Remember To Stop In The Middle

The first question:

Question 1:

The first thing to be understood about pessimism and optimism is that they are not different. They look different, but don't be deceived by their appearances. They are just two polarities of the same phenomenon. A pessimist can become an optimist; an optimist can become a pessimist. A pessimist is just an optimist standing on his head, and vice versa. They are not two different people, they are not two different dimensions.

Remember, it is not worth changing rooms. Get out of both the rooms, under the sky where neither pessimism nor optimism exist. You can be at ease only when both are gone, because both are wrong.

Analyze the situation. The pessimist goes on looking at the darker side of things and goes on denying the whiter side; he accepts only half of the truth. The optimist goes on denying the darker side of things and accepts only the whiter side; he is also half true.

Neither of them accepts the whole truth, because the whole truth is both summer and winter, God and devil, darkness and light, good and evil, life and death. The whole truth is both. Both are doing the same exercise -- they are denying the half and accepting the other half. The other half is as much half as the first; there is no difference. If th!e pessimist is wrong, the optimist is also wrong. Both are not ready to accept the truth as it is. They choose.

Move out of both the rooms under the open sky of choicelessness. Don't choose. Let truth be as it is. Don't try to paint it in your own mood. Try to see the facility of it; don't bring your mood in. Don't look through hope, don't look through frustration. Don't be positive and don't be negative -- that is the highest consciousness possible.

But optimism appeals because the world is more or less pessimistic. People have long faces; they are always complaining and grumbling. It is beautiful to come across the optimist. People are always talking about the thorns; it is fortunate to meet somebody who talks about flowers and fragrances. But he is also wrong.

Let me tell you another anecdote.

Once I went to visit the hospital where Mulla Nasrudin was confined as a result of an automobile accident. The Mulla had been seriously injured: a broken leg, both arms broken, a broken collarbone, terrible cuts over his face and head, and several broken ribs.

He was so thoroughly bandaged and taped and strapped up that only his two eyes and mouth were showing.

I was at a loss for words, but I realized that I must say something. So I asked the Mulla, "How do you feel today, Nasrudin? I suppose all of those broken bones and cuts cause a great deal of pain. Do you suffer very much?"

"No, not much," said Nasrudin. "Only when I laugh."

It is good to meet such a person. It is rare, but it is as wrong as the common variety The pessimist is the common variety. Out of a hundred persons, ninety-nine are pessimists.

They are looking for misery, they are waiting for misery. They are convinced that something is going to happen which is going to be wrong. They are ready for it. If it doesn't happen they will be very disappointed, but they are waiting for the negative, for the dark side. These people are certainly wrong, but then because of these people -- and they are in the majority -- the other rarity becomes very valuable: a person who is looking for the morning, who looks for the white lightning in the darkest of clouds. When the night is very dark he waits, because he knows now the morning is very close. He is always hopeful. But I again insist that both are wrong because life is both black and white. In fact, life is grey. On one extreme end it looks white, on the other extreme end it looks black, but just in between the two it is nothing but shades of grey.

One who understands both becomes choiceless. He is neither pessimist nor optimist. You will not find him in either of the rooms. You will not find him unhappy, you will not find him over enthusiastic about happiness. That is the goal of the Buddhas: they are not in agony and they are not in any ecstasy. They don't know any excitement; they are simply peaceful, silent. That is what bliss is, satchitananda. Bliss is not happiness, because happiness has a certain excitement in it -- it is feverish. Sooner or later you will be tired of it; it is unnatural. Sooner or later you will have to change, you will have to become unhappy. Bliss is neither; it is neither negative nor positive -- it is transcendental, it is beyond duality. One remains tranquil, calm, quiet, centered. Whatsoever happens, good or bad, one accepts both because one knows life is both.

This is the real man. He is completely without any attitude. It is very easy if you have been a pessimist for long: one day you realize that you are unnecessarily being unhappy, miserable, so you change the role. You slip into the role of an optimist. But now, from one extreme to the other you have moved.

Let me tell you one anecdote.

One day Mulla Nasrudin visited a large department store to buy his wife some nylon hose. Inadvertently he got caught in the mad rush of a counter where a bargain sale was going on. He soon found himself being pushed and stepped on by frantic women. He stood it as long as he could, then with head lowered and elbows out, he plowed through the crowd.

"You there!" said a woman. "Can't you act like a gentleman?''

"Not anymore," said Nasrudin. "I have been acting like a gentleman for an hour. From now on I am acting like a lady."

There is a point where one gets fed-up with one role. The pessimist one day realizes that, "Why? Why go on seeing the darker side? Why go on counting the thorns on the rosebush?" He forgets about thorns; he starts counting the roses -- but both are half. From one half to another half he has moved. The totality remains as far away as before.

The rosebush is both the thorn and the rose. They are both joined together there. They are not against, they are not enemies. In fact the thorns protect the flower. They are part of the whole organic being of the rosebush. And so is life. Good and bad are joined together; sinners and saints are joined together; birth and death are joined together. A real understanding is when you have understood this, this polarity. And by understanding it, you have gone beyond it. Then you become tranquil -- because there is nothing to be happy about and there is nothing to be unhappy about.

Remember, if you are happy, somewhere deep in the unconscious you are still carrying the possibility of unhappiness, because you can be happy only if you can be unhappy.

Both possibilities exist together. They cannot be separated, they are two aspects of the same coin. So if you throw one aspect the other is also thrown. If you keep one aspect the other is also kept. If you become a pessimist in the conscious mind, you will be an optimist in the unconscious. If you are an optimist in the conscious mind, you will be a pessimist in the unconscious.

Happiness, unhappiness, exist together. You can change the role anytime you like. In fact, people go on changing: in the morning you are an optimist, by the evening you have become a pessimist. That's why beggars come to beg in the morning -- because morning makes many more people optimistic. By the evening, knowing the whole life and the nastiness of it, people become pessimistic, tired, angry, frustrated. In the evening beggars don't come to beg because who is going to give? In the morning people are more open; the morning sun again brings hope. The night is gone: "Maybe today something is going to happen." People are more positive. By the evening, people become negative.

In the day you change your roles many times. If you are a little alert, you will see. A moment before you were an optimist, a moment afterwards you have become a pessimist.

Small things: changes in the climate, changes in the relationship, a small gesture on somebody's part can make, you change your role. Have you watched it? You are sitting, sad, and somebody comes, and he is a man of laughter, and he laughs and he jokes -- you forget that you were sad and you start laughing. You were laughing and a few friends come and they are all sad; they bring a climate of sadness, and you relapse into it.

As I see it, every man is born with both possibilities. You have to go beyond it; you have to see the futility of both. That's what silence is: it is complete absence of duality. So please avoid being extremists. Excess should always be avoided, because excess is the root of all untruth. In fact, there are no lies in the world, only half-truths and truth. All half-truths are lies; and the truth is not half, it is whole.

The mind tends to be always moving towards the extreme -- so you are moving towards the height, then you are moving towards the valley, going up then coming down. Like a yo-yo you go on, and you never become aware that both are useless. Like a pendulum of an old clock you move from one extreme to another. Once the pendulum stops in the middle, the clock stops. Once you stop in the middle, time disappears. Then you are no more part of this world. The clock stops...then you are part of eternity.

Watch the pendulum moving from left to right, from right to left. A very strange thing is happening. When the pendulum is going to the right, you see it as going to the right. Ask the mechanic: he will say that when the pendulum is going to the right it is gaining momentum to go to the left; when it is going to the left it is gaining momentum to go to the right. So when you are unhappy, you are gaining momentum to be happy. When you are happy, you are gaining momentum to be unhappy. When you are loving you are gaining momentum to be hateful, and when you are hateful you are gaining momentum to be loving.

Once you understand this subtle mechanism, that mind tends to be always moving towards extremes, you stop cooperating with the mind. Pessimist or optimist, both are within mind, and the real man of understanding is beyond it.

It happened: Mulla Nasrudin was getting ready to apply to a local department store for a job. A friend told him that it was the policy of the store to hire nobody but Catholic Christians, and that if he wanted a job there he would have to lie about being a Catholic Christian.

Nasrudin applied for the job, and the personnel man asked him the usual questions. Then he said to the Mulla, "To what church do you belong?"

"I am a Catholic," said Nasrudin, "and all my family are Catholics. In fact, my father is a priest and my mother is a nun, sir."

To the whole way!

Remember to stop in the middle. That will bring balance, that will bring centering. For the first time you will feel unperturbed, undistracted, and you will be able to accept both.

Your acceptivity will become total. You will not be angry because there are thorns, and you will not be ecstatic, exhilarated, excited, because there are roses. You will see that both are, and both are good, both are needed. But you remain unaffected, untouched, unscratched -- unscratched by the thorns and unscratched by the flower also. This is the goal.

The second question:

Question 2:

PEOPLE who trust themselves can trust others. People who don't trust themselves cannot trust anybody. Out of self-trust, trust arises. If you are distrustful about yourself, then you cannot trust me -- you cannot trust anybody. Because if you don't trust yourself, how can you trust your trust? It is going to be your trust. Maybe you trust in me, but it is your trust -- you trust in me and you don't trust yourself. So it is not a question about me, it is a deep question about yourself.

And who are these people who cannot trust themselves? Something has gone wrong somewhere.

First, these are the people who don't have a very good self-image; they are condemnatory towards themselves. They always feel guilty and always feel wrong. They are always defensive and always trying to prove that they are not wrong, but they feel deep down that they are wrong. These are the people who have missed, somehow, a loving atmosphere.

Psychologists say that the person who cannot trust himself is bound to have some deep- rooted problem with the mother. The mother-child relationship somewhere did not happen as it should. Because the mother is the first person in the child's experience; if the mother trusts the child, if the mother loves the child, the child starts loving the mother and trusting the mother. Through the mother the child becomes aware of the world. The mother is the window from where he enters existence. And by and by, if there exists a beautiful relationship between the child and the mother, a response, a deep sensitivity, a deep transfer of energies, a flowering... then the child starts trusting others also. Because he knows the first experience was beautiful, there is no reason to think that the second is not going to be beautiful. There is every reason to believe that the world is good.

If in your childhood there was a deep milieu of love around you, you will become religious, trust will arise. You will trust, trust will become your natural quality.

Ordinarily, you will not distrust anybody unless somebody tries hard to create distrust in you -- only then will you distrust. But distrust will be exceptional. One man deceives you and tries hard to destroy your trust. Maybe trust in that man is destroyed, but you will not start distrusting the whole humanity. You will say, "This is one man, and there are millions of men. Just for one man, why distrust all?" But if the basic trust is lacking, and something has gone wrong between you and your mother, then distrust becomes your basic quality. ]Then ordinarily, naturally, you distrust. There is no need for anybody to prove. You distrust man, and then if somebody wants you to trust him he will have to work hard, very hard. And even then, you will trust him conditionally. And even then, that trust will not be very comprehensive. It will be very narrow; it will be arrowed at one person.

That is the problem. In the old times people were very trusting. SHRADDHA, trust, was a simple quality. There was no need to cultivate it. In fact, if somebody wanted to become a great skeptic, doubting, then great training was needed, great conditioning was needed. People were simply trustful because love relationships were very, very deep. In the modern world love has disappeared, and trust is nothing but the climax of love, the cream of love. Love has disappeared. Children are born into families where the father and mother are not in love. Children are born -- the mother does not care, is not bothered about what happens to them. In fact, she is annoyed because they are a disturbance, and they are disturbing her life. Women are avoiding children, and if they happen it seems like an accident. And there is a deep negative attitude. The child gets that negative attitude; he is poisoned from the very beginning. He cannot trust the mother.

Just three or four days ago a sannyasin told me that during Primal Therapy here in the ashram, he came across a childhood memory. He remembered, he could see it, that his mother had tried to kill him by suffocating him. He could see the whole memory, again relived. Now his whole being is wavering, trembling. And he's not an ordinary man; he himself is a psychotherapist. Now, he understands many things that he had never understood before: why he seems to be so dead, stone-like, rock-like, unflowing, why he cannot trust anybody, why he cannot move into love easily, why it is such a great effort, and even then, something, somewhere goes wrong. He is not streaming -- the mother tried to suffocate him.

The basic trust lost, the tacit trust lost: "Even mother tried to kill me? Then who can be trusted?" -- impossible. Now this world is just inimical. One has to struggle; it is a survival of the fittest.

Many times I have wondered: somebody should try a psychoanalytical study of Charles Darwin. Nobody has tried yet. There must have been something gone wrong between him and his mother, hence the hypothesis of the survival of the fittest. In the same way one can have a psychoanalytical study of Prince Kropotkin. There must have been a deep love relationship between him and his mother, so deep that he contradicted Charles Darwin and tried to replace his theory of survival of the fittest with the theory of cooperation. He said, "There is no conflict in life, but there is cooperation. In fact, when a tiger jumps on an animal and eats the animal, this too is cooperation." How does he explain it? He says, "In fact, the moment the tiger jumps on his prey, the prey relaxes, dies easily. There is no conflict. The prey becomes food for the tiger."

There must be a cooperation when you pick an apple from the tree and you eat it; there must be a deep cooperation between the apple and you. Otherwise, the apple would create trouble in your body. It would go on fighting you if there were a conflict. It would never allow itself to be absorbed by your body; it would remain inimical. But it simply dissolves into you, becomes your blood, becomes your bones, becomes your flesh.

Kropotkin says, "There is tremendous cooperation in life." Even when a tiger jumps and kills the prey, he says there is cooperation. Ask Charles Darwin: even when there are two friends deep in love, and they are ready to die for each other, Darwin says that these are just pretensions. Deep inside there is conflict, struggle, competition, jealousy.

A philosophy is not born out of the blue. A philosophy comes from your own existence, your own lived experience. If the child has been deep in love with the mother and the mother has showered her love, that is the beginning of all trust for the future. Then the child will make more loving relationships with women, will make more loving relationships with friends, one day will be able to surrender to a Master -- and finally, will be able to dissolve himself completely into God. But if the basic link is missing then the foundation is missing. Then you try hard, but it becomes more and more difficult.

That's what I feel about the questioner.

"I need to trust so badly"...yes, because trust is nourishment. Without trust you remain hungry, you remain starved. Trust is the most subtle nourishment for life. If you don't trust you cannot really live. You are always in fear; you are surrounded by death, not by life. With a deep trust inside, the whole view changes. Then you are at home and there is no conflict. Then you are not a stranger in the world. Then you are not an alien, you are not a foreigner. You belong to the world, the world belongs to you. The world is happy that you are -- the world is protecting you. This feeling of a deep protection gives courage, and gives courage to move into unknown paths.

When the mother is in the home the child has courage. Have you watched it? He can go out on the road, he can move into the garden, and he can do a thousand and one things.

When the mother is not there he simply sits inside, he is afraid. He cannot go out; the protection is not there, the protective aura is not there. The atmosphere is totally alien.

It happened once....

I was staying with a friend. The couple had gone to attend some marriage ceremony and they had left their small kid to play, and they said to me, "Just you watch." I was watching -- he was playing just outside the porch. He fell, he looked all around, he looked at me. I looked at him very silently. He waited for a single second to feel whether it was worth crying or not. But I was so neutral, as if I was not there, so he shrugged his shoulders: "This fellow is useless." He started playing again. After half an hour when the mother and the father arrived, he started crying. I said, "This is illogical. Half an hour has passed, now it can't be hurting." He said, "That is not the question. But you looked towards me with such stoney eyes, so I thought,'What is the point? Even if it hurts, it hurts. Crying is useless.' Now my mother has come." Now he is in a different atmosphere -- now he can cry because he knows somebody is there to console, somebody is there to feel for him, somebody is there who cares.

If you have lived a childhood of a deep showering of love and trust on you, you gather a beautiful self-image about yourself. And if your parents have been really in deep love with each other, and they were very happy in you because you were the culmination of their love, the crescendo of their love, the actualization of their love; if they were deep in love, then you are the song that is born out of their love. You are the proof, the evidence that they loved each other. You are their creation: they feel happy about you, they accept you, and they accept the way you are. Even if they try to help you, they try to help you in a very loving way. Even if they say sometimes, "Don't do this," you don't feel offended and you don't feel insulted. In fact, you feel cared about.

But when the love is missing and the father and mother go on saying, "Don't do this," and, "Do this," by and by the child starts learning that, "I am not accepted as I am. If I do certain things, I am loved. If I don't do certain things, I am not loved. If I do some other things, I am hated."

So he starts shrinking. His pure being is not accepted and loved. The love is conditional; trust is lost. Then he will never be able to have a beautiful self-image. Because it is mother's eyes which reflect you for the first time, and if you can see happiness there, a bliss, a thrill, a great ecstasy just watching you, you know you are valuable, you know you have intrinsic value. Then it is very easy to trust, very easy to surrender, because you are not afraid. But if you know that you are wrong, then you are always trying to prove that you are right. People become argumentative. All argumentative people basically are people who don't have good images of themselves. They are very defensive, very touchy.

If there is some argumentative person, and you say that, "This thing you have done wrong," he immediately jumps on you, becomes very angry. He cannot even take a small friendly criticism. But if he has a good image about himself he is ready to listen, he's ready to learn, he's ready to respect others' opinions. Maybe they are right, and even if they are right and he is wrong, he is not worried because that doesn't matter. He remains good in his eyes.

People are touchy -- they don't want criticism, they don't want somebody to say to them to do this; they don't want somebody to say to them not to do that. And these people think they cannot surrender because they are very powerful. They are just ill, neurotic. Only a powerful man or woman can surrender -- weaklings, never. Because in surrender they think their weakness will be known to the whole world. They know they are weak, they know their inferiority complex, so they cannot bow down. It is difficult for them, because bowing down will be accepting that they are inferior. Only a superior person can bow down; inferior persons can never bow down. They cannot respect anybody because they don't respect themselves. They don't know what respect is, and they are always afraid of surrender because surrender means weakness to them.

Remember it: surrender is possible if you are tremendously powerful; you are not worried about surrender, you know that you can surrender and still you will not be weak. You can surrender and you will not lose your willpower. In fact, by surrendering you are showing the greatest willpower there is.

So if you feel it difficult to trust, then you have to go back. You have to dig deep into your memories. You have to go into your past. You have to clean your mind of the past impressions. You must be having a great heap of rubbish from your past; unburden it.

This is the key to do it: if you can go back not just as memory, but as a reliving. Make it a meditation. Every day, in the night, for one hour just go back. Try to find out all that has happened in your childhood. The deeper you can go the better -- because we are hiding many things that have happened, but we don't allow them to bubble up into consciousness. Allow them to surface. Going every day, you will feel deeper and deeper.

First you will remember somewhere when you were at the age of four or five, and you will not be able to go beyond that. Suddenly, a China Wall will face you. But go -- by and by, you will see that you are going deeper: three years, two years. People have reached to the point where they were born from the womb. There have been people who have reached into the memories of the womb, and there are people who have reached beyond that, into the other life when they died.

But if you can reach to the point where you were born, and you can relive that moment, it will be of deep agony, pain. You will almost feel as if you are being born again. You may scream as the child screamed for the first time. You will feel suffocated as the child felt suffocated when for the first time he was out of the womb -- because for a few seconds he was not able to breathe. There was great suffocation: then he screamed and the breath came, and his passages became open, his lungs started functioning. You may have to move to that point. From there you come back. Go again, come back, every night. It will take at least three to nine months, and every day you will feel more unburdened, more and more unburdened, and trust will arise simultaneously, by the side. Once the past is clear and you have seen all that has happened, you are free of it. This is the key: if you become aware of anything in your memory, you are freed from it. Awareness liberates, unconsciousness creates a bondage. Then trust will become possible.

When you are here with me, you are again in another womb, you are again waiting for another birth. That is the function of a Master -- to give you another birth, to make you DWIJA, twice born. One birth is from mother and father, another birth is from the Guru, the Master. You are again in another womb, a spiritual womb. You have to close accounts with your physical womb completely. You have to drop all hang-overs with your physical birth so you can be totally herenow with me.

"I need to trust so badly..." Yes, that is the point: a person who cannot trust needs to trust very badly. And a person who can trust is not even aware that he needs. The need arises when you are starving.

Psychologists have come across this -- that love is food. Just twenty years ago, if somebody had said that love was subtle vitality, then scientists would have laughed. They would have thought, "You are a poet, you live in illusion and dreams. Love and food? -- all nonsense." But now scientific researchers say, "Love IS food." When a child is given food, that nourishes his body; and if love is not given, then his soul is not nourished. His soul remains immature. Now there are ways to measure whether a child is being loved or not, whether the warmth he needs is being given to him or not. You can give a child all the nourishment he needs, all medical care he needs, in a hospital. Just remove the mother -- give him milk, medicine, care, everything, but don't hug him, don't kiss him, don't touch him. Many experiments have been done. The child, by and by, starts shrinking into himself. He becomes ill, and in most of the cases he dies, for no visible cause at all. Or, if he survives, he survives at the minimum: he becomes an imbecile, an idiot. He will live, but he will live just on the fringe. He will never be deep in life; he has no energy. To hug the child, to give your body's warmth to him is food, is very subtle food. Now this is being recognized, by and by.

Let me make you one prediction: after twenty or thirty years, psychologists will come to reveal that trust is even a higher food, of a greater potency -- higher than love... Like prayer. Trust is prayerfulness, but it is VERY subtle. You can feel it. If you have trust, you will suddenly see that with me you are going on a great adventure, and your life starts immediately changing. If you don't have trust, you will stand there. I go on talking, I go on pulling you; you are stuck -- somehow you go on missing me. Let your trust arise.

That trust will be a bridge between me and you. Then ordinary words become luminous, then just my presence can become a womb, and you can be reborn.

"I need to trust so badly, and I suffer because I don't. From where am I to find the courage to trust my killer?"

Yes, I am a killer, in a way. I have to kill you because that is the only way for you to be reborn. I have to cut you completely from your past, I have to destroy your biography.

Then only, the new can arise.

But if you have trust, you will be ready to die. If you have trust, you know resurrection is certain. I cannot guarantee it; there is no way to guarantee it. Only trust is the guarantee. I can talk about it, I can 'poetize' about it, but that will create only dreams in you, not guarantees. I can tell what has happened to me, I can allure you towards it, but it will not be a guarantee. "Who knows -- this man may be just Lying, or this man may not be Lying, he may be just in illusion?" How to prove it? It is not a thing that I can show to you. If you trust, then there is guarantee. In your trust is your guarantee.

You can trust me in two ways. That too has to be understood, because one way is a wrong way.

You can trust me because you feel insecure, alone. You can force trust because you can feel more secure with me. That's how many people live in churches, organizations, religions. Somebody is a Christian, somebody is a Hindu; it gives a certain security. You are not alone -- millions of Hindus, millions of Christians -- you are not alone. "How can so many people be wrong? They must be right" -- so you hold, hang with the crowd, just because you are afraid. Trust can arise because of fear -- then it is negative; it will not give you a new birth. In fact, it will obstruct new birth. Trust can arise out of love; then it is right.

People who trust because they are afraid, because they want somebody to hang to, to cling to, they are afraid and they want somebody's hand, they look at the sky and they pray to God just to feel unafraid. Have you watched? Sometimes passing through a dark street in the night you start whistling, or you start singing -- not that it is going to help.

But it helps in a way. Singing, you become warmer. Singing, you become occupied; fear is repressed. Whistling, you start feeling good. You forget that it is dark and it is dangerous, but it makes no real change in reality. If there is fear and danger it is still there. In fact, it is more, because a person who is engaged in singing can be robbed more easily because he will be less alert. He will be less cautious while whistling. He is creating an illusion around him with whistling. If your trust arises out of fear, it is better not to have that trust. It is false.

I have heard...

Mulla Nasrudin climbed into a barber's chair and asked, "Where is the barber who used to work on the next chair?"

"Oh, that was a sad case," the barber said. "He became so nervous and despondent over poor business, that one day when a customer said he did not want a massage, he went out of his mind and cut the customer's throat with a razor. He is now in the state mental hospital. By the way, would you like a massage, sir?"

"Absolutely!" said Mulla Nasrudin.

Out of fear you can say 'absolutely', but that will not be trust. Trust is born out of love, and if you find that you cannot trust, then you have to work hard. You have a very loaded past, wrongly loaded. You have to clean it, clear it.

The third question:

Question 3:

FIRST, belief is a pretension. Never believe in anything. Belief is pseudo-trust. It gives you a feeling as if you trust. It is 'as if' trust; it is very dangerous. If you have not experienced anything of the divine, please be honest. There is no need to trust, there is no need to believe in God. Don't make God a logical exercise. The questioner says, "I believe there is a God. There MUST be something keeping the universe together." This is a logical thing: the universe is there and things are really going together, everything is going beautifully together, so the logical mind says, "There must be somebody who is keeping it together. Existence is there, so somebody must have created it."

But God cannot be approached through logic. God can be approached only through love.

God is not a syllogism; it is not a conclusion. That's why scientists can never reach to God's truth. And people who were real thinkers have always denied God -- because if you are REALLY thinking, you cannot believe in God. God seems to be improbable, impossible, absurd. But logic can give you a false notion. It simply says that when you see that the world is going together, you infer that somebody is keeping it together. Just say that the world is going so tremendously together, that's all -- "I don't know why, I don't know who is keeping it or whether anybody is keeping it. " The conclusion is not right; remember that you don't know. That ignorance will be very, very helpful, because that ignorance will be sincere, authentic, true.

Now let me tell you -- you think that the world is going so together, that's why there must be a God. There have been philosophers who say that just because the world is going so together, there cannot be a God. Because if God is there, then sometimes He will get bored -- just the same repetitive world. Then there will be some personality in the world.

It is so mechanical: the stars go on moving, the sun goes on rising, the earth goes on moving, the people are born, the fruits and the seeds and again the trees and the seasons.

It seems so mechanical, many philosophers say, because the world is going so absolutely correctly that there cannot be a person behind it. Because sometimes a person changes also, and sometimes he gets fed-up also. One day he thinks, "No more sunrise today.

Enough is enough." One day he thinks, "Now, out of mango seeds apples will arise. " If there is a personality in the world, just think -- a Picasso painting the same painting every day. If out of Picasso's house the same painting came every day, would it prove that there is a person inside, or there is a mechanism? You never go inside the house. You don't know who is inside; just a painting is coming every day on an assembly line. The same painting, everything perfect, accurate -- will it prove that there lives inside a great painter, Picasso? or will it simply prove that there is a mechanism which goes on reproducing? There are philosophers who say because the world is running so mechanically there cannot be a personality behind it. Now what to do?

You say, the world is there: there must be a creator. There are philosophers who say that if the world needs a creator, then the creator will also need a further creator. Who will create the creator? And if you say that the creator needs no creator -- don't be foolish.

Then they say, "Then what is the point? Then the world can be without a creator, if the creator himself can be without the creator." So you have accepted the principle basically that something can be without being created -- so the world can be without a creator. If you go into logic you will be in trouble.

Let me tell you one anecdote.

"This is a lesson in logic," said the old professor in the teahouse. "If the show starts at nine and dinner is at six, and my son has the measles, and my brother drives a Cadillac, how old am I?"

"You are eighty-four," replied Mulla Nasrudin promptly.

"Right," said the professor. "Now tell the rest of the fellows here how you arrived at the correct answer."

"It is easy," said Nasrudin. "I have got an uncle who is forty-two, and he is only half nuts.

You must be eighty-four."

If you make God an exercise in logic, you will go nuts. Nobody has ever come out of the logical inquiry sane. Nobody has ever come back sane, because the dimension is totally different -- it has nothing to do with logic. It has something to do with the heart, something to do with love.

"I believe there is a God"; please don't believe, because that belief will become a rock and it will not allow you to move deeper. Simply know that you don't know. Accept your ignorance. Don't hide behind a belief -- because there is possibility from ignorance, but there is no possibility from false, borrowed, logical knowledge. Logical knowledge is barren, love is fertile.

"I believe there is a God. There must be something keeping the universe together" -- this is not the way to approach God -- "but deep in myself I don't feel that God is there." Of course...how can you feel, how can you feel a logical proposition in the heart? Two plus two are four, certainly true -- but can you love this proposition? Can you fall in love with two plus two is four? And if somebody denies it, will you be ready to become a martyr for it because it is true? You will say, "Forget all about it. If you want to make two plus two equal five, make it. Why should I lose my life for it?"

Nobody dies, stakes his life, for a logical proposition. It is not worth it. If somebody denies it, let it be so. Two plus two is perfectly true, but not a truth of the category of God, not even a truth of the category of Laila or Majnu. If your logic is proved wrong, nothing is proved wrong. You can change your logic. But if your love is proved wrong, you can never be the same person again. If your love is proved wrong, you are proved wrong. If your logic is proved wrong, nothing is proved wrong. You can change the logic; you remain unaffected by it. "Deep in myself I don't feel God" -- because there is no way from belief to feeling. They are not connected, so forget about belief. Otherwise there is a dangerous possibility: you may pretend that you feel.

Many people pretend. They go to the church, to the temple, to the mosque and they pretend that they are feeling for God. Their feeling is not feeling at all. In the temple you can see tears flowing down their eyes. Outside the temple you never come across that man again, that man you had seen in the temple. You never see him the same in the marketplace. That was just a mask: he was trying hard to feel. He was even ready to cry and shed false tears, what you call the 'crocodile tears'. You can see him praying, but nothing is arising out of his heart -- there is no fire inside, no passion -- the prayer is just verbal. He goes on repeating something which he has been told to repeat; it is just parrot- like. Feeling arises only when you live in tremendous, austere sincerity.

Forget about belief in God; there is no need. Just know that you don't know. This should be the beginning: I don't know. Maybe God is there, maybe God is not there; I have to inquire. Now where to find, how to find? If God is there, He must be the God of the trees and the birds and the animals also, not only of man. Trees don't know any logic, birds don't know any logic, animals don't know any logic. If there is God He must be the God of all. Logic is very local -- just a part, a very small part of the world. Humanity has a small corner of the mind for mathematical and logical thinking.

The God must be the God of all, so forget about logic. Start approaching as the trees approach. Start approaching as the rivers run towards the sea, start approaching as the birds approach, start approaching through your being, your totality. Dance deeply. Forget about God, just dance deeply -- because in a great dancing mood, in a moment, mind disappears; you become total. When you are really dancing and the movement is fast, mind cannot function. Mind stops; you become a no-mind. You are, but you are not a mind, and you don't think in terms of logic. You become a tree, a tree in a strong wind, a flower, a river, a rock, a star, but you lose that small territory that is dominating you, the territory of logic. Suddenly you will start a contact. You will feel you have been contacted by someone and you have contacted someone. A dancer becomes religious, has to become. Sing -- and I'm not saying sing a religious song. If singing is true, it is religious. What the words are does not matter. Run, swim, do something, and be lost in doing it.

Hence, I emphasize dynamic methods of meditation: dancing, singing, music, T'ai Chi, karate. Do something, because when you do, you are part of the greater world of the trees, of birds, of animals. They are doers, they are not thinkers. When you do something, suddenly you fall into the oceanic unity of existence.

There is then a feeling that God is. But that God is not the God of Christians and Hindus and Mohammedans. That God is your God. That has nothing to do with the Bible and Gita and Koran. That God is YOUR God; that God has nothing to do with logic, syllogism, philosophy, dogma. That God is a felt, lived experience. Then...then you will know, and there is no other way to know.

People are learning from scriptures, and the greatest scripture that has been given to you by existence remains unopened. And through scriptures you get notions.

I have heard....

Mulla Nasrudin went to see his lawyer about a divorce.

"What grounds do you think you have for a divorce?" the lawyer asked.

"It is my wife's manners," said the Mulla. "She has such bad table manners that she is disgracing the whole family."

"That's bad," the lawyer said. "How long have you been married?"

"Nine years," said the Mulla.

"If you have been able to put up with her table manners for nine years, I can't understand why you want a divorce now," the lawyer said.

"Well," said Nasrudin, "I did not know it before. I just bought a book on etiquette this morning."

You first read the books, then you decide about life.

First move into life and then decide about books. And then you will be surprised that the Gita and the Koran and the Bible are not three books, they are one book. Then Buddha and Christ and Krishna are not three persons, but three voices of the same person. But if you are first caught up in the logical structure of books, then you will never be able to know life. Try to become more natural. Forget all about God, the God that is discussed in the universities and in the churches and the temples. Forget about that God. Be with the God that is already surrounding you, that is your surround. This moment the cuckoo goes on doing her prayer, the birds go on doing THEIR prayer. Look at the trees, at how prayerful they are. The whole existence is in prayer, and what are you doing sitting inside your skull thinking about whether God exists or not?

"He must exist because the world is going so beautifully together. " The world IS going beautifully together. Become part of this togetherness, dissolve into this togetherness! When the river is flowing by, why not jump into it? What are you doing sitting on the bank with closed eyes thinking the river must be there because...?

Drop all these 'becauses'.

The inner trust arises only when you have a live contact with God. Do whatsoever you can do, but please don't become just heads. Nothing is wrong with the head if it goes together with your totality. The wrongness enters when it becomes a part, apart, and it starts dominating the whole. Get back down into your belly from the head! Come back to your senses, become more earthly.

That's the message of the Bauls: become more true and real. When you are real, God is real; when you are true, God is true -- because when you are true you are capable of contact with the truth of existence. When you are real you are suddenly in harmony with the whole. When you are false, then the problem arises of whether God exists or not.

When the problem arises of whether God exists or not, that simply shows that you have lost your harmony with the whole. Get into harmony, get into line, fall into line again.

Come back, be more real and true.

That is the whole message of all religions, of religion as such. That's why Buddha and Mahavir don't talk about God they say, "There is no need." Mahavir talks about truth: "Be true, be authentic, and you will be Gods." Just by being true you come closer to truth. It's simple. Can't you see such a simple point: that by being true, you come closer to truth?

Belief is false, borrowed knowledge is false. Drop all that is borrowed. You may feel poorer for the time being, because your knowledge gives you very great ego, that'I know'.

Knowing that you don't know, you may feel poor for a few days, you may feel like a beggar. But If you are ready to be true, suddenly one day the conversion happens. When you have lost all borrowed knowledge, something arises in you which was waiting and waiting. Something arises in you and fills your whole space of consciousness. That is what God is.

God is nothing but life. God is not a person; God is the energy you are, God is the energy the trees are, God is the energy the stars are. Everything is made of the stuff -- God. God is not the creator, God is this creation. This very moment you are in the ocean of God, but He is so close and you are so far away in your head that bridges are missing.

The last question:

Question 4:

I attract crazy people; I am crazy, that's why.

But crazy people are beautiful people. They are the only sane people is the world. That is the meaning of the word 'Baul'. Baul means crazy, mad. I am a Baul, and I attract Bauls -- that's why.