend. And this freedom, this vastness

of Krishna, stems from his experience of self-knowledge. It is the ultimate fruit of his enlightenment.

For this reason the question of violence has become meaningless in Krishna’s life. Now, violence is

just not possible. And where violence is meaningless, non-violence loses its relevance too. Non-

violence has meaning only in relation to violence. The moment you accept that violence is possible,

non-violence becomes relevant at once. In fact, both violence and non-violence are two sides of the

same coin. And it is a materialistic coin. It is materialistic to think that one is violent or non-violent.

He is a materialist who believes he can kill someone, and he too is a materialist who thinks he is

not going to kill anyone. One thing is common to them: they believe someone can be really killed.

Spirituality rejects both violence and non-violence. it accepts the immortality of the soul. And such

spirituality turns even war into play.

Spirituality or religion accepts, and unreservedly accepts, all the dimensions of life. It accepts sex

and attachment together, relationship and indulgence, love and devotion, yoga and meditation, and everything there is to life.

And the possibility of the understanding and acceptance of this philosophy of totality is growing

every day – because now we have come to know a few truths we never knew in the past. Krishna,

however, has undoubtedly known them.

For instance, we now know that the body and soul are not separate, that they are two poles of the

same phenomenon. The visible part of the soul is known as the body, and the invisible part of the

body is called the soul. God and the world are not two separate entities; there is absolutely no

conflict be tween God and nature. Nature is the visible, the gross aspect of God, and God is the

invisible, the subtle aspect of nature. There is no such point in the cosmos where nature ends and

God begins. It is nature itself that, through a subtle process of its dissolution, turns into God, and

it is God himself who, through a subtle process of his manifestation, turns into nature. Nature is

manifest God, and God is unmanifest nature. And that is what adwait means, what the principle of

one without the other means.

We can understand Krishna only if we clearly understand this concept of adwait, that only one is –

one without the other. You can call him God or Brahman or what you like.

We also have to understand why Krishna is going to be increasingly significant for the future and how

he is going to become closer and closer to man. It will be so, because the days when suppression

and repression ruled the roost are gone. After a lengthy struggle and a long spell of inquiry and

investigation we have learned that the forces we have been fighting are our own forces. In reality we

are those forces, and it is utter madness to fight them. We have also learned we become prisoners

of the forces we oppose and fight, and then it becomes impossible to free ourselves from them. And

now we also know that we can never transform them if we treat them as inimical forces, if we resist

and repress them.

For instance, if someone fights with sex, he will never attain to brahmacharya, to celibacy in his

life. There is only one way to celibacy and that is through the transformation of the sex energy

itself. So we don’t have to fight with the energy of sex; on the contrary, we should understand it and

cooperate with it. We need to make friends with sex rather than make an enemy of it, as we have

been doing for so long. The truth is, we can only change our friends; the question of changing those

we treat as enemies simply does not arise. There is no way to even understand our enemies; it is

just impossible. To understand something it is essential to be friendly with it.

Krishna: The Man and His Philosophy