Yes is the heartbeat of life

Question 1:

Primal therapy has contributed something very essential and significant to human growth. But just as other therapies in the West are amateurish, primal therapy also belongs to the same category.

Sigmund Freud used to say that exhaustive psychoanalysis would free man from all tensions, all worries; would give him for the first time freedom from the past, and a tremendous energy to create the future - not as a continuity of the past but totally new, fresh, discontinuous with the past.

But the whole problem is that exhaustive psychoanalysis is impossible. There is not a single person in the whole world who has gone through exhaustive psychoanalysis, which means that now he does not need any psychoanalysis. People have been in psychoanalysis for fifteen years, twenty years, and yet they are exactly the same as they had begun. Only one thing has changed: they have now become full of psychological jargon. They have become knowledgeable. They can drive you crazy very easily, just by talking all the nonsense that they think is psychoanalysis.

Primal therapy is a simple method. It is helpful in releasing the deepest repressed emotions. And the person has to come to a point where he's not holding anything back - his scream becomes primal.

The moment the child is born, he goes through a great trauma. Changing from the mother's womb into the cold, strange world is a great shock, and that shock remains deep in your unconscious for your whole life.

Primal therapy is a process to release you from the trauma of birth. You have to scream for days together. Finally, the ultimate scream comes, as if your whole being - every cell of it - has screamed with totality, wholeness, intensity. And that scream leaves you so unburdened, so light, weightless...

because with the primal scream, many other small screams that are in you are all released.

But Janov has failed the same way as Sigmund Freud has failed. Psychoanalysis has not been able to give man his spirituality, his being, his freedom. Of all that it has promised, not a single thing has been delivered, and millions of people have wasted their time and money for nothing. Now Janov has done the same number again.

One primal scream releases you, but only for a short time; tomorrow you will be the same. It was good, it gave you a good sleep because you were so relaxed. But your mind is accustomed to accumulating tensions, anxieties, worries. It will do its work. Tomorrow morning, you will find that you are the same person. Those few hours that you lived after the primal scream will become slowly, slowly faded, like a dream, far away.

Then he came up with the idea of "exhaustive primal therapy." Exhaustive means you go on doing it for ten years, fifteen years, twenty years. There is not a single person - many have tried - who is freed from all tensions through primal therapy.

Even Janov himself has no experience of his own being, has no experience of relaxing into the universal life forces, merging, meeting, and experiencing the eternal, the endless, the deathless.

Primal therapy is just a toy. You can scream as much as you like. It is not going to be exhaustive for the simple reason that you don't have only one life. There have been hundreds of lives before, and an exhaustive primal therapy will mean that all the tensions, all the anxieties that you have gathered in thousands of years which are part of your deepest unconscious, are all released. Perhaps you will need a few lives just to scream, and go on screaming! More probable is that you will be exhausted but primal therapy will not be exhaustive.

Seeing the situation, now Janov does not talk about exhaustive primal therapy... because it is not possible, and Janov has no idea about past lives. If this were the only life, exhaustive therapy would be possible. It is only a question of twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years - you could throw all the rubbish that has gathered in you. But it is a question of thousands of years - it will take thousands of years to throw it. And all the while you are throwing it, your mind is collecting it. So you are in a vicious circle: by the time you are finished with ten thousand years of screaming and you look at the mind, he is ready with fresh problems - start primal therapy again!

These are childish approaches. And it is not a coincidence that all these therapies are born in California. Once you know that a thing is born in California, you can be absolutely certain that it is childish, and it is going to be only a fashion for a few days.

Now in California, people are thinking about primal therapy as if it is something very ancient. They have gone to other therapies because there are other geniuses, and any type....

Now one of my sannyasins who is here invented a therapy - hugging therapy. The whole hour, the whole session, everybody is hugging everybody else... but in California, everything goes, and he was earning a lot of money. The strangest thing is, that you can tell the Californians any stupid thing and they will do it - and they will pay for it! Two hundred and fifty dollars at least. And when you have paid two hundred fifty dollars for screaming in a room for one hour - which you could have done for free - you come out smiling. You have to come out smiling; otherwise what will people say? that you are an idiot; you paid two hundred and fifty dollars and then you screamed for one hour, unnecessarily. You have to come out smiling - a big smile, spread ear to ear - and tell people, "Wow! It is far out!"

And people go on coming because they hear from others: "There is nothing like primal therapy. If you have not experienced primal therapy, your coming into existence is useless. You are here to do screaming."

The question is that Janov says man accumulates negativity, and that negativity is a chemical phenomenon. It is out of man's pain, misery, that certain chemicals start gathering in him which create the negative mind, which wants to destroy.

The miserable person always wants others to be miserable. The miserable person feels happy only when he sees somebody more miserable than himself. The miserable person becomes incapable of saying yes - to life, to love, to beauty, to poetry, to existence. He can only say no, he cannot say yes. Yes is impossible because in his life he has not felt anything for which he should be grateful.

Janov is saying that because it is a chemical reaction, the no.... The questioner is asking: if this is the situation, that the no inside us, the destructiveness is a chemical thing, then how can you expect sannyasins to say yes to existence, to love, to joy? It is something significant to understand.

I accept the idea that misery, pain, anxiety, anguish, create certain chemical changes in your body. Just as love, joy, blissfulness, ecstasy, silence, peace - they also create tremendously great chemical, physiological changes in your body and mind.

The question will be difficult for Janov to solve, because these therapists do not believe that there is anything beyond mind, that there is anything more than the body. You are confined in a prison of physiology, chemistry, biology and you cannot be free from them just by meditating.

But neither Janov nor the questioner understand that meditation is not an effort that your chemistry which is ready to say no, should say yes.

Meditation simply ignores mind. It bypasses mind; it reaches beyond mind, and once it is beyond mind it has a far superior power.

And in that space beyond mind, pain has never entered.

Bliss is simply the very atmosphere beyond the mind. Once a person has touched something beyond, he has a new power. He can say yes, although his body chemistry is saying no. The body is a servant. Just wake up your master, and the body is a servant, the mind is a servant. And once the master is there... and the master is never negative, that is beyond its nature.

It is intrinsic to your being to be creative.

You are coming from the universal creativity, you are born out of it.

You are part of it, you are still connected with it. You cannot live a single second without the connection.

Yes can be said, and the mind with all its chemistry will remain silent. Before the master, it has no power. All that power was derived from the master. But the master was asleep; now the master is awake and is not ready to give anything to destructiveness, to death.

No represents death.

Yes is the heartbeat of life.

So I am not saying that your mind has to say yes. No, I am saying you have to go beyond the no-saying mind. And once you have gone beyond, it is not a question of saying yes - you are yes.

Your very being is nothing but a totality of acceptance, with gratitude.

Out of this, the real prayer arises. All other prayers - in the synagogues, in the churches, in the temples, in the mosques - are just carbon copies. The original is within you, and the original has no words. It is absolute silence, but totally positive.

Silence, but so full of music... silence, but so fragrant... silence, but so luminous.

Once you have entered your real being, the mind is such a small thing... it simply starts wagging its tail. No need to hold the tail and wag it - then perhaps it may get angry; the dog may start barking.

Even a dog has a dignity of his own. He wags his tail out of his freedom - freedom of expression!

Now you are holding his tail and moving it... he will start barking: "This is too much! You are going beyond your limits, you are entering into the territory of somebody else. It is interference."

I don't want you to interfere in the mind.

That's what I have been teaching for thirty years continuously: don't interfere. Just be a witness, far above. To interfere, you have to be there - not far away, you have to be within the mind to interfere, to fight.

Neither is fight needed, nor is interference needed.

All that is needed is an aloofness.

You are on the sunlit peak. The mind is in the dark valley. And because of your superior powers, the mind automatically follows you. You need not even give an order. It understands your new state of awakening.

You can say yes, but you will have to go into meditation.

Through mind, you can force yes, but it will be superficial, hypocritical, forced. Underneath, there will be no - vital, stronger, and soon it will throw away your yes.

Let the yes come from above, from a greater, bigger source of energy. The mind will automatically follow, and when mind follows on its own, there is a beauty and there is a grace. When mind says, out of its own understanding - because the master is awake, and now the mind cannot go on behaving in the old ways.... When the mind, out of understanding says yes, there is beauty.

One great Zen master, Hotei, was a strange man - beautiful, very loving, but a little bit eccentric.

That eccentricity adds much spice to his life. It makes his life not ordinary and flat but very meaningful.

Each morning when he would wake up, this was his routine, only broken once. The routine was that when he would feel that he was awake, before opening his eyes, he would say, "Hotei," - that was his name - "are you still here?" And then he would answer himself, "Yes, master." He would say, "That's good."

His disciples thought that this seemed to be crazy. Many times they asked him, "Why do you do this?"

He said, "One day, I will wake up and Hotei will not be there. And Hotei has been such a beautiful servant - in good times, in bad times, in darknesses, in lights - the first thing is that I want to be sure, whether Hotei is around or gone. And the moment he says 'Yes, master,' I am filled again with great energy for the day's work. His 'Yes!' is such a beauty, such a grace."

"But," his disciples said, "there is nobody. You are saying both things. You ask the question and you answer it."

Hotei said, "From the outside, this is how it appears, but all that appears is not real. From the inside, I am asking: 'Hotei, are you here?' and it is my mind who says, 'Yes, master!' As far as I am concerned, the question and the answer are coming from different sources."

But in his whole life, only once... that was the day he died. He opened his eyes and his disciples were surprised. A lifelong habit... they have also become habituated to listening to it. Something was missing - what happened? There was silence.

And then one disciple asked: "Master, have you forgotten today? You have not asked, 'Hotei, are you still here?' Have you forgotten? Are you becoming old, losing your memory?"

Hotei laughed. He said, "I am not losing my memory and I cannot become old, I am eternally young.

I am not asking because I don't want to put Hotei in an embarrassing situation."

They said, "We don't understand. What is the embarassing situation?"

He said, "The embarrassing situation is that today, Hotei cannot say 'Yes, master!' This is my last day. In fact, I would have died in the middle of the night. I simply managed to go on breathing for the morning, so that you all can come and I can see you for the last time. And perhaps you can also see me for the first time."

He closed his eyes and said, "Hotei, okay - now we can go."

And he said, "Yes, master. I have been ready since the middle of the night, it is time."

Have you noted the beauty of Hotei's eccentric behavior? It looks eccentric... it is the sanest behavior possible.

Question 2:

It is a great disease. And we carry the disease from generation to generation. Everybody is brought up in a climate of continuous judgment, condemnation, criticism. This makes people hard, this makes people without compassion. And the society needs people who don't have compassion, who are hard, and who are always putting everybody down.

Your continuous habit of judging is nothing but an effort to put everybody lower than you. When you criticize something, when you judge someone, you have already taken a higher position. You don't know the other person. You don't know his life story, you may have known a little fragment. On that fragment, you judge the whole life of a man - unashamedly.

But the society wants you to be continuously struggling, competing; continuously putting others down, pulling on their legs and trying to raise yourself higher and higher in the world of power and position.

This world is almost a battlefield. And there is cold war going on continuously; everybody is everybody else's enemy.

Here there is no friend.

I was reading THE BIBLE and a small child was sitting by my side. He was very curious and very cute. Whenever I used to sit in the garden, he would come and sit - and he was intelligent; he would ask questions. He would ask me to read something to him so he could also get some idea of what I was reading.

He was the son of a principal who lived next door. I read him the sentence from Jesus: "Love your enemies as you love yourself."

And that little boy said, "This is very good. But I want to know... has he said anything about loving your friends?"

This is what only an innocent child can ask. A knowledgeable person will feel that it doesn't look right to ask such a question - why become a laughingstock? But he asked and I had to think it over.

I told the boy: "Because there are no friends."

He said, "Right!" He said "This is the beauty of asking questions to you, because you say the truth.

There are no friends, it is a friendless world. There are only enemies. That's why Jesus says, 'Love your enemies,' because there is no other kind available."

It is simple. Without becoming in any way superior... and one becomes superior only by having superior values. If you have infinite love, if you have unlimited compassion, if you have absolute fearlessness - with these qualities, you never think yourself superior, you are. Only those people who are not superior think that they are superior. Superior people never think, they never even become aware of the fact that they are superior. They are simply superior and they enjoy it. They really feel a deep pity for you, that you are capable of enjoying all these riches and you are missing - just collecting seashells and colored stones and wasting your life.

But to attain to superior qualities, to become a superman without any self-consciousness that "I am a superman...." The superman will know that "I am just an ordinary man." That will be one of the basic and fundamental qualities of the superman: that he cannot even dream that he is superior to anybody.

One of the mystics of India, Kabir, has a beautiful song. He was uneducated; he could not write, he could not read. All his songs are spontaneous outpourings. They may not be grammatical - they are not; they may not be linguistically correct - they are not; but they are so beautiful that after Kabir, there have been thousands of poets in this country who know language, who know grammar, who know the whole art of poetics, but they are pygmies.

Kabir is a superman. His songs are simple but so full of meaning. One of the songs says:

"I used to think that I was a superior man, but then I went for a pilgrimage and came in contact with many, many people. When I returned home, the idea of being superior was dropped. Instead, I started feeling that I must be the most ordinary man in the world. My first idea was my ignorance about people. When I came to know so many people, I realized my utter ordinariness."

But this is the quality of a superman. Only a superman can say that, can have the guts to say it. But to attain to this superiority, you will need superconsciousness. You will have to climb to the sunlit peaks of your own being.

That is a little arduous. The cheaper way is - rather than making yourself superior; without any difficulty, the cheaper way is to judge others as inferior. Nobody can prevent you, it is just your inside idea. And because everybody is inferior, you are superior. Now this is the cheapest way. You don't move anywhere, you are the same person, but in your mind you have put others.... That does not change anybody else, it does not change you - but it gives a great consolation.

Winston Churchill, a great orator, was asked once: "You are one of the most important, articulate, impressive orators in the world. Do you remember the first day, when you faced thousands of people looking at you and you were standing on the stage - do you remember the stage fright?"

And you will be surprised at what Winston Churchill said. He said, "Don't be worried about the first day, that was sixty years ago. But even today, it is the same. When I stand up on the stage, the same fear - and I have been speaking for sixty years!"

He was the only person in the whole world who remained a member of the parliament for sixty years continuously without a gap. And he says that he feels afraid.

Then the person asked, "How have you been managing?"

He said, "I have my own strategy. My strategy is: before I stand up, I look all around and say to myself: All these are idiots; otherwise, why should they come to listen to me? And there is no need to be afraid of these idiots, because what can they do? Their opinion does not matter at all. Once I settle with the idea that all these people are idiots, then I start my speech without fear - what is the fear? who is there who can judge what I am saying?"

This is the cheapest way. But everybody's doing it - ordinary people and the so-called heroes like Winston Churchill - they are all doing this nonsense.

That's why you judge. Your judgment about others is really an effort to feel satisfied that you are better: "This man is a thief. That man is a rapist. This man is crazy." And you can go on labeling anybody. Finally, only you are left. But judging is the quality of the inferior person.

The superior person never judges. He feels compassion. If he sees something wrong in somebody, he feels compassion. He tries in his own way, without offending the person, to help him. But there is no judgment.

I was a professor in the university but I refused to examine people's answers in their examinations.

The vice-chancellor called me and asked, "What is the matter? First you refused to make up some examination papers, question papers, and now you are refusing to examine the answer."

I said, "That's right! I will not ask questions for the simple reason that in my idea, your whole educational system is utterly wrong. Five questions, and you have judged the person's intelligence?

It may be just accidental that he knows only those five answers and your judgment about his intelligence is wrong. It may also be possible that he does not know only those five questions and he knows everything else. Then too, your judgment is going to be wrong and inhuman. And I am not going to examine their answer copies, because whenever I see that somebody has not answered rightly, I feel great compassion for him. And because of my compassion, I give him higher marks than to those who have given the right answer, because they don't deserve any compassion."

He said, "What are you saying? The right answer gets less points and the wrong answer gets more?"

I said, "Yes! That's why I am keeping out of it, because then you will call me and ask. It is better - include me out. Don't put me in this game. There are many who are mad, who want to compose question papers because that brings money, who want to examine answer copies because that brings money. I am simply refusing money - anybody else will be happy to have it. Make somebody happy."

He looked at me and he said, "I have always thought that in your eccentricities, there is always something of truth. Yes, I agree. It hurts to give a zero to somebody, if you are not just mechanically judging but seeing the person behind the answer. With great hope he has given this answer - it may be wrong but his hope... what about his hope? His parents may be poor, he may be working in the night and studying in the day. He may not have the chance, the time, to rest which others have, and you are giving him a zero."

I said, "I simply refuse. And if you insist, then don't ask any question about what I do. I can compose question papers but you cannot ask, 'What kind of questions are these?' because I will be trying to figure out questions which don't depend on memory. I will cancel all those people who are depending on memory, because memory is not intelligence. I will compose questions which need intelligence - but intelligence is not found in the textbooks of the universities. Intelligence is not being taught.

People are not being trained. Only memory is being filled, with more and more information.

"I will compose questions that will not ask information, they will be immediate questions. Whether the person has been reading or not, coming to the classes or not, if he has intelligence, he will find the answer. If he has no intelligence, then all his memory cannot help. Then don't tell me that I am disturbing the whole structure of the university. I can examine their papers, but I cannot be their judge. Everybody will pass first class, because as far as I am concerned, every human being is a first-class human being. What does it matter that he has not answered one question rightly? And what do you mean by not rightly - you mean that it is not the exact copy of the textbook! The student has not proved himself a parrot."

He said, "You simply forget all about it. From now on, you are free about question papers, answer copies...."

But he forgot one thing, and the superintendent of the examinations sent me a letter saying "You are appointed to supervise in the examination hall."

I said, "My God! I forgot to discuss this with the vice-chancellor."

So I went to the examination hall, and in the beginning I told the students: "You can take it for granted that I am not here, because I don't want to be an interference in anybody's life. You can do whatever you have planned to do. If you have brought notes with you, no harm. If you want to copy from other people, you can do it but don't disturb - so many people are here, so be silent. And there are professors outside in other rooms, so you have to be alert - not of me, but of all these people. I am absent and I will not disturb you at all; it is just some mistake that I am here."

They had never heard such a thing. And what I did was that I turned my chair facing towards the blackboard, with my back towards the students and I said: "When the time is up, wake me."

One of the students stood up and he said, "You trust us so much?"

I said, "It is not a question of trust or anything. I just love freedom and I don't in any way want to be in your way. You are mature enough. You must know what you are doing. Is it right? - then do it. If it is wrong, then it is up to you whether to do it or not to do it."

And you will be surprised. They brought their copies and their notes and they piled up everything in front of me. And they touched my feet and said, "Bless us."

"But," I said, "what is this big pile?"

Even books, printed books they had in their pants... one boy brought his shirt.

I said, "But you will be sitting without a shirt."

He said, "But I have to put this shirt here, because I have written notes on it."

"On the shirt?"

He said, "Yes, this is what I have done."

He showed me the other side of the shirt, the inside. He had written notes on it.

I said, "You can have it. I trust you that you will not look into those notes. But sitting without a shirt, and those professors... that will become a question mark, what is the matter?"

And all this pile in front of me... the vice-chancellor heard, because those professors were watching, listening to what I was saying. Everything was reported to him. In the evening, he came to my house and he said, "We forgot about this. And it was just out of a mistake, because another person is the superintendent of the examinations. It will never happen again. But the students who were in your examination hall have never been so happy. They have never been trusted, they have been never given their dignity."

Judgment is an ugly phenomenon.

Rise in your own being - higher. Don't destroy that opportunity by judging people as lower. You are doing immense harm to yourself, not to anybody else.

Question 3:

Watching the mind, in the beginning, looks as if a part of the mind is watching the other parts. You are in the mind, so in the beginning it is absolutely okay. But remember that a real watching is not of the mind, in the mind, by the mind.

The real watcher is far away from the mind. And to create the distance between the mind and the watcher is the whole art of meditation. So don't just get involved in intellectual questions; make a few efforts to experience whether you can be just a watcher of the whole mind.

You can be, because I can be.

Thousands of mystics have been watching the mind from the outside. Because you are outside - it is not a question that you have to come out of the mind, you have never been in it. It is almost like a dream. You dream in the night that you are in Paris - but do you think that if somebody wakes you suddenly, you will wake up in Paris? You will still wake up here. You can dream of Paris, and in the dream you can be in Paris, but if awakened, you will be here. Awakened, you will not say, "Okay, I will try to find out about flights, how I can reach to Bombay because right now I am in Paris." If you say that, that means there is no more dream - you are mad!

There is a beautiful story about Chuang Tzu. The world has created many beautiful people, but Chuang Tzu is still unparalleled. He has something unique about himself.

One morning, he woke up. He was very sad. He called all his disciples and he said, "I am very sad because for the first time in my life, I have come across a problem that I cannot solve. And I used to think that I had solved everything. For years, there has not been a single problem. I have lived in utter silence. But last night disturbed everything."

One disciple asked, "Please tell us what happened."

He said, "In the night, I saw a dream that I had become a butterfly, flying over flowers, moving from this flower to that flower. Then I woke up and a question arose in my mind: in the night I had gone to bed as Chuang Tzu, and in the dream I became a butterfly. I still remember the colors, the flowers...

and now I'm wondering: who am I? Is it not possible that the butterfly has gone to sleep and is dreaming that she has become Chuang Tzu? If Chuang Tzu can become a butterfly in a dream, then a butterfly can become Chuang Tzu in a dream, there is no problem. So who am I? - a butterfly dreaming to be Chuang Tzu? I am very much puzzled. You try to find out."

They all said, "This is only a dream. You are a great sage, you should not be concerned with these small things."

He said, "This is not a small thing. It is a very significant question."

And just then Lieh Tzu, his very intimate disciple, came in and he asked, "What is the matter? What is this whole crowd doing here?"

They gave him the way and they said, "Chuang Tzu, our master, is very sad."

He heard the whole thing. He went away and came back with a bucket of ice cold water and poured it on Chuang Tzu! Chuang Tzu said, "Wait! It is too cold. I am Chuang Tzu... no question, nothing!

And where have you been? If you had been here from the very beginning, this whole morning could have been saved. All these idiots are trying to persuade me that this is not a significant question and only you have solved it. It is a significant question... but ice cold water?" He said, "A philosophical question is one thing... but Lieh Tzu, I'm getting old. You should be careful about it - this ice cold water."

Lieh Tzu said, "Nothing else would have brought you to your senses. Anything more about the butterfly?"

He said, "No, nothing. Only butterflies have to bother about it. Why should I bother? I am Chuang Tzu again, it was just a small episode in the night. Forget all about it... but take your bucket!"

You have to grow.

But never choose anything cheap, because no cheap thing can give you that which is the most precious experience in life.

Question 4:

It is very simple: Whenever you have a question about whether it is a real achievement or just imagination, then it is imagination.

If you don't have any questions, even if the whole world says it is imagination but inside you there is no question, if inside you, you are absolutely certain that this is an achievement, then it is an achievement.

Any authentic achievement brings with it a certainty, a guarantee that "I am true." And every imaginary achievement brings with it all kinds of doubts.

So whenever you are in doubt, decide: it is imaginary. Whenever there is no doubt, you are in a doubtless certainty, then it is a real, authentic evolution. You have found something.

I have heard about a farmer who was coming home with his donkey. He found on the way a big diamond. He had no idea that it was a diamond but he loved his donkey very much, and the diamond was shining so beautifully... in the morning sunrise, it was throwing rainbows around. He said, "It will be good for the poor donkey. I have never given him a present." So he made an arrangement so that the diamond would hang around the neck of the donkey.

By coincidence, as he finished hanging the diamond around the donkey's neck, a jeweller came on his horse; he was going to some other place. He could not believe his eyes. His whole life he has been a jeweller, a prominent jeweller, but he has never seen such a big diamond. Even after cutting and polishing, it was still bigger than Kohinoor.

He said, "My God, and that is hanging around the donkey's neck!"

He got down from the horse. It was obvious that the farmer did not understand that it was a diamond, so he said, "A beautiful stone you have... how much you will take for it?"

He said, "How much? I have never sold any stone before - perhaps one rupee will be more than enough. If you are interested, you can have it. I will purchase something for my poor donkey."

But such is the greed of man... that diamond was worth millions of rupees, but the jeweller said, "No, one rupee is too much, just for a stone. I can give you half a rupee."

The farmer said, "No, then let my donkey enjoy it."

The jeweller went away. He thought that the man would think and would call him back. He went slowly on his horse, but by chance, another jeweller... he asked the price.

The man said, "One man was asking just before you. I said one rupee and he said he could give me only half a rupee. For half a rupee, I am not going to sell. My donkey is enjoying it so much."

The man said, "I will give you two rupees."

The other jeweller, who was moving slowly on his horse, looked back and was shocked that some other jeweller had reached the man - "My God! Millions of rupees are gone!" He rushed back and he said, "Wait! Whatsoever he is offering, double! I will give you double."

The other jeweller said, "Then I will give you double that!"

And they went on doubling... the farmer stood there and said to the donkey, "What do you think? We should leave these two donkeys here and go home. I am not going to sell it anymore. Don't bother.

You are jewellers, and you could not recognize that it is a diamond? You recognized it, but your greed is such that you are getting a diamond for one rupee and still you want to save half a rupee - and you are ready to risk millions. I was not aware that this was a diamond, but seeing the conflict between you, that you are now raising the price double.... I don't know what it is, but one thing is certain: it is not an ordinary stone. I am going to the jeweller's market, it should be auctioned there.

You can come."

They said, "Wait!"

He said, "You have been stupid! You have both been stupid! Now I can understand why my donkey was smiling. I was puzzled - why was he smiling? He has never smiled before. But he had never seen jewellers before."

Life is very precious. You may not recognize the diamond that you are carrying within you, but the moment you enter into yourself and find it, its very presence, its very luminosity will be enough to convince you. There is not going to be any suspicion or doubt.

But if you are imagining things, certainly doubt will follow. Doubt follows only imaginations. For example, if you believe in God, doubt is going to be there. If you believe in heaven and hell, doubt is going to be there. But if you know from your own experience, then there is no doubt. When you fall in love, have you ever asked yourself, "Is this love REAL?" No. Nobody has ever doubted his love because his love is coming from his very heart, with a certainty.

You can doubt God but you cannot doubt love. That's why, to me, God has never had anything to do with religion. But love has much to do with it because it is the fundamental experience upon which your whole flight towards the unknown is going to be based.

Question 5:

Yes, it is love.

And in other words, it is the beginning of a great pilgrimage which only begins and never ends, which goes on becoming bigger and bigger. Whatever you are feeling, go on deeper into it. Don't be afraid of anything because we have nothing to lose, and we have the whole universe to gain.

You are right on the doorstep of the temple of God.

Love is the beginning, God is the journey.

God is not the goal, God is the pilgrimage.

I am reminded of Al Hillaj Mansoor, a great Sufi mystic. He was young, but very poor. He collected money, borrowed money, tried to earn, because he wanted to go to Mecca for a pilgrimage. For Mohammedans, one of the essential things is that at least one time in your life, you should go for a pilgrimage to Mecca, the place where Mohammed created the whole world of Islam.

Finally, after three years, he had enough money to go. The whole town had come to bid him farewell.

As he left the people and was leaving the town boundaries, he saw an old man, sitting under a tree.

It was a crossroad, so he had to ask him: "Which road goes to Mecca?"

The old man said, "Come here," and the way he said "Come here" was such that Al Hillaj's Mansoor had to go.

The man said, "No road goes to Mecca! But if you are interested in the pilgrimage, that is possible, and there is no need to go anywhere. First, put everything, all your money and everything in front of me."

He was saying it in such a way... he had a certain charisma around him; whatever he said, Al Hillaj had to do. He hesitated a moment - "He is going to take all my money! Three years I have worked...

but what to do? Looking at the man, money seems worthless. Looking into his eyes, it seems you have reached Mecca."

And the old man laughed, "Right! You are understanding it: Look into my eyes and you have reached Mecca. Put everything here!" So he had to put everything there - a bit reluctantly, but there seemed to be no other way.And then the old man said, "Now the pilgrimage begins - because God is a pilgrimage. Go around me seven times. Just the way Mohammedans go around the stone of Kaaba in Mecca seven times, go around me. And I promise you that you have reached Mecca; now start the real pilgrimage."

Mansoor went around the old man seven times. The closer he came to the old man, the more rounds he took around him... he felt so silent, so joyful. He started dancing, started singing.

The old man said, "Perfectly right! Now you can go anywhere, and wherever you go, it is the pilgrimage to God. Just remember the dance, the song - they should not only be outside, they should be inside, too."

He went back home. The whole town gathered. They said, "What happened?" Because Mecca in those days used to take at least four to six months, going and coming. "You are back! We have just reached home and you are back. What happened?"

He said, "Mecca came to meet me outside the town and asked me to give all my money. I took the seven traditional circles around the old man and he said, 'God is a pilgrimage and now your pilgrimage has started. Just sing, dance, feel the glory of existence.'"

The townspeople said, "You are a fool! Somebody has cheated you."

Al Hillaj said, "No, I have looked into the eyes of that man. I have looked into the face of that man. I have been around him, I have felt his presence. I am absolutely convinced that Mecca has come to receive one of its followers. There is nothing wrong. It has been said in the scriptures," he said, "that if your thirst is total, you need not go anywhere. Your thirst will pull the truth, God, to you, wherever you are. Mohammed has said that if mountains cannot come to Mohammed, then Mohammed will go to the mountains."

This is a beautiful statement. And Al Hillaj said, "He was right. You are on the doorstep of the divine.

Just celebrate."

Enter into this feeling, into this beautiful mood you have arrived at.

Merge, melt, disappear into it.

It is love.