Peace or mind

Question 1:

The mind is always asking for more, It is a beggar.

I will tell you an ancient parable...

A beggar knocked on the doors of the palace. By chance the king was just coming out for his morning walk in the garden, so he himself opened the door. The beggar said, "It seems to be a fortunate day for you."

The king said, "For me or for you?"

The beggar said, "By the end of the day it will be decided. I am a beggar and I ask only one thing. I have got this begging bowl; can you fill it up - with anything you like?"

The beggar looked a little strange. His eyes were those of a mystic; his speaking was not that of a beggar but of an emperor. His whole aura was of tremendous authority. The king ordered his prime minister to fill the beggar's bowl with gold coins, so that he would remember that he had knocked on the door of a king, and that he was fortunate. The beggar laughed.

The king said, "What is the matter?"

He said, "By the evening everything will be decided." His behavior was strange but very attractive too. He was a beautiful man.

And then the trouble started. As the prime minister brought a bag of gold coins to fill the bowl, they all disappeared, and the bowl remained empty. More coins, more coins... all the coins that were in the treasury were brought, and they all disappeared. The whole town gathered there and the news spread like wildfire.

The king said, "Whatever the case, bring all the diamonds, rubies, emeralds, but fill the beggar's bowl." But everything disappeared in it and the bowl remained as empty as ever.

Finally the king lost everything. It was evening. The whole day there had been great excitement all over the capital. The king was stubborn - but now there was no point, he had nothing else to give.

He fell at the feet of the beggar and asked him the secret of the bowl. "Is it a magic bowl? It is evening and you have been telling me again and again, 'By the evening, by sunset, everything will be decided.' Now it is time. And in a way everything is decided, I have been defeated by a beggar.

But you are not an ordinary beggar. All I want to know is, what is the secret of this begging bowl?"

The beggar said, "It is not a secret, it is something everybody knows. Just look closely at the begging bowl. It is made of the skull of a man."

The king said, "I don't understand."

The beggar said, "Nobody understands. Inside the skull of man is his mind. You go on pouring everything in it and everything disappears. It is always asking for more; it is always empty. It is always a beggar, you cannot change it. You can only understand it and get rid of it."

This is your situation too.

You were thinking that religiousness is something extraordinary, very special, is attained by very special people. It was not your thinking; this has been told to you for centuries. This is the way the whole of humanity has been deceived for thousands of years: religiousness is something so extraordinary, it happens only to special people, prophets, messiahs, saviors, incarnations of God.

It is not for the ordinary and the common people. And you have accepted that conditioning. That conditioning is acceptable to the mind because it gives mind an immense scope to ask for more. It gives mind the opportunity never to be satisfied; there must be more.

My whole approach is that religiousness is just like freedom, just like your heartbeat. It is nothing special, it is nothing extraordinary; it is not something to be achieved - there is no question of excitement. Mind is not needed at all. If you are going to achieve something, then mind is needed, then mind's support is needed; then mind has to think of ways and means of how to achieve it.

But religiousness is your nature. You are born religious. Every child is born religious; it is the society that makes him irreligious, it is the society that corrupts him. It is your religious leaders who are responsible for making the whole of humanity irreligious.

Your religious leaders, your popes, your shankaracharyas, imams, Ayatollah Khomeini - these are all in the service of the devil. They are destroying the innocence of the child, which is the very center of religiousness. They are destroying the pure humanity of the child by making him a Jew, a Christian, a Hindu, a Buddhist. They are putting masks on the child, conditionings on his mind; and they are giving you this desire that you have to achieve religiousness - which is a rare adventure.

You have been befooled for centuries.

And mind is in absolute cooperation with the cheaters, exploiters, because if religion is something like a goal far away, and only special and extraordinary people achieve it, then mind is very happy.

That is its desire - to be special, to be somebody extraordinary, higher than others, holier than others, a saint, a prophet, a messiah. The mind is not happy with being just an ordinary and normal human being; it is ready to sacrifice everything to become extraordinary.

But whatever it does it can never become religious, because religion is not there, far away, as a goal.

Religion is your source.

It is your very being.

You are not to achieve it, you are simply to remember it. So when I say to you, you are religious, you have only forgotten it... you have been made to forget it. Your innocence has been covered with all kinds of ugly, stupid theologies; you have been given all kinds of faces. But your original face has been lost in these artificial faces.

Your original face is the face of the religious man. You brought it into the world; you came into the world absolutely natural, pure, innocent, loving. You came into the world playful, nonserious, enjoying the small things of the world - collecting seashells on the beach, running after butterflies, collecting flowers, colored stones - and you were so happy, as if you had found the world's greatest treasure.

You had unprejudiced eyes, you had an unpolluted heart.

Hence I say again: Religiousness is only a question of remembering what has been forgotten. It is an ordinary human phenomenon. Your mind is cheating you, deceiving you still. Although you are feeling serene, you are feeling peaceful, you are feeling happy, the mind goes on saying to you, "There must be something more." It will go on saying the same to you even if you meet God - who does not exist. The mind will say, "This god is okay, but there must be some bigger god. This god looks so normal, made in the image of man. There must be a huge god."

You cannot satisfy yourself if you listen to the mind; if you don't listen to the mind, right this very moment, contentment is yours. You can choose between the misery of the mind... because mind will always remain miserable, asking for more and more; that desire is unending.

I had a friend who was a very rich man. He was not born rich; he was a poor man's son, and we were friends when he was a poor man's son. He was adopted by one of the richest families in India because they had no son. Suddenly he became the richest man in India. He should have enjoyed it. He would not have been able to attain such great riches even if he had worked for hundreds of lives. Suddenly he got it without any effort - but he was not happy. He wanted more.

Just money was not enough, he wanted to become a great leader too. And he had the money, so he fought the election and became a member of parliament. But that was not enough. Again more: he wanted to be a cabinet minister. Because of his money he managed to become a deputy minister - but that was not enough.

He told me, "I want to be a cabinet minister."

I said, "Do you think that will be enough?"

He said, "I think so."

I said, "Right now you think so. Once you become a cabinet minister, you will not think the same way."

He became a cabinet minister, and immediately when he came to see me he said, "You were right.

The day I became a cabinet minister my mind said to me, 'You have come a long way. Now to be the prime minister of the country is not far away. Just a few steps more and you can become the prime minister.' But now I am so tense, so worried, I cannot sleep, I cannot enjoy anything. While I am eating I am thinking of politics. While I am making love to my wife I am thinking of the prime ministership. Everything has become mixed up. Help me to find some peace of mind."

I said, "First you become prime minister. Your mind will say, 'Now become the president of the country.' If you go on listening to the mind, you cannot have any peace; if you want peace, stop listening to the mind. And drop all those things that you have attained by listening to the mind. As a poor man you were so happy, so joyous. You had nothing, but you had a beautiful being. I am not saying throw away your money. Just don't let your mind dominate you. Then wherever you are you will be peaceful."

If your mind dominates you, even in paradise it will say, "This is paradise? - there must be something more!" All the houses look so old and rotten and used, because they have been there for eternity.

All the people look so sad and serious; they have also been there for eternity. So much dust has gathered on them, and they have nothing to do there, they have lost their dignity. They have attained paradise, but they have lost their humanness, they cannot laugh.

Laughter is prohibited in paradise, did you know? No scripture of the world, of any religion, says that humor is a religious quality - except me. Nobody is willing to allow humor into religiousness. What will those dead, dry-as-a-bone saints be doing in paradise, can you conceive? They cannot love, they cannot play cards, they cannot even have a football match. They cannot watch television - it is so unsaintly; they cannot drink even a cup of tea, no coffee break, and no work at all... Their days are empty, their nights are empty; they must be hankering to come back to the earth. At least here they were worshiped as saints; there, nobody worships them because everybody is a saint.

But nobody can come back from paradise. It has an entrance, but no exit. So before entering paradise, think twice - this is going to be the last act, then you are finished. It is entering almost into your own grave. But the mind will say certainly, "This is not paradise. Find out! Look for paradise.

This seems to be some mockery, the devil seems to be behind it. It seems to be a great joke to call this paradise." Even in paradise your mind will not allow you to have peace: peace and mind don't meet.

One of America's very famous rabbis, Joshua Liebman, has written a book, PEACE OF MIND. I wrote him a letter - the book is a great seller - saying, "Whatever you know about mind seems to be rubbish. You don't even know that peace of mind is a contradiction of terms, and that is the title of your book. The title should be, PEACE OR MIND."

He must have been shocked by my letter - he never replied. I wrote to him again. "This cowardliness is not good on the part of a rabbi. Either change the title or give me the explanation." Neither has he changed the title nor has he given me any explanation, and I have asked a simple thing. Peace of mind... such a thing does not exist.

Either peace exists, then there is no mind, or mind exists and there is no peace. The right title would be peace or mind. But he cannot change it because that is the whole theme in the book: peace of mind, and how to attain it. He is showing methods, ways how to attain to peace of mind. The change of title will not fit with the book.

He can understand that I am putting him into a difficult situation; if he changes the title then the book will not fit with the title. He will have to write the whole book again, and he cannot write the whole book again because he does not understand that mind is the source of all your tensions, anxieties, worries. It cannot be peaceful, that is impossible.

This is the whole essence of the East's experiments in spirituality for thousands of years: peace or mind. The choice is yours. Peace is a very normal, very ordinary, very simple phenomenon. And you are experiencing it, but by the side the mind goes on giving a commentary, "There must be something more. Don't stop. Go on searching."

You have to say to the mind, "Shut up!" It is your mind and you have the right to tell it to shut up, that you are not going to bother about its nonsense for more and more...

Enjoy whatever you have got and the more you enjoy it the more it grows. This is the paradox: mind asks for more and more and becomes more and more worried: without mind, you live peace, you live love, you live silence. And by living it, it becomes more and more - deeper and deeper. Slowly, slowly your happiness starts having wings, starts becoming a blessing, a blissfulness, a benediction.

Question 2:

It is a very simple question. Man, as a child, is the most helpless amongst the children of all the animals. Without the father and mother the child cannot survive. He needs absolute protection, nourishment, warmth; otherwise he will shrink and die. The human child is the weakest child in the whole of existence, but his weakness is a blessing in disguise.

But it can also be exploited - and that's what has been done down the centuries. The parents never allowed the weakness, helplessness and dependence of the child to turn into independence, strength, integrity, individuality; they were happy that the child remain obedient. Naturally, an obedient child is not a trouble. A disobedient child is a continuous trouble, but a disobedient child is a real human being.

The obedient child is just simple cow dung. A child who cannot say no has no integrity, and a child who cannot say no to something, his yes is meaningless. The yes gives meaning only when the child is capable of saying no too. Then it is up to his intelligence to decide.

But it is easier for parents that a child always says yes. He is rewarded for being obedient; he is punished for being disobedient. The situation is the same in the schools: the obedient child is rewarded, the disobedient is punished.

In my high school, for one year continuously in the ninth class, I was kept standing outside the class, not allowed to be inside. The first few days I was allowed in, but my interest was more in the trees outside, the birds, the beautiful sky changing its colors, and I was always looking out of the window.

The teacher told me, "If you look out of the window then I will send you out of the class. Then you can look wherever you want. But this is insulting to me; I want you to look at the board."

I told him, "As far as the window and board are concerned, the window is more alive, more beautiful than your blackboard with your ugly handwriting. I don't want to see it... and don't be worried, because whatever you are teaching I will manage in the examination."

That was too much. He told me to get out of the room and stand there. Then the next day he said, "It is better that you remain outside. What is the point? - every day the same argument, and I have to send you out."

I said, "I am immensely grateful. You are the greatest teacher in this school. Outside the air is good, the sky is beautiful. Just behind the school is a beautiful forest. And I am at freedom; I don't have to ask you whether I can go anywhere or not, I am already out. So I can go into the forest, I can go up to the trees, I can climb the trees - the mangoes are ripe - and who cares about your blackboard?

There is no juice in you; mangoes are so sweet and so juicy."

He said, "I don't want to listen to anything - because you will corrupt the minds of others. They are also thinking of being with you outside and then who am I going to teach? You just remain silent and enjoy whatsoever you want. I will see you at the examination time."

I said, "Before that, I will see you."

He said, "What do you mean?"

I said, "You will know when I see you."

He used to live in a small house just a few houses away from my house. He was a bachelor, he never married; perhaps no woman ever agreed to marry him. It is better to avoid teachers as husbands and lady teachers as wives because they start behaving with you as if they are teachers.

Before the examinations I simply went on his roof - just by the side of his house there was a big tall tree, a peepal tree - I climbed the tree, went on his roof and removed a few tiles. He was asleep - it must have been twelve o'clock in the night - and just from the hole that I had made by removing two or three tiles, I dropped a rope.

In the markets there were rubber snakes available, and I had tied a rubber snake on the rope, and the snake touched his mouth once or twice. He threw it away but it came back again. Finally he had to open his eyes, and seeing a snake hanging over him, he screamed so loudly that... I have been teaching dynamic meditation for years and I never heard such a scream. I have been teaching the primal scream - but this was something even more than the primal scream.

The next day on the board I made a picture of the snake and wrote, "Now you have seen me, and remember it in the examination; otherwise, I am going to visit you again!"

The whole year I enjoyed being outside. And he gave me a hundred percent mark because he did not want me to do anything more. He was thinking, "This boy can bring anything..." He still believed that it was a real snake.

Teachers want you to be obedient; it is easier for them to control you, to dominate you. All my teachers were complaining to my father, and my father was telling them, "Who am I to complain to?

Do you think I am in power? Do you think he is going to listen to me? Do whatsoever you want to do: punish him, expel him from the school - whatsoever you want to do I absolutely agree. But don't bother me about him, because the whole day... have I nothing else to do? Or have I just to go on listening to what he has done to this teacher, that teacher, this neighbor, that neighbor?"

And he told me, "You can do anything you want, but don't spoil my business. Everybody is coming and I think they are customers... but it turns out they are your customers."

I suggested to my father, "You do one thing. In your big shop, just in the corner you can write on a small board COMPLAINTS HERE in the back. You are saved... and I will see those people. Let them come."

He said, "The idea is good, but have you seen in any shop a complaints box? People will think those complaints are against me and the shop; nobody will think they are against you. And you will play more mischief on those poor guys who have come in to complain."

I said, "It was just a suggestion to help you."

It is difficult for parents, it is difficult for teachers, it is difficult for priests, it is difficult for everybody to allow any kind of disobedience. Even God - who is omnipotent, all-powerful, the greatest despot, the greatest dictator - could not allow; even he could not tolerate a small disobedience from Adam and Eve. They were thrown out of the Garden of Eden and they had committed no sin. In fact, hearing that it was an apple tree I have been eating apples as much as possible. I don't see any sin arising out of eating the fruit from an apple tree.

But the question was not the apple tree.

The question was disobedience.

You are asking me why it happened in the beginning. It is happening every time a child is born.

Every child is a beginning. And just looking at every child's life, you can understand the beginning of all the people who have existed on the earth.

So the first thing is that obedience has to be forced; for obedience, fear has to be used. That fear becomes in religious terms, hell. For obedience, reward has to be used; in religious terms, that becomes paradise or heaven. And to keep control over everything a father figure is needed - so God becomes the father.

I know why they have not made God a mother. I know from my own experience that my mother would hide me in the house when my father was searching for me because I had done something and he was very angry. When my father would refuse to give me any money because I had done something that he had prohibited, my mother would manage to give me money. So I know that the mother cannot be such a disciplinarian as the father can be.

And a mother can be persuaded very easily, because she is nothing but love, she is nothing but heart. The father is head, logic, reason, discipline. The father is man, and the society is man-made.

My mother even used to enjoy it when I would come and say to her, "I have done something, and I am in urgent need of help."

She would say, "But first tell me what you have done. I will save you, I will try my best, but first tell me the whole story. You bring such juicy stories that I wonder why your father gets angry. He should enjoy them."

The priests, the father in heaven, the parents here on the earth, the teachers, the political leaders, they all want absolute obedience from everybody so that there is no question of any rebellion, no revolution, no change, so their vested interests are protected. We have all become victims of their vested interests. It is time that things should be changed.

The obedient child is always mediocre; to be disobedient means a little intelligence is needed. The obedient child becomes a good citizen, goes to the church every Sunday; the disobedient child is unreliable. What will he do in his life? He may become a painter, he may become a musician, he may become a dancer - which are not very profitable professions - or he may become just nobody, a vagabond, enjoying his freedom.

One of my friends, a very intelligent man I know, had a doctorate in philosophy, but he never worked.

He always cheated people, borrowed money from this one and that one. He had a few things in him which attracted people: he was a good card player, a good chess player, a good drinker, things like that. He would never get drunk; you could go on giving him drink and he would remain in his senses.

He was a very friendly and loving person, so wherever he went he would always find friends from whom he would borrow money.

I asked him once - because he used to come once in a while, when there was nowhere else to go he used to come to stay with me - I asked him, "How long can you manage it?"

He said, "You don't know the population of the world. I never deceive the same person twice. You should appreciate my ingenuity; I have never deceived the same person again. I could have done it - but no, it is not my principle. I am a man of principle: I deceive a person only once. The world is so populated, I always find somebody else who is willing to be deceived. If nobody deceives him he will feel bad, I tell you!"

He is still doing that. He has become old and he has learned even more tricks. He is still doing the same, and the people he has deceived do not think badly about him, they understand him. "That man has so many qualities that if he has deceived us for a little money it is not bad. If he had worked he would have been earning more money. If he had just been a showman showing his tricks with cards and other things, like our work, he would have earned more." Nobody felt hurt that he deceived them; in fact everybody knew that he was going to borrow money and never return it, because he had no money, no sources of income.

I was the only person he never borrowed money from. He said, "I will not borrow money from you because there are bad days in business and I need a shelter. You are my shelter - so I can at least come to the house, and food and everything is available, and I can rest here before I find new victims."

So he used to come once or twice a year and stay one or two weeks, and then he would start moving again. He had no address; all his letters used to come to my address, and they would accumulate for six or eight months. When he came I would give him the whole lot, a hundred or two hundred letters, and he would say, "Now it is too late, they have already been answered. Burn them. Why bother ... after eight months who is waiting for the reply?" He never read those letters.

The society is afraid. It creates fear, it creates greed, it creates ambition. And the most cunning people in the society become priests, because their business is the most cunning one.

I used to visit a place in India called Surat. Once it was a big port; the Britishers had first landed in Surat. At that time Bombay was nothing, just a small village of fishermen, and Surat was at its peak.

In Surat there is a small community of Mohammedans who believe that their leader, their chief priest, is in direct connection with God. So if you want to transfer any money from this world to the other world, you give it to the priest and he will give you a note saying, "I have received one million dollars"

- or something - "from this man, and it should be given to him when he reaches heaven." The chief priest gives the note with a seal, and that note is put with the dead man when he goes into his grave.

Can you believe that?

I used to stay in a house that belonged to the same sect. I said, "Do you think there can be more conmanship than what this priest is doing?"

My friend said, "There is no conmanship; the money really reaches to the other place. People earn for their whole lives, save their money so they can have an account in the other world. And he is in direct contact..."

I took him to the graveyard one night and I said, "Dig up a grave."

He said, "For what?"

I said, "I want to see whether the man has taken that receipt, or if the receipt is still there. Only that will give you some sense."

He said, "But it is against my religion."

I said, "It may be against your religion, but I can dig." I brought out that receipt and showed him, and I told him, "The receipt is here. The bank account has not been transferred."

He said, "My God, but we have all been believing.... I am not alone; thousands of followers all do this when they die. Before death they give as much money as they can."

So one thing: the priests are the most cunning people in the world. Man, as a child, is more helpless than any animal's child. Just join these two things - man's helplessness and the cunningness of the priests - and this is the whole story of all your religions.

And it is not just a question of what happened in the beginning. Every child is a beginning, and every child is born out of parents. Those parents are already under the control of some priesthood, of some religion, and they force the child also to be under the influence of the priest. The parents don't have any bad intentions; they have been befooled. What has been done to them by their parents, they are doing the same to their children. Somewhere the circle has to be broken.

I want my people to jump out of this circle. Drop all fear. There is nothing to fear. There is no hell to be worried about and there is no paradise for which you have to be greedy.

This life, this sun, this ocean...

What more do you want?

Paradise is here. And if we drop the idea of paradise beyond death, we can make this paradise a thousandfold more beautiful.

Once the priest disappears, the most criminal part of humanity will have disappeared. Freedom from religions is the fundamental principle if you want to be religious. To be religious needs no fear, no greed; to be religious needs no churches, no synagogues, no temples. This whole existence is the temple.

All these trees - just look at the tree I am sitting under; it is a tremendously unique tree. For thousands of years its fruits have been used for weighing gold, because it is the only tree in the whole of existence which produces fruits of exactly the same weight - I think in Greek they call it carob - and from carob trees has come the word 'carat'. Gold is still weighed in carats; carob is the name of the fruit of this tree. The miracle is that thousands of fruits would come, but of exactly the same weight, so the most precious metal, gold, could be weighed using those fruits.

Existence is so beautiful, so unique, with all these birds chirping and singing, that you need not be bothered about any paradise or any hell.

Man has to be free of his childhood fears, his childhood greed for rewards; then religions will disappear, priests will be gone, and there will be an immense freedom to grow your individuality and your world.

I know that within you there is something which will go on living beyond death. But it is not a concern for the moment. If you know how to live this moment, if you know how to live life, you will know how to live death and how to pass through death without any scratch.

Question 3:

That's strange. You should feel superior, not inferior.

Acting like a child is a great quality.

Yes, the crowd, the mob of retarded people will think that something has gone wrong: you are acting like a child... Let them think it. But you should not be hurt by what they say.

Just look at me. My whole life... I don't think any man in the whole of history has been so much condemned, with so many lies, allegations, charges from all over the world. Reasonable, unreasonable, true, untrue - nothing has made me even think about them. It simply proves that we are living in an insane world.

My sannyasins have to be like small children - with the same joy, with the same innocence, with the same beautiful eyes, looking at the world with great excitement and ecstasy.

Don't be worried if people see you and you are running and catching butterflies. There is no harm.

If they see you collecting colored stones on the sea beach, let them laugh.

But the last laughter is going to be ours.