... THE MOUNTAIN VALLEY MAKES THE VOICE ECHO; THE EMPTINESS OF THE HEART MAKES THE BUDDHA. WHEN YOU EMPTY THE HEART, THINGS APPEAR AS IN A MIRROR, SHINING THERE WITHOUT DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THEM. LIFE AND DEATH AN ILLUSION, ALL THE BUDDHAS ARE ONE'S OWN BODY. ZEN IS NOT SOMETHING MYSTERIOUS; IT IS JUST HITTING AND PIERCING THROUGH. IF YOU CUT OFF ALL DOUBTS, THE COURSE OF LIFE-AND- DEATH IS CUT OFF...

... DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THEM. LIFE AND DEATH AN ILLUSION, ALL THE BUDDHAS ARE ONE'S OWN BODY. ZEN IS NOT SOMETHING MYSTERIOUS; IT IS JUST HITTING AND PIERCING THROUGH. I am reminded... A great industrialist had imported a totally new, sophisticated machine. It worked so beautifully, a hundred times more productive than the older one, but one day it stopped. Nobody knew what to do. The manufacturers were...

... are finished completely... when you look all around and you don't find yourself -- that is the goal. This beyond is the buddha. IF YOU CUT OFF ALL DOUBTS, THE COURSE OF LIFE-AND-DEATH IS CUT OFF NATURALLY. I ASK YOU ALL: DO YOU SEE IT OR DON'T YOU? -- HOW IN JUNE THE SNOW MELTS FROM THE TOP OF MOUNT FUJI. He is saying that just as in June the snow starts melting from Mount Fuji... so simply, without...

... disappearance is making you the whole universe. Buddha has said, "When I disappeared, I saw stars within me, sun rising, sunset, full- moon nights -- everything within me, not without me. It was my boundary that had been keeping them out. Now the boundary is no more; everything has fallen in. Now I am the whole." At the time of his death the Zen monk, Guin, wrote: ALL DOCTRINES SPLIT ASUNDER ZEN...

... to the heart, because it is finally the heart that is going to decide the caliber of your being, the very growth of your consciousness, and finally the transcendence that leads you and your awareness beyond death. Anything else is simply mundane. What is your commitment? A man of understanding avoids stupid commitments. What is your continuity? - because your father and your forefathers had been...

... loneliness. To avoid loneliness, he creates all kinds of relationships, friendships, organizations, political parties, religions and what not. But the basic thing is that he is very much afraid of being lonely. Loneliness is a black hole, a darkness, a frightening negative state almost like death ... as if you are being swallowed by death itself. To avoid it, you run out and fall into anybody, just to hold...

... understanding. Then only one thing remains: to see whether loneliness is such a thing that you should be afraid of, or if it is just your nature. Then rather than running out and away, you close your eyes and go in. Suddenly the night is over, and a new dawn ... The loneliness transforms into aloneness. Aloneness is your nature. You were born alone, you will die alone. And you are living alone without...

... simply means you will have to relate in a totally new way, which will not create suffering and misery, which will not create conflict, which will not be an effort - directly or indirectly - to dominate the other, to enslave the other. Because it is not out of fear, it is pure life. Out of fear is only death; out of fearlessness grows everything that is beautiful. Just a joke for Nirvano. In her...

... the criminals who had been sentenced to death. Millions of people gathered in Jerusalem and it was a great entertainment to see people crucified - such is the barbarous instinct in the crowd. Governor General Pontius Pilate was perfectly aware that this young man, Jesus, was not a criminal. But the whole crowd of the Jews, their priests, the high priest, were unanimously asking that he should be...

... group. But up to now, this has been the rule: if you are a Christian, then you exist for Christianity - Christianity does not exist for you. If you are a Hindu, then you exist for Hinduism, and if there is a need to die, you will have to die for Hinduism. But Hinduism is neither living for you nor dying for you. Just words, ideologies, fictions, have destroyed the reality. The individual is the only...

... what happened... he never spoke, and until his death he continued to promise, but he could not do anything. If you don't use your intelligence - and every religion wants you not to use your intelligence... their strategy is: believe, have faith. They don't say directly, "Don't use your intelligence;" but in an indirect and in a cunning way, they stop you from using intelligence. If you have...

.... The new man will bring with himself his new ways of seeing things, his new ways of loving, his new ways of living. He will have new tastes - they will not even reflect the old and the dead. "What can we do to create a new beginning?" Please, just don't do it. You are old, anything you will do will remain old. You have to disappear, that's all you can do. You have to die as an ego and you...

... earth, it will be difficult for anybody to destroy it. I believe in the earth. I repeat Zarathustra who said to his disciples, "Never betray the earth." All the religions have betrayed the earth. The earth is the only reality. Everything else talked about by religions is only fiction to distract you. We don't want religions which are interested in a future heaven after death. Our interest is...

... here, now -- before death. What is the point of thinking about after death? This has been the routine because people could not succeed to create something beautiful in life. They started postponing it beyond death because nobody knows what happens beyond death; so it was a very good postponement. I am not for postponing it, not even for tomorrow. Whatever can be done should be done right now. Don't...

... inside you are just empty, hollow. Perhaps this may shake you up, wake you up. Perhaps this may give you the idea to look inside at least one time, whether there is a soul or you have been deceived. And George Gurdjieff helped more people in this century than anybody else, because he created a great longing: "Don't die before you have created a soul; otherwise nothing will survive the death...

... discover that they already have it. They have been told, "You are the very kingdom of God"... and it is so comfortable and so consoling to believe. But then there is no way to seek and search and find whether your hypothetical belief has any truth in it, or is just a hypnotic trick used by the society to keep you unafraid of death, to keep you unafraid of disease, old age, to keep you unafraid...

... most people are born and die; there is no soul that survives. He was telling a compassionate lie. He was not right, but I cannot say that he was telling the lie for any other reason than compassion. It is true you are born with the soul, but it has become such an accepted fact that you don't even look within yourself. Somebody needs to shatter your idea that you are born with a soul, to tell you that...

.... Crystallize your being so that death cannot destroy it. But you are not born with it, you have to create it." The idea of all the religions, although true, has not been helpful; it has become a hindrance. Gurdjieff's compassion is great. All the religions were against him, obviously, because that is the one point they all agree on -- that everybody is born with a soul. But Gurdjieff's point is more...

... because there was no point in living; there was nowhere to go. In a way the conscious mind felt, "This is death." She loved the man so much that without him she could not live. This flashed into her conscious mind, although she did not die - death is not so easy. But she became half dead; she became paralyzed. But everything was conscious. Nothing was repressed. It was a conscious...

... is there - the journey will continue, only the trains change. Death is a kind of change of trains. The Eastern religions are non-convertive. They don't convert anybody; they don't go out of the way to convert somebody. If somebody feels like... tries to understand and wants to enter, even then they are not very enthusiastic. They say, "You understand it; you can do it remaining in your own...

... BE ACCEPTED AND EXPRESSED. WHAT IS THE MECHANISM THAT HAPPENS THEN IN THE CASE OF HYSTERICAL PARALYSIS? YOU HAVE TOLD THE STORY OF THE GIRL WHO BECAME PARALYZED WITH THE SHOCK OF HER HUSBAND'S DEATH. WHEN HER HOUSE CAUGHT FIRE, LIFE RETURNED TO HER LIMBS AND SHE WAS ABLE TO RUN FROM THE HOUSE. PRESUMABLY THERE WAS SUCH A SHOCK TO HER SYSTEM THAT THE UNCONSCIOUS SIMPLY DROPPED THE UNRESOLVED PROBLEM...

... has been used symbolically. Your life energy is also coiled and asleep. But it can become straight; it can become awake, with its full potential actualized. Then you will be transformed. Life and death are only two states of energy. Life means energy functioning, and death means energy nonfunctioning. Life means energy awake; death means energy gone again into sleep. So according to kundalini yoga...

..., the anger will die. If you can go on breathing rhythmically, anger cannot overpower you. In the same way, if you go on breathing rhythmically, sexual passion cannot overpower you. It will be there, but it will not become manifest. No one will know it is there. Not even you will be able to know it. So sex can be suppressed; anger can be suppressed. Through rhythmic breathing you can suppress them so...

... will die through it. One has to come back to the roots. But coming back is difficult, arduous. Kundalini yoga is concerned with life energy and its inward flow. It is concerned with techniques to bring the body and mind to a point where transcendence is possible. Then, everything is changed. The body is different; the mind is different; the living is different. It is just life. A bullock cart is...

... that is old. The old religions, the old political ideologies, the old man - all that is old, you disconnect yourself from it. You start life afresh, from scratch. And unless we prepare humanity to begin life again - a resurrection, a death of the old and a birth of the new... It is very significant to remember that the day Gautam Buddha was born, his mother died; as he was coming out of the womb, his...

... mother was going out of existence. Perhaps this was historical, because he was brought up by his mother's sister - he never saw his mother alive. And now it has become a traditional idea in Buddhism that whenever a buddha is born, his mother dies immediately, his mother cannot survive. I take it as a symbolic and very significant indication. It means the birth of a rebel is the death of the old. The...

... revolutionary tries to change the old; the rebel simply comes out of the old, just as the snake slips out of the old skin, and never looks back. Unless we create such rebellious people around the earth, man has no future. The old man has brought man to his ultimate death. It is the old mind, the old ideologies, the old religions - they have all combined together to bring about this situation of global suicide...

... sometimes they commit suicide they commit it with sleeping pills, just so the husband has to call the doctor and becomes ashamed. And the neighborhood gathers, and humiliates him: "You should not behave so... you are a barbarian!" And the woman does not die. The number of suicides of men is double that of women; the number of murders is twenty times more than those of women. The amount of...

... raining. A man who has gone to commit suicide does not come back because it is raining! What does it matter when you are going to die? But any excuse... and his wife was absolutely certain that there was no need to be alarmed: "In Bengal, no Bengali commits suicide. They talk about it." One day things came to such a great crisis that he told his wife, "You prepare my tiffin." I was...

... FEELINGS OF UNEASINESS AND UPSET, AND THAT ALL KINDS OF THREAT ANIMALS, THIEVES, ROBBERS, MURDERERS, CATASTROPHIES, DEATH AND FRIGHTENING STRANGERS GREATLY DISTURB SLEEPING CHILDREN. MOST CHILDREN, HE SAID, ARE PARALYZED WITH FEAR BY THE DANGERS THEY DREAM ABOUT. I absolutely disagree with this Munich psychologist. In a hurry to criticize Sigmund Freud, he has forgotten that Sigmund Freud was surveying...

... as a criticism of Sigmund Freud's fundamental hypothesis: " ... STIFLING FEELINGS OF UNEASINESS AND UPSET, AND ALL KINDS OF THREAT ANIMALS, THIEVES, ROBBERS, MURDERERS, CATASTROPHIES, DEATH AND FRIGHTENING STRANGERS GREATLY DISTURB SLEEPING CHILDREN." All this is the gift of television. It has nothing to do with Sigmund Freud's fundamental hypothesis; it is still right. But this is how...

... effort. And because every natural human being is bound to become an enlightened person, no recognition is taken of it. It is just as childhood is followed by youth, youth is followed by middle age, middle age is followed by old age and you know that old age is followed by death. It is just a natural sequence. Buddhahood should be a natural sequence. It is not, because of your God and your priest and...

..., "I CAME HERE FOR BUDDHA'S BIRTH CELEBRATIONS, JAMUNA DARSHAN." Buddha's birthday was coming. And Buddha's birthday has a very special coincidence. He was born on the same fullmoon night as he became enlightened, in the same month, on the same fullmoon night, as he died eighty-two years afterwards -- the same month, the same fullmoon night. A strange man -- birth, enlightenment, death, all...

... happened on the same fullmoon night, in the same month of the year. So his birthday is also his enlightenment day. It is also his death celebration. So in a single day all three experiences happened. That's why for Zen the full moon has become something special -- because everything that happened to Buddha happened on the fullmoon night. So in every Zen monastery on the fullmoon night people just sit...

... this is a special, very special night for the people belonging to the small stream of Zen. Shodai said, "I have come here for Buddha's birthdate celebrations." Ma Tzu was a very famous master; Sekito was not that famous. Slowly, slowly he became famous after his death, but Ma Tzu was famous while he was alive -- very famous, because of his strange behavior. Shodai must have thought that on...

... the celebrations of this moon, it would be good to go to Ma Tzu -- something might transpire. So he said, "I have come here to celebrate the birth of Gautam the Buddha." Ma Tzu said, "Buddha has no birth, no death -- Buddha is eternal. Life has no beginning, no end, it is eternal. The very word 'birth' belongs to the world of delusion, because that which is authentic in you is never...

... born. It has been coming from one house to another house, from one body to another body, but it is eternal in itself. So no birth, no death happens to it. It happens only to the outside of the house, which becomes tattered so it has to be renewed, or else you have to move into a new house." Ma Tzu said, "Buddha has no birth, no death. The very idea of birth and death is delusion. YOU ARE...

...?" All the way coming back he must have been thinking, "Ma Tzu said there is no birth of the buddha and no death of the buddha. Then what is the buddha?" The buddha is equivalent to awakened life. SEKITO REPLIED, "THERE IS NO BUDDHA NATURE IN YOU." SHODAI ASKED, "WHAT ABOUT ALL LIVING BEINGS?" SEKITO REPLIED, "THEY HAVE BUDDHA NATURE." Sekito was strange in...

... years old," replies Sally. "Well, that is nice," says Fever. "And do you know who made you, Sally-Jane?" Little Sally hesitates for a moment, and then says, "Shit! Mom did tell me, but I have forgotten the guy's name!" Late one evening on the little Greek island of Crete, old Mrs. Lilypopolis is weeping into her black handkerchief, mourning the recent death of her...

...; "I want to know," says old lady Lilypopolis, "when I die, will I go to heaven -- I mean my Christian heaven -- to be reunited with my friends, Mrs. Souvlaki, Mrs. Theocrapolis and Mrs. Acreepolis, in the glory of eternal paradise?" After some time in a deep trance, Madam Goggle opens her eyes and speaks, "I have asked the sacred ones if you will go to heaven," moans Madam...

... and half dead? It is worse than death. It is better to die once and for all than to die piecemeal. So choose the paradox. Don't choose the alternatives that the paradox has given to you. Choose the whole paradox. Say, 'I will remain free and I will love.' It will be hard, it is going to be arduous - all growth is. It is an uphill task, and the higher you move, the greater challenges are going to...

.... And this is not only a new skill. It is learning a new being. It is going to be hard. The old has to die for the new to be born. The old has to go for the new to come. If you go on clinging to the old, there is nowhere for the new to come in. So if you like your likings very much and you are perfectly happy, then I will not create any trouble for you. Just feel your own way and whatsoever you feel...