Let everything pass

Question 1:

Milarepa, I have been commenting my whole life on love, in thousands of different ways. But the message is the same. Just one most fundamental thing has to be remembered, that is: it is not the love that you think is love. Neither Socrates is speaking about it, nor I am speaking about it.

The love you know is nothing but a biological urge, it depends on your chemistry and your hormones.

It can be changed very easily, by a small change in your chemistry - and the love that you thought is the ultimate truth will simply disappear.

You have been calling lust, love. This distinction should be remembered. Socrates says, "a man who practises the mysteries of love...." Lust has no mysteries, it is a plain biological game. Every animal, every bird, every tree knows about it. Certainly, the love which has mysteries is going to be totally different from the love with which you are ordinarily acquainted. "A man who practises the mysteries of love will be in contact not with the reflection, but with truth itself."

This love that can become a contact with truth itself arises only out of your consciousness; not out of your body, but out of your innermost being.

Lust arises out of your body. Love arises out of your consciousness. But people don't know their consciousness, and the misunderstanding goes on and on - their bodily lust is taken for love.

Very few people in the world have known love. Those are the people who have become so silent, so peaceful... and out of that silence and peace they come in contact with their innermost being, their soul. Once you are in contact with your soul, your love becomes not a relationship, but simply a shadow to you. Wherever you move, with whomsoever you move, you are loving.

Right now, what you call love is addressed to someone, and confined to someone; and love is not a phenomenon that can be confined. You can have it in your open hands, but you cannot have it in your fist. The moment your hands are closed - they are empty. The moment they are open - the whole of existence is available to you.

Socrates is right: one who knows love also knows truth, because they are only two names of one experience. And if you have not known the truth, remember that you have not known love either. "To know this blessing of human nature, one can find no better helper than love."

There is only one thing I would like to say about Socrates: his whole approach was logical and argumentative. His method is known as Socratic dialogue. It is a very lengthy process, like psychoanalysis. He will discuss and discuss, and destroy all your false arguments and false ideas.

This was his contention, which has a truth in it: When all false ideas are demolished, that which remains behind and cannot be argued about, is your being. And from that being arises the fragrance of love.

But Socrates knew nothing of meditation. He came to know truth through the long, unnecessary route of arguments. He was one of the best arguers the world has produced; there is no parallel.

But what he was doing by argument cannot become a universal phenomenon; the path is long, and unnecessarily long.

The false can disappear if you sit silently, whenever you have time, and just watch your thoughts.

No need to argue, no need to fight, no need to push them out, just watch - as if you are seeing something on the TV-screen.

The East has known a greater miracle than Socrates. Socrates was not acquainted with the East at all. And the obvious reason was: he has found love, he has found truth - and he never thought that there could be a shortcut. His process is torturous. If you read the dialogues of Socrates you will feel that the process is long, and each argument creates new problems - new problems create new arguments... he is fighting with shadows.

But it was not his fault. In his time Athens was one of the most sophisticated, intellectual cities in the world. He was unaware that exactly at the same time Buddha was teaching meditation in India, Lao Tzu was teaching meditation in China, Mahavira was teaching meditation.... It was at exactly the same time, twenty-five centuries ago.

Socrates had inherited logic from his forefathers; Greece was full of sophists. Sophists were strange people, their philosophy was that there is no truth, there is no untruth - it all depends who has the better argument. If you can argue better, than your opponent, you are right. And if you come across another person who can argue better than you, then you are wrong.

So it was only the gymnastics of argument that Socrates inherited. He changed the whole process:

Sophistry became philosophy. The word ?philo' means love, and ?sophia' means wisdom. Sophistry was simply argumentativeness. He did a great job, but it almost always happens - the people you are fighting with, even if you are victorious, leave a great impact on you.

Just by fighting with them you have to use their own methods; otherwise you cannot fight. If one country is piling up nuclear weapons, then those who fight them have to pile up nuclear weapons.

Because Socrates was continually fighting with the sophists.... He wanted to destroy this idea that better argument is all, that there is no truth and there is no untruth - and he succeeded. He was a discontinuity with his past. But the people he had been fighting, he had to fight with arguments. So although the Sophists were defeated, the argumentativeness remained with Socrates himself.

He used it in a better way. He used it in discovering the truth. But he was absolutely unaware that in another part of the world, in the East, in China, in India, people had a different inheritance: almost ten thousand years of sitting silently and doing nothing.

And as silence descends on you, as thoughts start leaving, and all disturbances disappear, and the lake of your consciousness becomes almost a mirror:

You know you are the truth; You know you are love; You know you are divine.

In a single step - from mind to no-mind - all the treasures, all the mysteries of love, life, truth, blissfulness, open their doors. There is no need to argue against the false.

My contention is: even to argue against the false is to give some credit to the false, and that has been the eastern contention for thousands of years. You don't argue with your shadow: Don't come with me today, I don't like you, when I don't want you, why do you go on following me? You don't run away from your shadow - because the shadow will run too.

A Sufi story says: "A man was afraid of his shadow, because he had read in a book that death was almost like a shadow - that when it comes, it comes like a shadow. And it became such an obsession in his mind, that he became afraid even of ordinary shadows.

He would run, and he would do everything... he would try to fight - and he was a warrior! But even your sword cannot do any harm to a shadow - the shadow does not exist. He was so tired that he asked a mystic, "What to do with the shadow? I have done everything that can be done, but nothing happens. I have broken my sword. I have been running so much to avoid it that my feet are oozing blood."

The mystic laughed, he said, "You do one thing. Under that tree, just sit down, and then tell me, where is your shadow?"

Under the tree there was much shadow. To have a shadow you need the sun, the light. But when he went under the tree, and sat there and looked all around, there was no shadow. He said, "What a miracle you have done! You have not even moved from your place, and my shadow is gone." The mystic said, "Your very approach was unnecessary. To fight with the false is to give credibility to the false. In your fight you have accepted that the false also has some reality."

The East has never fought with the mind; it has found a totally different method. Its method is just to be a watcher on the hills.

Let everything pass.

Don't judge, don't condemn, don't evaluate.

You are only a mirror; these are not your functions. You simply reflect - and they will all pass. If you don't take any note of them, if you can ignore them, they will stop coming to you; they don't want to be uninvited guests. Perhaps because of the old habit, for a few days they may continue; but you will be able to see that the traffic is becoming less and less; otherwise it is twenty-four-hour rush hour.

Once the mind is silent, empty, spacious, you have found the golden key, the master key, which opens all the mysteries of love, of truth, of eternal life.

Socrates' idea is basically right, but about his method I do not agree. His method is unnecessary. If you are going to come home, why run miles away and then come back home? You are already there.

Just close your eyes and be silent, and relax. But the conclusion is right: "A man who practises the mysteries of love will be in contact, not with a reflection, but with truth itself. To know this blessing of human nature, one can find no better helper than love."

Either you can start by increasing your love, expanding your love... but where will you expand it?

Your mind is standing like a China wall all around you. First that China wall has to disappear - and that is the function of meditation.

Socrates could have been for the West their Gautam Buddha, and the whole history of the West would have been totally different. He has created the basic path for the western mind: argument.

And argument by and by, rather than discovering love, has discovered atom bombs, nuclear weapons, science, technology.

The East has not been able to discover these things because it has never given any credit to argumentation, to reason. Its whole concentration has been on expanding consciousness - and to give it space, it has to get rid of the mind. Once the mind is not there you don't have any boundaries, even the sky is not the boundary. You are all over the place. This feeling of being all over the place is love; and knowing it, that it is arising from the very center of your being, is truth.

But, Milarepa, Socrates is not talking in California. He is not talking to so-called lovers all over the world. He is talking to a few disciples who have come in search of truth. He helped a few people; he could not help many, for the simple reason that with everybody the process was so long.

But the East has been fortunate to discover a single-step pilgrimage: from mind to no-mind - and you have arrived home.

You have always been there. You have never left it for a single moment! Just, your mind has been wandering all over the world, but you have never been anywhere else; you are exactly where you should be.

If the wandering of the mind stops, suddenly - the revelation.

Question 2:

Ram Fakeer, this is my work: to take away from you all that is false.

I cannot give you anything, I can only take away - because that which you need, you already have.

But it is covered with so many lies, so many falsities, so many superstitions, that although my basic attitude is creative, ninety-nine percent of my work is destructive.

To create that which you already have - to make you aware of it - everything false has to be removed.

And you have so much junk! Your mind is so full of rotten furniture....

I used to stay in one place in India, Sagar, in the house of the richest man of that city. He was a collector of things. Anything that came onto the market, whether he needed it or not, had to be in his house. His house was so full of absolutely useless, out-of-date, unnecessary things, that it was difficult even to move in the house.

The room where I used to stay, was so full of furniture! Furniture belonging to different ages, Victorian.... Radio sets, and television has not come to that city yet - but in his room there was a television set.

I said, "What is the purpose of this television set?"

He said, "Some day, television will come."

I said, "Have you ever thought of one thing, that in the room where you put me - and you put me in the room which has all your great treasures - even to move one has to be very cautious not to stumble, even in the daylight." I told him, "You have destroyed this room."

He said, "What are you saying? I have decorated it."

I said, "Your decoration is nothing but destruction."

The English word ?room' is very significant. It simply means ?roominess,' ?spaciousness.' The more things you put in the room the more you are destroying it. Then it is no longer a room, it has become a warehouse.

I asked him, "Have you another room in the house?"

He said, "This is the best. If you call this a warehouse, then you will be even more unsatisfied with the other rooms. They are even more full. In this room I keep the latest things; this is my guest room."

I said, "Great guestroom you have created! "

Your mind always reminds me of his guestroom - so much rubbish, junk, so much furniture that there is no space even for yourself.

The life of meditation is: to create room in you, to create space in you. Throw out all the nonsense that others have given to you. You will be aware of yourself only when the mind is utterly empty. On the one hand, it will become empty; on the other hand, it will become full of you, your pure being.

Growth needs space. Your consciousness is starving. Give it a sky to fly in - and it is in your hands, because whatever you have in your mind, you have collected it. Now you don't know how to get rid of it. Meditation is only a technique for getting rid of it. The greatest day in your life is when deep silence overwhelms you.

Yes, Ram Fakeer, your observation is true: "At the age of thirty-seven I feel as if I am starting a new life." You are starting a new life - but don't think that before this you had an old life too. You were dead. Because your statement can have the implication that the old life is finished, the new is beginning.

I want to say to you: Life is always new, only death is old. You were dead, and I have been calling you, "Lazarus, come out of the grave." And it is not late, thirty-seven years old is not late. You have wasted only half of your life; half is still there. And this half can be lived so intensely and so totally that what has gone unlived will not be missed.

Even a single moment, lived totally and intensely, is equal to eternity. Otherwise you can go on vegetating for the whole of eternity; you don't have any taste of life, and the nectar of life. It is a beginning. Let us say, Ram Fakeer, you are born now.

There is a beautiful story in Gautam Buddha's life: one of the great emperors of his time, Prasenjita, had come to see him. Naturally he wanted to have a private conversation, because people who are rich, people who are in power, are always afraid to expose themselves. If people know that they are also as human as you are, with all the frailties, with all the weaknesses, it will be humiliating.

So Buddha gave him a private audience. He was talking to the emperor, and at that moment an old sannyasin, who must have been seventy or seventy-five, approached and said, "Forgive me. I don't want to disturb your conversation, I just want to touch the feet of Gautam Buddha and I will go. I will not say a single word. I am going for a long journey, to spread the message of my master; and I have to start now, because before the sun sets I have to reach the next village. "Once the sun sets, Buddhist monks don't travel, so it is just out of compulsion; please forgive me." And he touched Buddha's feet.

Buddha asked a very strange question - at least it sounded strange to Prasenjita. He said, "Bikkhu,"

that is Buddha's word for sannyasin, "how old are you?" And the old man said, "Don't make me feel embarrassed before the emperor, because I am only four years old."

The emperor could not believe it; he looked again, this man four years old? It is possible he may be seventy, seventy-five, eighty - that much difference is possible; but four years old is absolutely unbelievable. He said to Buddha, "It is none of my business to interfere, but I cannot resist the temptation. This man is lying so flatly, and you are not even objecting. Do you think he is four years old?"

Gautam Buddha said, "Yes, but you are puzzled because you don't know how we count age. When a man starts authentic life, a life of love and silence and meditation, when he gets initiated into the mysteries of existence - life is counted from that day. Physically this man is seventy-five years old, but it is only four years ago, that he found the door out of death into life."

Ram Fakeer, forget those thirty-seven years in exactly the way you forget in the morning all the dreams and and the nightmares of the night. Not that you have not lived them; when they were present, they were as real as anything. Start totally fresh.

You are saying, "I feel as if I am starting a new life." You are starting your first life. "Knowing nothing,"

- that is a great beginning, the most blissful beginning - because knowing nothing means mind has been put aside; knowing nothing means ego has been dropped; knowing nothing means your eyes are again fresh, innocent, full of wonder. You can again understand the songs of the birds, you can again see clearly the psychedelic colors of the flowers, you can again run after butterflies, you can again collect seashells on the beach.

A man who has come out of his grave finds this whole existence so alluring, so beautiful, so attractive, that there is no need to find any God. He has found God in the flowers, in the birds, in the trees, in people. In fact there is no other God except this singing life, this dancing life, this green foliage, these colorful flowers.

God is not a creator - God is creativity; and the whole existence is continuously engaged in creativity.

That old idea that God created the world in six days and then got tired, and on seventh day rested, and he is still resting.... His Sunday has not ended yet, I don't think Monday will ever start... the whole idea is idiotic. This beautiful existence cannot be created in six days.

I used to have a tailor, a very beautiful old Mohammedan. I was going for a long trip, so I asked him, "Saturday evening I want my clothes to be ready, and there are six days still, and don't play tricks!" Because all over the world for some reason, tailors cannot be relied upon. That is part of their profession.

He said, "If you want, I will make them in six days. But before you ask it, have a look at the world."

I said, "What do you mean?"

He said, "I mean God created this world in six days - what a mess! Then don't tell me that the sleeves are long, or the robe is short, or the neck is too tight - it will be a mess. If even God could not manage.... I am a poor old man."

So I said, "Okay, you take your time, but my clothes should not be a mess. I can postpone the trip."

But the whole idea of God creating the world is absolutely without evidence. There is not a single eyewitness. By the very nature of the case there cannot be any eyewitness, because if an eyewitness was there, that means the world was already there. And it is also stupid, because Christians think God created the world exactly four thousand and four years before Jesus Christ was born. Certainly it must have been the first of January, Monday, when he started. But one wonders what he had been doing before that... the whole of eternity in the past.

What kind of God, what kind of creator? And if he had waited so long, what was the necessity to create it now, and make people unnecessarily miserable? He could have waited still longer. The people who believe in that story - and they have to believe, because it is in their holy scriptures - cannot provide a single reason why he suddenly decided to create the world. And if the cause of creating the world came from outside, that means the world was already there. It must have come from his own inner being; hence I want to change the whole structure of the story.

To me God is creation itself: It has always been here, and it will always be here. God is not a person separate from existence; God is in every particle, in every cell, in every atom of existence. He is our existence, our life, our love, our truth.

Ram Fakeer, you have started with a great beginning, knowing nothing. Nothing can be greater than that. In this not-knowing many, many flowers will blossom; in this not-knowing an authentic humbleness will grow; in this not-knowing you will find tremendous gratitude. Just that you are here, in this moment.... The knowledgeable person is covered with so much dust - and dirty dust. His mirror is covered with so many layers of knowledge that it stops reflecting.

Not knowing means all dust has been removed, your mirror is clean. Now you can reflect the farthest stars in the sky.

"Knowing nothing, unsophisticated and childish, dreams and ambitions are being shattered and the future is totally unknown." That is the beauty of the future. If it was known, it would be very ugly. If you knew that tomorrow morning your wife would kiss you.... The kiss in itself is enough of a torture, but to know it beforehand - you cannot sleep the whole night because the morning is coming.

If you knew the future, life would lose all adventure, all ecstasy, all mystery. It is the unknown that, every moment, keeps you surprised and again surprised. A man who knows everything about the future - just think of his misery. He knows that on a particular date after thirty years, "I am going to die." He knows that on a particular date, to a certain woman, "I am going to be married." He knows what is going to happen after marriage... every day a quarrel, every day a fight.

Still, people are strange; they go to the astrologers, to the palmists to know about the future. They are not satisfied with knowing the past. That has tortured them enough, they have suffered enough - still they want more suffering.

One astrologer was brought to me in Calcutta; he is very famous in that part of the country. I was staying with a very beautiful man - rarely one comes across such a man - his name was Sohanlal Dugar. We had come to know each other in a strange encounter in Jaipur. I was talking to a gathering and he was present. I had no idea who he was - he was one of the richest men in the country, and certainly the richest in Calcutta.

After listening to me he came with a big bundle of notes, touched my feet, and put the notes at my feet. I said, "I accept your love, your respect, but notes I don't need. If I need money sometime...

you can just leave your address with me."

As I refused - the man was almost seventy-five or eighty years old - tears, big tears started coming out of his eyes. I said, "Have I hurt you?"

He said, "You don't understand my misery and my poverty. I am one of the richest men in the country, but I have got only money and nothing else. So when somebody refuses my money, he has refused me. I don't have anything else to give to you. You can just accept it and burn it in front of me - that is your business. Once you have accepted, what you do with the money is not my concern, but you cannot reject it. I am a very poor man, because I don't have anything else than money."

It was so difficult; I accepted the money and gave it to the organization which had arranged the lectures for me, but the old man became a great friend to me. The difference in my age and his age was great at that time.

He said, "If you have really accepted the money, whenever you come to Calcutta you have to stay at my house."

I said, "There is no problem, I will be staying at your house."

He was really a great soul. The whole house was centrally air-conditioned; it was a palace. When Calcutta was the capital of India, before New Delhi, it used to be the palace of the governor general.

There were no mosquitoes, no flies - still when I was eating he would sit in front of me in the old Indian way, with a small bamboo fan in his hand, moving it. I said, "There are no flies, no mosquitoes, and the house is centrally air-conditioned, it is absolutely cool; your waving the fan over me is absolutely unnecessary, just sit by my side."

He said, "No, because I am a gambler. Today I am the richest man, but tomorrow I may not be. This palace may be gone, this air-conditioning may be gone. But you have promised me that you will stay at my house, so I don't take any note of this air-conditioning and this palace. Then, only this fan will be there to give you a little coolness and to drive away the mosquitoes."

I said, "This is too much concern for the future. If it happens, then you can do it; but right now?"

He said, "I live according to palmistry, astrology - and I have called my best astrologer to see your birth-chart and your hand."

I could not hurt the old man, so I said, "Okay, when he comes...." The astrologer came, and I told him, "I don't believe in astrology. Even if it is true, I want sciences that make the future known to people destroyed. The future should remain unknown. But there is no need to destroy, because it is a bogus science, and I will prove to you that it is bogus. "

He said, "You don't know... I am the biggest astrologer in Bengal. I will see how you can prove it." He said many things about my future and then he asked for his fee. His fee was one thousand rupees, and I had told Sohanlal Dugar, "You are not going to give him the fee. I will settle the matter."

So the old man remained silent. The astrologer asked about his fee. I said, "You should have known that this man is not going to give you the fee. You don't even know the future that is so close - within five minutes this man is going to refuse.... and you are talking about my whole life. You don't even know about your own life: that one thousand rupees are gone. This is my evidence that this is a pseudo science. You can cheat people because people are so interested in knowing the future.

They don't understand that if they knew, life would lose all juice. When you were born, you could have brought with you a small card, with everything that is going to happen printed on it. And do you think then life would be worth living?"

Life has excitement and ecstasy because the future is unknown. The unknowability of the future is the most beautiful phenomenon; one does not know about the next moment.

Ram Fakeer, you are saying, "I feel that you are stripping me naked. Is this Your work?"

I repeat, Yes, this is my work. The moment you are naked, you have come home. All falsities dropped, all cover-ups dropped, all masks dropped, you are simply yourself, a naked consciousness.

Yes, that is my very profession.

Okay, Vimal?