Knowing is not of the Mind It is an Experience or rather, Experiencing

Deva means divine and sita means coolness; divine coolness. So become cool, and just surround yourself with the feeling of coolness. Don't get heated up. Whenever you catch yourself getting heated up, relax immediately. Exhale deeply and you will suddenly feel cool. Anger, or any other sort of heatedness, has to be dropped, and you will feel tremendously beautiful.

Even while making love, remain as cool as possible. It will be difficult in the beginning, mm? because we don't know how to make love in a cool way. We know only the heated state of passion, the feverish state of passion. But once you have known how to make love in a cool way, you will be surprised how much you were missing. Then love becomes meditation. Anything done with coolness becomes meditative.

So let that be your secret mantra - coolness. Sitting, walking, talking, remember it again and again, and relax. If you are walking, don't walk in a hurried way. There is no hurry... we are not going anywhere. Existence is here. All going is pointless. Everything is available here, so don't be goal- oriented.

A goal-oriented person becomes heated up, because he has to live for the future. When you live in the present you become cool. There is no worry in the present. The worry comes when you start living in the future. Then you start thinking and planning what to do, what not to do.

Just herenow there is no problem. Problems don't exist in the present; they come as a by-product of the future. And with problems, fever, wastage of energy. With wastage of energy, one goes on committing suicide. Then life becomes nothing but a long drawn affair of death. Then between death and birth there is nothing but a long, slow coming death... a gradual death.

If you remain cool, you collect energy. If you remain cool, you become a tremendous pool of energy.

And when energy is there and you are not doing anything with it, there is delight. Energy is delight.

Ordinarily we know only the pleasure of release - that is pleasure. In sex, in anger, in exercise, we know one pleasure - and that is of releasing energy. You feel unburdened. But pleasure is not delight, pleasure is not joy - it is a very poor substitute.

Delight comes when the energy is there and you are not doing anything with it, you are not throwing it away. You have become a reservoir; then there is delight. And delight is a totally different dimension.

Delight brings you to bliss.

Delight is divine, I say, and pleasure is human - not even human... it will be better to call it animal.

Pleasure is animal.

So just try it - in every possible way, keep cool. And you can do it - that's why I am giving you that process.

Deva means divine or god, and arpita means devoted; devoted to the divine. Let devotion be your way, and prayer, your path. Mm ? you will grow from the feeling centre. So feel more, love more.

Bring more and more compassion and friendliness to your life. And for no reason at all - not addressed to anybody in particular. Just let that be your way of being, your very style, your climate - of love, compassion, friendship.

Move in dimensions where feeling can have easy growth - music, poetry, painting. Listen to music, play or sing, dance... recite poetry or compose poetry, read poetry. Move more and more into the world of feeling. They are different worlds.

We don t live in one world. People live in different worlds. A man who lives from his thinking centre, lives in a totally different world from the person who lives from his feeling centre. The man who lives from his thinking centre, lives in flat prose, mathematics, logic, calculation. The man who lives from the feeling centre lives in a poetic way. He is not logical.

His approach is not for consistency; his approach is for beauty. He does not approach life's problems through logic, argument - no! He approaches life's problems through wonder, awe, reverence. In fact, the word 'problem' never arises in the person who lives through the feeling centre. The problem - the very word 'problem' - belongs to the thinking mind.

For the feeling person the same thing appears more like a mystery rather than a problem. Not that it has to be solved, but that it has to be lived and loved.

If a man of thinking looks at a flower, the flower poses itself before him as a problem. The man living through the head would like to know what the name of the flower is, to what species it belongs, from what country it has come. He would like to know about it. He is not interested in the flower itself, in the beauty that is there... in the joy that is moving with the flower itself.

A man of feeling is not concerned with what the name of the flower is, to what species it belongs. He is not even concerned whether it is a flower or not - words don't count. The presence, the reality of this flower is so tremendously overwhelming that he feels in awe, reverence, wonder. He is feeling a mystery. His feeling is that of love, of beauty.

So try to approach life through love, through beauty, through feeling, and anything that can be helpful for it, will be helpful for your growth. So become more interested in music, dancing, singing. And sometimes just sit silently with folded hands, bowing to the whole existence. Looking at the stars, bow down. Feel a thrill in the heart.... And we are all connected. Even the farthest star is connected with you. Nothing is disconnected.

Once you start feeling, you will feel tremendously alive, because the whole life is yours, and everything is criss-crossing. The stars and the moon and the sun and the flowers, and the people - they all pass through you... their rays pass through you. They enhance your being.

In the morning, the early morning, a sun ray has come.... It has travelled ninety-three million miles...

and a small violet flower opens to receive that ray. Ninety-three million miles to open this violet? The ray has travelled very far, and these ninety-three million miles are just an empty darkness... just in search of this violet flower? And this violet flower waiting for this ray? Waiting tremendously in trust.

The ray will come and the flower will open and receive it, and will be joyous and will dance... will have its being, and will have its moment of life. With tremendous trust this flower was waiting for something which is so far away. Unbelievable that it will ever reach!

This miracle is happening all around - every single moment. Watch for these miracles, and feel for these miracles. This is the temple of god - this ray coming from the sun... this violet flower opening.

This is the temple of god. A far away star reflecting in a small pool in your garden.... Look at that shimmering light! It is so incredible!

But we are blind - we don't see. And we are deaf - we don't hear. We have lost all sensitivity, we have lost all feeling.

So let feeling be your path, devotion, prayer. Surround yourself in them....

[A sannyasin has had a problem with smoking - since he dropped sucking his thumb, at sixteen.]

Mm mm. Sucking the thumb is better than smoking.

You can try it again. And it will be easier to drop smoking. This is one of the things to be understood:

if you were sucking and then you stopped that, you have chosen smoking as a substitute. Smoking is not your problem. You cannot do anything with it. Howsoever hard you try, you will never succeed, because it is not in the first place a problem - the problem was something else. You have changed the problem. The real problem has been dropped, and a false problem has been put there instead.

You cannot change it!

My suggestion is: forget about fighting with your smoking - you start sucking the thumb (she giggles a little self-consciously). And don't be worried - it is beautiful, it is just beautiful. There is nothing wrong in it, because it is not harmful. Start sucking the thumb, an(i once you start sucking the thumb, smoking will disappear. When smoking disappears, we are on the right track. Then for a few months go on sucking the thumb so this long habit of so many years - smoking - drops. For six or nine months suck the thumb, and don't be ashamed of it - because there is nothing wrong with it.

Smoking basically is somehow concerned either with the sucking of the thumb or with inadequate breast-feeding. When a child is taken away from the breast and he was not ready to, and he wanted to continue - then he starts sucking the thumb. It is a substitute. What else can he do?

Later on sucking the thumb looks so ugly and so childish that one starts finding some substitutes for it: chewing gum or smoking, or chewing pan; one finds something. And of course when you find smoking, smoking fits better than the sucking of the thumb. It is more similar to the breast than the thumb, because when you drink the milk from the breast, it is warm. The smoke is warm, and it gives you again the same feeling of warmth . The thumb cannot give that. So once the child has discovered that smoking is more suitable, then the thumb is dropped - but the thumb was innocent.

So first drop the smoking and instead start sucking your thumb go back regress back. After six, nine months, when smoking has completely disappeared and again the thumb-sucking is replaced, then start to drink milk every night, from an artificial bottle that you use for children... every night. Enjoy it like a breast, mm?

and don't be shy about it. Enjoy it every night - fifteen minutes regularly - and it will give you very very deep sleep. And then go to sleep - just Lying down with the bottle. In the morning also when you open your eyes, again you can find the bottle and suck a little warm milk. In the day also - two, three times. Not much - just a little milk.

So first the cigarette has to be dropped, then you come to the thumb; then the thumb has to be dropped. Then you come back to the breast - this time artificially - and from that, things will disappear. Just after a few days you will see that now there is no need. First you will be drinking four, five, six times a day, then three times, then two times, then one. And then one day you will suddenly feel that there is no need... but this is how it has to disappear.

If you fight with smoking, you will never succeed. Millions of people are fighting and they never succeed, because they never follow the whole procedure. You have to go about it in a very scientific way. You have to come to the root cause. The root cause is - you missed your mother's breast. You could not get as much as you wanted. That desire is lingering, that desire has not gone. And with that desire, something of the unsatisfied child will always remain in you. So it is not really smoking that is the problem: that unsatisfied child will be there.

And once this whole problem is tackled rightly, you will find that for the first time you have become grown-up. Once that child disappears, and the desire to suck the mother's breast disappears, you will suddenly feel an upsurge of energy - something caged has been freed. You will become grown- up.

A person who smokes is not a grown-up, and he is never going to become a grown-up.

But smoking is not the problem, so I never say to not smoke - that is not the problem. Mm? you have substituted many problems before it. It is a shadow of the shadow of the shadow.

Go to the root, to the original problem. There things can be settled, nowhere else. And not only about smoking - about every problem, always go to the root; always find out where the root is.

Once you know the root, it can be cut. But without knowing the root, you can go on fighting with the shadow. With shadows, you will be defeated; you can never be victorious.

So you make it a one year program, mm?

And it will be a better world if everybody - these smokers - are sucking their thumbs, sitting in the train, in the bus, moving around. It will be a better world! It will be more innocent, harmless. It is your thumb! You are not sucking anybody else's. Or if two persons decide to suck each other's thumb, that is their business - they can do it! (laughter) Nothing wrong in it! It will be a loving gesture.

But smoking is patent foolishness. It is not a sin - it is simply stupidity. But move slowly, and don't be in a hurry in dropping the smoking. First start sucking. The moment you are really into sucking, smoking will disappear. You will simply feel uninterested. Even if somebody offers you a cigarette, you will not feel any interest. For six, nine months you continue sucking; then move to a false breast.

And in a one year program it will disappear.

And not only this will disappear - you will be transformed through it. Something very basic in you - which is holding you back - will disappear. Your body will become more healthy, your mind will become more sharp and intelligent. In every way you will become more grown up. You are tethered to this small problem. Something in the past is holding you back, so you cannot move smoothly into the future.

[A sannyasin says: Sometimes I am bored. I feel to go away.]

No! Nowhere to go. One has to find god in people, and in ordinary life. The mind is always tempted to go away, to escape, but escapism never helps, and it never makes one so rich - it makes one poor. In india many escapists are there, sitting in their himalayan caves and just vegetating. You will not see anything in them... just sitting there! No worries, certainly; silence all around - but it is not the real silence. It is the silence of the cemetery... it is the silence of death.

I teach the silence of life, the silence which is throbbing, alive, pulsating... the silence which, when it is pulsating, is positive, affirmative. It is a joy. It is not just absence of worry - it is presence of ecstasy. One can easily escape, and one can attain to a certain silence - it will be just an absence of worry, an absence of tension. It is nothing much.

The real silence has to be in the marketplace, in the crowd. When you are alone in the crowd, you have known what aloneness is. When the crowd cannot disturb your solitude, then it is yours - otherwise the solitude is of the Himalayas, not yours. When nothing disturbs you, when nothing distracts you, then you are centred.

It is easy to find a place where there is no objective disturbance, so of course you are not disturbed; but it is just the objective circumstances that are missing - you have not changed. After thirty years of living in the himalayas, when a monk comes back to the world he again finds himself the same person. Again he gets disturbed - even more so - because in those thirty years of silence he has become very very delicate. Just a small thing and he is disturbed so much. He has lost in fact, rather than gaining anything.

So I am for life, all for life. Be in the world, help people, serve people, and pray towards that service.

Let that be your meditation, and sooner or later you will find that you have become silent. Objective circumstances have not changed at all - you have changed.

The subject has changed - the subjectivity is new.... And it is going to happen.

My whole effort in introducing a new concept of sannyas, is to bring to the world that which for centuries we have been thinking can only be gained in the monastery, in the cave, away from the world. Because of that idea, humanity became divided into two parts - the worldly and the other-worldly, the religious and the irreligious. And of course, if silence can only be attained in the loneliness of the himalayas and the alps, then the whole world cannot go there. If the whole world goes there then there will be no silence either. Only a few people can escape. So the whole world will never become religious that way. That s how the world is not religious. I would like to change this whole idea.

You can become silent, you can become prayerful, meditative - in the world. Then the whole world can become religious. And this has been observed - that if in a village of one thousand people, even ten people start meditating, the whole quality of the conscious-ness of that village changes.

Because those five, ten persons are not isolated. They are not sitting in caves - they are living in the world. They create a certain vibe, they create certain ripples of peace around them. Those ten persons moving in the village of one thousand people come in contact with almost everybody. They go on infecting people. The whole quality of the village will change. Just ten people... that means one percent.

If one percent of human beings are changed towards, turned on to meditation, we will be able to change the whole world consciousness... just one percent. And a totally new consciousness can come into being. The world needs it now - it never been in so much need. It is really passing through a tremendous crisis. It has never been so; there have been crises before, but never of such proportion. So work hard!