Start with meditation

Question 1:

Satyam Svarup, there are two ways to look at life. One is the way of the schizophrenic. That has been followed by the crowds around the world down the centuries. It divides things. It is very uneasy without dividing them. And because for thousands of years the teaching has penetrated into every mind it seems to be the only way.

It looks neat and clean divided, but existence does not follow it. It has its own undivided melting, merging into each other without making any demarcations.

I am against the first because it has destroyed so much that the crime is incalculable.

Just the other day one underground sannyasin has been sent by the court in Germany to an insane asylum. And all that she has done was that she was sticking posters around the city saying that Christianity is the greatest crime against humanity. She was caught and brought to the court and the judge said, "It is criminal to hurt people's feelings."

The young woman must have been of immense courage. She said, "If truth hurts people's feelings what are you going to choose? People's feelings or the truth? Whatever I have written in the posters, I can prove it. And unless you disprove it you have no right to send me to jail."

It is a truth that Christianity has committed immense crimes, and goes on committing them. And Christianity is not alone in it. Hinduism, Mohammedanism, Jainism, Buddhism - even these soft religions, Jainism and Buddhism - go on committing crimes.

Instead of sending her to jail the judge ordered that she should be put in a mental asylum. To speak the truth is the greatest crime. In fact the judge should have been put into the mental asylum. He has no grounds to refute her, and he cannot say that truth has to be repressed because it hurts some stupid people who are clinging to lies.

But this goes on happening around the world. Not a single protest has been made against the treatment of the young woman; neither has anybody protested against the judge. It has been taken for granted... we have taken for granted so many things which are not so.

The old way, the wrong way, the ugly and the insane way, divides love from silence, divides silence from ecstasy, divides ecstasy from self-realization and so on, so forth. But they are not divisions. It is a simple flow of energy moving into different spaces.

You are asking, "Your silence goes so deep into my heart that it makes my love unconditional."

To any logician, to any follower of the first path it will look absurd. What has silence to do with unconditional love? They seem to be worlds apart.

But, Satyam Svarup, you gathered courage to say something which goes against your training of logic. It was possible because it is not an intellectual question, it is your existential experience. And logic cannot overrule existential experiences.

Man is a miniature cosmos, everything intertwined. If your love deepens, your silence will deepen; your blissfulness will deepen, your innocence will deepen, your sensitivity, your aesthetic potentiality will come to flowering.

Just as your hands are not separate from your eyes, neither are your feet separate from your head; you are an organic unity - the same is the situation in the inner world. Your love, your meditation, your silence, your blissfulness - they are simply waves in the same ocean of consciousness. So don't be disturbed by the mind, which is pretending to be the master. Listen to the heart and you will never be on a wrong track. And the more you listen to the heart, the more and more your life will go beyond intellect, beyond logic, beyond dialectics, beyond all kinds of discriminations.

It is beautiful that you have brought it into a question: "As your silence goes so deep into my heart, there it makes my love unconditional."

Start from anywhere. You are a perfect circle, and so deeply interconnected, with everything in your life. You can start by being more meditative, which is the simplest because it does not involve other human beings. The others are a little complex; it is better to let them come on their own.

My own understanding is, don't start with love, because your understanding of love is not the authentic love. It is simply biological infatuation, and if you start with that you have gone astray.

Start with meditation because meditation is the only thing that biology has not given to you. It has a tremendous force of its own. That's why the physiologist or the biologist will account for everything but will never mention the word 'meditation'.

Meditation is the only bridge between you and the beyond. Start with meditation - and that's what is happening to you, effortlessly. Sitting with me, listening to me, a silence enters into your heart and suddenly you feel springs of love unaddressed, radiating in all directions. It is not love to someone, it is simply being loving.

But if it comes from meditation, from silence, it will have purity, because it is not coming from biology.

It is not coming from your past, it is not coming from all your conditionings; it is coming from the spontaneous experience of silence. And suddenly you see a great aroma of love around you.

You have known love, but it was always conditional. Anything conditional is not worth a penny, because the conditional will disappear. Once the condition is fulfilled there is no purpose in it.

Two small boys were talking seriously. One said, "It is strange, everybody else has a girlfriend and I cannot get one."

The other said, "You are fortunate, because to get one is simple but to get out of the love affair is a very messy thing. You enjoy your aloneness as long as you can. I am suffering from these girlfriends!"

Any love which has some conscious or unconscious conditions is bound to bring frustration, because those conditions cannot be fulfilled. The very nature of conditions is such.

Every girl hates her mother; she may not be conscious of it at all. But the thing becomes more complicated because she hates the mother and she imitates her too, because there is no other woman whom she can imitate and learn from. So she learns all those ugly ways that she hates!

Every young girl loves the father, just as the boy loves the mother. It is very natural, because the first experience of the other polarity for the girl is the father, and for the boy is the mother. That is their first experience of the other sex, and naturally there is a tremendous attraction.

But there is also a big, wide barrier. The boy hates the father, just as the girl hates the mother. The reason is the same: the boy hates the father because he is possessing his love-object - the mother.

And the girl is jealous because the mother is possessing the father whom she would have liked to possess. These things go into the unconscious realms of your being, and they remain with you for your whole life unless you become enlightened. This makes your love strangely conditional, which cannot be fulfilled.

Every man unknowingly is expecting his wife to be his mother; that is the image of the woman that he is carrying. Now no other woman can fulfill that image, and anyway the girl has not married him to become his mother! And things become more and more complicated because the girl is carrying the image of her father; she wants her husband exactly to be like her father, and certainly no man marries a woman to become her father.

And the complexities go on becoming more and more difficult: the husband wants the wife to be like the mother, but she hates the mother. The girl wants the husband to fulfill the condition of being the father, but the poor husband in the first place has no idea what is expected of him and in the second place the husband also hates the father. Now things become so complex and complicated....

The family has been, as long as we can remember back into the past, the basic unit of the society - a very insane unit, and it creates the whole society. Each generation transfers its cancer to another generation.

When I say love has to be unconditional it means you are not expecting from the other anything.

You are not expecting the other to be someone else. You are simply loving to the other, as he or she is. And your unconditional love will make you unattached to individuals; it will be just an aroma around you. You will be a loving person. You will love the trees, you will love the sunset, you will love a woman, you will love all that this universe provides you.

Right now, the conditional love is like an imprisonment. Two persons who don't like each other are holding each other in imprisonment. It is a strange thing. If you don't like the other, say good-bye.

But you cannot say good-bye because you are afraid he may enjoy himself somewhere else. It does not fit with your jealousy, he has to be happy with you. A husband does not like his wife to be laughing, to be happy with another man. Neither does the wife like such a situation.

So it is a very strange situation in which we have placed humanity. And unless a great awareness happens that this is our fundamental misery, you cannot be freed from this hell that you have made of the earth. Lovers - the so-called lovers, I mean - are more like detectives to each other than lovers.

Jealously watching what the other is doing... every letter is opened, every pocket is searched.

One night, a woman heard... in sleep her husband was again and again saying, "Kamala, darling."

The woman was listening to exactly what he was saying. In the morning she asked, the first thing, "Who is this 'Kamala darling'?"

The man said, "It is nothing, it is just the name of a female horse. I have been thinking to bet on that horse - you know the racing season is coming."

And then, just when they were talking about this, the phone rang. The husband ran towards the phone; the wife said, "Stop, I will take it." And then she handed over the phone to the husband: "That female horse 'Kamala darling' wants to talk to you."

Even in sleep you are not free to say things. And people say there is freedom of speech! If there were a small window which God had managed to make into every head, the wife would have been looking through the window into your dreams. "What are you seeing? Who is this woman?"

I have heard, two young men were going to Alaska, far away from humanity, for some research work.

In the last village, they purchased everything that they would need for at least three months. When their purchase was complete, the owner of the shop said, "I don't want to interfere, but I am more experienced and I have been giving things to all kinds of research workers who go deep into Alaska where you will not meet another human being..."

They said, "What do you mean?"

He said, "I have a suggestion: I have a plastic woman, really great, glamorous..."

They both said, "This is nonsense. Plastic woman - what are we going to do with a plastic woman?"

He said, "Just keep it in case you need. There will be no woman available for thousands of miles."

One of them relaxed and he said, "I will purchase it."

The other said, "Are you mad?"

The first said, "I am not mad, but without a woman for three months, I may get mad. I am going to purchase the woman; just show me."

The shop owner pumped the air into the woman... and it came out so beautiful because it was manufactured, everything perfect. The first man said, "You have been a great wise man to advise us." He purchased the woman and he said to his friend on the way, "Remember, I don't like anybody to befool around my wife."

The man said, "Have you already gone mad? It is a plastic woman, it is not your wife."

He said, "Whatever it is, for these three months in Alaska, watch out. Because I am a very angry man. If I see you with my woman, there is only one way that I know and that is to shoot you."

The man said, "What kind of nonsense are you talking? A plastic thing and you will shoot me - your best friend! And why I should get interested in your plastic woman?"

He said, "I have just made you alert about it. Don't ask me later on why I did not say it to you."

After two months, the man who had purchased the woman came back to the same village and thanked the shop owner, saying, "You gave me something that was immensely needed in that lonely place."

The owner asked, "But what happened to your friend?"

He said, "Don't ask me about that bastard. I shot him."

The owner asked, "For what?"

He said, "I caught him making love to my woman! And that idiot did the last thing as I came in and was going to shoot him - he cut the nipples of my woman with his teeth, so she immediately flew out of the window. I have lost the woman, I have lost the friend. I have come to ask if you have got another pair."

This whole society is boiling with jealousy. Nobody says it, everybody hides it. But the more you hide it, the more it goes on like a cancerous growth, expanding in your interior being. Just look how many things you are jealous of: somebody has a beautiful house and somebody has a beautiful physique, and somebody has a beautiful strong body. Somebody is an intellectual giant and somebody has the most wealth that one could ever think of. So on, so forth, there are people all around who will make you jealous.

Instead of your life being in an oceanic love, it is suffering in a gutter of dirty jealousy. But unless you start looking inwards and finding the roots, you will not be able to transform it.

You are blessed, Svarup, that just without any effort my silence reaches to your heart. It will purify you, it will destroy all that is poisonous in you - jealousy, anger, greed, attachment, possessiveness.

It will make you just a beautiful flower of love.

What is happening has been called in the East satsang, being with a man who has attained the truth. Yes, this is satsang - where, without any effort on your part, just the grace of your master starts alchemical changes... so silently that you become aware only when the work is done.

And there are a few things... for example if you have known unconditional love, you cannot undo it. It is so vast and it is so beautiful that what you used to think was love looks like just an ugly nightmare compared to it. You would not like to go back to it; your whole being will resist going back to it.

My speaking to you is not especially to give you any philosophy or any dogma, or any creed or any theology or any religion. My talking to you is a device so that you can experience my presence, my silence. In an unaware moment perhaps you can come closer to my heart without any fear.

This is a device for meditativeness.

I am not interested in any kinds of doctrines; they have tortured humanity long enough. I am interested in a loving humanity, in a humanity fragrant with silence, rejoicing this immense gift of life and existence.

The madam watches anxiously as Gloria, her best girl, is about to be wheeled into the operating room for a heart transplant. She grasps the surgeon by his sleeve and asks, "What are her chances for recovery, Doc?"

"Ah, pretty good, I would say," replies the doctor. "After all, she has not rejected an organ in twenty years."

Mendel Kravitz, the wealthy Jewish businessman, has a very bad case of hemorrhoids. He goes to all the most famous doctors for a cure, but no one can help him.

One day he is glancing at a religious magazine when he notices an article explaining how Pope the Polack has a special holy cure for hemorrhoids. He goes to see the pope, who for a fee of ten thousand dollars gives him a series of massages, using special holy oil.

After the third session, Mendel asks the pope if he could buy some of the holy oil to take back to New York so that his wife Ruthie can complete the treatment.

Pope the Polack agrees, and the next day Mendel is sprawled on his bed at home while Ruthie massages his hemorrhoids. Mendel asks Ruthie exactly how she is giving the massage. "Well,"

says Ruthie, "my left hand is on your shoulder and with my right hand, I am massaging your ass."

"That's funny," says Mendel, "when the pope did it, he put both of his hands on my shoulders."

Okay, Maneesha?

Yes, Beloved Master.