... without surrendering? Why can't we meditate and listen to you and be benefitted as much as we want? What is the point of surrendering?' They don't understand. In the beginning it may not look very relevant. Why? For what? You can listen to me without surrendering and you can meditate here without surrendering. You can pass through growth groups without surrendering. It seems perfectly okay. Surrendering...

.... Right now you are a greyish mass. Meditate over this story, and meditate over the seven valleys. Let me repeat it again: man is a paradox. Man is the only being who tries to surpass himself. Man is the only being who has a great longing to transcend. This is man's glory, because this is God's gift to man; and this is man's anguish too. Now it depends on you whether you will make it into a blessing or...

... again the boredom will be coming, and again and again it will be more and more loud. You can escape in sex, in eating too much, in music - in a thousand and one kinds of things you can escape. But again and again the boredom will arise. It is not something that can be avoided; it is part of human growth. It has to be faced. The other response is to face it, to meditate on it, to be with it, to be it...

..., you have to drink the same tea, and you have to sit.... The same gestures followed again and again. And the whole day is also a very very fixed routine: you will eat your breakfast at a certain time, then you will meditate again, then you will have your food at a certain time - and the same food! Everything helps boredom. And the same clothes, and the same monastery, and the same master every day...

... with his stick walking around. And every day in the evening you have to go for a session with the master. And the questions that are given are such boring questions to meditate on: What is the sound of one hand clapping? Just think of it - it will drive you mad! What is the sound of one hand clapping? There is no answer to it, you know it; everybody knows there is no answer to it. And the master goes...

... one has to meditate over it. There is no way to escape from it. Then go into it. See where it leads. And if you can keep going into it, it leads into enlightenment. Only man is capable of boredom, and only man is capable of enlightenment. The second question Question 2: IT SEEMS THAT THOUGH THE SOCIETY IS AT PRESENT REJECTING YOU, BY AND BY IT WILL ACCEPT YOU. Please comment. SIDDHARTHA, why are you...

... FAITH HE IS A TRUE SEEKER. A NOBLE HORSE RARELY FEELS THE TOUCH OF THE WHIP. WHO IS THERE IN THIS WORLD AS BLAMELESS? THEN LIKE A NOBLE HORSE SMART UNDER THE WHIP, BURN AND BE SWIFT. BELIEVE, MEDITATE, SEE. BE HARMLESS, BE BLAMELESS. AWAKE TO THE LAW. AND FROM ALL SORROW FREE YOURSELF. THE FARMER CHANNELS WATER TO HIS LAND. THE FLETCHER WHITTLES HIS ARROWS. THE CARPENTER TURNS HIS WOOD. AND THE WISE...

... your ego. It burns your greed, it burns your possessiveness, it burns your jealousy - it burns all that is wrong and negative, and it enhances all that is beautiful, graceful, divine. And when the gross and the ugly are burned, a great sharpness happens to your being, a great swiftness comes to your life, a great intensity and passion, a great totality and wholeness. BELIEVE, MEDITATE, SEE. Let me...

... remind you again: don't read "believe," read "trust": Trust, MEDITATE, SEE. These are the three steps, simple, very simple. The first thing is trust: have a loving trust for all that is, then meditation becomes easy because you can relax. The person who trusts can relax into existence. The person who cannot trust remains tense, remains anxious, afraid. The person who trusts can melt...

... poetry, it can't have any joy, it can't have any ecstasy. And ecstasy, joy, is your birthright - but you can have it only when you attain to this worth, to this worthiness. Become aware, trust, start seeing - drop all beliefs and all doubts, and the goal is not far away. You need not go anywhere. If you can trust, meditate, see, if you can awaken to the eternal law, you are the master - not the master...

... STILLNESS OF MEDITATION. And meditation in the East is not what is understood in the West by the word. In the West, meditation means contemplation: meditating on God, meditating on truth, meditating on love. People ask me sometimes, "You tell us to meditate, but on what?" If you meditate ON something, you are not meditating at all, because you are again focused on something outside of yourself...

... thought moving inside you there is stillness; that stillness is meditation. Not even a ripple arises in the lake of your consciousness; that silent lake, absolutely still, that is meditation. And in that meditation you will know - you will know what truth is, you will know what love is, you will know what God is. Not by meditating on God.... See the point: how can you meditate on God? You don't know...

... anything about God. All your meditation is going to be just imagination, an exercise of imagination. You don't know truth - what are you going to meditate upon? Some idea given by others, some belief, some concept! It is not going to help. Buddha's way is: first become meditation, and then in meditation, truth, God, love, and all that is transcendental will be revealed to you. Meditation opens the eye...

..., nobody has ever been able to make somebody happy. But the king was mad and he might kill. The physician said 'I will have to meditate, Sire, and consult the scriptures. Tomorrow morning I will come.' And he meditated the whole night and in the morning he came upon the conclusion: 'It is very simple.' He had consulted the books, but happiness was not mentioned in the medical books. The problem was...

... koan: the disciple has to meditate on it. The parable says nothing. it ends abruptly. Now the disciple has to work it out. Now he has to meditate, he has to be aware of death. of life. of love, of this and that. And he has to meditate on the fact: Who is really happy? Are you happy by being just alive? You are not; the whole world is so miserable. So one thing can be deduced, and can be deduced...

... mind becomes more restless, you see more thoughts coming than in your ordinary day-to-day life. Working in your shop, in the office, in the factory, thoughts don't bother you so much; but when you sit in a temple or in a mosque or a church to meditate for a few minutes, suddenly a great crowd of thoughts comes, surrounds you, starts pulling you to this side and to that. A maddening experience, and...

..., completely unoccupied, with the outer engagements and your full observation is focused on your inner world. In the beginning you will see you have opened a Pandora's box. In the beginning you will see you have entered into a madhouse, and you will want to escape and become engaged again. Avoid that temptation. To avoid this temptation is a must, otherwise you will never be able to meditate. Many tricks...

... have been found to avoid the inner turmoil. Transcendental Meditation is a technique not of meditation but of avoiding facing your inner reality. A mantra is given to you and you are told to repeat the mantra. That helps - not to meditate but to remain occupied. You go on repeating, 'Ram, Ram, Ram...' or 'Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola...'. You go on repeating something - any word will do, your own...

... of food up to now and you have been fasting, the mind will create such beautiful, delicious dishes for you. The aroma, the smell of the food... and you are distracted. Hence one of my insistences for my sannyasins is: don't repress, otherwise you will never be able to meditate. If you repress, then in meditation you will have to encounter your repression. And whatsoever you have repressed becomes...

... mean when I say it is more complete? Now it is a growing phenomenon, it does not put a full stop. Before there was a full stop, it was a finished product; you could not have added anything to it. It didn't leave anything for you to meditate upon. But just 'the sound', and it opens a door. There is no full stop anymore. It becomes a quest. So now it is more complete but less perfect. Now it is utterly...

... complete, complete in the sense that it is growing. Now it is a tree growing, unpredictable. Now each one has to meditate over it. And this became one of the great meditations for the seekers who were to follow Baso. Now it has more beauty than before. Always remember, anything complete, anything absolutely complete, loses something from it - it becomes dead. All the great painters know this. And the...

... sound Still later, he dropped a few more things. Now it became, The old pond Frog jumps in Plop! Now this is getting to the crescendo: just 'plop!' This is truer - truer to the frog, truer to the pond, truer to reality. The reality knows only 'plop!' and it simply leaves you there - to wonder, to inquire, to meditate. Somebody asked Baso, "Why have you dropped the words 'of water' and finally...

... gathering there. It is going upwards. Just the other day somebody had asked a question. He said that he has seen the most beautiful women around here that he has ever seen anywhere else, but they are non-erotic. Why is it so? It is so, his observation is right. If you meditate deeply you will become non-erotic. You will have a different kind of beauty, but it will not be erotic. It will start having the...

..., meditate, become aware what has happened. Ordinarily we do it, but we do for wrong reasons. We do it to put our image back in its right place. You always think you are a very loving person, compassionate, and then you suddenly become angry. Now your image is distorted in your own eyes. You do a sort of repentance. You go to the person and you say, 'I am sorry.' What are you doing? You are repainting your...

... your boss, now you become afraid. Now you start thinking he may throw you out, or he may carry the anger within him. Your salary was going to be raised; he may not raise it - a thousand and one things... you would like to put things right. When Buddha says repent, he's not telling you to function from C or P or A. He is saying when you become aware, sit down, close your eyes, meditate upon the whole...

... illness. That is dangerous; you are on a suicidal path. If there has been anger, there has been greed, there has been something that happens only when you are unconscious, recognize it - the sooner you do it the better. Meditate upon it. Move to your center and respond from the center. IF A MAN WHO HAS COMMITTED A MISDEMEANOUR COME TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF IT, REFORM HIMSELF AND PRACTISE GOODNESS, THE FORCE...

... you have done, by and by thinking too much about wrongs that you have done, you will be giving too much food to them. To give attention is to give food, to give attention means to play with the wound. Take note, be mindful, meditate, but don't play with the wound. Otherwise you will be making the wound again and again more alive. It will start bleeding. So don't become too much concerned about your...

... no thinker. If you really want to understand it you will have to meditate deeply and come to a point where thinking disappears. The moment thinking disappears you will be surprised - the thinker is also gone. With thinking, the thinker also disappears. It was just an appearance of moving thoughts. You see a river. Does a river really exist, or is it just a movement? If you take the movement out...

... universe must have a self. Because you have a self, the whole universe must have a supreme self. That supreme self is god. Buddha says you don't have any self. The universe is, but there is no supreme self in it... millions of processes, but no supreme self. There is no center to it; it is all circumference. Very difficult to catch hold of it - unless you meditate. That's why Buddha never goes into...

... metaphysical discussions; he says, 'Meditate.' Because in meditation these things become so clear. When thinking stops, suddenly you see the thinker has disappeared. It was a shadow. And when the thinker disappears, how can you say, how can you feel 'I am'? There is no 'I' left, you are pure space. That's what Buddha calls anatta, the pure space of no self. It is a tremendous experience. ... YET IN THE NEXT...

... are reborn. You can see it clearly, it is absurd. If you don't exist how can you be reborn? And he says, 'That I don't know. You don't exist and you are reborn - that much I know, that I have come to see, that I have seen. And if you want to see it, meditate. Go deeper into your being as I have gone into my being and you will also be puzzled, very much confused. But by and by you will settle with...

... the factory and work in the shop, but just to have time, opportunity, to play. Don't let your life be reduced into just a working routine. Because the goal of life is play. Play means doing something for its own sake. You come to me even to meditate, and you take meditation also as work. You think something has to be done to achieve god. It is nonsense. Meditation cannot be done that way. You have...

... out, who knows whether the breath will come back or not? It is not certain, there is no guarantee. But there are a few people whose whole religion is security. Even if they talk about god, they talk about god as the supreme security. If they think about god, they think only because they are afraid. If they go to pray and meditate, they are going just in order that they remain in the good books - in...

... sometimes. Once a young man came to me. He was a good runner, a champion runner, and he asked me how to meditate, and he was so bubbling with energy. He was a great runner, and he said, 'When I sit, and you tell me to sit silently, I cannot sit; the energy is so much. Is there any possibility for me to ever become meditative?' I said, 'You forget about meditation. You run, and you drop yourself in running...

... asked for it. It is from papa.' If you go on repressing, then it will become uglier and uglier. And in old age all your repressions become very strong - because you become weak and your repressions take revenge. I am not saying to repress. I am saying understand. Only if understanding can help, then it is good. And understanding helps. Meditate on your sexuality. See it through and through. Let it...