Thirsty

Man is always in crisis. Man is crisis... constant. It is not accidental, it is essential. Man's very being consists of crisis, hence the anxiety, the tension, the anguish. Man is the only animal who grows, who moves, who becomes. Man is the only animal who is not born complete, who is not born closed, who is not born like a thing; who is born like a process. Man is open. His being consists in becoming. That is the crisis. The more he becomes the more he is.

Man cannot take himself for granted, otherwise one stagnates and vegetates. Life disappears. Life remains only when you are moving from one place to another place. Life is that movement between two places. You can't be alive at one place - that's the difference between a dead thing and an alive phenomenon. A dead thing remains in one place; it is static. The alive thing moves - not only moves, leaps, jumps. The dead thing remains always in the known. The alive phenomenon goes on moving from the known towards the unknown, from the familiar towards the un-familiar. This is the crisis. Man is the MOST alive.

You have to go on moving. The movement creates problems because the movement means you have to go on dying to that which you know. You have to go on dying to the past, which is familiar, which is comfortable, which is cozy. You have lived it, you have become skillful about it, you have learned much about it; now there is no danger in it. It fits with you, you fit with it. But man has to move, man has to go on the adventure. You are a man only when you go continuously on that adventure - from the known to the unknown.

The mind clings to the past because the mind is the past. But your being wants to go beyond the past. Your being wants to explore. Your being has an intrinsic discontent; I call it divine discontent.

Whatsoever you have, you are finished with it; whatsoever you are, you are finished with it; you want to have that which you don't have, and you want to be that which you are not. Man gropes in the dark for richer being, for more being, for new being.

It is not right to say that man is born one day and dies another. It is true about other animals, but not true about man. Animals are born one day - they have a birthday - and then one day they die.

Man is constantly dying and constantly being born. EACH moment is a death and a birth. In man death and birth are not opposites, but like two wings of a bird, complementary, helping each other.

The death simply helps the birth to happen. The death goes on cleansing the ground so the past can cease and the future can be. Death is in the service of birth. In fact, to call them two is not right.

It is ONE process looked at from two different angles.

It is like a gate: from one side it is entrance, from the other side it is exit. Or, it is like breathing:

the same breath going inwards is called inhalation, and the same breath going outwards is called exhalation. It is the same breath.

Death is exhalation, birth is inhalation. Birth is entrance, death is exit. But it is the same life-energy, the same wave. Man has to die each moment and has to be ready to be reborn again and again and again. Between this constant death and birth is life. Between these two is the gap which is life.

Between the past and the future is life - in that small interval called 'present'. It has no duration, it is there without any duration. The past has duration, length; the future has duration, length; the present has no duration. It is simply there... atomic it is. Between the past, the long past, and the long future, exists a gap. Only those who go on constantly dying and constantly getting reborn know that gap, because they pass again and again through that gap. Each time you are ready to pass through that gap, you will find a crisis.

The crisis is that the mind wants to cling to the known and the familiar, naturally. The mind is efficient with it. Somehow it has learned it, learning has been arduous. And now suddenly you move. All that learning is lost, it will never again be relevant. In no other situation will it have any meaning. It can only have meaning with the situation in which you have lived. "Cling to it," the mind says.

But the being cannot be contained by the mind. The being is infinite, and the mind is a very very small hole. The being is like the sky - it cannot be contained in it. The mind is too narrow. The being wants to get out of it, the being wants to grow and become wider and wider. The being wants to go to the farthest corner of existence. The being is an adventure. The being wants to risk - this is the crisis.

And each person has to face this crisis. And there are two alternatives: out of fear you stop dying to the past and you become stuck, stagnant. People call their stagnancy safety, security. Safety and security are just rationalizations for remaining stagnant. They become pools instead of rivers. They go on shrinking, they never know the joy of flow. Joy is just a by-product of flow. When the river moves there is joy, there is dance, there is song. When your life flows from one space into another space, there is joy - the thrill of the new.

You can remain secure and safe with the past. You can avoid the crisis: that's what millions of people have decided. But then they remain mediocre, then they remain imbeciles. Then they only age, they don't grow. They are stuck. Their life becomes a wasteland and they never come to see the ocean.

Only when you come to see the ocean and when you enter into the ocean do you know what bliss is. Man has to go on leaving the past, man has to go on searching. Man has to feed, nourish, his search.

But man has invented many many things to avoid it; man has invented many philosophies.

Philosophy is a distraction: it never poses the real problem before you. It poses many problems to avoid THE problem. It constantly creates newer and newer problems, and goes into those problems and finds solutions, and out of each solution it brings many more problems, and it goes on and on.

It is a distraction. It does not help you to face the real problem.

The real problem is only one. The problem is: how to go on continuously dying to the past? How to go on remaining courageous enough to take new life every moment? How to go on being born?

That problem is avoided by philosophy. It talks about God, it talks about what the truth is, it talks about the creation, it talks about hell and heaven, and a thousand other things.What Taoists call 'ten thousand things' - philosophy goes on talking about them. And it creates much fuss, and it is very easy to be lost in the philosophical speculation. It does not solve anything, it simply deceives you.

Then there are theologies. Philosophy is a distraction; theology is a pseudo-religion, not existential.

It is philosophy in the guise of religion, philosophy pretending to be religion: Christian theology, Hindu theology, Buddhist theology. It again supplies you with answers which are plastic, synthetic, because the real answer can come only through living the question. The problem can be solved only by going into it; there is no other way to solve it. It cannot be solved by others' answers. My answer can't become your answer. You will have to live your problem, you will have to suffer your problem.

You will have to pass through many many anxieties, anguishes. You will have to live through the crisis; only then will your ice melt and will you start flowing.

Those crises cannot be easily avoided either by philosophy or by theology. Everybody wants to avoid them - that's why people have become Christians, Hindus, Mohammedans. They have taken others' answers as if they are their own. They live in that 'as if', their whole life is an 'as if'. It is not true, it is inauthentic.

How can Buddha's answer be your answer? There have been many Buddhas before Buddha; their answers could not become his answer. How can Christ's answer be your answer? He had to seek and search for his answer. He had to sacrifice for his answer - he had to go to the cross, he had to carry his cross on his shoulders. How can his answer be your answer? You have not carried the cross on your shoulders yet. You have been avoiding, you have been escaping. Your logic is that of the ostrich... open your eyes. The problem is big, immense, huge, and the natural tendency is to close one's eyes and forget all about it, find some occupation, engagement, become involved in something and forget all about it. That's what people go on doing.

That's what politics is all about. People become involved in trifles and they become so much engaged that they forget that they yet have something to solve - without which they will never really be men, without which they will never be their own selves. Politics gives great occupation to people.

It is occupation through action, as philosophy is occupation through speculation.

And parents are in a hurry to give their borrowed knowledge to their children. Schools, colleges, universities are there only so that the past can live in you, so that it becomes almost impossible for you to drop the past, so that you forget all about your future possibilities. The university makes you efficient about the past and it destroys all your potential for the future. The university exists there as a conspiracy - of the parents and the priests and the politicians.

If you go on repeating a certain knowledge again and again, you forget that it is not yours.

Adolf Hitler has said in his autobiography, MEIN KAMPF, that there is only a little difference between the truth and the lie; the difference is of repetition. If you go on repeating the lie again and again, it becomes true. He is saying something immensely valuable. And he knows it, because he has done it.

But that has been done down the ages by the priests and the politicians. They go on repeating certain things. Slowly slowly, those repeated things become habits of your thought; they become unconscious. Then you go on repeating them. You will give them to your children, just as your parents have given them to you. Your parents have not lived, otherwise they would have been Christs and Buddhas and Krishnas. You are not living if you are simply repeating your parents' ideas that were given to you when you were a child and unable to defend yourself, when you were a child and not aware enough of what was being done to you, when you were a child and vulnerable, when you were a child and trusting, when you were a child and you did not know that your parents could deceive you. And they were not deceiving you knowingly. They were deceived by their parents, and so on and so forth. They were simply repeating a performance. Whatsoever had been done to them by their parents7 they were doing it to you. That was the only way they knew how to deal with the children. They were themselves victims. Don't be angry with them. They have not done anything wrong to you knowingly, but whatsoever they have done IS WRONG.

They have made you Christians, Hindus, Mohammedans; they have made you communists, fascists - they have made you this or that. They have not allowed you an open growth. Why? Why were they so afraid? Why were they in such a hurry to send you to the church? Why were they in such a hurry to baptize you? They were in a hurry because they thought they loved you, and they would like to protect you - to protect you from the problem, the crisis that one day you might feel, you might encounter. So they were giving you answers before the question had arisen. They were preparing you. They were providing you with answers so when the question arose you would be able to deal with it, you would know the answers.

But those answers are false. They did it out of love for you, but all that is done out of love is not necessarily right. Unless love is aware, it can do harm. The world suffers much harm from love which is not aware. They wanted to protect you, they wanted you to be ready to face any crisis in your life, so they supplied you answers - and answers cannot be supplied, answers have to be found.

One has to PAY for answers. They are not cheap. Knowledgeability is not knowledge.

Politics provides you with one kind of distraction, philosophy another kind of distraction.

Art is simply a consolation. It simply decorates your prison cell, it makes it worth living in, it makes it beautiful, it paints it. It keeps you in the prison cell because the prison cell becomes so beautiful - as if the cage has been made of gold and the bird forgets about the sky, and it becomes difficult to leave the cage; it is golden.

Philosophy distracts. Theology cheats. Art simply decorates, consoles. Art is a kind of ointment when what is needed is surgery, not ointment. It is consoling but it is not transforming. And education simply functions as a conspiracy. Education is in the service of the past. Education is not creative.

And these are the things one gets involved in sooner or later.

Only religion can take you beyond your stagnancy. But when I say religion, I don't mean Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan. I simply mean religiousness. And religiousness is very simple. It is so simple that you will not believe in it. Theologies are complex, religion is simple. Truth is very simple, philosophies are very complex. The philosophies have to be complex, otherwise you would see the lie in them. They have to be so complex that you cannot find the lie. They have to create so much jargon, clouds, subtleties, complexities; they have to make the whole thing so zig-zag, like a riddle, a puzzle, so that you can never come out of it. Philosophies, theologies are all labyrinthian: you can enter into them, getting out is very difficult because one thing leads to another. And the complexities become more and more complex the more you enter into them.

Truth is simple. Religion is simple. Religion has no theology, religion is pure experience - the experience that happens when you die to the past and you are being born into the future. Between the two is what religion is, the insight into reality.

And remember, the theologians of the world point out that things are but transitory: "All the brightness of one rose is only for a while. The mayfly comes in the morning, and in the evening is dead, is gone. God does not come and go, therefore seek only God." This is simply greed, nothing else - the same old greed in a new form, the same old wine in a new bottle.

God is NOT permanent, but the God of the theologians is permanent - because the ego wants something permanent. The ego is greedy; it wants to cling to something. It does not want an unknown God. It wants a God who is known, well-known. Hence people cling to ideas supplied by theologians - Christian God, Hindu God, the form of the God, the name of the God.

God is unknown. Even those who have known Him don't know Him.When they know Him, they know only one thing: that they have come to the unknown. And that is the beauty of it.

And God is not permanent. God is certainly eternal, but not permanent. But the eternity is a flux.

God is more in the flower than the statue you worship in the temple. God is there each moment, in each death, in each birth.

God is change. God is crisis. God is chaos.

In the name of greed you go on worshipping known Gods. True religion however, looks to what is momentary and only mortal. That has to be the distinction between the true religion and the untrue religion: untrue religion talks about a permanent God, true religion only talks about the impermanent life-flux - the flower in the morning, and by the evening, gone. And the leaf was so green just a few days before, and now it is pale and it has fallen from the tree, and the wind is playing with it. And the man was so young and now he is old. Everything is changing. EXCEPT change, everything is changing.

Change is God, because only change is eternal. True religion looks to what is momentary and only mortal: a lark dropping from the sky, the smell of the laurel, a stranger's look, the giggle of a child, the tears of joy in somebody's eyes, a cry on the wind. The very wind....

True religion is not worried about anything BEYOND this life. True religion looks into this life and finds the beyond. The other reality is not somewhere else, the other reality is hidden in THIS reality.

This reality is the other reality! The difference is of your vision. If you have depth, you will see this reality is the other reality. THIS IS THAT! That is the meaning of the famous Upanishadic saying:

Swetketu, Thou art that, TATWAMASI, SWETKETU.

God is present in everything. God is the depth of everything - let us say it in that way; God is the depth of the rose-flower, the depth of the rock, the depth of man and woman, the depth of love, the depth of sadness, the depth of joy. God means depth. And if you know how to LIVE deeply - and you will only know how to live deeply if you go on constantly dying to the past and being born into the future. Between these two, the depth happens, your being deepens. Suddenly the door opens and you can see that which is. For a moment the mind is no more functioning, the mind is dropped.

The new mind is still not born, and you can see the truth as it is. Soon the new mind will be born, and the moment it is born it starts becoming old; again you will have to drop it. This I call meditation.

Meditation is a way to face the real crisis of life, to face one's own growth and the growing pains.

Philosophy distracts, theology deceives. Politics only keeps you occupied in stupid things. Art only decorates the cell. And science is not yet courageous enough to tackle the real problem, so it goes on working on things, on the outer.

Religion is that courage to enter into the paradoxical reality of birth and death together, of matter and mind together, of this and that together. Very few people have been religious - a Buddha, a Krishna, a Zarathustra. And each person can have that joy of being religious, can live God. But then you will have to renounce many things. You will have to renounce your philosophies, your religions.

You will have to renounce your stupid occupations. And I'm not saying that you have to renounce the world - your wife, your children, your work - no. That is not the problem. The real problem is in your beliefs. You have to renounce your beliefs.

But what happens in the world? Somebody gets fed-up with the world; he renounces the children, the family, and escapes to a Himalayan cave, or to some Catholic monastery. He renounces all EXCEPT his beliefs. Those beliefs he carries to the monastery, and those beliefs are the real things to be renounced. I teach my sannyasins to renounce the beliefs, the concepts, the prejudices. The world is perfectly beautiful because the world is the visible God. Just renounce your attitudes that you have been taught, that you have been conditioned for. If you renounce your conditionings, you have renounced your ignorance. You will become innocent, and out of that innocence knowing arises. One becomes wise. But remember, when you become wise, the world will not think you are wise. The world will think you are an idiot!

Jesus was thought to be idiotic. So was it the case with Buddha. And people must have told Lao Tzu again and again, "You are an idiot!" He himself writes that in TAO TE CHING: "Everybody seems to be intelligent except me. I am an idiot." The idiots exist in such a great majority that when you become wise, they will think you have gone mad.

Remember it - to have eyes in the world of blind people, you will have to be ready for a few things.

They will laugh at you. They will not believe that you have eyes; nobody has ever heard of anybody having eyes. They will think you are a charlatan. They will think you are a fraud. They will think that you have some motivation behind this declaration that you have got eyes. They will be angry, they will be enraged. They may poison you, they may kill you. One thing is certain: they can't believe that you are wise, because to think you are wise they will have to accept the idea that they are not - and that is too difficult. It is easier to crucify Jesus and murder Mansoor and poison Socrates than to think that we are all idiots.

The presence of a Jesus brings the crisis: if he is right then everybody else is wrong. And if he is wrong, then everybody else can relax into his cozy world, comforts, and forget all about the crisis.

Jesus opens the door. Jesus becomes the problem, remember it.

A REAL Buddha, a REAL JESUS, does not supply you with the answer. He simply brings the problem which you have forgotten to you. He creates the problem again. He lives the problem in front of you. He forces you to see the problem, and he is so persistent that he annoys you.

Just think of Socrates walking on the streets of Athens - he was annoying everybody! He had not done any harm to anybody; there was no reason to poison him and to kill him. But he had annoyed.

He was asking questions nobody wanted to listen to, because those questions take away the very earth beneath your feet. Those questions are dangerous. Once they have entered into you, then you will never be able to sleep easily; they will haunt you. Once those questions have penetrated into your consciousness, you can't live the same way you have been living. Those questions will become the seeds: they will start growing in you, they will start changing you in subtle ways.

People were annoyed with Socrates, people were annoyed with Jesus. They had to kill just to save their sleep. They had to kill so that they could forget the problem. Jesus is simply the question- mark that somehow they had managed to forget about - in money, in respectability, in the search for power, in politics, in philosophy, in art. They had somehow got engaged and they had forgotten the problem. Now this man comes and shouts from the tops of the houses.

That's what Jesus has said to his disciples: "Go and shout from the housetops. Because people are fast asleep, they will hear only if you shout and go on shouting. Go on yelling at people! Go on hammering! If you persist in hammering, only then one day will they see that they have not solved the real problem of their lives." And how can you live if you have not solved the real problem of your life? Life starts only when you have solved the real problem.

And what is the real problem? The real problem is how to go on dying towards the past and how to go on being born towards the future; how to remain fresh, young, like dewdrops; how not to become old. That is the way to grow - how not to become old, how to remain always young and fresh. In life, in death, the freshness should not be lost. No dust should be allowed to gather on you.

Now this beautiful story:

THERE ONCE WAS A KING WHO WAS THIRSTY. HE DID NOT QUITE KNOW WHAT THE DIFFICULTY WAS, BUT HE SAID, "MY THROAT IS DRY."

Savor the story very very patiently and very very slowly, because these stories are not ordinary stories. They are condensed life experiences.

THERE WAS ONCE A KING WHO WAS THIRSTY.

Thirst was his problem.

HE DID NOT QUITE KNOW WHAT THE DIFFICULTY WAS...

And if you don't know what the difficulty is, never go in search of a solution - because whatsoever you will find will be wrong. The first thing is to know exactly what the problem is - because in fact in the deepest core of the problem is the solution. If you know exactly what the problem is, half the problem is solved even before you have done anything else. Just in knowing the problem exactly, half the problem is solved - because the problem itself contains the keys.

If you know you are thirsty, the problem is solved. Now you can search for the water. And water is available everywhere, it is not such a difficulty to find it. Before the thirst is, water is. The thirst is possible only because the water is.

Remember, life goes on providing.

The child is born; before the child is born the mother's breasts are swelling with milk. The child is yet only on the way, the child is not born yet, but the breasts are getting ready. Before the hunger of the child, the food is ready. If you look deeply into life you will find it happening everywhere: life provides. And once you know it, great trust arises in life. That trust is religious.

Trust does not mean believing in a book, in a certain ideology. Trust means SEEING that life provides, FEELING that life cares, that it is not against you, that it is all for you, that it is not indifferent to you, that it loves you, that it protects you, that you need not be worried, too worried about security.

Life is your security.

THERE ONCE WAS A KING WHO WAS THIRSTY. HE DID NOT QUITE KNOW WHAT THE DIFFICULTY WAS....

Nobody knows what the difficulty is. And the difficulty is simple, like thirst.

When you start thinking about God you are moving in a wrong direction. First look deep into yourself and you will find a thirst. And that thirst is not for God, never. If you had not heard the word 'God', you would never have thought about God.

Now there are millions of people in Russia who never think of God. Do you think they don't feel the religious thirst? They feel it, but they don't think of God: they have been supplied with other idols - the Communist Party. Now it is not Christianity, it is the Communist Party. Now it is no longer the temple, it is the Kremlin. Now it is no longer Christ, it is Lenin, Marx, Stalin, or somebody else. Mao has destroyed the Buddhist tradition in China. Now people don't think of Buddha, they think of Mao.

What I want you to become aware of is that it is not a question of whether you think of Mao or Moses, Krishna or Christ, God, the Bible, the Koran - that is not the problem. Look into your thirst. What exactly is your thirst? What is your discontent? Why call t you relax? Why are you always on edge, uneasy, tense, in anguish? Don't jump to conclusions too fast. Rather than thinking of what you want to find outside, think, go deep, meditate inside; what exactly is your thirst? And you will be surprised: once you know exactly what your thirst is, the problem is solved.

Buddha solved it without thinking of any God, without any Vedas and Upanishads, without any book.

What did he do? He simply searched into his thirst. He looked deeper and deeper and deeper.

He went into innermost causes, and finally he came to a point where he could see: the problem is, the only problem that man faces is, that we are separate from existence. Somehow we have fallen out of line with existence. The harmony is broken. We are no longer part of the orchestra of this universe. Hence we start feeling like outsiders hence we start feeling insecurity, fear. We have to protect ourselves, we have to guard ourselves, we have to do everything. We can't relax, because if we relax we will be the losers. We have to fight, we have to survive. We start thinking in terms of antagonism to existence - as if the existence is there to destroy us.

The deeper Buddha moved into himself, the more he felt the only problem is that "I am", that the ego is. And how does the ego persist? Of what does it consist? And then he looked deeper into it and found that it consists of the past. If you drop the past the ego disappears. He tried to drop the past, and the day he succeeded in dropping the past, there was no ego, and there was no problem, and there was no thirst. All was quenched. He again became part of the whole. He became holy. He never thought about God. He never prayed, he only meditated. Meditation simply means he looked inwards to find out exactly what his problem was. Rather than rushing for a solution, he looked into the problem. Remember these two different things.

If you go for the solution you will become philosophical. Sooner or later you will be caught by some philosophy, some theology, some 'ism'. And only you are responsible. Those shops are there, those merchants are there - naturally they go on selling whatsoever they have to sell. But there was no need for you to go to them. Churches and temples and mosques will disappear of their own accord if you start moving towards the solution. Once you enter your problem, you will find the solution waiting in your own self.

THERE ONCE WAS A KING WHO WAS THIRSTY. HE DID NOT QUITE KNOW WHAT THE DIFFICULTY WAS, BUT HE SAID, "MY THROAT IS DRY."

Now to be thirsty is one thing, and to say "My throat is dry" is another. You have posed the question in a wrong way. Pose a question in a wrong way and you will be immediately supplied with wrong answers. One has to be very very intelligent in posing a question, because all depends on how you pose it.

Every day I come across people; they go on asking wrong questions. And because they ask a wrong question, even if the right answer is given it does not satisfy - because that is not their question.

Their real question remains hidden to themselves. So the first thing for every seeker is to be very clear and very alert about the question. There is no hurry. Take time. Take it easy, but go around the problem. Look from every angle at what exactly it is. Before you ask a question be absolutely certain that this is your question. Otherwise wait, there is no hurry. If you can wait enough, if you can be patient enough, you will know what your question is.

Now this king asks a wrong question. He started a wrong journey: "MY THROAT IS DRY." Just a single word, 'dry', now triggers a process.

LACKEYS AT ONCE RAN SWIFTLY TO FIND SOMETHING SUITABLE TO ALLEVIATE THE CONDITION. THEY CAME BACK WITH LUBRICATING OIL.

Of course, when the throat is dry, it needs something lubricating. It is logical. If the king had said, "I am thirsty," it would have been almost impossible to bring lubricating oil. The lubricating oil is brought because the question has been posed wrongly: "My throat is dry."

And remember, advisers abound. There are millions all around you. They may not have solved their problems, but they are very very happy in solving yours. Their throats may be dry, but if you say "My throat is dry" they will jump upon you. There are many do-gooders. They are just watching - they enjoy whenever somebody is in some need. To help feels very very good for their egos. You are in trouble and they enjoy your trouble because now you need their help. If you are happy, nobody comes to you. People think you are mad. If you are healthy, people don't believe you - "You must be deceiving." If you laugh they think, "What is so funny?" If you are miserable they all feel happy:

they are there ready to help you out of your misery. Everybody is a missionary, and everybody has solutions to solve all the problems. They have not solved their own problems! In fact, that is their way to avoid their own problems - they enter into others' problems, they become engaged with others.

Remember, unless you have solved your problem, don't start helping others. Rather than helping, you will be harming them.

LACKEYS AT ONCE RAN SWIFTLY TO FIND SOMETHING SUITABLE TO ALLEVIATE THE CONDITION.

Now, thirst is not a disease. It is a dis-ease, but not a disease. It is very healthy. Thirst is healthy, remember it. A dead man cannot feel thirst; it shows life. Now discontent is not unhealthy, it is not a disease; it simply shows life, aliveness. Only dead people are without any discontent. A really alive person has to live his discontent. He has to be thirsty, he has to be afire. Only through that fieriness, that thirst, will he live an intense life.

People live at the minimum; they never come to know what is the optimum. And things happen only at the optimum. Orgasmic experiences happen only at the optimum, and people live at the minimum. They are very miserly in their lives. They go only so far, they don't become too involved in living, they always remain more or less spectators. When they want to dance, they go and see some dancer dancing. When they want to play, they go and see a football match. When they want to love, they go and see a movie based on some story. People have become spectators. And TV is absolutely reducing them to being spectators. Wherever TV has become available people are glued to their seats for four, five, six hours a day, just watching. Life has become 'just watching'. But there is one good thing about watching - you are never involved. You simply sit in your chair. You are out of it, you don't go into any danger, you don't take any risk. Others take the risk for you, you are a watcher. You become a voyeur. You are a peeping-tom - you are glued to somebody's keyhole and watching.

But when are you going to live? Life is slipping by every moment. You are not a plastic flower, remember. You are a real flower - by the morning you will be gone. Play with the wind, have a dialogue with the sun, whisper to the clouds. Dance and sing... the evening is coming. And if you don't dance and you don't sing and if you don't play with the wind and you don't have a dialogue with the sun, your life will be poor, your death will be poor, because death can only be rich if the life has been rich. You will live meaninglessly, you will die meaninglessly.

From where does the meaning come? Meaning comes by living intensely. Intensity brings meaning.

Intentionality brings meaning. Only when a man lives as if the torch is burning from both ends together - then he knows what life is. In those rare moments of intensity God is revealed, never before. Contentment certainly happens, but it happens only in the most intense moments of discontent.

I teach you discontent so that contentment can happen to you. But you have been taught to practice contentment, to remain satisfied.

Socrates is right when he says, "I would rather be a discontented Socrates than a satisfied pig."

But millions of people have decided otherwise: they have decided to live as satisfied pigs. They go on avoiding any intense phenomenon. Rather than falling in love, they have decided for a plastic marriage. Rather than meditating themselves, they say, "Jesus saves!" What has Jesus to do with it? And why should he save you? And how can he save you? Only you can save yourself, nobody else! That is absolutely your right! If you claim it, you get it. If you don't claim it, you don't get it.

But people are very cunning and clever; they postpone. They say, "Okay. If Jesus is there, why should we worry?" People come to me; they say, "Osho, you are here. Why should we meditate?

We trust in you."

How can you trust in me if you don't meditate? Trust is a fragrance that comes out of meditation.

No, they are not saying that they trust. They are simply saying, "If you can do it, do it. We are not much interested in doing it on our own. We don't want to take any risk."

Remember, thirst, discontent, hunger are healthy qualities, wholesome. A satisfied man is a dull, stupid man. And because satisfaction has been practised down the ages, your churches are full of those dullards, monasteries are full of those dull, dead people. They are walking corpses, somehow dragging themselves. They have lost all juice. They are frozen, non-flowing. Their life is not a streaming, is not a vibration; it is not a music, a melody.

Thirst is perfectly beautiful, because it is only through thirst that you will know what contentment is, what the beauty is of feeling quenched. If you are really thirsty then you will know the joy of drinking water. If you are really hungry then you will know the joy of eating food.When you are burning, like fire, only then contentment happens. And God is the ultimate contentment. It happens to the religious person who lives through discontent. A religious person is one who is thirsty.

But remember to pose your question rightly, otherwise lackeys are always available.

Those lackeys... RAN SWIFTLY TO FIND SOMETHING SUITABLE TO ALLEVIATE THE CONDITION. THEY CAME BACK WITH LUBRICATING OIL. WHEN THE KING DRANK IT, HIS THROAT DID NOT FEEL DRY ANYMORE, BUT HE KNEW THAT SOMETHING WAS NOT RIGHT.

That's what is happening everywhere. You go to the church, you feel a certain kind of religiousness arising in you, but still you feel something is wrong. You can't pinpoint it - where, what? - but something is wrong. You are being supplied with a thousand and one answers, and somehow they seem to satisfy you, but deep down you know something is wrong. You go on carrying the Bible and the Gita, and deep down you know something is wrong.

THE OIL PRODUCED A CURIOUS SENSATION IN HIS MOUTH. HE CROAKED, "MY TONGUE FEELS AWFUL, AND THERE IS A CURIOUS TASTE, IT IS SLIPPERY..."

Have you not felt that taste in a church? Have you not croaked, "My tongue feels awful"? Reading the Bible or the Gita or the Koran, have you not felt it? - that things only seem right on the surface, but something is missing? The Christian priest goes on talking the same language as Jesus. He uses the same words as Jesus, but you can see it - something is missing. The soul is missing.

THE DOCTOR IMMEDIATELY PRESCRIBED PICKLES AND VINEGAR - WHICH THE KING ATE.

And let me remind you again, these people are always around - not only around kings, they are around everybody.

Naturally, now the disease had taken a new phase. Now the thirst was completely lost, forgotten about. Nobody will ever think of thirst any more. Once you have taken a wrong step, then one wrong step leads to another wrong step, and so on and so forth. And it will become almost a superhuman task to find that the first step had been wrong.

He immediately prescribed pickles and vinegar - which the king ate.

SOON HE HAD STOMACH-ACHE AND WATERING EYES TO ADD TO HIS SORROWS.

Now one problem is solved but another is created. Things become more complex. Rather than becoming simple, they start becoming more dangerous.

"I THINK I MUST BE THIRSTY," HE MUMBLED, FOR HIS SUFFERINGS HAD MADE HIM DO SOME THINKING.

He must have been a wise man. Otherwise people go on suffering and suffering; they don't think about their suffering, they go on asking others how to alleviate the suffering. And others go on supplying them with their advice. And remember, nobody can advise you. His advice may have even been right for him, it may not be right for you. In fact. one thing works only for one person - and once only. It never works again for another person. It does not even work for the same person again. Things go on changing. You cannot live through learned responses; they are reactions. You have to respond to reality anew each moment. You have to respond like a mirror, and you can respond only if you remain like a mirror.

People function like photograph plates: they go on watching whatsoever is available. The mirror never catches anything. It reflects but never possesses anything, never holds anything back. It goes on allowing it to slip by. It is never in any kind of attachment. That is the beauty of meditation - meditation is mirroring. You live, you live a thousand and one things, but you never cling to anything.

When the spring comes you enjoy it, you reflect it, you respond to it. When it is gone, it is gone. You don't look back, you don't cry for it, you don't weep. You don't weep for the spilled milk, you go on moving ahead.

The king did a little thinking and thought, "My first question was wrong. In fact, I was thirsty." But now things became more difficult.

"THIRST NEVER MADE THE EYES WATER..." so true... SAID THE COURTIERS TO ONE ANOTHER. "Who has ever heard that thirst makes anybody's eyes water?" But KINGS ARE OFTEN CAPRICIOUS, AND THEY RAN TO FETCH ROSEWATER, AND SCENTED SYRUPY WINES FIT FOR A KING.

Remember always, your problem has to be solved, not your ego satisfied.

Sometimes you come to me and I can see both things are there. If I solve your problem you are angry with me, because it may not necessarily satisfy your ego. You feel I am hard. In fact, you had come not for the problem. The problem was just an excuse - you had come so that I could satisfy your ego. If I satisfy your ego I am your enemy; that I cannot do. And that is the distinction you have to make.

People ask me sometimes, "How to find that the Master is true?" or "How to find that this Master has REALLY attained?" This is the way to find out: if you go to a Master and he only satisfies your ego, and you feel good in your ego, you can be certain that he is bogus. If he does not satisfy your ego, hits hard, shocks you, SHATTERS you, but tries to solve your problem, you can be certain that you are around a person from where help is possible.

But that is the difficult thing: you will cling around a person who satisfies your ego, and you will avoid the person who shatters your ego. YOU ARE YOUR OWN ENEMY. That's why so many bogus people go on existing as Masters. This is the criterion: a Master has compassion, but is bound to be hard. He cannot go on watering, nourishing your ego, because your ego is your hell. So sometimes it happens that you will go to a certain saint and a certain Master, and you will feel very good because he was so compassionate, so loving. Watch... where is your satisfaction happening?

In your ego? - then avoid. Be where you are going to be shattered and destroyed, because only in your destruction is the possibility for the new to happen.

A real Master is a murderer. He has to murder you.

"THIRST NEVER MADE THE EYES WATER," SAID THE COURTIERS TO ONE ANOTHER. BUT KINGS ARE OFTEN CAPRICIOUS, AND THEY RAN TO FETCH ROSEWATER, AND SCENTED SYRUPY WINES FIT FOR A KING.

THE KING DRANK IT ALL, BUT STILL HE FELT NO BETTER - AND HIS DIGESTION WAS RUINED.

A WISE MAN HAPPENED ALONG IN THE MIDDLE OF THIS CRISIS....

The wise man happens only when you are in the middle of the crisis. He cannot happen otherwise, at no other time. Not that the wise man is unavailable to you; the wise man is always available to you, but you can see the wise man, or there can be a dialogue or any relationship, only when you are in a crisis. Otherwise, who bothers? Who cares? One lives one's life perfectly satisfied, like a pig.

When your problems become so acute, chronic, that there seems to be no solution coming from anywhere, that is the only point where the wise man can happen to you. But still you can miss.

A WISE MAN HAPPENED ALONG IN THE MIDDLE OF THIS CRISIS, AND HE SAID, "HIS MAJESTY NEEDS ORDINARY WATER."

The wise man always has simple answers. His answers are not complicated. His answers are not to satisfy your intellect, his answers are not games of the intellect. He simply says whatsoever is the case. He calls a spade a spade. He uses words only to indicate the reality, not to camouflage it.

The wise man said, "HIS MAJESTY NEEDS ORDINARY WATER." "A KING COULD NEVER DRINK COMMON WATER," SHOUTED THE COURT IN UNISON.

"OF COURSE NOT," SAID THE KING. "AND, IN FACT, I FEEL QUITE INSULTED - BOTH AS A KING BEING OFFERED PLAIN WATER, AND ALSO AS A PATIENT. AFTER ALL, IT MUST BE IMPOSSIBLE THAT SUCH A DREADFUL AND DAILY MORE COMPLICATED AILMENT AS MINE COULD HAVE SUCH A SIMPLE REMEDY. SUCH A CONCEPT IS CONTRARY TO LOGIC, A DISGRACE TO ITS ORIGINATOR, AND AN AFFRONT TO THE SICK."

Now these are your reactions. When you meet a wise man, these are your reactions. Beware of them. This story is the story of a seeker, of somebody who is thirsty. And even when he comes around a clearcut solution, he tends not to listen to it. Not only that - he's enraged, he becomes angry.

The courtiers were, of course... okay, they can be forgiven... they said, "A KING COULD NEVER DRINK COMMON WATER." Their whole purpose there is to help the king's ego. They are right, they are doing their duty. But the king is also foolish. That's how everybody is.

"OF COURSE NOT," SAID THE KING. "AND, IN FACT, I FEEL QUITE INSULTED..."

Have you not felt insulted when a truth has been told to you? Lies are always very consoling.

Friedrich Nietzsche has said that man cannot live without lies. Man needs lies, man cannot bear truth. Truth is unbearable. "Don't disturb people," Nietzsche says. "Let them live in their lies. Lies are good, lies are props to life."

You all live in lies. And when you live in lies a simple truth can shatter your whole house of glass.

You will not accept the truth.

The kings says, "OF COURSE NOT.... AND IN FACT, I FEEL QUITE INSULTED - BOTH AS A KING BEING OFFERED PLAIN WATER, AND ALSO AS A PATIENT.... "

Whenever you go to the doctor, and if the doctor says that there is no illness, nothing to be worried about, you don't feel good. You feel like going to. somebody else, to some other doctor. If the doctor says; "It is all in your mind," you feel offended. You were thinking you have a great disease, and then you go and the doctor says it is just a common cold. Do you like it? In fact, you should like it, but somehow the ego feels offended. The ego is stupid; it wants everything big. Just a common cold?

And you were thinking you are suffering from cancer or something, something REALLY big.

The King was offended. He said, "This is an insult. For such a complicated disease which has been becoming more and more complicated every day, such a simple remedy?"

Always remember, remedies are simple. And only simple remedies help, because truth is simple.

Life is simple, love is simple, God is simple. That's why it is said: those who are simple will know.

By being simple they will fall in tune with the simplicity of the whole. By being simple they will be bridged with the simplicity of existence. That's why Jesus says, "Unless you are like small children, you will not enter into my Kingdom of God."What is so great in a small child? - his innocence, his simplicity. He's uncomplicated. And only when you are uncomplicated like a child, innocent, can you enter into the Kingdom of God. And the Kingdom of God surrounds you. It is here. It is now. But you are complicated. You are hiding behind your complications.

Drop all complexity. Be nude, be in the sun like a tree, and you will know what grandeur is, and you will know what glory is.

Jesus has said to his disciples, "Look at the lilies in the field. Even Solomon in all his glory was not attired as one of these." What is the beauty of a poor lily-flower? - its simplicity, its uncomplicatedness, its oneness.

A complicated person is a crowd. A complicated person is fragmentary; he is many. What is simplicity? When you are one, there is no possibility of being complex. When there is only oneness inside you a silence pervades, a stillness, an innocence. You know nothing. You are full of wonder and awe, but you know nothing. Then anything can reveal the ultimate truth to you. Then any small experience can become the ultimate experience of 'aha!' and the door can open and you can be flooded with reality.

But the king said, "Such a simple remedy? Such a concept is contrary to logic..."

Naturally, it is contrary to logic. "So many doctors have failed, so many wise men of the court have failed, so many remedies have failed. And now here comes this man, and he says, 'Just common water'? So does my court consist of fools? Is my doctor, my personal physician, a fool?"

"SUCH A CONCEPT IS CONTRARY TO LOGIC, A DISGRACE TO ITS ORIGINATOR..."

Because there are only two possibilities: either this wise man is right or the whole court is wrong and the doctor and the king and all his friends are wrong, and all his advisers. That cannot be accepted.

That is too much. It goes against the grain.

"IT IS A DISGRACE TO ITS ORIGINATOR, AND AN AFFRONT TO THE SICK."

THAT IS HOW THE WISE MAN CAME TO BE RENAMED ' THE IDIOT'.

The wise man has always been known as 'The Idiot' - because he behaves in strange ways, he behaves in eccentric ways. They look eccentric because you are accustomed to something else.

The wise man looks like an outsider. He is the only insider! but to you he looks like an outsider. It seems something has gone wrong in him. He looks abnormal. In fact, you are abnormal. Buddha is the norm because he is normal. You are abnormal, you are ill, you are mental; but you have the majority with you. Buddha is alone: you can condemn him and he is helpless, he cannot do anything. He has to accept. If you call him 'The Idiot', he has to accept. He laughs, he smiles at you. But by calling him 'The Idiot', you have prevented yourself from following his advice which could have transformed you, which could have quenched your thirst.

Remember, in the madhouses of the world many people are there who are not really mad but who are more sane than you are - and that is their trouble - who are saner than the sane. That's why they have to be put into a mad asylum; they are dangerous people.

Always the poet, the mystic, the messenger, the one who brings something from the unknown to the earth, has been condemned. If you don't condemn him, you will be transformed by him. That is the meaning of being a disciple. It is simply a gesture from your side that "I will not condemn you.

Sometimes you look mad to me, but I will not act out of that attitude towards you. I will keep that attitude aside. In spite of me, I will follow you." That is the meaning of disciplehood.

If you can find an idiot like Jesus or Buddha, don't miss the opportunity. Go with him, go with him headlong! Go with him all the way, because he is the only hope. And your mind will condemn, and your mind is very logical, and the remedies given by Buddhas are very simple.

Just think of it....

A man came to me. He's a politician, a cabinet minister, and he was suffering from insomnia. And I told him, "You simply sit for one hour and do nothing. Just sit silently doing nothing." He said, "How can sitting help? My problem is very complex! You don't understand my problem. Just sitting like a fool for one hour not doing anything - how can it help?" And he looks logical. But if a politician can sit for one hour silently he will see his stupidity - what he has been doing for twenty-three hours.

I have heard about a Master. A man came to him and he said "What should I do to become wise?"

And the Master said, "You go outside and stand there." And it was raining. And the man said, "But how is this going to help me? Maybe, who knows? Masters are strange." So he went outside, and he stood there, and it poured and poured. And he was completely soaked, and the water was flowing inside his clothes. And after ten minutes he came back and he said, "I have been standing there.

Now what?"

And the Master said, "What happened? Standing there, was any revelation given to you?"

He said, "Revelation? I simply thought that I am looking like a fool!"

The Master said, "This is a great revelation! This is the beginning of wisdom! Now you can start.

You are on the right track. If you know you are a fool, things have started changing already."

But the politician said to me, "It is so simple, sitting for one hour. How can it help?"

In Zen, in Japan, they don't do psychoanalysis. They don't go into very very long analytical processes. A madman is brought to a Zen monastery, he is given a very very faraway cottage, provided with food, taken care of, but nobody says anything to him - just left alone. Nobody talks to him. Even the person who brings food is not allowed to talk to him. He's simply left alone. He can move around the cottage, he can do something in the garden if he wants. Otherwise he is supposed to lie down in the bed and rest and just be there. And what does not happen in three years' psychoanalysis happens in three weeks. Just the man sitting there doing nothing, lying down on the bed or sitting on the lawn or looking at the stars, cools down, slows down. The tension disappears. The tension need not be analyzed; analysis may make it acceptable but can't make it go.

It seems simple. If you tell it to a Freudian, he will think you are talking nonsense - "Such a simple thing. How can it help? Problems are very complicated. Dreams have to be analyzed first, and you have to go deep down into the unconscious." And if you go to a Jungian, then he says you have to go even to the collective unconscious. And if you go to a primal therapist he says, "This won't help.

First you have to go backwards to the primal scream. It will take years!" And all that happens out of all this psychoanalysis, and thinking about it, and dreams, and the past, is that the man by and by becomes fed-up with the whole thing and starts accepting it. He says, "Okay, this is the way I am."

Nothing much happens out of it. Psychoanalysis has been a failure. It will take time for people to understand that it has failed.

But in the East we have been trying a totally different approach, a simple one. Just leave the man alone. Let him relax, let him swim, sit, walk, let him be in his body. Let him be in a situation where he's not expected to do anything. Let him be irresponsibly there; then those three, four weeks become like a womb. He relaxes, he eats, sleeps, takes the bath, and nothing to worry about. And the Zen people say, "Sitting silently, doing nothing, the spring comes and the grass grows by itself."

Life takes care of itself.

My suggestions to you are very simple. Somebody comes and I say, "Dance," and he looks a little offended. He says, "What? I bring such great problems to you, and you simply say 'Dance'? How is this going to help?"

Truth is very simple. If you can dance and dance deeply, so deeply that the dancer disappears in the dance, the problems will change, because in that disappearance of the dancer, the ego will disappear and you will have a look at reality without the ego. That is the only transforming force.

That is the only radical revolution.

Remember, all great truths are simple. Lies are not simple. They cannot afford to be simple, because then you will catch hold of them and you will immediately know this is a lie. The lie has to be very, very sophisticated, slippery; you can't catch hold of it. And it has to be so complex that you can go on and on, round and round in it, and you can never find a door out of it. It has to use jargon, great complicated words.

Truth is as simple as the sun, as these birds singing, as these trees' green. Truth is as simple as the green of the tree, the red of the tree, the gold of the tree. Truth is as simple as "I am here. You are here." Truth is as simple as this moment, this pause between you and me. Truth is as simple as this pause....