Master and disciple, a journey hand in hand

Question 1:

It is true, and it is not true.

The sannyasins have been certainly evolving, going through radical changes in their lifestyle, in their thinking, in their behavior, in their very vision of existence.

I am also moving moment to moment, changing. In this sense it is true that I have gone through a revolution hand in hand with my sannyasins. But in another sense - and a far deeper sense - your change is the change towards yourself; my change is towards existence. You are moving inwards. I am moving beyond the inner and the outer. The reality is neither inner nor outer; it transcends both.

I love the expression 'hand in hand', but it is just like when the sun rises in the morning and the birds start singing, the flowers open and release their fragrance. As the sun rises, they are also blossoming, hand in hand - but the distance is immense. That's why I said the question is a little complicated.

I am with you and yet far away; the distance is just like that between a rose opening and the sun rising. Without the sunrise the rose will not open. And I say it on my own authority, that if all the roses decide not to open the sun will not rise. It will look so stupid - for whom to rise? For what?

Existence is interconnected so deeply, so intimately... but the distances are vast. On the full moon night you see the ocean - it is affected by the full moon, hand in hand, but the moon is far away.

And it is not only the ocean that is affected; even you are affected, because eighty percent in you is ocean water.

It is not strange that the people who have become enlightened - only with one exception, Mahavira - have all become enlightened on the full moon day. Mahavira became enlightened on the night of amawas - no moon in the night, total darkness. It is because of this fact he is called Mahavira. That is not his name. Mahavira means the great warrior, going against the current - and not only going against the current but achieving it.

Gautam Buddha became enlightened on the day of the full moon. Gautam Buddha's whole life is connected with the full moon: he was born on a full moon night, he became enlightened on the full moon night, he died on the full moon night. This cannot be just coincidence.

And now psychologists have been studying the effects of the full moon on the human psyche, and the results are staggering. On the full moon night more people go mad than any other night, the number is almost double. More people commit suicide - again, the number is almost double. More people commit murder, and again the number is almost double. The full moon night does something to the human psyche. The full moon is so far away - but not so far away; it affects you. Since the very beginning it has been affecting the poets, the painters, the sculptors, the musicians, the dancers. They all feel that something is different under the full moon, that perhaps the rays of the full moon are hand in hand....

Yes, you have been going through many radical changes to reach yourself. I have been going through many revolutions to reach beyond, beyond myself.

You have been moving towards enlightenment, and I have been going beyond it - and this whole process is going hand in hand. But the distance is vast.

Remember the distance, and also remember the closeness, the intimacy.

Question 2:

The genius of the caliber of Frederick Nietzsche is always in danger of going mad.

Nobody has ever heard of any idiot going mad. To go mad, first you have to have a mind. A genius is walking on a sword - just a little mistake and he can fall, fall into an eternal darkness of madness.

Nietzsche is perhaps one of the most prolific geniuses the world has produced. He had so many insights that finally he had to change his way of writing. His writing became aphoristic because the insights were crowding in his mind and if he were to write an essay, the other insights might be forgotten, might be lost. He started writing aphoristically, in maxims.

But to have too many insights is dangerous. One can afford only a limited number.

And Nietzsche was confronted with an infinite number of insights. Each insight could have become a philosophy. For example, this insight that when there is love there is no question of good and evil, love is beyond both. That's all.... He could have written a whole system on it, explained it in detail in different contexts.

There are traditional ways of writing, and they have a certain validity about them because you cannot misinterpret them, you cannot misunderstand them. For example, Bertrand Russell, in his famous book PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA devotes two hundred sixty-five pages to a simple thing.

You cannot conceive how a man can manage such a big-sized book, two hundred and sixty pages, just to prove that two plus two are really four. But he has taken every possible consideration, every possible question, every possible implication into account. He has exhausted the subject, he has not left anything for anybody. That is the traditional way of writing - systematic, rational.

But Frederick Nietzsche had no time. Life is too short and his insights were so many. So he would write simply a maxim, that "Love takes you beyond good and evil. If you love, then don't bother about good and evil."

He is right, dangerously right - we will have to look into a few of the implications of his statement.

Ordinarily, for centuries love has been synonymous with good - it takes you beyond bad, beyond evil.

Love cannot harm, love cannot be violent, love cannot be destructive, love cannot be evil; those are the qualities of hate. For thousands of years man has thought love and goodness are synonymous.

But Frederick Nietzsche is far more right than the long tradition. Nobody has thought about it before him. That is the function of a genius: he brings new light, new glimpses into the world; he opens new windows into existence. But he has not explained it.

I agree with him totally. Good and evil are opposite to each other and they exist together. Just like darkness and light, life and death - all these opposites exist together, you cannot separate them. If you make love synonymous with good, then the evil will follow you like a shadow; and that has been happening everywhere around the world, for centuries.

There is a treatise by a psychoanalyst entitled "The Intimate Enemy". It is about love: whomsoever you love you are bound to hate. This will be like a wheel - day comes, night comes; love comes, hate comes.

It is not something unnatural that lovers are continuously fighting, nagging each other. It is part of the game - you have chosen love, you have chosen hate as the other side of the coin. Once in a while things become too much and the hate part asserts itself.

If you watch the life of lovers you will be immensely surprised: before they feel loving towards each other, first they fight. When their fighting part is fulfilled, then their love part comes up - they are simply moving on a mechanical wheel. Then they are hugging each other and kissing each other and just a few minutes before, they were throwing things at each other.

Before every lovemaking there is a pillow fight. I don't know what pillows have done - they are such innocent people, they never do any harm to anybody - but they unnecessarily get caught in between the lovers because it happens that they are on the bed, and handy. After a good fight - saying things against each other, against each other's family - when this catharsis is over suddenly they are full of love, hugging each other. You cannot believe these are the same people. Then why were they doing that drama before? And this happens every day, it is a routine process.

Certainly your love is not what Nietzsche means by love.

He means by love what I mean by love - love not addressed to anybody in particular but just your aroma, your field of energy. Just as the perfume of the rose surrounds the rose, a loving man is surrounded by love. That love is beyond good and evil; it transcends that intrinsic contradiction of the ordinary love.

But it is true that a man like Frederick Nietzsche, reaching to the very heights of understanding, himself became mad. The reason is not his insight. The reason is that his insight remained only intellectual. He had no foundation in meditation, he never heard of the word. If Frederick Nietzsche had been born in the East he would have been another Gautam Buddha, nothing less - perhaps more. But in the West, intellect seems to be all. So he came to conclusions logically - beautiful conclusions, and then he tried to live according to those intellectual conclusions for which there was no meditative foundation.

He fell apart. He had a nervous breakdown. He tried to reach where only meditators are allowed; and naturally he had to fall from those heights, and he suffered multiple fractures. His genius was absolutely certain, but his genius led him into madness; that too is certain.

In the East it has never happened. One should look into it.... In the West it has always happened:

whenever there was a man of great genius, sooner or later there was a nervous breakdown, as if he had seen so much that he could not absorb it. He had not wings enough, but still he had taken a long flight into the sky - tired, tattered, he fell down.

In the East it has never happened, because we never begin with insights. First we make certain that you have a foundation. We make your wings stronger. We don't care about flights, we care about your wings.

You cannot conceive a Gautam Buddha, a Bodhidharma, a Mahakashyap - even to conceive that these people can be mad is impossible. Their sanity is so perfect. And their sanity is rooted in their meditativeness, in their silence, in their peace, in their grounding in their own being. Because they have roots deep down into the earth, they are capable of sending their branches high to have a dialogue with the stars. Their flowers can go high in the sky to release the perfume.

You must remember one fact: a tree grows only proportionately. It can go only to a certain height if it has a certain strength, a depth to its roots.

In Japan there is an old art. I don't call it "art" but they call it art. I call it murder. But people go to see it from all over the world because there are only a few trees... five hundred years old and six inches in height. You can see that although it is just six inches high, the tree is old. Its bark is old, its leaves are old; just its tallness somehow has been prevented.

And the strategy is that in the mud pots in which those trees are put, there is no bottom. So the gardeners, from generation to generation - because the tree is five hundred years old; many generations of the family that owns the tree have passed - they go on cutting the roots, they don't allow the roots to grow. The pot has no bottom; otherwise the roots will find their way into the earth.

The roots go on becoming older, the tree goes on becoming older. But because the roots cannot spread, cannot go deep into the earth, the tree cannot go high into the sky.

People think it is an art. It is sheer murder, it is a crime against the trees. And the same crime has been committed against man all over the world. Your roots have been cut.

Intellect can have flights, but it has no roots. Once in a while a genius may suffer from his own intelligence, and finally either he will commit suicide - because the tension of his intelligence will become too much, his thoughts will become too many - or he will go mad.

In the West many professors, many philosophers, mathematicians, painters, poets, novelists - all kinds of creative people who have genius - have gone mad or have committed suicide. A few have done both. First they went mad, and then when they were thought to be cured and were released from the madhouse, they committed suicide.

Vincent Van Gogh, one of the great painters of Holland, was for one year in the madhouse. He was released, and the next day he committed suicide. And he wrote a letter to his brother in which he mentions, "It is better not to be, than to be mad. And I don't want to be mad again and I KNOW I cannot avoid it; my mind is again moving in the same directions. All their medicines and tranquilizers can keep me normal in a madhouse, but to live in a madhouse is not life. At least I will have the satisfaction that although I could not live my life, I could manage my own death. I was not the master of my life, but I was the master of my death."

And he was so young, only thirty-three years old, but one of the greatest painters the world has produced. His insights were such that people who have been studying his paintings are simply puzzled, they cannot figure out how this man managed. Because one hundred years ago he painted stars as spirals. You don't see stars as spirals; nobody has ever seen spirals, and in his paintings all his stars are spirals. Even other painters were saying, "Watch out. You are going towards insanity.

This is nonsense, nobody has ever seen it. Stars are not spirals."

Van Gogh said, "What can I do? I see them as spirals." And after one hundred years, just four weeks before one hundred years had passed, modern physicists came to the conclusion that stars are spirals. Our vision... because they are so far away, that's why we cannot see that they are spirals.

Now people are puzzled. Van Gogh had the insight, had the genius - without any instruments. It took one hundred years for the scientists to find out, with all kinds of sophisticated instruments, that stars are spirals. Van Gogh, with his bare eyes....

But he himself started thinking he must be mad. No, nobody supported his vision; even painters, great painters laughed. And this was not only one case, about all his paintings this was the case.

He was seeing things which nobody else sees.

A genius is always ahead of his time. The bigger the genius, the farther in the future is his reach in time. Nobody is going to agree with him. He will be thought mad.

And remaining mad was not worthwhile; Van Gogh committed suicide. We forced him to commit suicide.

What harm was he doing? That's why I say don't judge people. He was not doing any harm to anybody. The canvas he was painting on was not in any way insulted. The canvas was not reporting to the police station that "This man is making stars into spirals on me." The colors that he was using had no objection....

But people go on continually judging. Can't you keep quiet? Perhaps he sees better than you, farther than you. And anyway, he is not doing harm to anybody.

You will be surprised: in his whole life he could not sell a single painting. Who would purchase it?

Only a genius, only a man of insight, only a man of the same category as Van Gogh would purchase one; otherwise, who would purchase his paintings? You will not purchase his painting, because anybody coming to your house will look at the painting and will think you are mad: "Is this painting?

How much have you paid?"

And now only two hundred paintings have somehow survived, in friends' houses. Each painting is worth a million dollars, and Van Gogh lived hungry because he could not sell them. His brother used to give him enough money for seven days. Four days he was eating, and three days he was fasting - to purchase materials for paintings. This fast I call religion - not the fasts of Jaina monks, those are stupid fasts. This man was pouring his blood on the canvas. He had something more valuable than his own life and he was ready to sacrifice it.

And the same was the case with Frederick Nietzsche. He was condemned by everybody, because if you say love takes you beyond good and evil, that means there is something higher than good. And if it leads you beyond good and evil then you are totally free; then your acts cannot be judged as good or bad.

He was right, but he had no meditative support. He could argue about it, but he could not prove it by his own life. He himself could not love the love he was talking about. That love comes only as a fragrance of meditation - and then certainly there is nothing good, nothing bad.

Love is the highest value. There cannot be anything higher than that.

I feel deeply sad for Frederick Nietzsche. I don't feel for the normal human beings, because whether they are in the East or in the West makes no difference - they will be the same people. Superficial differences of course will be there. But I feel deeply sad for Frederick Nietzsche because if he had been in the East he would have raised the consciousness of humanity with his own enlightenment and perhaps, going beyond it.

Question 3:

Awareness is never lost.

It simply becomes entangled with the other, with objects.

So the first thing to be remembered: it is never lost, it is your nature, but you can focus it on anything you want. When you get tired of focusing it on money, on power, on prestige, and that great moment comes in your life when you want to close your eyes and focus your awareness on its own source, on where it is coming from, on the roots - in a split second your life is transformed.

And don't ask what are the steps; there is only one step. The process is very simple. The step is only one: that is turning in.

In Judaism there is a rebellious school of mystery called Hassidism. Its founder, Baal Shem, was a rare being. In the middle of the night he was coming from the river - that was his routine, because at the river in the night it was absolutely calm and quiet. And he used to simply sit there, doing nothing - just watching his own self, watching the watcher. This night when he was coming back, he passed a rich man's house and the watchman was standing by the door.

And the watchman was puzzled because every night at exactly this time, this man would come back.

He came out and he said, "Forgive me for interrupting but I cannot contain my curiosity anymore.

You are haunting me day and night, every day. What is your business? Why do you go to the river?

Many times I have followed you, and there is nothing - you simply sit there for hours, and in the middle of the night you come back."

Baal Shem said, "I know that you have followed me many times, because the night is so silent I can hear your footsteps. And I know every day you are hiding behind the gate. But it is not only that you are curious about me, I am also curious about you. What is your business?"

He said, "My business? I am a simple watchman."

Baal Shem said, "My God, you have given me the key word. This is my business too!"

The watchman said, "But I don't understand. If you are a watchman you should be watching some house, some palace. What are you watching there, sitting in the sand?"

Baal Shem said, "There is a little difference: you are watching for somebody outside who may enter the palace; I simply watch this watcher. Who is this watcher? This is my whole life's effort; I watch myself."

The watchman said, "But this is a strange business. Who is going to pay you?"

He said, "It is such bliss, such a joy, such immense benediction, it pays itself profoundly. Just a single moment, and all the treasures are nothing in comparison to it."

The watchman said, "This is strange... I have been watching my whole life. I never came across such a beautiful experience. Tomorrow night I am coming with you. Just teach me. Because I know how to watch - it seems only a different direction is needed; you are watching in some different direction."

There is only one step, and that step is of direction, of dimension. Either we can be focused outside or we can close our eyes to the outside and let our whole consciousness be centered in. And you will know, because you are a knower, you are awareness. You have never lost it. You simply got your awareness entangled in a thousand and one things. Withdraw your awareness from everywhere and just let it rest within yourself, and you have arrived home.

Question 4:

Sarjano, there was no need to say yes because I have seen it in your eyes. I have heard it when you were sitting near me, although you have not uttered it.

Since you have come to me there has never been a no in you. And it is strange, because your type is no-type! You have said no to everything, and perhaps that is the reason that your no is finished.

You don't have any no anymore, and you have come to the person with whom you can connect only through yes.

To be with a master is to be in a yes attitude.

That's what I mean by receptivity, openness, vulnerability.

But I know that one wants to say it, thinking perhaps I may not be aware. I am absolutely aware of those people whose heartbeat is saying yes.

There are people who are still in two minds - sometimes yes, sometimes no. There are also people who are too much attached to their no - but I don't count them, they are not my people. Only those whose yes is unconditional, absolute, categorical, are my people.

And Sarjano, you are fortunate. You belong to my people.

Yes, Sarjano.