Love is the greatest alchemy

Question 1:

Amrito, you have seen something so significant that everybody must be made aware of it.

There is only one possibility for sanity to exist in relationships so they don't turn into inferiority and superiority games, so they don't become sado-masochistic tortures. And that only possibility is in the presence of an unconditional love.

Love is the greatest alchemy.

It transforms base metals into gold. Your ingredients are the same - the murderer and the Gautam Buddha are not different as far as their ingredients, their intrinsic potentialities are concerned. It is just that man is not a one dimensional machine.

Man is not one-dimensional; otherwise, his whole world would be sheer boredom.

And man's search is basically to be one with existence - separation hurts.

In our other loving relationships, in small measures we are searching for the same unity. In love with a woman, in love with a man, in love with a friend, in love with some creative activity - dance, music, poetry - we are trying to have a certain synchronicity with existence.

Our situation is that of a small child in the forest who has lost his mother and is searching in the forest, not knowing where to go. This situation allows many exploiters... this helplessness is used by those who are in power, by those who have money. The helplessness is used to convert you into a slave, into dependence.

Hence, all the religions have developed particular programs. They begin with God - and with God, your relationship cannot be anything else but that which exists between a puppet and a puppeteer, between the slave and the owner. With God, you cannot expect more than that, because he is the creator; he has made you - he can at any moment destroy you too. Neither did he ask you whether you wanted to enter into life, nor will he ask you whether you are in favor of destroying the world.

All the gods of all the religions are dictatorial. They are fascist.

I don't have any God; hence I don't have any program for you in which you will be transformed slowly into a slave.

I am fulfilled - nothing more can be added to my experience. That's why the people who are with me will not feel in any way inferior.

Nobody is inferior. People may be in different spaces, but nobody is inferior and nobody is superior.

They are all made of the same stuff you call God. How can somebody be superior and somebody be inferior? We belong to the same existence, our roots are nourished by the same existence.

Existence makes no distinctions, no discriminations between the sinners and the saints.

My approach is existential.

Hence, nobody is superior and nobody is inferior here. Naturally, by destroying this complex of inferiority and superiority, we are removing the very possibility of any kind of fascist mentality, fascist personality - because to me, it is inconceivable that a fascist can ever be religious.

And your so-called religious people are more or less all fascist fanatics. They are not in search of truth; they think they have found it already - in their scriptures which are dead, in the old superstitions which even they know have no basis in reality.

Just a clarity of vision dispels all darkness out of which all the monsters are born.

Here with me, whether you are a man or a woman, whether you are white or black, it does not matter; nobody even takes note of it. It is enough that you are a human being. And it is your freedom to choose your own lifestyle; it is your basic right how you want to blossom. Those who love you can help in taking care of the garden in which you are growing - watering your roots, showering their warmth.

It has now been scientifically proved that even the plants know who are their friends and who are their enemies. They have developed something like a cardiogram which is attached to the tree, and if a man comes with the idea to cut a branch of the tree or to uproot the tree - he just has the idea - suddenly the graph that is being made by the cardiogram on the tree starts trembling. It loses the rhythm it had... now you can see how fear is felt by the tree.

And remember that the tree has telepathic sensitivity; otherwise she could not know the thought in the man's mind. He has not done anything - visibly, nothing has happened. And when the gardener comes - with his warmth, with his love - suddenly the graph becomes the most harmonious. Now the tree is no longer afraid, the tree is immensely blissful.

Loving warmth is not only a poetic phenomenon. It is a reality of great importance.

Now the flowers will be bigger, the fruits will be juicier; the tree will respond. Except for man, perhaps there is no ingratitude in this whole existence. The tree cannot give anything more - she cannot give money, she cannot give gold - but she can give beautiful flowers, as big as possible, to a loving heart. She can give juicier fruits.

Love has never been thought of as food, but it is a very subtle kind of food. And now psychologists have concluded that if a child gets everything necessary - all chemicals, all hormones, food, exercise, fresh air, rest, everything that is necessary for life - still he will die in three to six months unless there is someone to pour love. He will not feel that life is worth living without love; he will simply shrink and die. And in thousands of labs around the world, many animals have died in these experiments.

Ordinarily, it is understood that these experiments are being done on animals first and that unless we have found safe principles we do not apply them to human beings - this has been the idea prevalent in the masses. Even the medical professionals - doctors, physicians - also believe in it. But the truth is something very different.

Just a few days ago.... For almost two years, a group of senators in America were investigating about a certain amount of money... not a small amount of money; two hundred million dollars is there in the books, but where has it been spent, where has it gone? The cabinet went on denying any knowledge of it, the president went on denying. The suspicion was that the government of America today is the greatest terrorist. And the money is going to the terrorists in a small country in the middle portion of the Americas, between South America and North America.

Just like Cuba, another small country has become communist. It is their right, whether they are right or wrong. Nobody else has to decide it. If they want to live a wrong kind of life, then too, they have the absolute freedom to live it; only they should not harm anybody else. They should not interfere in the lives of others.

Two hundred million dollars had been given to guerrillas, terrorists, to destroy that small Central American country because it had gone into the hands of the communists. And after two years of continuous struggle, only now has the president accepted that, "Yes, that money has gone to the terrorists."

And the whole world is silent, nobody has criticized it!

Governments are to save people from terrorism, and here governments are supplying money and arms and food to terrorists. And then they go on lying....

I have looked into the scriptures of all the religions, I have looked into the ideological literature of all the political parties and I am amazed: they go on piling up lies upon lies. And the whole of humanity is asleep - not only does nobody object, but nobody even suspects.

Here with me, you are gathered for a special purpose: the search for the truth, the search for the purest kind of love, the search for a life which is a dance of sheer joy.

Nowhere else in the world are people gathering for the same reasons. They are gathering for the purpose of creating more hatred; they are gathering to create more wars; they are gathering to create more destructive activities in human life. Naturally, we have a sick world, an insane world.

Here, it is impossible to feel any superiority or inferiority.

I have tried my best to convince you of only one thing: that enlightenment is your nature; that it is not something achieved, you bring it with your birth. All that you have to do is not to create it but just to open the hidden secret of your life.

The moment you start feeling your inner light, your whole perspective starts changing. You will feel compassionate towards human beings even if they are doing stupid things. And you will feel immensely joyous, celebrating, even though you don't have anything to celebrate. Nothing is needed to celebrate - only excuses... my birthday is just an excuse! But if you want to celebrate, you will find a thousand and one excuses.

It is your life, and whatever becomes of it is your creation.

Remember, there are hidden signatures on it. You cannot disassociate yourself from what you create, from the way you live, the way you respond.

Once you are overflowing with love and blissfulness, you cannot, even in your dreams, act in a way which is humiliating to another. Because the other is not really the other, it is just part of us.

We are one consciousness filling the whole universe.

But a little experience will help... and you will start seeing the same light in others. And to see light within yourself and light within others is to live the whole year round surrounded with a festival of lights.

In the outside world, there are people who want to dominate and there are people who want to be dominated. The responsibility is not one-sided. There are people who want to be enslaved, because slavery has one thing about it: it takes all responsibility away from you. Then the responsibility is of your owner. You are just instrumental - whatever he says, you do, but you don't feel any burden. So most human beings deep down want to remain slaves.

Slavery in religion means you remain a Hindu, a Mohammedan, a Christian. And you are afraid also, because your slavery is based only on beliefs. So everybody is trying to protect his flock from coming in contact with others.

Just the other day I received a message from friends in Germany. The German parliament has passed a resolution that I cannot enter Germany. Sannyasins are protesting it because it is absolutely against the German constitution, against German law. There is not a single precedent!

Not only in Germany but all over the world, there is not a single incident prohibiting a man who has never before entered your country. How can you judge that he is going to be dangerous?

So they asked five hundred world-famous, prominent intelligentsia from different fields - professors, scientists, poets, painters, dancers, actors. Up to now they have received one hundred and fifty letters of strong support, an absolute protest against the government.

They have also received a few letters which are in support of the government. A few points in those letters were so hilarious that they have sent me those few points. One point was: One Protestant high priest has supported the government because he thinks I am a Catholic, and Germany has to be saved from the Catholic religion.

Such fear shows deep doubts. You are not certain about your Protestant theology; you are afraid somebody may make punctures in the balloon of your faith.

Here with me, there is a religious fragrance but no religion as such. That gives you total freedom.

That makes you proud of yourself and grateful for all that existence has done for you.

Remember, pride is not ego.

Ego is something without content. For example, a man who cannot even draw a straight line thinks himself a great painter - that is ego, there is no content. But if Picasso thinks he is a great painter, that is simply a fact, and if he is proud of his genius there is nothing wrong in it. In fact, people should be helped to find some pride in their individuality because that pride will make their eyes shine, their faces luminous; that pride will make them unique individuals, with no more question of inferiority and superiority.

And secondly, anybody who is proud is always grateful. Because the genius of Picasso or Yehudi Menuhin is not their own; they are only vehicles. It is the beyond that comes through them - in music, in dance, in painting, in scientific research, in poetry, in thousands of ways, but the real genius will know it for sure, that it is coming from the beyond.

He is proud that he has been chosen, he is not proud in comparison to you. Ego is a comparison:

you are higher, you are superior, but there is comparison. You cannot be superior living alone in a forest - superior to whom? You cannot even be inferior - inferior to whom?

The man of pride has a deep feeling of gratitude that existence has chosen him, although he is not worthy. It is a strange phenomenon. The more worthy you are, the more you feel you are not worthy enough. You have been given so much and you cannot do anything in return.

Here, there will be people with pride. I would like my sannyasins to be proud, even of the fact that they are sannyasins, that they have been courageous enough to move against all orthodoxies, traditions, conventions, all that is rotten, and come out into the fresh, into the young, into the new.

You are blessed.

But your blessedness will be full of gratitude.

That is the distinction to be remembered between ego and pride.

I destroy the ego and I create the pride. Ego is something like a cancer that simply eats you and eats others. Pride, self-respect is a creative phenomenon. It fulfills your own potential and it also shares with the world all the treasures that you have brought into the world.

So here the situation is totally different.

I would like it to be so in the whole world, but they are so afraid. Their fear that I can destroy their morality, their religion, their past, is a clear-cut indication that they are already uprooted from the past. They are just hoping against hope that somehow all this old garbage can be carried. Because we have respected it as golden for centuries. Now, to suddenly drop it as garbage by the side of the road hurts the ego, because it means the ego has been wrong for centuries.

A sannyasin needs the courage to drop the fear - because unless he drops the fear, the ego cannot be dropped. And without dropping the ego, the whole load, the whole luggage, all rotten, has to be carried.

Your whole energy is wasted in carrying the dead.

Just think of yourself carrying your father, your grandfather, your forefathers, all on your back and going towards Marine Drive. Do you think you will ever reach Marine Drive? Because the people lined up on your back is going to be endless; all your skyscrapers will look like pygmies. The load is going to be so tremendous that you will not be able to carry it without the help of Suraj Prakash - you will need trucks, transport vehicles. And your whole life will be simply wasted carrying these dead people.

And we are all carrying them. That's why life becomes serious, burdensome, heavy, juiceless, dry.

Otherwise, there is no reason. You can be lush green with red flowers.

And there is no need for any comparison. Why not have all the people of the planet be emperors?

What is the problem? It is a question of understanding the world - and if you understand yourself, to understand the world is not difficult, it is the simplest thing.

And once you have understood that to be an emperor or to be a slave is your decision, who is going to choose to be a slave? When you can put your whole energy into creating something that will give you satisfaction, that will give you a deep sense of fulfillment, a sense that you have not been here unnecessarily, you have contributed something; you have made the world a little more beautiful - a few more flowers you have added to it.

If everybody is adding a few more flowers, this whole world can again become a garden.

There is no need to fight. There is no need for you to be superior to anybody, because I am giving you something which is far higher than superiority.

I am making you unique individuals.

Question 2:

Time exists no more for me.

That's why I have to go on looking at my watch, because I don't have any sense of time. If I don't look at my watch, I may speak for the whole night!

To me, every day is the same, every moment is the same.

But when I say every moment is the same, it means it has the same blissfulness, the same ecstasy, the same joy, the same silence, the same peace that passeth understanding.

I don't see any difference between two points, between two days. As far as I am concerned, all differences have disappeared.

I live in absolute silence.

Even while I am speaking to you, believe it or not, I am silent. Only the mechanism of the mind is being used, but my consciousness is centered in absolute beauty and silence.

Question 3:

Maneesha, spirituality is an explosion.

With enlightenment, suddenly all the great qualities start blossoming in you. Before enlightenment, meditating... as your meditation goes deeper, new qualities start emerging. But it is something like a rehearsal. Or better to say, what emerges before enlightenment is like on a full moon night when you are sitting by the side of a silent lake and you see the full moon in the water. It is the full moon, and it is tremendously beautiful but it is only a reflection. Just throw a small pebble and the reflection is disturbed; the silver of the reflection is spread all over the lake. The moon disappears.

In meditation, you become acquainted with the reflected qualities. They are the same qualities, but they are only reflections - reflections of the qualities that you will have when enlightenment has happened. But for the seeker, even the reflected qualities are so great that they transform his whole character. They prepare him for the moment when he will look up into the sky to the real moon.

But before enlightenment, you cannot be in possession of the real qualities. It is more than enough that existence allows you even the qualities which are only reflections - but they give you the taste, the conviction. They bring you the real conversion; you remain in the world but your eyes start moving inwards. You remain in the world but the distance between you and the world starts becoming bigger.

You are coming closer to home, but the real experience will be when you enter the home, when you enter your center.

Don't think that if meditation gives only reflected qualities then why bother about meditation? Those reflected qualities are going to become steps towards the real. If you don't have them, the temple of the real is so far away that even to conceive of any bridge is impossible.

With meditation - slowly, step by step, without any hurry - you go on coming closer and closer to home. And it is good, because you have time to absorb, you have time to get acquainted, and when you reach to the real it will not be absolutely unknown. You have seen it in the reflection, you are already in love with it. It is just like a photograph....

Once in a while it happens. I have received a few letters saying that somebody has seen my picture and has fallen in love. He had no money to come; it took ten years to reach here, but for ten years he has been a sannyasin. For ten years he has meditated and now he has come - a mature person.

Even the photograph has helped; something in the photograph turned him on. And it must have made a great impression because for ten years he was earning money just to come here.

The way, the path, is very simple and can be made even more simple. But simplicity is against the priests, they want it to be complex - so complex that they are needed to interpret it; so complex that without a mediator it is impossible to grow in your understanding.

The reason why religion looks so complex is because religion became a business, and priests found that unless it is complex enough, it will not be attractive enough either. It has to be complex, it has to be challenging, it has to be far away, and then the priest becomes an absolute necessity. And they have been exploiting in every possible way.

Just recently, I was reading a joke. A beautiful woman is standing in the confession box of a Catholic church. The bishop has seen the woman - the woman is certainly rare, very beautiful, and the bishop is an ordinary human being as everybody is. And the woman starts saying that she has been raped. He asks a few questions and then he completely forgets all Catholicism, all Christianity, all religion.

He says to the woman, "Your thing is very complex. You come into the other room." And there in the other room, he puts his hand around the woman. She looks a little puzzled because she was always calling him "Father" and he was always calling her "my dear daughter" - but the way he has put his hands around her, does not feel like the hands of a father. The very vibe is disgusting.

The bishop asks, "Did that nasty fellow make some movement like this?"

And the woman says, "This is nothing; he did something worse."

He says, "Something worse?" So he kisses the woman and asks, "Did that man do this too?"

The woman says, "Father, you don't understand. He was really the worst type of man."

By this time, the father was also sexually aroused. He forced the woman onto the bed, made love to her and then asked, "Did that evil man do this thing too?"

The woman said, "Father, you don't understand; he did even something worse."

The bishop said, "Something worse? Worse than this? My God! But I wonder what he could have done?"

The woman said, "He gave me AIDS!"

These poor priests are just as ordinary as anybody. They have no training in meditation, no training in yoga, no training in tantra - which are absolutely essential for the maturity of a man. All these bishops and cardinals and priests are all amateurish. They will be saying things and doing just the opposite - they have to! I'm not angry, I'm simply stating the fact.

All the religions have been telling people that anger is bad, greed is bad, sex is bad. And the list is long... almost everything that gives you pleasure is bad. Put it on the list without any fear; it will be found in all the scriptures of the religions - if it gives you pleasure, it must be counted as a sin by the religious scriptures.

So all that is pleasant has been poisoned, and all that is unpleasant has become your life. And these millions of priests of different religions are living on your wounds. They are simply parasites; they have been sucking your blood for centuries, saying stupid things without any evidence, without any reason. But they have destroyed such a beautiful world.

The only way is to take the world out of the hands of the priests. Man, free from priests, will have a beauty of his own. Priests have crushed and crippled him from every direction.

Just remember one thing: you have to remain one. Whatever divides you is against you; it makes you schizophrenic. And almost everybody is schizophrenic in different degrees. You cannot do anything wholeheartedly, something always remains uninvolved. The action remains partial; hence, unfulfilling.

Man need not be miserable unless he chooses it. He has the possibility of living at the highest blissfulness possible, but that is a little arduous because it is an uphill task. But when you get to the peak, to the sunlit peak, all the arduousness of the journey is completely forgotten. Just the very idea that "I have arrived" relaxes you. You forget all the hell that you had to pass through.

In fact, you even feel grateful to all that hell because that helped you to find this sunlit peak.

Question 4:

You are asking the impossible.

My ideas are universal. That is the reason they cannot be accepted. People's minds are not universal; they are very local. First, the nation, the religion, the language - perhaps a sect of the religion, perhaps a dialect of the local language. They are very much confined. Otherwise, Sikhs asking to have an independent country would not be possible.

On the contrary, there should be intelligent people around the world asking for one world. That is going to solve the problems. The world is already dissected into so many small parts that if you go on dissecting it more, your capacity to solve the problems becomes less and less.

So the first thing: my message is already universal - that is one of the problems. If it were Hindu, at least I would have been at ease with four hundred million Hindus. If it were Catholic, I would have been at ease with seven hundred million people. But my message is universal - neither Hindu, nor Mohammedan, nor Christian, but purely existential; not based on the past but based on my own experience.

Secondly, you are asking if I can speak, can bring my message to the people in such a way that it becomes more acceptable, that it becomes more usual. It cannot become - at least, as long as I am alive, it cannot become usual. You have so many usual doctrines, usual religions, usual ideologies.

My approach is going to remain unusual, because the usual approaches have all failed. Something unusual has to be tried.

I know you love me and you want my message to reach people, but your love is blind. You don't see the implications of what you are saying. You are saying, "Can't your message be more acceptable?"

That means I will have to compromise. I will have to think of the blind people all around me and adjust to their ideas. It is betraying the truth. Every compromise is a betrayal.

My message will remain universal even if I am the only person who trusts in it, because its universality does not mean numbers of followers. Its universality means that it is the foundational doctrine of existence. And I cannot conceive how it can be more acceptable.

The only way is to knock on as many doors as possible, to shout from rooftops hoping that somebody may not be deaf, somebody may not be blind. But I cannot compromise on any point, because it is not a business.

Who am I to compromise on behalf of truth? And a truth compromised becomes untruth. A truth is absolutely uncompromising.

But that has been always the case. All the masters in the past had to face it. They are always ahead of their time. It seems to be something in the very nature of life, that the people who are going to be decisive about human consciousness will always come ahead of their time - because it takes one hundred years, two hundred years for people to understand them. If they come in their own time, then by the time people have understood them, they will be out of date. They have to be ahead of their time so that by the time human mind, human consciousness reaches the point where they can be understood, their message will be available.

So the greatest work for sannyasins is to keep the message pure, unpolluted by you or by others - and wait.

The future is bound to be more receptive, more welcoming. We may not be here but we can manage to change the consciousness for centuries to come.

And my interest is not only in this humanity; my interest is in humanity as such.

Keep the message pure, twenty-four carat gold. And soon those people will be coming for whom you have made a temple - although it is sad when you are making the temple; nobody comes. And when people start coming, you will not be here. But one has to understand one thing: we are part of a flowing river of consciousness.

You may not be here in this form, you may be here in another form, but keep it in mind never to ask such a question that I should be more acceptable, more respectable, more in agreement with the masses. I cannot be.

And it is not stubbornness on my part. It is just that truth cannot compromise. It has never done it; it would be the greatest sin.

Question 5:

I don't agree with George Gurdjieff.

I love the man, I agree with him on many points, but on many points he is uninformed. Particularly about Gautam Buddha, he has no in-depth connection with the sources that Buddha made available to the world.

He is saying that for the normal man, laughter is just a release of excessive energy.

It is an absurd statement. Firstly, the normal man cannot have excessive energy. He is tired, he is somehow dragging himself; he does not have excessive energy.

So why does he laugh?

Gurdjieff's diagnosis about laughter is not right. The normal man has to laugh just to live. Life is so miserable... it is all sadness, frustration. The normal man is burdened with only negative feelings.

He needs something positive to live, and he needs some way to get rid of the negative feelings.

Laughter is a great medicine - it does both jobs. It helps you not to be unburdened of extra energy but to be unburdened of negative energy - your anger, your sadness, your frustration.

And because Gurdjieff is wrong about the normal man, he is certainly going to be wrong about Gautam Buddha.

Gautam Buddha does not laugh, that is true. But the reason why he does not laugh is that he has seen everything, he has known everything. There is nothing more to know, there is nothing more to experience, there is nothing more to see. Life has come to a tranquillity... not even a ripple. It is so calm and quiet and collected... and because it is so peaceful, so silent, so blissful, laughter is absolutely unnecessary.

What Gurdjieff is saying about the normal man.... My suspicion is that he was acquainted with many mad people. He studied madness in order to evolve his psychology for the future man.

Mad people certainly laugh because of excessive energy. They don't have anything to do. The energy accumulates, and it needs some way.... Mad people will talk to themselves, mad people will talk to walls, to trees. And mad people have their own arguments, their own rationality - you cannot defeat a madman; he follows a totally different system of logic.

Because he is not involved in life anymore - you have isolated him, put him in a mad asylum - his energy goes on accumulating. What is he supposed to do? If he is a violent type, he will express his excessive energy in destruction, but if he is not a violent type then he will find other sources. One of the sources is laughter, and a madman's laughter has a beauty, a purity, an innocence.

When you laugh, your laughter has a judgment in it. If somebody has slipped on a banana peel and you laugh, you are judging - and that man will feel embarrassed. His embarrassment shows your judgment.

In my high school days.... Every year in India there is a certain day for worshipping the serpent. On that day, all over India there are wrestling matches - Indian-style, not like boxing, but more human, more artful. Boxing looks just primitive, because you are hitting the other person just like an animal.

Indian wrestling is far more refined and if you have seen a really beautiful wrestler, you will not forget the experience. I am reminding you.

There was a wrestling match. All the schools of the district had sent their wrestlers, but our wrestler had graduated the year before. We held the shield - that's why all the wrestlers had to come to our school. But there was nobody in our school who was ready. I just passed by a young man I loved very much for the simple reason that he was never serious.

I asked him, "Would you like to try? I can make you a famous wrestler within seconds. Because the principal has given me the task to find somebody, but nobody is ready. They know they are not wrestlers, and good wrestlers will be coming here from every school."

The boy said, "You know I'm not a wrestler. I have not even had a fight with anybody. In fact, I am a Christian. If somebody slaps one of my cheeks, I will give him the other and go home - I believe Christ is right. And I don't even know the ABC of Indian wrestling, and it is an art, an ancient art."

I said, "Nobody else is willing - but the difference between you and the others is, they are all serious so they cannot be persuaded. You are the only man who is not serious. You can even accept defeat with laughter."

He said, "That's true, because what is the harm? If I am defeated I don't see that there has been any harm to the world. So okay, I am ready."

I said, "Okay. Remember, you will be in the finals and you will get the toughest guy."

He said, "Don't be worried, you have given me the key - laughter."

And that was a match which was remembered for years. Because we had been winning the trophy for almost seven years; just one time more and the trophy would have become our possession - it had to be won eight times consecutively. We had won seven times, but the man who was the reason for our winning was not really a student. He was admitted into the school and he was given some scholarship, but the only reason to keep him was for the wrestling match. There was a possibility that he might have become champion of the whole state, but then suspicions began - because for seven years this man was in the same class, and people had seen him working with a doctor as a pharmacist. The whole day he was in the dispensary, so when did he study? Because questions had started, he had to be dropped.

But this gave such a beautiful opportunity. There were other wrestlers, they fought... then the finals.

The other school had also brought a professional wrestler, because seeing the situation - and this was the eighth time, something had to be done; otherwise the shield would be gone. So they had brought a professional wrestler. Because of his age, his body and everything, he looked like he was a professional. This poor boy... and my principal was standing by my side.

The principal said, "What have you done? You don't even see that there are times to be serious.

This is not the time to be humorous! You have put the wrong person there - he cannot do anything, he does not know anything."

I said, "Don't be worried. He will do something, and he will do something that will be remembered for years to come. Your trophy will be forgotten." And then the bell rang, and the student I had chosen - he was my friend - and the wrestler from the other school came, and they stood in the middle of the ring.

I had told my friend to have a dance first: "You are going to be defeated, so about that we are certain.

Forget all about it. Enjoy, and help this crowd to enjoy. So first you go around dancing...." And he really went dancing!

And people suddenly became silent. They could not believe it! - a very giant wrestler was standing there and this small boy is dancing! He has some nerve.

And then he came in front of the wrestler, fell on the ground, completely touching the ground with his whole body, and had a good laugh. The other wrestler could not understand what was happening.

He had fought many times but this was a strange type... and the whole crowd could not understand.

The referee went there and asked, "What are you doing?"

The boy said, "All that I can do I am doing! - I am doing my best. Now it is up to him to do something!

He is standing there like an idiot." But there was nothing to do, because the boy had already done to himself what was to be done by the wrestler - he was lying down flat on the ground! The wrestler could not even touch him. When he is flat on the ground, he has accepted defeat. And now he is laughing and the whole crowd is laughing and the man who has become victorious is standing there sad, completely lost.

My principal whispered in my ear, "You are right. You chose the right person." His laughter was so out of context that nobody could have imagined... and the way he did it, lying down flat on the ground, leaving no chances for the other person - he could not even touch his body. And without fighting, he became the hero. The crowd took him up, the victor was forgotten. Everybody loved him. Nobody said anything like "You are defeated."

And when I met him, I said, "It has been a great victory because not a single person said that you were defeated. The other man has not even touched you. So don't be worried; now we will raise the legal question. The shield cannot go to the other side."

The principal said, "What are you saying?"

I said, "The shield cannot go from this school. It can wait one year longer, because our wrestler has not been defeated. He has not been touched."

The principal said, "You are something. First you brought that boy, and now you are bringing this law!"

I said, "You have to stand by me and we have to fight it. The other wrestler has not done anything and even the crowd has not accepted it. We have photographs to show that he is standing completely defeated and our man is laughter - all laughter, and people are carrying him like a hero."

So the principal had to agree with me. He said, "What is your whole plan? You tell me, because this... you caught me unawares. It was wrong to ask you in the first place."

I said, "Now, I want to tell you that that man is a professional wrestler, he is not a student. But keep quiet - we also have professional wrestlers, so next time we will hire a professional wrestler. The shield has to remain once it has come to us." And we had won seven times and we had a very good group of wrestlers in our town; it was famous for wrestling. So I looked around all the gymnasiums and found a very strong man, almost steel. If you hit him, you would be harmed. His whole life was just preparing and preparing - he was hoping to become a national champion. He was already a state champion.

Seeing him - everybody knew him, he was state champion - the other wrestler started saying, "This man is not a student!" Their principal and all the staff had come this time; the whole school had come to support their wrestler because somehow the shield had to be taken. Now this great difficulty arose. They all started saying, "We will not accept this man. This man is a professional wrestler."

I said, "Yes, this man is a professional wrestler, because your man is a professional wrestler." And we had collected all the information about the other person: where he worked, what he did, how old he was, how educated he was - and he was not a student. When we put forward all the information, they felt so ashamed.

I said, "What do you want? If your wrestler is not ready to fight, you lose. Because now it is no longer a question that somebody is a professional wrestler - both are. So it is equal. So let us go into it, and whoever wins.... But the other wrestler stepped out and the shield stayed in the school, although it was not completely conquered because of that one time. Then that school dropped the idea, because it was exposed to the newspapers that they had been bringing in a professional wrestler and that because of them we had to bring in a professional wrestler, just to expose it.

But one thing I have always remembered about that young man: that he could laugh in such a situation, where everything was against the poor fellow. But laughter saved him.

Gurdjieff has a different system of changing the chemistry of man. So in his system, what he is saying may be perfectly right.

But the way I am working, laughter is one of the most significant religious qualities. And if Gautam Buddha does not laugh that does not mean he cannot laugh. That simply means he has come into a space where all is joy.

For laughter to exist, the contrary to laughter is needed, just like white chalk is needed to write on blackboards. Laughter is visible if you are sad, and dark clouds in your heart give it a background.

But when all dark clouds have disappeared, laughter remains but it is no more the old form; it has taken a totally new shape.

Gautam Buddha himself has become laughter. He is so joyous, each of his movements, his silence or his sermons, are all nothing but his laughter resounding into our hearts.

It is a resonance. You will feel it; perhaps you may laugh. Just being with Gautam Buddha, you may start laughing. He may trigger your energies.

He himself is now complete, entire, a cosmic whole.

His very being is laughter - that's why there is no question of him laughing the way we laugh.

After enlightenment, every quality of life changes.

We have all those qualities but in a very raw condition. Enlightenment refines them, purifies them, and it takes some intelligence to recognize that they are the same qualities.