Step aside, let the mind pass

Question 1:

The basic thing to be understood is that you are not the mind -- neither the bright one nor the dark one. If you get identified with the beautiful part, then it is impossible to disidentify yourself from the ugly part; they are two sides of the same coin. You can have it whole, or you can throw it away whole, but you cannot divide it.

And the whole anxiety of man is that he wants to choose that which looks beautiful, bright; he wants to choose all the silver linings, leaving the dark cloud behind. But he does not know that silver linings cannot exist without the dark cloud. The dark cloud is the background, absolutely necessary for silver linings to show.

Choosing is anxiety.

Choosing is creating trouble for yourself.

Being choiceless means: the mind is there and it has a dark side and it has a bright side -- so what? What has it to do with you? Why should you be worried about it?

The moment you are not choosing, all worry disappears. A great acceptance arises, that this is how the mind has to be, this is the nature of the mind -- and it is not your problem, because you are not the mind. If you were the mind, there would have been no problem at all. Then who would choose and who would think of transcending? And who would try to accept and understand acceptance?

You are separate, totally separate.

You are only a witness and nothing else.

But you are being an observer who gets identified with anything that he finds pleasant -- and forgets that the unpleasant is coming just behind it as a shadow. You are not troubled by the pleasant side -- you rejoice in it. The trouble comes when the polar opposite asserts -- then you are torn apart.

But you started the whole trouble. Falling from being just a witness, you became identified. The biblical story of the fall is just a fiction. But this is the real fall -- the fall from being a witness into getting identified with something and losing your witnessing.

Just try once in a while: Let the mind be whatever it is. Remember, you are not it. And you are going to have a great surprise. As you are less identified, the mind starts becoming less powerful, because its power comes from your identification; it sucks your blood. But when you start standing aloof and away, the mind starts shrinking.

The day you are completely unidentified with the mind, even for a single moment, there is the revelation: mind simply dies; it is no longer there. Where it was so full, where it was so continuous -- day in, day out, waking, sleeping, it was there -- suddenly it is not there. You look all around and it is emptiness, it is nothingness.

And with the mind disappears the self. Then there is only a certain quality of awareness, with no "I" in it. At the most you can call it something similar to "am-ness," but not "I- ness." To be even more exact, it is "is-ness" because even in am-ness some shadow of the "I" is still there. The moment you know its is-ness, it has become universal.

With the disappearance of the mind disappears the self. And so many things disappear which were so important to you, so troublesome to you. You were trying to solve them and they were becoming more and more complicated; everything was a problem, an anxiety, and there seemed to be no way out.

I remind you of the story The Goose is Out. It is concerned with the mind and your is- ness.

The master tells the disciple to meditate on a koan: A small goose is put into a bottle, fed and nourished. The goose goes on becoming bigger and bigger and bigger, and fills the whole bottle. Now it is too big; it cannot come out of the bottle's mouth -- the mouth is too small. And the koan is that you have to bring the goose out without destroying the bottle, without killing the goose.

Now it is mind-boggling.

What can you do? The goose is too big; you cannot take it out unless you break the bottle, but that is not allowed. Or you can bring it out by killing it; then you don't care whether it comes out alive or dead. That is not allowed either.

Day in, day out, the disciple meditates, finds no way, thinks this way and that way -- but in fact there is no way. Tired, utterly exhausted, a sudden revelation... suddenly he understands that the master cannot be interested in the bottle and the goose; they must represent something else. The bottle is the mind, you are the goose... and with witnessing, it is possible. Without being in the mind, you can become identified with it so much that you start feeling you are in it!

He runs to the master to say that the goose is out. And the master says, "You have understood it. Now keep it out. It has never been in."

If you go on struggling with the goose and the bottle, there is no way for you to solve it.

It is the realization that, "It must represent something else; otherwise the master cannot give it to me. And what can it be?" -- because the whole function between the master and the disciple, the whole business is about the mind and awareness.

Awareness is the goose which is not in the bottle of the mind. But you are believing that it is in it and asking everyone how to get it out. And there are idiots who will help you, with techniques, to get out of it. I call them idiots because they have not understood the thing at all.

The goose is out, has never been in, so the question of bringing it out does not arise.

Mind is just a procession of thoughts passing in front of you on the screen of the brain.

You are an observer. But you start getting identified with beautiful things -- those are bribes. And once you get caught in the beautiful things you are also caught in the ugly things, because mind cannot exist without duality.

Awareness cannot exist with duality, and mind cannot exist without duality.

Awareness is non-dual, and mind is dual.

So just watch. I don't teach you any solutions. I teach you the solution:

Just get back a little and watch.

Create a distance between you and your mind.

Whether it is good, beautiful, delicious, something that you would like to enjoy closely, or it is ugly -- remain as far away as possible. Look at it just the way you look at a film.

But people get identified even with films.

I have seen, when I was young... I have not seen any movie for a long time. But I have seen people weeping, tears coming down -- and nothing is happening! It is good that in a movie house it is dark; it saves them from feeling embarrassed. I used to ask my father, "Did you see? The fellow by your side was crying!"

He said, "The whole hall was crying. The scene was such..."

"But," I said, "there is only a screen and nothing else. Nobody is killed, there is no tragedy happening -- just a projection of a film, just pictures moving on the screen. And people laugh, and people weep, and for three hours they are almost lost. They become part of the movie, they become identified with some character..."

My father said to me, "If you are raising questions about people's reactions then you cannot enjoy the film."

I said, "I can enjoy the film, but I don't want to cry; I don't see any enjoyment in it. I can see it as a film, but I don't want to become a part of it. These people are all becoming a part of it."

My grandfather had an old barber who was an opium addict. For something which was possible to do in five minutes he would take two hours, and he would talk continuously.

But they were old friends from their childhood. I can still see my grandfather sitting in the chair of the old barber... And he was a lovely talker. These opium addicts have a certain quality, a beauty of talking, telling stories about themselves, what is happening day-to-day; it is true.

My grandfather would simply be saying, "Yes, right, that's great..."

I said to him one day, "About everything you go on saying, `Yes, right, it is great.'

Sometimes he is talking nonsense, simply irrelevant."

He said, "What do you want? That man is an opium addict..."

In India razor blades are not used; things almost like six-inch long knives are used as razor blades. "Now what do you want me to say? -- with that man who has a knife, a sharp knife in his hand, just on my throat. To say no to him... he will kill me! And he knows it. He sometimes tells me, `You never say no. You always say yes, you always say great.' And I have told him, `You should understand that you are always under the influence of opium. It is impossible to talk with you, to discuss with you or to disagree with you. You have a knife on my throat, and you want me to say no to something?'" I said, "Then why don't you change from this man? There are so many other barbers, and this man takes two hours for a five-minute job. Sometimes he takes half your beard and then he says, `I am coming back, you sit.' And he is gone for an hour, because he gets involved in a discussion with somebody and forgets completely that a customer is sitting in his chair. Then he comes and says, `My God, so you are still sitting here?'" And my grandfather would say, "What can I do? I cannot go home with half the beard shaved. You just complete it. Where have you been?"

The barber would say, "I got in such a good argument with somebody that I completely forgot about you. It is good that that man had to go; otherwise you would have been sitting here the whole day. And sometimes I don't even close the shop at night. I simply go home, just forget to close, and once in a while a customer is still sitting in the chair and I am sleeping. Somebody has to say to him, `Now you can go; that man will not be seen again before tomorrow morning. He is fast asleep in his home. He has forgotten to close his shop and he has forgotten about you.'" And if you were angry... Sometimes new people got into his shop, and became angry. He would say, "Calm down. At the most you need not pay me. I have cut only half of the beard; you can just go. I don't want to argue. You need not pay me; I don't ask even half payment."

But nobody can leave his chair with half the beard shaved -- or half the head shaved! You ask him just to shave the beard and he starts shaving your head, and by the time you notice, he has already done the job. So he asks you, "Now what do you want? -- because almost one-fourth of the work is done. If you want to keep it this way I can leave it; otherwise I can finish it. But I will not charge for it because if you say that you never wanted it to be cut, then it is my fault and I should take the punishment. I will not charge you."

This man was dangerous! But my grandfather used to say, "He is dangerous but he is lovely and I have become so much identified with him that I cannot conceive that if he dies before me I will be able to go to another barber's shop. I cannot conceive... for my whole life he has been my barber. The identity has become so deep that I may stop shaving my beard, but I cannot change my barber."

But fortunately my grandfather died before the opium-addict barber.

You get identified with anything. People get identified with persons and then they create misery for themselves. They get identified with things, then they get miserable if that thing is missing.

Identification is the root cause of your misery. And every identification is identification with the mind.

Just step aside, let the mind pass.

And soon you will be able to see that there is no problem at all -- the goose is out. You don't have to break the bottle, you don't have to kill the goose either.

Question 2:

It is the same question that I was just answering. All your fears are by-products of identification.

You love a woman and with the love, in the same parcel comes fear: she may leave you -- she has already left somebody and come with you. There is a precedent; perhaps she will do the same to you. There is fear, you feel knots in the stomach. You are too much attached.

You cannot get a simple fact: you have come alone in the world; you have been here yesterday also, without this woman, perfectly well, without any knots in the stomach.

And tomorrow if this woman goes... what is the need of the knots? You know how to be without her, and you will be able to be without her.

The fear that things may change tomorrow... Somebody may die, you may go bankrupt, your job may be taken away. There are a thousand and one things which may change.

You are burdened with fears and fears, and none of them are valid -- because yesterday also you were full of all these fears, unnecessarily. Things may have changed, but you are still alive. And man has an immense capacity to adjust himself in any situation.

They say that only man and cockroaches have this immense capacity of adjustment.

That's why wherever you find man you will find cockroaches, and wherever you find cockroaches you will find man. They go together, they have a similarity. Even in faraway places like the North Pole or the South Pole... When man traveled to those places he suddenly found that he had brought cockroaches with him, and they were perfectly healthy and living and reproducing.

If you just look around the earth you can see -- man lives in thousands of different climates, geographical situations, political situations, sociological situations, religious situations, but he manages to live. And he has lived for centuries... things go on changing, he goes on adjusting himself.

There is nothing to fear. Even if the world ends, so what? You will be ending with it. Do you think you will be standing on an island and the whole world will end, leaving you alone? Don't be worried. At least you will have a few cockroaches with you!

What is the problem if the world ends? It has been asked to me many times. But what is the problem? -- if it ends, it ends. It does not create any problem because we will not be here; we will be ending with it, and there will be no one to worry about. It will be really the greatest freedom from fear.

The world ending means every problem ending, every disturbance ending, every knot in your stomach ending. I don't see the problem. But I know that everybody is full of fear.

But the question is the same: the fear is part of the mind. The mind is a coward, and has to be a coward because it doesn't have any substance -- it is empty and hollow, and it is afraid of everything. And basically it is afraid that one day you may become aware. That will be really the end of the world!

Not the end of the world but your becoming aware, your coming to a state of meditation where mind has to disappear -- that is its basic fear. Because of that fear it keeps people away from meditation, makes them enemies of people like me who are trying to spread something of meditation, some way of awareness and witnessing. They become antagonistic to me -- not without any reason; their fear is well-founded.

They may not be aware of it, but their mind is really afraid to come close to anything that can create more awareness. That will be the beginning of the end of the mind. That will be the death of the mind.

But for you there is no fear. The death of the mind will be your rebirth, your beginning to really live. You should be happy, you should rejoice in the death of the mind, because nothing can be a greater freedom. Nothing else can give you wings to fly into the sky; nothing else can make the whole sky yours.

Mind is a prison.

Awareness is getting out of the prison -- or realizing it has never been in the prison; it was just thinking that it was in the prison. All fears disappear.

I am also living in the same world, but I have never felt for a single moment any fear because nothing can be taken away from me. I can be killed -- but I will be seeing it happening, so what is being killed is not me, is not my awareness.

The greatest discovery in life, the most precious treasure, is of awareness. Without it you are bound to be in darkness, full of fears. And you will go on creating new fears -- there is no end to it. You will live in fear, you will die in fear, and you will never be able to taste something of freedom. And it was all the time your potential; any moment you could have claimed it, but you never claimed it.

It is your responsibility.

Question 3:

Death, if it happens with enlightenment, is a tremendous experience. On the one hand the man dies; on the other hand he achieves the totality of life.

When I touched my father's seventh chakra, just on the top of the head, those who were perceptive, silent, meditative, may have experienced something strange happening.

According to the centuries-old science of inner reality, a man's life energy is released from the center, the chakra, at which he was living.

Most people die from the lowest chakra, the sex center. There are seven chakras in the body from where life can go out of the body. The last is on top of the head, and unless you are enlightened life cannot go out from that chakra.

When I touched my father's seventh chakra, it was still warm. Life had left it, but it was as if the physical part of the chakra was still throbbing with the tremendous happening.

It is a rare happening. And in that moment it may have appeared to many that the small section on the podium where I was with my father's body was in a different world. It was, in a sense, because it was on a different level. Just by his feet was my mother... and ten thousand sannyasins in Buddha Hall -- that was the normal world.

But something abnormal had happened. The chakra was still warm, the body was as if it was still rejoicing in the phenomenon. If you had eyes to see, then this distinction was bound to be seen.

It is good that it came to your vision, the difference. It is a difference of levels. The lowest is where most people are living, and the effort here is, in this mystery school, to bring everybody to the highest.

Slowly, slowly, moving from one center into another, you will also feel within your body a few things. For example, if you are existing at the sex center, you will find a subtle division -- below the lower center and above the lower center. You can feel it, that in the body below it and the body above it there seems to be a division, because the lower body has no centers, no chakras. It is the same for anybody. Wherever he is, the body below the sex center remains the same; it is our roots in the earth.

But if your center changes, comes to a higher level -- for example if your heart becomes your very life -- you will see again that below your heart the whole body is separate, and above the heart the whole body is separate. Wherever your energy is there will be a separation line.

When you reach to the seventh chakra, then the whole body is below it and there is no division. The seventh chakra is only in a sense in the body; otherwise it is above the body, as if a line touching your head is pulsing. Your whole body will become one, and for the first time you will see there are no divisions -- and this you can watch.

With each chakra coming into function, your actions will change, your responses will change, your dreams will change, your aspirations will change, your whole personality will go through a change. As you move higher, newer dimensions start happening which were not available to you before.

For example, the heart center is almost in the middle; three centers are above it and three centers are below it. The man of the heart will be the most balanced man. In his actions, in his feelings, in everything he does he will find a subtle balance, an equilibrium. He will never be hectic; there will be a grace.

In other words, he has found the center of his life, exactly the middle path. You will not see any extremes in him, and because all extremes have disappeared from his life he will have a balanced view of everything. He will not be rightist, he will not be leftist; he will always be fair and just.

If the world was run according to me, then I would choose as magistrates and judges only people who are at their heart center, because only they can be just and fair. It is not a question of intellectual qualifications or seniority; it is a question of your inner balance.

The Sufi story is.... Mulla Nasruddin is chosen an honorary magistrate. The first case appears. He hears one side and declares to the court, "Within five minutes I will be back with the judgment."

The court clerk could not believe it -- he has not heard the other side! The clerk whispered in his ear, "What are you doing? Don't you see a simple thing? You have heard only one party, one side. The other side is waiting, and without hearing them you cannot give any judgment."

Mulla Nasruddin said, "Don't try to confuse me. Just now I am absolutely clear. If I hear the other side too, then there is bound to be confusion."

These Sufi stories are not just ordinary stories, they are extraordinary. It is saying that every judge is listening only to one side because he already has a prejudiced mind; he is not capable of listening to both sides. For that a totally different kind of man is needed -- which no educationalist concerning law and jurisprudence has even thought about.

No one thinks -- you ask the judge to be fair, but his mind is prejudiced. He cannot even hear both stories, both sides, with the same clarity -- impossible. He only pretends. In all the courts of the world there are pretensions.

And now that I have been in the courts I can see, and say with absolute authority that they don't listen to both sides. They can't! I am not complaining: I am simply stating a fact.

Their education is wrong.

As you go above the heart center, new things that may not have ever been a part of your life start happening. The second chakra above the heart is the throat. If that chakra has your life energy, then whatever you say has a deep authority in it. Without any effort to convert anybody, it converts, because it convinces.

The chakra above that is the most famous and well-known -- the one on the forehead between the two eyes. That kind of energy moving through the agnya chakra, the sixth, has a deep hypnotic influence. It is managed... the person is not doing anything; it simply happens, his eyes become so full of some unknown magnetism.

The man with the seventh chakra open has the capacity, the intrinsic flowering, so that his presence becomes infectious. Below the seventh, the presence is not infectious; with the seventh chakra opening, it is as if the consciousness has blossomed and there is a fragrance, an aura.

Whoever is available to this presence, to this aura, will feel the freshness of a breeze, the freshness after a shower. And many rotten things -- rubbish that you have been entangled in, fighting -- will simply disappear from your life. Just a touch from this kind of man will be a transformation.

But that evening something was transpiring, and what you noted was an energy phenomenon; many others must have noted the same.

I answer such questions in order for you to become aware of your own situation and start moving upwards.

Question 4:

There is no one to surprise or to be surprised.

I am as absent as I will be when I will be dead, with only one difference... that right now my absence has a body, and then, my absence will not have a body.