The psychology of the Buddhas

Question 1:

The present psychology is not yet comprehensive enough, it touches only the periphery of human individuality. It remains confined to the mind. It is not right to call it "psychology." Psychology means "the science of the soul" and the present psychology is not only not the science of the soul, it denies even the existence of the soul.

The moment you deny the soul, consciousness, something which is beyond the mind but within you... This denial is not an ordinary denial because it destroys the whole dignity of man. It takes away his very center. He becomes centerless, soul-less, just a robot.

The right name for modern psychology is "robotology" because it studies only the mechanical behavior of man and the mechanics of mind. Its studies cannot go very deep for the simple reason that if mind is all and there is nothing more to life than mind, you cannot ever become one, undivided.

To be divided is the nature of the mind; to be always balanced between opposites - love and hate, courage and fear, yes and no, atheism and theism.

Mind does not feel at ease unless it has divided a thing in two. It cannot conceive of light unless it is contrasted with darkness, it cannot conceive of life unless it is defined by death.

And because psychology remains within the boundaries of the mind it cannot help man to grow to his potential heights. Psychology will discourage you: spiritual search is nothing but a mirage, the seeking of truth is hallucinatory.

It is not a coincidence that we are the most intelligent generation, because ten thousand years of growth is within us. So on the one hand it is the most intelligent generation that has ever existed and on the other hand, because of psychology spreading these poisonous ideas - that there is no consciousness, no soul, no life beyond death, and man is just matter; that mind is also nothing but a certain combination of material elements - this has created a very strange situation. Intelligence is pulling man towards more growth and the people who deal with growth are pulling man backwards, telling him, "There is no beyond, just be normal - that is more than you can dream of."

"Just to be normal" is the goal of psychology.

A great goal: just to be normal.

People have lived for thousands of years without any psychology - and normally. In fact, as you go backwards you will not find so many murders, you will not find so many suicides, you will not find so many rapes, you will not find so many sexual perversions. As you go back they start becoming less. Primitive man was more innocent than you are. He was not as intelligent as you are, but he was more innocent. You inherit his innocence but you are keeping it repressed.

The combination of intelligence and innocence is meditation. The moment innocence and intelligence start growing within you... it is not that you become capable of solving all the problems of the mind, but a totally new thing happens: you start going beyond mind. The problems of the mind are left far behind, as if they never belonged to you - in fact they never belonged to you.

And once you know how to slip out of your mind, a totally different psychology will be founded on the art of slipping out of the mind. A person who can get out of his mind helps the mind to cool down.

The mind is getting no more energy - it cools, calms down on its own accord. That's why I have said meditation is a medicine too - and both words come from the same root.

Once your intelligence and your innocence are available to you, just like two wings, the whole sky is yours. There are no more boundaries for you.

I have called the psychology that is based on meditation the psychology of the buddhas. Modern psychology is the psychology of people who are asleep.

It has to be understood; the people who came to Sigmund Freud, the founder of modern psychology, were all sick people - obviously, otherwise why should they come to the psychoanalyst? They were seriously sick, their minds were falling apart. Sigmund Freud came in contact only with sick people - that gave him the impression that man himself is sick. In a way he is logical because everybody he examined, everybody he analyzed, everybody he treated was sick. And these were high-class people, bourgeois - professors, scientists, very rich people - because a psychoanalyst's time is the costliest thing in the world today. All these people were basically living an insane life, but because everybody else is also living the same insane life you don't become aware of it.

If Sigmund Freud denied that there is any possibility of a soul in man he cannot be blamed. He never came across a Gautam Buddha, he never came across a man who had gone beyond mind.

The trouble was these people who have gone beyond mind have no reason to go to Sigmund Freud.

And Sigmund Freud is afraid to go to such people because they are against the very foundation upon which he has raised a whole empire - certainly there was a great vested interest. If just a simple method of meditation can help a person... not only to be normal, because to be normal can never be accepted as the goal. That means you remain a mediocre person for your whole life; you never go beyond the boundaries of the society. In everything you remain half-hearted, there is no intensity, there is no totality.

A normal person is wishy-washy, just in a limbo, neither here nor there... hanging in between.

It is unfortunate that the great psychologists of the West had no opportunity to know the mystic and to become acquainted with his world - which is absolutely extraordinary. He lives twenty-four hours among you, but not with you; his kingdom is far away. He has tasted love, of which you have been only dreaming. He has experienced truth, of which you have been only thinking and philosophizing.

He has encountered existence directly without any mediation of a priest, a prophet, a savior. He has seen existence in its freshness. He is not a Christian, he is not a Hindu - because these are so old, so full of dust and borrowed, they cannot give you a transformation.

Remember one thing: unless the truth is your own experience, whatever you believe about truth is only a belief. And all beliefs are lies, and all believers are blind.

The psychology of the buddhas means that we accept man as a three-storied building. There are a few who remain only on the ground floor, only in their bodies; all their interests are centered in the body - this is the lowest life for someone to choose, as if you are living on the porch when the whole building is yours.

The second level of life is that of a well-understood mind - but who is going to understand the mind?

You can see the difficulty of the psychologist: he studies the mind but if you ask who is studying the mind.... Mind cannot study itself.

There must be something beyond - a witness, a watcher who studies the mind. The scientist is studying only from the outside. He is studying the behavior of other people and from their behavior he is deducting principles upon which human behavior is based. But his observation is of the behavior, not of the real being inside. He can be deceived.

You can be sad but you can smile, you can hold back the tears. Or if you are a little artful, you can manage to bring crocodile tears. Your behavior is not reliable. We don't know what is happening inside you, whether your behavior is an expression of your inside or it is a camouflage, hiding you in beautiful GARBage.

Buddha accepts three steps: the body, the mind, the consciousness. Even the consciousness is only a step.

These three steps lead to the temple of the divine, of the immortal, of beauty, of celestial music....

You start touching heights, Himalayan heights where you can find virgin snow which has never melted.

In your inner being also you are carrying greater peaks than Everest, with eternal beauty.

The psychology of the buddhas is comprehensive of the whole individuality of man - and it does not end there. By studying, by experiencing the body, the mind, the consciousness, and the beyond, Buddha is preparing you to dissolve into the universal.

Just like a dewdrop slipping from a lotus leaf into the lake.... On a beautiful morning the sun is rising and the whole sky is so colorful... just a cool breeze is there, but it is enough for the rosepetals, for other flowers... for the lotus....

In the early morning sun the dewdrops on the lotus petals look like pearls - or it will be better to say that pearls look like the dewdrops. They are slipping slowly, slowly towards the vast ocean, in which they will be lost and yet not lost. As dewdrops they will be lost, but they will emerge as the whole ocean.

Unless psychology can bring human beings to this oceanic experience it is immature, it has just started its ABC's. And in the West it is going around in a circle - because you do not accept higher realities; where can you go? You are stuck with the mind - analyze it, analyze its dreams, analyze its repressions. But it should be taken as a very significant question that there is not a single man in the whole world who is completely analyzed. This is a failure of the whole system of psychoanalysis - twelve years, fifteen years people have been in psychoanalysis and they have not moved anywhere.

Yes, they have learned psychological jargon, it has become more difficult to talk with them! But they are the same persons with all the weaknesses, with all the frailties. Twelve or fifteen years of psychoanalysis has not been able to a make even a single dent in their personality.

It is a rich man's game. Just as poor people have their games, rich people have their own games.

Psychology is still a game, guesswork, with no foundation in reality.

The mystics in the East have never bothered too much about the mind; they have only developed methods to bypass the mind. Those methods are the techniques of meditation - they are just to bypass the mind.

Once you have bypassed the mind, once you can have a bird's-eye view of your own mind, things start settling.

It is your energy that disturbs the mind, that gives it the power to be violent, to be sad, to be angry, to be hateful, to be jealous. Now you are no longer giving it any energy.

It won't take a long time. The mind withers almost like a cloud - it was there and it is no more.

The moment mind disperses, your meditation has come to maturity. Now your meditation will be the medium, not the mind. The mind will be used as a mechanism by your meditative forces, but mind is put aside; it is no longer the master. And it is one of the strangest stories that for ten thousand years in the East we have worked on meditation and we have been absolutely successful, not only in becoming meditative, but also in dissolving all the problems of the mind.

There is only one way to solve the mind and its problems, and that is to get out of it.

But modern psychology has no idea of where to go, so they go on around and around but they remain just ordinary beings. Now Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler and Assagioli have devoted their whole lives... but you don't see the eyes of Gautam Buddha, you don't see the gestures of Mahavira, you don't see the insight of the seers of UPANISHADS. You don't see the transforming presence which all the mystics in all the countries have always radiated.

In my way of looking at things, mind itself is sick. Unless you get out of it, you cannot help the poor mind to become healthy. You are too much identified.

Not being identified with the mind is the shortest way to your own being. And your being is always healthy, it does not know what sickness is. It cannot know, it is not in its nature. Just as mind cannot know peace, your being cannot know tensions, anxieties, anguish. The question is not of curing the mind, the question is shifting your whole energy, your whole focus, from mind to being.

Meditation helps you to shift.

This great shift of your attention, of your awareness, is what I call the psychology of the buddhas.

And any other psychology is going to be wrong, because only a man of eyes knows what light is. There may be millions of people who are blind - there are millions, but it is not a question of democracy. They cannot vote, they cannot assert a single word about light. That one man is right and those millions of people are wrong.

The question is not of numbers. The only question that is significant is the transformation of your being from mind to no-mind.

Modern psychology thinks it is the science of the mind.

The psychology of the buddhas will be the science of no-mind.

Question 2:

It is the society, the culture, the civilization in which you are born which gives you wrong ideas.

Those wrong ideas go on haunting you from the cradle to the grave.

There is nothing wrong in being weak. But this society trains every child to be strong.

Just across from my house in my village there was a gymnasium. My uncles and my father were all going to the gymnasium - it was the best in the town. They tried to persuade me.

I said to them, "The idea of the strong man is primitive. It comes from the days when people were hunting. I am not going to be a hunter!"

And I don't think that you can ever be so strong that the need for being stronger disappears. Even the strongest people have found weakness, disease, old age, death... There was one man in India, Gama, who was the world champion in the Indian type of wrestling. But he died at the age of forty, and the diagnosis of the doctors was that he died because he exerted himself too much, exercised too much. The body is not made of steel - he killed himself. He became the world champion but he lost his life. And even if he had lived, he would have lived in utter misery, pain, because all his inner body functions were out of control. The simple reason was that he tried something against nature.

I refused to go to the gymnasium. I told them, "To be healthy - or to be more accurate, not to be sick - is enough."

Weakness has a wrong connotation, and through that wrong connotation half of humanity, the world of women, has been condemned to weakness because they don't have muscular bodies. But for what are muscular bodies needed? Those who need them will get them. But a poet does not need a muscular body - in fact it will look very ugly, a muscular man writing poetry. In fact, no muscular man, no great wrestler, boxer, has ever written any poetry or painted, or played on musical instruments.

They exercise too much, to make the body almost steel; they also have to eat too much, and it is now a proved fact that the people who eat too much don't live long.

In experiments on mice, it has been found... one group of mice were getting as much as they wanted to eat - the American way, five times a day - and another group was kept on one meal a day, saintly, religious. It was thought that they would not be able to last long. But the mice who were getting one meal a day lived to be twice the age of the group that was eating American style. Then many other experiments proved it conclusively. And the reason is simple: the stronger you are, the more food the body needs - more nourishment, more water; your digestive system needs to work more, and work hard. They all start failing - they are not meant to work too hard.

There are still tribes alive who eat one meal a day, and they live the longest. There are even a few people who are one hundred and eighty years old. They live longer and they live younger - mostly, even at the age of one hundred and eighty, in the provinces of the Soviet Union near the Caucasus these people are still working on the farms.

One of my friends from the Soviet Union has sent me a photo. He thought it would be hilarious in India, and it does look hilarious: a man who was one hundred and eighty was going to marry a woman who was one hundred and seventy two - but she looks great!

The idea of being strong is based on continuous fight, war, struggle... in life too it is a cut-throat competition, every day, continuously. If you are not strong, you will be thrown out of the traffic that is going to New Delhi!

I have heard a story about a dog. He used to live in Varanasi - he was a very religious dog. But everybody was going to New Delhi, everybody was wearing hand-spun clothes, carrying spinning wheels which they never spun upon, but symbolic - that they belonged to the ruling party - and wearing Gandhi caps. A strange thing... have you ever seen any picture of Gandhi with a cap? This cap can be anybody else's, but NOT Mahatma Gandhi's. He never wore it.

The dog became curious. Everybody was dying to go to Delhi, so he thought he should have a look - perhaps something was cooking. He figured out that it would take almost twenty-one days. He was a strong dog, and he went towards Delhi.

Rumors reach faster than anything, and in every village there was some difficulty. Dogs are, after all, dogs. They would catch hold of that dog - the whole village full of dogs would bark at him - and they would not allow him to rest. The question of food or anything was just irrelevant.

Dogs in Delhi were waiting because they thought this dog must be a mahatma, a saint, coming from the holy city, the most ancient city in the world. They were waiting... and they could not believe it, because they were also thinking that it would take three or four weeks at least. This dog reached Delhi in three days! They said, "You have done a miracle! In the whole history of dogs, you are the greatest."

He said, "First let me explain to you what happened. I am not the greatest dog, but our country's dogs are really great. One bunch of dogs from one village chased me to the boundary of the next village. Then the next bunch took over. They did not allow me to rest anywhere, so I have been running continuously, without food without rest. And in this way, the journey that was going to be fulfilled in twenty-one days is finished in three days. And I am finished too!" Saying this, he died.

We are still living under barbarous ideologies. Our education is still poisonous. Our whole approach - calling Alexander "the great," Genghis Khan "the great," Peter "the terrible"... these are the strong people who have overruled the world. And every child is being prepared to be the richest, to be respectable, to reach to the highest pinnacle of glory. Certainly strength is needed and weakness has to be condemned.

Weakness can be seen from a different angle - that is my angle.

Weakness is beauty. Weakness is a delicate structure. Women are not weak, they are more beautiful, they have a more symmetrical, more proportionate body. Why look at weakness as something bad?

The rose is going to be weak; you cannot make a rose as strong as a stone. If the rose and the rock clash together, the rose is going to suffer, to die, not the rock. But it is not weakness. It is a delicate structure, a beautiful phenomenon that looks to be not of this world.

I am not saying anything against those who are strong; that has a beauty of its own. But its days are gone.

What you are going to do with physical strength in a world of nuclear weapons? Just don't be foolish - are you going to do push-ups when nuclear weapons are exploding? The days of that kind of strength are gone.

But whenever two persons fight, the old mind supports the stronger, the winner. This is very inhuman. The one who is weak should be praised, because in spite of all the struggles he has been able to keep his delicate body, just like a child. The strong one should be condemned because he is behaving like an animal.

But it is an insane world, where Muhammad Ali can declare himself three times great, because now one time does not matter. Alexander was great, but only one time; and nobody thought of being great two times, double the amount of Alexander the Great. But Muhammad Ali has figured it out. He is not even talking about a second time, he is talking about a third time. He is saying, "Muhammad Ali thrice great."

And what is creative about him? This man has broken many people's noses, has fractured many people. He is awarded, he is thought to be a hero. He should be kept in a cage in a circus - that is the only place where he belongs.

Our values govern people and their behavior. If you are by nature strong, use your strength for your deeper inquiry; use your strength for higher flights in your consciousness. It is not right to destroy this strength in wrestling, in boxing, in being idiots. And if you are weak, unless you are sick and ill there is no problem. Your weakness should be the weakness of a flower; it should be loved, respected. And the days of strength are gone anyway.

The days of beauty and the days of more delicate human beings are going to come.

I have been looking into all your great heroes. None of them has been creative, none of them has increased the beauty of life, none of them has been a stepping stone for future progress. They have all been cruel, ugly, violent - murderers, butchers. The history that you are teaching to your children in your schools, colleges and universities, should be banned. You are teaching small students things in your history which are ugly.

Gautam Buddha appears only in footnotes, not to mention other mystics who are not so well known.

Sarmad you may not find in your history books at all; Kabir, Farid, Meera you will not find in your history books. These people don't belong to the mainstream humanity. These people are a kind of rebellious category in themselves, rebellious spirits who have left the crowd and have moved alone.

Gautam Buddha's body was weak and delicate and beautiful, but no strong man has been able to reach higher than Gautam Buddha. That is real strength - not that you have the body of a bull.

Just drop the whole idea. If you are not sick as you are, then accept yourself; don't compare. Love yourself, because if you cannot love yourself how can you think of somebody else loving you? If you cannot accept yourself, who is going to accept you?

If you are continuously feeling an inferiority complex because you are weaker, you are this, you are that... and there are a thousand and one things, it is not a question of one thing. Somebody has a more beautiful face, somebody has a sharper intelligence, somebody is taller - if you are going to look all around and compare yourself you will commit suicide because there seems to be no way....

The competition is not one-dimensional, it is multi-dimensional. And wherever you are, whatever you attain, you will forget about it - you will remember only that which you don't have. People remember only that which they don't have. Once you have it, for one or two days you can feel the euphoria and then things settle. You cannot remain in the excited state forever; it will kill you, it will give you a good heart attack.

Weakness should not be taken as weakness; it is the comparison that gives you the word. Call it a more delicate body. The moment you call it a more delicate body, your whole conception about it changes.

Words become realities to people.

Always remember to use words with right connotations.

So I don't see that there is any problem. Stop trying to be strong. Start to be what you are, pour all your energy into what you are. If you are a beautiful, delicate person, pour your energy into making yourself more delicate, more beautiful. There is no need for you to change places.

Everybody, as he is, is needed - and he is needed as he is - that's why you are born in a certain way. Don't try to go astray from your nature.

Once or twice I went with my father to see the gymnasium and I told him, "I hate it."

He said, "Why? You can see so many beautiful bodies there."

I said, "I cannot call them beautiful. They are trying to force their bodies, to make them almost as they must have been thousands of years before, the bodies of animals. These people should not be made heroes." I asked my father, "Can you tell me that any of your wrestlers, any of your boxers in the world has been a genius, a great scientist, a great poet, a great painter? What have these people contributed? These are either mediocre and most probably idiotic people."

Life is not to fight.

Life is to live and life is to grow.

Life is to bring to the world all that is hidden in you to share. There is only one thing: you should discover your treasures and start sharing them with people. This is your only strength, because in this way you will be finding more and more roots - in people, in the earth, in the trees, in the stars.

You will be finding more and more friends.

I used to sit by the side of a river in my village, under a small tree. It was the same kind of tree under which Gautam Buddha became enlightened, and because of Gautam Buddha's enlightenment, the tree's name has become the bodhi tree. In English it is the bo tree - that too is coming from Buddha, bo. Bodhi means enlightenment.

And a few scientists have discovered that there is a certain chemical, without which mind cannot function. The more you have it, the better your intelligence will be - sharper, quicker. The bodhi tree has that chemical. And strangely, only the bodhi tree - of all the trees in the world - has that chemical in it. It may not be just a coincidence that Buddha became enlightened under a bodhi tree.

I used to sit under this bodhi tree by the riverside for hours. It must have been almost the middle of the night, a full moon night, and we had become such friends.... Just that day one of my teachers had told me, "I hear that you are saying to people that there is a possibility of communication between man and trees?"

I said, "Yes."

He said, "Don't spread strange ideas for which you don't have any proof."

I took him with me on that full moon night and I told him, "You touch the tree and just tell me how you feel."

He said, "It is cold."

And I said to the tree, in front of the teacher, "It is a question of your friend's word. I want you to respond in some way. And the easiest will be that when my teacher puts his hand on you, show your warmth, don't be cold."

The teacher said, "You must be mad, you are talking with the tree!"

But I said, "There is no harm in trying. The tree is willing - I feel the willingness all around. You put your hand there."

He said, "I don't believe that there is any possibility of communication." But he put his hand on the tree and was shocked - the tree was so warm, and it was a cold night. He said, "My God, now you have got me also into trouble! Everybody thinks you are a little bit crazy, now what about me?"

I said, "You are my disciple - first disciple! Just start spreading the news that...."

He said, "I have never done such a thing... but I will have to do it because I have experienced it myself."

He told others and everybody laughed. And I never wanted so many people to hear, because I was not certain how much the tree liked people, who she liked, who she did not like, whether she liked to be in a crowd or just to be alone, standing high in the sky - or perhaps just with a chosen few friends.

People started asking me: "That teacher is saying this phenomenon...."

I said, "I don't know anything about it."

The teacher met me by the evening, he said, "The whole day I have been searching for you!"

I said, "I have been escaping! Because now you have become an idiot; can't you understand, trees and man cannot communicate!"

He said, "My God, you are saying that? The whole day long in school I have been spreading the news."

I said, "Which news?"

He said, "I never thought you were so dangerous."

I said, "Now you know... that full moon night we never met!"

All around your life it is the same life, the same consciousness in different forms. You don't need strength; the whole universe is yours, its strength and vitality is yours.

All you need is more vulnerability, more softness, more openness, more receptivity. Perhaps all these things have been condemned as weakness - "become almost like a citadel, close your heart completely so nobody can harm you." It is true - if you close your heart nobody can harm you. I can even suggest better methods: if you commit suicide, after that nobody can harm you at all! Even if the third world war happens you are saved.

Naturally, to accept oneself and to love oneself are the foundations of the psychology of the Buddhas.

It is only the beginning, but the whole meditative process reaches to the highest stars.

Modern psychology has not even started its real work. What it is doing is just exploiting rich people.

Question 3:

Milarepa, you are the answer but you are fast asleep.

The answer within you is just a seed. It needs the right soil, it needs a master gardener, it needs your cooperation, your willingness to die as a seed so that you can be born as a plant.

Otherwise, you have the answer. Because it is in a seed form, questions arise.

Those questions are really in search of the answer that is within you, so there is no contradiction.

Question 4:

Yes. Unfortunately, all unenlightened people are self-destructive.

They are self-destructive because they don't know why they are here, where they are going, what the meaning and purpose of their life is. Without knowing anything about themselves, whatever they do is going to be harmful.

It is going to be harmful to you, and through you, to others. You cannot do anything but harm because your eyes are closed, you don't have any inner sensitivity, you don't have any creative joy.

And above all, for centuries you have worshipped self-destructive people.

There was a man in Alexandria who remained seated on a thirty-foot-long pole. It was a pole from an old, ancient temple which was now in ruins but the pole had remained intact. This man, Peter of Alexandria, remained for twelve years sitting on the pole. That was his only contribution to the world, but he was recognized by the Christians as a saint. The pope himself - and this has happened only once; otherwise whenever the pope declares somebody as a saint....

And by the way you should know that the word 'saint' in English is very ugly. It comes from 'sanction'.

It means the pope has sanctioned that this man is holy - it is a certificate. The saint who is going to receive the reward as a certificate travels to the Vatican and receives it there, touching the feet of the pope. It is strange... the pope is not a saint and nobody has bothered about a simple matter: how can a man who is not a saint himself recognizes anybody as a saint? What authority does he have to declare somebody a saint? And what kinds of saints are these who travel thousands of miles just to receive a certificate? It does not look saintly.

But with Peter of Alexandria it was difficult. He could not come down, he had taken a vow to remain till death on the pillar. And he was doing all kinds of nasty things from the pillar, it was disgusting.

For thirty years he had not taken a bath - in Alexandria, which was hot, burning hot. And he was urinating, he is doing everything while sitting on the pillar. He could not sleep - or perhaps slowly, slowly he became accustomed to sleeping while sitting on the pole, which is a very difficult thing but not impossible. If you can remain in your bed without falling out of the bed in the night, St. Peter can remain sitting. But except creating this nauseous spot he has not done anything and he has become a saint!

You have always worshipped people who can do things which you feel you cannot do. Suddenly, if you cannot do it and somebody else can do it, he becomes higher, he has some superior power.

A real saint need not be dependent on any pope to give him a certificate. His certificate should come from his own experience. It will be a declaration, nobody else can do it on his behalf.

Take your delicateness and put your energy into creating beauty - in any direction, in any dimension.

Remember one thing: that you should not leave this earth unless you have made it a little more beautiful, a little lovelier, a little more loving. To me, this is the only strength, the only power - that we can transform life, we can transform consciousness.

Accept it peacefully and joyously - wherever you are, whatever you are, however you can use your energies into some creativity.

Your creativeness will help you to become enlightened, just as enlightenment brings an explosion of creativity. And unless you create, you are going to remain self-destructive - it is the same energy.

You have the energy, you are creating the energy, you are a dynamo of energy continuously being created from the cosmos. What will you do with it? If you don't create you are going to be destructive, you are going to destroy.

All your so-called strong men have been destructive. And the people I call the mystics have not been strong men, but they have created. They have participated with God in creation, they have known power at its highest peak.

Question 5:

My God! Stones hear sermons when I pass them. People like me - who have been speaking continuously for decades - become deaf, because we only speak, we never listen.

Stones are giving sermons - that much I know. But when I am with them the poor stones have to sit down silently and listen to a long sermon.

Question 6:

Suraj Prakash, do you see? Jogging brought results immediately! You have started meeting great mystics.

I have not forgotten Mulla Nasruddin. I heard that he died. He died in Iran - he had gone to see Ayatollah Khomeiniac - and as a proof they have made a marble memorial in Iran for Mulla Nasruddin. It has been made according to his will.

His will was certainly unique, but not unexpected. His whole life is essentially concluded in his will.

The will is simple. It says, "When you make a memorial, on the memorial put a door. Lock the door and throw the key in the ocean."

They were all puzzled because just a door without walls... what is the point of locking it? Anybody can go around the side. But they knew that that man was a strange type, and there must be some meaning in it.

So a marble statue with a marble plaque was made, with a door - just the frame of the door. On the door is a big lock and it makes everyone curious because there are no walls - you can go around this side or around that side and at the back there is nothing, just the same grave.

He used to talk with me about this will and he used to say, "I want humanity to remain puzzled about me even after my death."

So everybody who goes to his grave comes back puzzled: "Why did he do it?"

It is impossible not to ask the question why he did it. There is nothing behind the door, there are no walls. Why did he ask for the door and the lock and leave special instructions that the keys should be thrown in the ocean, because the door is not to be opened again?

Now Suraj Prakash has met him on Juhu Beach. That either means somebody played a joke on Suraj Prakash or perhaps Mulla Nasruddin is back as a ghost. And if he is back as a ghost, he will stay somewhere close by my side. Many of you may have the chance of meeting him!

He loves me, and you are asking for something for him.

I will tell you a joke, Suraj Prakash. Tell the joke to Mulla Nasruddin if you happen to meet him again.

In a circus it happened. By mistake the cage of the zebra was left open and in the night, the zebra escaped and ran away to a nearby farm. As it was getting to be morning, and he was enjoying the freedom and the fresh air... he approached an old hen, saying, "What do you do around here?"

She said, "My work here is to lay eggs for my master's breakfast."

The zebra then walked over to the cow, asking, "What do you do?"

The cow said, "I give milk for the farmer's breakfast."

The zebra then spied an enormous bull, and asked the same question. The bull looked at him with a quizzical smile on his face and he said, "Listen you queer ass, take off those faggy pajamas and I'll show you what I do around here!"

Just tell Mulla Nasruddin. He will enjoy it and he will tell other ghosts. Mulla Nasruddin cannot go to heaven, obviously, and hell is overcrowded. People are on a waiting list. Many people on the earth must have died before but there is no place for them to go, so they are living.

And they think they are living - it is simply that there is no space in hell. Also, Mulla Nasruddin cannot be accepted in hell even if there is space someday, because he is a character of his own type. Neither God nor the devil can manage him, so he's going to remain in limbo - that limbo is called the world of ghosts. In the world of ghosts, you will find very rare people - people who are not allowed in heaven and people who cannot even be allowed in hell. For them, there is a special category so they don't create trouble anywhere.

It is good that Mulla has become a ghost. If you see him, Suraj Prakash, or if somebody else sees him, just tell him to come. And for ghosts, there are no passes!