Laughter: love, joy, gratitude

The first question:

Question 1:

Vimalkirti, it certainly is a joke, but you cannot get it. You are German, and not only an ordinary German - you are the great-grandchild of the German emperor! Just think of the old man in his grave: he must be tossing and turning, seeing you in orange, cleaning floors in Poona! What do you think? - is it not a joke? Could your great-grandfather ever have imagined or dreamed that this was going to happen to his own children one day? Impossible that he would have ever dreamed about it - but it has happened.

You have been told for centuries that life is a serious affair; it has become a deep conditioning. Otherwise life is really a joke. It is playfulness, it is LEELA. It all depends on how you take it. If you take it seriously it becomes serious, but then you suffer - you suffer from your own idea. Life becomes heavy, it becomes a weight, a mountain on your chest; you are crushed underneath it. Life loses all joy, all laughter. You simply drag, you don't live. How can one live without laughter?

It is man who is the only animal on earth who knows how to laugh. Laughter is the only thing that is special to human beings, not reason but laughter. Animals can also reason - - they reason in their own way - but they cannot joke, they cannot laugh, they cannot see the humorous side; that is impossible for them. All animals are serious people and all serious people are animals! The moment you get rid of your seriousness you get rid of your animality.

Hence I have no respect for your saints. They are very serious, far more serious than the donkeys, far more serious than the buffaloes. They have fallen, they have not risen.

Your saints are serious, your politicians are serious, your revolutionaries are serious, your scientists are serious. They are all taking life as if somehow one has to pass through it - not dance. The very concept of dance is far away from them. They cannot even walk, they drag. They don't live, they only slowly die. They are all waiting for death to relieve them of the pain and the suffering of life.

It is very rare to find a human being who has not contemplated committing suicide once or twice. On average, four times in his life every human being thinks of committing suicide. He does not do it, that is another matter. Maybe he has no guts to do it, maybe he is afraid of what is going to happen after death. Who knows? It may be far worse than life itself. At least life is known, familiar; it is risky to move into the unknown.

Indians don't commit suicide much because they believe that they will be sent back again, so what is the point? - millions of times you have to be born. All Indian religions seek and search not for God, remember, but for freedom from life, freedom from the circle of birth and death. How can these people rejoice and how can these people be thankful to God? They are complaining and their complaining is very loud. They are saying, "We don't want to be born. We never wanted to be born. Why didn't you ask us first? It is unfair! It is not a gift, it is unfair to send us into a life which we had never asked for. And it is unfair to go on sending us into a life which is nothing but misery."

But life is not misery. It is our approach, it is our way of looking at it that has made it ugly. Our vision is distorted, not life itself. Our mirror is distorted, not life itself.

Because our mirror is distorted, life appears distorted.

Vimalkirti, to me it is all a joke. And I am not joking - I am really serious about it!

You say, "But I don't get it."

I have heard that in Germany people are not allowed to tell jokes on Saturday evenings.

Why? - because they might burst out laughing in church on Sunday morning. It takes time for them to understand! And you are the great-grandchild of the German emperor, it may take a little longer for you! But if you are here you are bound to get it. Don't be worried. Life is so full of hilarious moments that it is almost impossible to miss them. It is a miracle how people go on missing them; otherwise you will come across jokes everywhere.

When Winston Churchill was appointed prime minister for the first time - he was tired from the election campaign and all the politics that had gone before and all the struggle to reach the top - his wife thought it would be good to call a friend who knew many beautiful jokes so he could tell a few jokes to Winston Churchill. "That will relax him, help him to laugh a little. He has been so serious for so many days and he looks so tired."

The friend was called; he came with all the latest jokes. He asked Winston Churchill, "Would you like to know the latest jokes?"

Churchill looked at him and said, "Please, no more - I have appointed them all in my cabinet!"

If you look around, if you are watchful enough, then you are bound to stumble again into something so beautiful and so ridiculous. The very idea of creating the world and creating you all is such a cosmic joke! God must have a sense of humor.

An old rabbi was dying and somebody asked him... because they were afraid for the old rabbi. He was not very religious, not very virtuous; in fact, he was just the opposite.

They were worried. They asked him, "Are you ready to meet God?"

He opened his eyes and said, "Yes, that's what I am doing - I am just trying to remember a few beautiful jokes to tell him. He must be getting tired of all those long faces, sad saints. He will really enjoy a few jokes, a few gossips about the earth."

And I absolutely agree with this old rabbi. If you meet God, don't fall on your knees and start praying - he is tired of all that! Tell him a beautiful joke. That will be a deeper communion with him. Let him have a good laugh. In that laughter there will be a revelation.

Vimalkirti, a few jokes for you:

Karpuik was rushed to the emergency room of the city hospital. The doctor on duty was amazed to discover that Karpuik had scalded his scrotum. "How did it happen?" he asked.

"I was making tea," replied the Polack, "and the directions said, 'Soak bag in hot water.'" Pilzudski took his wife to the doctor and complained that he could not have intercourse with her because she was too tight.

"Alright," said the doctor, "let's test it!"

The sawbones put the wife on the table, applied some vaseline to his instrument and entered Pilzudski's wife easily.

"Hey," said the Polack, as he watched the doctor pumping away, "if it not be for the medicine I think you be screwing my wife!"

There once was a pious young priest, who lived almost fully on yeast; "For," he said, "it is plain that we'll all rise again, and I want to get started at least!"

My approach towards life is that of laughter. And laughter contains love, laughter contains joy and laughter contains gratitude. Laughter contains a tremendous thankfulness towards God.

When you are really in deep belly laughter, your ego disappears. It happens very rarely in any other activity, but in laughter it is bound to happen. If the laughter is total the ego cannot exist; nothing kills the ego like laughter. That's why all egoists are serious.

Ego can exist only in seriousness; ego lives, feeds on seriousness. And serious people are dangerous people.

We have to destroy all kinds of seriousness in the world. Temples should be full of laughter and song and dance and celebration. That's how trees are, stars are, rivers are, oceans are. The whole existence, except man, is in a nonserious state; only man seems to be very serious. No child is born serious, remember, but we destroy the innocence of the child. We destroy his qualities of wonder and awe, we destroy his laughter, we destroy everything that is beautiful and valuable, and instead we give him a load to carry on his head - of knowledge, of theology, of philosophy. The more and more he becomes educated by us, the more and more he loses all sense of humor. He can't see any humor in existence because he starts living through his knowledge; he knows everything.

Because of his knowledgeability all wonder is destroyed. Because of his knowledgeability, the greatest religious quality - awe - is killed.

A young man at college, named Breeze, weighed down by B.A.s and M.D.s, collapsed from the strain; said his doctor, "It's plain you are killing yourself by degrees!"

By the time you come back from the university you are almost dead. Your state is pathological. You are ill - ill with knowledge, suffocated by knowledge. And you cannot laugh; that is only for children and madmen.

And my whole effort here, Vimalkirti, is to make you both simultaneously: to make you childlike and to make you utterly mad. If these two things happen, then only are you a sannyasin. My only commandment is laughter!... and everything else will follow. If you can love and if you can laugh, totally, wholeheartedly, your life will become such a bliss and a benediction, not only to yourself but to everyone else. You will be a blessing to the world.

You have to drop all seriousness. You have to drop this seriousness because it has been forced upon you; this is not your nature. You did not come serious into the world, you came laughing. Each child is bubbling with joy and by the time he is four he starts dying. The age of four for the boys and the age of three for the girls is the time when death starts occurring. Girls are always ahead of boys in every way; even in this matter they are one year ahead.

And once death settles in you, it kills you slowly slowly. It is not that you die suddenly when you are seventy or eighty; that is only the completion of a process that started at the age of three or four. Have you ever noticed the fact that if you try to remember backwards you cannot pass the barrier of the age of three? At the most you can remember when you were three years old; beyond that all is blank. Why? You were here, certainly, and those three years were not blank at all; in fact they were more full of experience than any other year of your life is ever going to be. Each moment was full of experiences. You were constantly exploring life, people, everything; you were constantly in inquiry.

In one university they were doing an experiment. The experiment was... that children seem to be so active - from where do they get so much energy? Their bodies are so small and their bodies are so delicate - they are just like flowers, fragile - but they seem to be so energetic, so vital, so overflowing with energy. From where do they get so much energy?

So they tried an experiment. They arranged that a very strong man would follow a child, and he would do exactly whatsoever the child was doing. And they were going to pay him; whatsoever he wanted they were going to pay him. He was a really big man, a wrestler, a famous wrestler, so he was not worried about following a child. What can a child do? But within four hours he was flat on the ground, because once the child knew that he was imitating him, the child jumped and the child ran and the child rolled on the floor and the child laughed uproariously.... And the child did so many things that the wrestler, within four hours, was finished!

He said, "Never in my life have I been so tired. I have been fighting my whole life, I have fought great fights, I have been always a winner. This is my first defeat!"

And that small child was not tired at all; he was still ready, he was still challenging the man. He said, "Come on! Let us have a little more fun! Are you finished? Why are you lying down on the ground?"

Every child is born with such great energy, but we destroy it. We paralyze every child, we cripple every child. And our churches and our temples and our priests have done the greatest wrong to humanity. They are the greatest criminals in the world, they are the real sinners. They have sinned against humanity - they have paralyzed every human being. You don't know who you would have been if you had been allowed total freedom from the very beginning - if your laughter had been free, your love had been free, your joy had been free, and you had not been hindered, interfered with, distorted, manipulated, forced, channeled in certain directions....

No child is interested in money, because no child is foolish. No child is interested in being the president of a country or the prime minister, because no child is so stupid. His interests are far more natural. He is interested in the flowers, he is interested in the butterflies, he is interested in the pebbles on the seashore. He is interested in dancing under the stars, in dancing in the sun, in dancing in the wind. He is interested in climbing the tree or in climbing the mountain. He is interested in swimming the river or in going into the ocean.

His interests are totally different, but we divert all his energies. We say, "No need to climb the tree, no need to climb the mountain. Climb the ladder of success!" - which is an absolutely mediocre process, which is an absolutely unintelligent process. "Climb the ladder of success. Be more rich than others. Be competitive. Be jealous. Be possessive.

Fight!" - a fight for things which are meaningless. Then you lose your joy, then you lose your laughter. Then life seems more like a nightmare than like a beautiful joke.

Vimalkirti, it is a cosmic joke.

And my vision is that the future religiousness is bound to be rooted more in life than in death, more in laughter than in sadness, more in dance than in dragging your life.

The second question:

Question 2:

Deva Bruce, the void is the source of all forms. The void is eternal, forms are temporary.

Forms are like ripples in the lake, the void is the lake itself. Forms come and go, the void remains. Forms are only appearances, the void is the reality.

Hence Buddha calls reality SHUNYA. Shunya means the ultimate void. Yes, it is far more tangible than your so-called real things, because these real things come from the void and will go back down to the void. The void is the source and the goal. Everything comes out of nothingness and disappears back into nothingness.

Hence, remember, nothingness does not mean that it is nothing; nothingness simply means that it is all. Nothingness means "no-thingness." Things are forms; nothingness is a formless energy. It can manifest in millions of forms, and it can only manifest in millions of forms because it has no form of its own. It is fluid, it is available for any form, it has no resistance to any form. It can express itself in millions of ways because it has no obsession, it has no fixation. It can bloom as a rose, it can bloom as a lotus. It can be a song, it can be a dance, it can be silence. All is possible because nothingness simply means that no form has yet been taken. Once a form is taken, things become limited, alternatives become limited. Once a form is taken you are not totally free; your form becomes your bondage. Hence, meditation is an entry into nothingness.

The Western religions have missed the point completely. Even their God has a form; God cannot have a form. To give God a form is anthropocentric, it is projecting our own form onto God.

If horses were philosophers - and who knows, a few horses may be - then God would be a horse, a beautiful horse, with all the great qualities of a horse. Horses cannot think of God as a man, impossible. Man has not been good to the horses at all. They can think of the Devil as man, but not of God as man. Man thinks of God as man.

The Bible says God created man in his own image. The truth is just the contrary: man creates God in his own image. Hence the Negro God will have a Negro form, the Hindu God will have a Hindu form, the Chinese God will have a Chinese form. The Chinese God cannot have a Hindu form; it is impossible. The Chinese cannot think that God can have another form than the Chinese - of course, the most beautiful Chinese form, but it is going to be Chinese. These are our ideas projected onto God.

God is not a form, God is formlessness. God is absolute nothingness, God is total void.

Out of that voidness everything arises - trees, people, mountains, earths, stars, creations. They come, for the time being they are there, and then they again disappear into the ultimate void. That is the beginning and the end; it is before the beginning and after the end. Buddha calls it the beyond, the ultimate beyond, beyond the beyond.

You ask me, Bruce, "Why, despite appearances, is the void more tangible than the form, consciousness more than thought, silence more than the word?"

Consciousness is God because consciousness is nothingness. Thought is a world; hence Buddha calls mind "the world." The moment a thought arises, a wave has arisen in the lake of consciousness, a form has arisen, and the form is only temporal, momentary.

Soon it will disappear; it is not going to abide, it is not eternal. Don't cling to it. Watch it come in and watch it go out. Watch it arising and watch it disappearing, but don't cling to it. Remember consciousness, in which it arises and in which it dissolves again. That is your reality, that is your truth. The thought can be good, the thought can be bad, but good or bad it makes no difference. A thought is a thought; it is not eternal - and that is the only criterion of reality.

That's how the mystics have always been judging reality: whatsoever is eternal is real and whatsoever is momentary is only a dream phenomenon. There is no difference between the dream that you see in the night and the dream that you see in the day, the dream that you see with closed eyes and the dream that you see with open eyes. Yes, there is a little difference: one dream is absolutely private. In the night with closed eyes you see a private dream; in the day with open eyes you see a collective dream, an objective dream. There are many participants in it, hence it gives you the feeling as if it is real. It is not so. What happens when you fall asleep? You forget all about the day.

It is said about Chuang Tzu that one morning he woke up and started laughing. His disciples gathered together and they asked, "What is the matter?"

Chuang Tzu said, "I have come across a problem that I cannot solve. Help me to solve it."

That was the first time that he was asking the help of the disciples to solve a problem.

Otherwise he was always solving their problems.

The disciples said, "It must be a really great, complicated problem - you tell us."

He said, "The problem is simple, but in a way very complicated - and I don't think it can be solved, it seems insoluble. That's why I am laughing. I have looked at it from every side; it seems absolutely insoluble. The problem is, in the night I dreamed that I had become a butterfly."

The disciples said, "That's nothing. We all dream all kinds of things - dreams are dreams. Now you are awake the dream is finished. Why make so much fuss about a dream?"

He said, "I am not making much fuss about a dream. The problem is: if Chuang Tzu can dream that he is a butterfly - now the problem arises - the butterfly may have fallen asleep and is dreaming that she is Chuang Tzu! Now what is what? Am I Chuang Tzu who dreamed about the butterfly or am I the butterfly who is dreaming of being Chuang Tzu?"

In fact there is no difference. The butterfly is also a form and Chuang Tzu is also a form.

One form arose when you were asleep, another form arose when you were awake, but both are forms. Chuang Tzu is neither - he is neither the butterfly nor Chuang Tzu. He is the consciousness, he is the awareness; the awareness of the dream, the awareness of the butterfly and Chuang Tzu. That awareness he is. And that awareness is far more real, the only reality in fact. No thought is real.

And the same is true about silence. Words arise in the lake of silence, beautiful words, but they are just forms. Hence the insistence of all the mystics: move from words to wordlessness, move from sound to silence, move from form to formlessness, move from thought to consciousness. Don't get entangled with the forms, thoughts, words. That's what meditation is all about.

Don't get identified with all that arises in you and disappears. Remain centered in that which never appears and never disappears, which is always there. Remain centered in the abiding reality of your being, and you will know the greatest bliss possible and you will know the truth that liberates. You will know freedom from all forms - because all forms create bondage. You will know you are neither a man nor a woman, neither white nor black, neither this nor that - NETI, NETI. You will know that you are only the pure awareness which has no name, no form.

That's what Buddha says: You don't have any form and you don't have any name. Don't hanker for that which you are not, because hankering for that which you are not is creating misery for yourself, is creating unnecessary pain for yourself. Just be that which you are and have always been and will always be. Don't try to become - be! And that you already are. It is not a question of becoming, it is not a question of desiring, it is not a question of reaching somewhere. You are already there, you have always been there. Just wake up! Wake up from the dreams, all the dreams - night dreams, daydreams. Wake up from all the forms and abide in the formless.

And all the awakened ones say the same thing: Knowing that formlessness, knowing that eternity, your life is fulfilled. You will attain to tremendous contentment and bliss and benediction.

The third question:

Question 3:

Devo, nothing is wrong with you, nothing is wrong with garlic either, but garlic is going to create a few problems for you. And the problem that you have come across is not really a great problem; soon you will have to face greater problems. The British lady at the most may leave you; that is not a problem - that will be getting out of the problem!

Find some woman - be free of ladies! A woman is beautiful, a lady is a problem. And it is very difficult to find a British woman - I have not come across one yet. They are all ladies. The men may not all be lords, but the women are all ladies.

An Englishman and his wife were strolling around their West Indian estate when they came across a black girl and boy making love in the bushes.

"My gracious!" exclaimed the British lady to her husband. "They do it just like human beings!"

If she thinks you are primitive that is nothing - at least she thinks you are a human being! Or maybe she does not think that you are a human being, but she cannot say it. It is so unmannerly to say to you that you are not a human being so she says you are primitive. That is not a great danger - at the most the lady will leave you. You continue eating garlic. If there is going to be a choice between a British lady and garlic, prefer garlic; it is far healthier. But the real problem will come later on - once the British lady has left you, then you will be in trouble.

Did you hear about the Gypsy girl who had to give up wearing garlic around her neck?

It kept the vampires away alright, but it attracted too many Italians.

So if you want to drop garlic, drop it when the British lady has left you; meanwhile she will protect you from the Italians. Every man needs a woman as a protection; otherwise he is so helpless. Once the other women see that one woman is protecting you they don't bother you. The moment they see you are unprotected they all jump upon you!

So first use garlic to get rid of the British lady, then immediately stop garlic; otherwise Italians will start coming. And it is easy to get rid of a British lady; it is next to impossible to get rid of Italian women because they are not ladies. They are true women and they will create so much trouble for you. They help only in one thing: they make you so much aware of the trouble that love brings, or that comes in the wake of love, that you start thinking of religion, God, meditation. All these great things would not have been possible without women. The people who started thinking about all these great things were people who were tortured by women. These were their escapes, escape routes, so they could tolerate whatsoever was happening around. They could hope for a paradise somewhere after death. They lost all hope in life because they knew wherever they went some woman was going to create trouble for them.

It seems God sent man alone first. He made Adam, but if man had been alone here he would never have thought of God. He made woman - the woman is a constant reminder. She never leaves you at ease, she forces you to believe in hell. And once you believe in hell you have to believe in heaven too.

Devo, nothing is wrong with you, but if you want to live with garlic you have to renounce life. The British lady may be right in a sense: you have to be primitive, you have to go to the caves, as far away from humanity as possible. Garlic is simply dangerous for any communion, for any communication. It is very medicinal; it will keep you healthy and it will keep you alive longer than you would have lived without it. Or maybe because you will have to live alone your life will look longer!

If you want more advice about garlic you can ask Maitreya - he is the expert about garlic and all its great qualities. I have never tasted it, so whatsoever I am saying is not very reliable. And I have never allowed any primitive to be close to me. You know my sniffers! No people who eat garlic will ever be able to come close to me! Garlic is good but a little inhuman: it is good for you, but bad for everybody else.

The fourth question:

Question 4:

Anand Manuel, it is impossible for innocence to happen to an adult without awareness.

Awareness is the only method that can help you to destroy all the conditionings that the society has imposed on you. Society has hypnotized you, but the hypnosis is done in such a subtle way, for such a long time, and it starts when you are so small, that you never become aware of it. You are hypnotized with the milk of your mother, you are given all kinds of conditionings, and those conditionings destroy your innocence.

Unless you become aware, you will not be able to see that you are a conditioned human being, that you are living with borrowed ideas - ideas which have been imposed by others on you against your will - that you are almost a prisoner. Not that you live in a prison, but you live in an ideology which is a subtle prison. You are a Hindu - how can you be innocent? You are a Christian - how can you be innocent? The ideology keeps you away from innocence; it makes you knowledgeable, and knowledgeability is the only thing that destroys innocence. It takes all wonder away from you.

There are millions of people who don't feel any wonder in life. They will see a roseflower and yet they will not see anything - no beauty, no awe. They will not even stop for a single moment. The rose seems to have no message for them, as if they have not seen it at all.

Every day you pass by beautiful trees, birds singing in the early morning sun, flowers releasing their fragrance, but you are a robot. You go on chattering inside your mind, yakkety-yakkety-yak... you go on and on. And what you are chattering inside has been put inside you. Your mind has been used like a computer: just as they feed a computer they have fed you.

In communist Russia they will feed you with communism. They will also teach you the holy trinity, their own holy trinity. They will teach you their own Bible, they will teach you their own religion. Communism is a religion, a substitute for other religions. Marx, Engels, Lenin, that is their trinity; DAS KAPITAL is their Bible. And they believe in all these things as fanatically as any Catholic, any Hindu, any Mohammedan. The Mohammedan believes in Kaaba and the communist believes in the Kremlin. The objects differ, but the belief is there. Both are knowledgeable, both have lost their purity, their innocence, their childlike quality.

Once you are full of knowledge you think you know all the answers. You don't know anything because unless you know yourself, nothing is known. And the beauty of self- knowledge is that it deepens the mystery of life, it does not demystify it; it makes it more mysterious, more miraculous. The person of wisdom, one who has dug deep into his own consciousness, becomes more and more full of wonder and awe. But the ordinarily knowledgeable person goes on living in absolute unawareness; nothing makes him wonder. He knows all the answers.

A dog walked into a restaurant and ordered a steak.

"How would you like it cooked?" asked the waiter.

"I like it well done, with crushed cherries on top. Then put some marinated tomatoes on it and soak it in pepper."

The waiter brought the food.

"Did you enjoy your dinner?" the waiter asked when he was finished.

"Very much," answered the dog. "By the way, don't you think this is all very odd?"

"No," answered the waiter, "I like my steak the same way."

The waiter knows too much about the steak - he is not looking at the dog at all.

It was two o'clock in the morning and Gedalia the goniff was trying to break into a house. He tried all the doors and windows but he could not pry any of them open.

Cautiously he climbed up to the second-floor balcony. Peering through a locked window, he saw a baby in its crib. By this time he was quite desperate so he decided to enlist the aid of the infant.

"Hoo-hoo, bay-bee," he called softly. "Itsy-bitsy boo-boo, is oo gonna open window for nice mansi-wansie, hmm?"

"Open the window?" yelled the baby. "Why, ya dumb schnook, I can't even walk yet!"

The baby cannot walk, but he has become knowledgeable, he can talk.

You have all become knowledgeable. You know nothing and yet you are full of knowledge. Your knowledge simply covers your ignorance, it does not make you wise.

It simply makes your foolishness a little decorated, a little polished.

A troubled young man went to see a doctor. The doctor told him to take off his clothes for an examination, then said, "Ah, you have orange candle wax in your navel? - I know about this problem. Just the other day a girl came to see me; she also had wax in her navel - because her boyfriend likes to eat by candle-light. Does your girlfriend like to eat by candlelight too?"

"No," said the man, "she needs the candle to find it."

Just look at things, don't bring your knowledge in, and you may be always in for a surprise.

You ask me, "Can innocence in an adult happen without awareness?"

It is impossible. The beginning of innocence in an adult is to be aware that you are conditioned. Millions of people are not aware that they are conditioned. If you don't know that you are in a prison, why should you try to get out of it in the first place?

Just the other day I came across a newspaper. The editor must have been here, he must have listened to one of my discourses. He comments that whatsoever I said was against Indian culture - as if that is enough to criticize me, that it was against Indian culture!

He takes it for granted that anything that is against Indian culture is bound to be wrong.

But who has said that I am not against Indian culture? I am against all rotten things - Indian, non-Indian, it makes no difference! I am against the very idea of Indian culture and Chinese culture and Japanese culture. I am against the very idea of dividing humanity and I am against the past. I am not here supporting Indian culture. So that is not a criticism of me - in fact, that is a compliment!

I am against all that is dead. One should not carry dead bodies for ever and ever, they should be buried or burned. I don't believe in any culture and I don't believe in any country and I don't believe in any race and I don't believe in any religion.

I believe in religiousness, I believe in culturedness, I believe in humanity. But humanity is not Indian, religiousness is not Christian or Hindu or Mohammedan, culturedness has nothing to do with any country. It is a grace that comes through meditation, through awareness. It is a beauty that happens to you when you become rooted in your consciousness, when you are settled in your consciousness, when nothing can distract you from your consciousness.

Yes, every person has to become a child again, but how is he going to become a child again? Except through becoming aware there is no other way. First, become aware of your conditionings - and there are a thousand and one layers of conditionings - and when you are aware, then slowly slowly disentangle yourself from all the conditioning.

Drop those conditionings, become dehypnotized, so no layer of dust remains on the mirror of your being. When there is no layer of dust on the mirror of your being, you will be able to reflect that which is - and that is God and that is truth and that is nirvana.

But you are asking the question so that you can avoid awareness. You would like to find some shortcut to innocence. There is no shortcut; awareness cannot be avoided.

Awareness is the only method - let me repeat, the ONLY method - which can cut from the very roots all the conditionings and can make you free from the prison in which you are living. And it is only a question of becoming more and more aware; nothing else can help you. I cannot do it for you, nobody else can do it for you. If somebody else does it for you, you will be reconditioned again. Remember it, you have to be unconditioned, not reconditioned. That's what happens: a Christian becomes a Hindu; of course he becomes unconditioned as a Christian, but he becomes reconditioned as a Hindu.

My effort here is to uncondition you, to help you to be unconditioned, and not to recondition you again. My effort is to leave you in total freedom; then you have to decide what to do with your life. You are the master of your life; I can simply give you a few indications of how to get rid of all the nonsense that has been forced upon you.

Once you are free from all that nonsense, I am not going to give you any positive instructions about what to do or what not to do, because that will be a reconditioning again.

So awareness will help you in two ways: first it will help you to become unconditioned and then it will help you to find ways and means to live your life. It will be the only way to uncondition and the only way to find a new style of life, a new vision of life.

The fifth question:

Question 5:

Anand Amito, no, categorically no! Sarjano may help to save your boxes and bags, but what about Radha? Radha will be in danger. It is better to risk the suitcases - you will not be able to save Radha from Sarjano. Avoid Sarjano, even if he wants to come.

Certainly he will help you to save the suitcases, but Radha will be gone.

So it is up to you. If you are too much attached to your suitcases, then you can take Sarjano with you; otherwise, that incident is not going to happen every time. And it was a fictitious journey that I talked about - you are going on a real journey. On a real journey things like that don't happen....

The sixth question:

Question 6:

Satyam, I don't know that much Italian, but I will try my best. The Italian word for refrigerator is 'ice-a box', and the Italian word for a pretty girl is 'nice-a box'!

The last question:

Question 7:

IS THERE ANY HOPE FOR SOMEONE FROM AMERICA? WHAT ABOUT ONE WHO COMES FROM CALIFORNIA, BUT IS ENGLISH AND GERMAN; HAS A SCOTTISH STEPFATHER AND A JEWISH MOTHER; LOOKS SWEDISH AND FEELS ITALIAN?

Anupama, you are in quite a mess! Enlightenment is absolutely sure!

Enough for today.