The journey from despair

Question 1:

Baby, the honeymoon has not even started!

First, the honeymoon... and then I will discuss your question.

I have heard a story.... A young man got married. He was known in the university as "a mama's boy,"

and he was. So he inquired of his mother, "I am going on my honeymoon - any advice?"

The mother said, "Don't miss a single moment, because the honeymoon comes only once in life."

The boy and his wife went to a resort place, rented the best room in the best hotel. They both were tremendously excited. The girl immediately threw off her clothes and jumped into the bed, but the boy went to the window, sat on the windowsill and looked out.

Seconds passed, minutes passed, half the night passed, and the girl said, "What the hell are you doing there? It is supposed to be our honeymoon."

He said, "Don't disturb me. My mother has said, 'Don't miss a single moment of it, the honeymoon happens only once in a lifetime.' You can go to sleep, I will enjoy my honeymoon." The full moon was in the sky, and he enjoyed the honeymoon!

Our honeymoon was of the same type. Now what you are feeling is your reality.

The day you took sannyas, two-and-a-half years ago, it was just excitement; something new was going to happen. Your heart was throbbing with a hallucinatory idea of sannyas.

You had seen sannyasins dancing, enjoying, blissful, laughing, and you were also becoming part of their laughter, their joy; so you imagined. It was all illusory, it was not a honeymoon.

After two-and-a-half years of hallucinating, waiting, naturally you have come to your reality. All hopes have disappeared. What was so positive has become negative. What was so beautiful is now just a negativity, a despair.

You think the honeymoon is over? The true honeymoon is never over; it only begins and never ends.

That which ends is simply hallucination. But still there is time.

The blissfulness is not going to descend upon you from somewhere: you have to go through a transformation. Just taking sannyas does not mean that you are a new being. It simply means a commitment to yourself, a decision that, "I am going to transform myself." Your red robes, your mala, will remind you continuously of the commitment that you have made to existence, the declaration of transformation, the decision.

Rather than transforming yourself, you started hallucinating, which is very easy for women to do.

Now get back to the ground and the reality.

You are a negative person, just as everybody is before transformation. You are full of despair, just as everybody else is full of despair before the inner revolution that takes you from darkness to light and from death to eternal life, which frees you from all bondage and gives you wings and the whole sky. But you have not done anything; you have simply waited, expecting that it is going to happen.

You have to prepare the ground, the house, for the guest who is coming.

In a negative mind it is impossible. And I am not saying that you have to become positive, I am saying simply drop negativity. There is no need to be positive; that will be repression. Can't you remain without being negative and without being positive? Just clean, hanging with nothing? Just pure, with no decision, with no conclusion, with no judgment? It is possible, and that is the way to enlightenment.

But ordinarily your life has been divided into these two polar opposites: either be negative or be positive. Either be theist or be an atheist - as if there is no third alternative. So neither the atheist finds the truth nor does the theist find it.

One is blocked by his belief, another is blocked by his disbelief. One is blocked because he has said a phony yes, and one is blocked because he has said a phony no. Without inquiring, to say no is below human dignity. That's why I suggested to you a third word: po.

Be in the state of po: no "yes," no "no." And you will feel a great silence - in the beginning a little fear, because your yes was giving you a certain consolation, your no was giving you a certain consolation.

Your yes was saying to you, "God is there and He is taking care of us all." With the no you were consoled, because there is no God and there is nothing to fear: with death everything ends.

But with po, you don't have any consolation, you have only an opening. You have to inquire what is really the case, on your own.

Truth borrowed becomes a lie.

You cannot purchase truth by your austerities, by your fasting, by standing on your head and all kinds of stupidities. You have to seek and search with an open mind. And the mind can be open only if there is no "yes" and no "no." You are simply a tabula rasa, a clean sheet of paper; nothing is written on it.

So it is good that you have come to realize your reality. Now work on this reality. You were hoping to get transmuted without any work. You hoped too much, you imagined too much. And now another stupid idea is arising in your mind: "Is the honeymoon over?"

It was not a honeymoon. Sitting on the windowsill, looking at the moon - and your honey is lying naked in the bed. It was simply the moon, not the honeymoon.

And if you had been with your honey, even without the moon, the honeymoon would have happened.

Moon is not a necessity for a honeymoon, honey is necessary! From where has that moon entered into it?

When I look at language, I cannot believe it.... Because of these words, so many people get onto wrong tracks. When you hear the word "honeymoon", the moon seems to be very real. Honey becomes secondary, moon becomes primary - and the moon has nothing to do with it. Even on a dark night you can have a honeymoon; no moon in the sky and you can have a honeymoon. All that you need is your honey!

I have heard about a Jew who was going to a hill station. A friend met him in the train. He asked, "Where are you going?"

He said, "I am going to enjoy my honeymoon."

His friend said, "But I don't see your wife."

He said, "She will go next year. Together it is too expensive. She will tend the business while I am away enjoying my honeymoon. And when she goes I will tend the business."

A perfect Jewish solution of not closing the business and still managing the honeymoon - without the honey!

Drop that idea completely, that whatever you felt had any reality in it. You imagined it. Reality is hard. Imagination is in your hands; you can make anything out of it. Real work starts from your reality, whatsoever it is.

Your negativity is yours; you have not trained yourself for it. Your despair is yours; you have not managed to imagine it. Who is going to imagine despair? Nobody has ever done it. People imagine beautiful things.

They think, they dream of marrying some beautiful woman. They don't imagine that they are going to marry a dragon. The dragon they are married to already. Just to avoid her - at least for a few moments - they imagine some beautiful woman. If they cannot imagine, they can at least look at the pornographic magazines like PLAYBOY. They don't exist without any reason, people need them.

They fulfill a certain purpose: they help you to go on living with the dragon you are married to.

I would not like you to start with imagination. Howsoever sad, howsoever terrible the reality is, if you want to get to the real truth you have to start from real despair.

So you are now at the point from where the journey can begin. These two-and-a-half years you simply wasted. You should have at least asked me in these two-and-a-half years, "Is this a real honeymoon, or am I imagining it?" But when one is enjoying a honeymoon, one does not ask questions - somebody may create a doubt, somebody may disturb your imagination, your projection.

Now it is perfectly good to ask the question.

Despair is in the heart of every man.

Despair simply means that one has not been able to achieve one's potential.

Despair means that the tree is there, but it is not flowering; there is no fragrance. The wind comes, but the tree cannot contribute to the beauty of the world, it cannot give color and fragrance. It is barren. That is despair.

A man who has not attained to his real being is barren: a tree without leaves, without flowers, a tree on which even birds don't make their nests, a tree where birds don't sing their songs. And when the sun rises, it is not a beautiful experience for the tree. In fact, in the sunlight the despair becomes deeper. The tree wants to be lost in darkness where she can forget the leaves and the flowers and the fruits, and the birds and their songs, and the whole of life.

Unless one becomes enlightened, somehow or other one is going to remain in despair.

It is good that you have realized just in the small time of two-and-a-half years. There are people who have not realized in thousands of lives. But your conclusion is wrong. You are still believing that what has happened - the ecstasy and the joy - was real. If it was real it would have stayed.

Reality never dies, only dreams know death.

Reality is eternal.

So it is good, in a way, that you are finished with your imagination. Now, start from scratch.

Why should you be negative? Look deep into it. Why are you negative? What is the negativity?

What is the cause?

Life has given you so much. It has given you life, which cannot be purchased, which is invaluable.

It has given you the capacity to love. It has given you the capacity to grow in consciousness. it has made available the whole opportunity to become enlightened one day. And you are full of negativity!

Against whom? For what?

You should be full of gratefulness.

Have you ever thought, do you deserve life? What have you done to deserve it?

Do you deserve love? What have you done to deserve it?

Do you deserve enlightenment?

You deserve nothing. It is all a gift from existence. Out of abundance existence goes on giving to you - and you are negative. Existence goes on giving things to you, but because of your negativity you don't receive them. You are not available, you are closed.

Just try to look at your negativity. Try to understand, see the foolishness of it.

Don't force yourself to be positive, that is not the right way; the negativity will remain repressed. Go deep into your negativity and find that there is no reason to be negative. And the moment you have found there is no reason to be negative, negativity disappears; and what remains is positivity.

Positivity is not something to be imposed.

Negativity has to be understood. In that understanding is its disappearance, its death. And when that corpse of negativity is no longer there occupying you, a silence, a deep yes - not for any belief, religion, but for the sheer joy existence makes available to you - arises. Not with any effort - you just see it arising in you.

That is one of the most beautiful moments in life - when you see the yes arising in you. You cannot remain without dancing, without singing. You have to show your yes in some way. Language is too small. You have to say it with your whole being - that is the dance. You are saying yes with your whole being. Every pore of your being is involved in it. It is not a phony yes said by your mouth, which may not have any meaning at all.

Go deep into your despair. What is making you so desperate? There are certain reasons for your despair. One is - the most basic - that you have not been true to your nature. You have listened to all kinds of nonsense from the priests, pedagogues, politicians, saints, and all kinds of people who are really parasites. They suck your blood.

It does not matter whether the Catholic pope sucks your blood and you are a Catholic, or the Hindu shankaracharya sucks your blood and you are a Hindu. The real thing is: Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian, Jew - whoever you are, somebody is sucking your blood. And the way to suck your blood is to deprive you of your nature, to make you perverted, to divert your potentiality into directions where you will never reach the goal. That brings despair.

You go on and on, and it is just desert and desert; as far as you can see it is desert. All your yesterdays were a desert, your today is a desert, the future seems to be just the same. This is despair. You are not arriving at any oasis. You are thirsty, you are hungry....

Who has done this immense criminal act?

All the religions have been teaching people to be celibate. And they have been teaching for so many thousands of years that it has become almost an unquestioned truth. In ten thousand years, not a single man has asked, "Is celibacy possible?"

It is impossible, for the simple reason that your mind has no control over your biology. Once you have eaten your food, you cannot do anything else. Below your throat it is beyond your reach; now biology has taken possession of it.

And it is good that biology has not left essential things for you, because you would become a mess!

You have become a mess without such tremendous responsibilities. If you were able to sort out all the proteins and vitamins, and to make blood and to make this and to make that, then perhaps you might be able to be celibate, you might not create sexual energy anymore.

But can you see the strangeness? - that for thousands of years idiots have been talking about celibacy, and nobody has even asked how it is possible! Biology will function according to its laws.

It will go on creating male sperm, it will go on giving the woman the monthly period.

What is the monthly period? Each month the woman releases one egg. And if she does not become pregnant, then the blood that was going to make the child has to be thrown out of the body. Once the woman becomes pregnant, the menstrual period stops, because now that blood is being used in creating the child. But it is not in your hands! Nature has kept all the secret keys in its own hands.

Jainism has not allowed women to be liberated directly from the female body. And you will be surprised, the reason is their menstrual period; they cannot control it, they cannot be celibate. Man can find ways to hide his reality and be a hypocrite, but the woman cannot do it. For six, seven days per month she will suffer pain, and blood will come out of her. How can she hide it?

It is easy for man to become a homosexual, to make love to the animals, to masturbate. Or if he prevents himself from doing all these things, then too, in his sleep he will have erections, he will release the semen, because he has a small bag and it has to be emptied: new semen is being created continuously. But he can hide these things, that's why man has pretended that he is celibate.

Religions have turned humanity towards perversions. And you can satisfy your natural instincts, but you cannot satisfy perversions. If you are hungry you can eat; the hunger disappears and you are satisfied. But religions say fasting is spiritual. If fasting is spiritual, then why has the stomach been given to man by nature? Why is there hunger? Fasting is not spiritual, it is just unnatural.

No religion has said, "Feasting is spiritual."

I say it. A fast is a crime; a feast is something of the beyond, because it is rejoicing, rejoicing in your nature.

In India, Jainism is the most fast-oriented religion. The fast has become their central theme. The longer you fast, the bigger saint you become. And I have seen their saints, but I have not seen a single saint who has any intelligence. Fasting will kill intelligence, because your brain needs certain proteins. If they are not provided, the brain cells which are very delicate, die.

I have particularly looked into Jaina monks. They are all simply idiots, and they have made themselves idiots - but they are respected immensely. Respect is the trick to make them go against nature. Now how can these people get away from despair? Hungry, they can manage because respectability is there. But respectability is not food. Respectability has no proteins, no vitamins, nothing that nourishes. It only enhances your ego, sharpens your ego.

Jainism and the followers of Jainism have been very much against me because I said that fasting is equivalent to meat-eating. They had never heard that. Their religion is ten thousand years old, at least. They could not believe that I am in my senses. What am I saying - fasting, meat-eating?

I said, "You can fast and go on weighing yourself every day. Two pounds disappear in twenty-four hours. Where have two pounds of your weight gone? - you have eaten it!"

Man's body, for emergency purposes, has a double system - just for survival. There may be times when you cannot get food, so if you just fast for three days, your inner mechanism moves to the emergency level and you start absorbing your own flesh, your own meat. Within thirty days you will be just a skeleton.

Where has all the meat disappeared?

Just to live you need energy, just to breathe you need energy. To walk, to talk, to do anything you need energy. Your meat is being converted into energy.

Everybody has surplus. A healthy person can fast for three months - at the most, then he will have to die, because only bones remain. You cannot eat your bones, but everything else has disappeared.

This is cannibalism. You may not be eating somebody else's meat, but you are eating your own.

This is not vegetarianism; and Jainism is proud of its vegetarianism. But fasting and vegetarianism don't go together. Vegetarianism needs feasting. So I make feasting something spiritual. Eat well, drink well, dance, sing, enjoy! - and despair will disappear.

Don't do anything which is against your instincts.

But all the religions condemned your instincts: they say the instinctive man is like an animal. But what is wrong in being an animal? Rather than being in despair, it is perfectly good to be a healthy animal. An animal simply means alive: anima means life. So there is nothing condemnatory in the word. Certainly, no animals become saints, but no animals suffer from despair either.

So just watch where you are going against your nature.

Change your course, be in tune with nature.

Be truly animals.

Man is the highest animal in existence. He has to be really a more authentic animal than anybody else.

In your being natural, despair is not found. And the moment despair disappears, negativity disappears, that will be the moment when the honeymoon begins.

It can begin - it is never too late.

Question 2:

Why in the future? Right now!

Life is not theater, life is not literature.

Life is something more solid, more real.

Theater is just entertainment, and who needs entertainment? - the people who are in despair. For a few hours they can forget their despair and become identified with the theater.

Who needs literature? A man who is really living, his life is poetry itself. A man who is really loving, his life is literature itself.

You will be surprised to know that the people who have written poetry about love are the people who have never known love. Writing poetry about love is a substitute.

But writing about food will not help a hungry person; and only hungry people think of food. When you are well-fed you don't think of food. When you are thirsty you think of water, but when you are not thirsty it will be simply insane to go on thinking about water. It is impossible.

The people who have created great literature lived in tremendous tragedy; for example, Dostoyevski, who is perhaps the best novelist the world has yet produced. But he himself was utterly sad, suicidal, always in misery, always in despair.

This man could not live his life, but one has to do something; he projected everything in his literature which he had not been able to live. Listening to his literature, reading his literature you will think, "What a great man!" But if you happen to meet him, you will feel great pity for him.

Kahlil Gibran must be recognized as one of the best writers of this age. Just read his books: THE PROPHET, THE GARDEN OF THE PROPHET, JESUS THE SON OF MAN, and you will be thrilled, what kind of a man he is! He talks like the old prophets - the same language, the same sharpness, the same meaningfulness. But he himself lived just in an opposite way.

In THE PROPHET he talks about love, and perhaps he has written the best lines about love, but in his own life there was no love, only anger. About anger he does not write; there is no need, he has enough of it. Love is missing; he writes about love.

The people who have known Kahil Gibran were surprised - how did he manage to create such great books like THE PROPHET? The man was almost insane in many ways.

He would throw things around, he would break things when he was angry; that was his daily practice.

And after that he would write THE PROPHET. That was a substitute.

Theater and literature are not life.

But your question is important. Life itself depends on polar opposites. But it is better not to call them polar opposites, because really they are complementaries. They look like polar opposites: the night and the day, life and death - they look like polar opposites, but it is not true.

There are animals who can see only in the night. They have better eyes than you have, and they don't even need glasses. For them there is no darkness in the night. In fact, their darkness starts with the sunrise, because their eyes are so delicate that they can see only in darkness. As the sun rises they cannot open their eyes; the sun is too much. So for the owl, your day is his night, your night is his day.

This can give you the idea of complementariness. Darkness simply means less light. And when you say less light, immediately the opposite polarity disappears. And light simply means less darkness.

Light and darkness are one energy.

It is just like cold and hot. They are not polar opposites. The same thermometer can show you, this is cold, how much cold; this is hot, how hot. The difference is of degrees, not of opposition. They are one phenomenon, absolutely joined together.

For example, for you to exist in Alaska or Siberia is very difficult, because you are a warm-weather animal. But the walrus cannot exist anywhere else. The walrus is a cold-weather animal. Its body is made for the cold.

So in Alaska or Siberia he is perfectly happy, in tune with nature. Bring the walrus into a hot area and he will die, just as you will die in the eternal cold of the Himalayas or Siberia or Alaska. You will need tremendous arrangements for yourself to keep warm. But the walrus has no woolen clothes, no electric blankets, not even hair. He does not need them; his body is made so that even if it is ice-cold, he does not feel any difficulty with the atmosphere.

Coldness and hotness are just degrees of the same phenomenon.

You are asking, "Is there something beyond the polar opposites?" There is only one thing, and that's what I call enlightenment. Otherwise everything has its polar opposite.

Enlightenment has no polar opposite.

You may feel the question arising in you, "Then what about unenlightenment?" That is not a reality, it is only an absence of enlightenment. And anybody who can be unenlightened has the capacity to become enlightened. It is good that you can be unenlightened; otherwise, there would be no way to become enlightened.

Unenlightenment is simply an absence.

Your potential has not grown, has not blossomed, has not released its fragrance - that's all. You have remained just a closed seed; your possibilities have remained possibilities. You never allowed them to become actualities, realizations.

But there is no such thing as unenlightenment - only in language. Otherwise everybody has reached different degrees of enlightenment. Somebody may be just a seed; that is a degree, the lowest degree. Somebody may be a sprout, somebody may have grown into a big tree. Somebody may have come to flower, to fruition.

But there is no polar opposite anywhere. From the seed to the flower, it is a single phenomenon unfolding itself. So degrees of unfoldment - but remember, the difference is only of degrees. That's why I insist, when someday you become enlightened, don't think yourself holier than others. They are just a few feet back.

There is a beautiful story of Gautam Buddha. In his past life, when he was not enlightened, he went to see an awakened human being. He touched his feet, and as he was standing up, the awakened one touched his feet. Buddha could not believe it. He said, "What are you doing? You are enlightened, I am unenlightened."

The man said, "That's true. One time I was also unenlightened - now I am enlightened. Today you are unenlightened - tomorrow you may become enlightened. The difference is only of timing. And I am paying my respects to you because this is my last life: when you become enlightened, I will not be there to pay my respects.

"But you are certain to become enlightened - today or tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, it does not matter. Time is irrelevant."

If you want to transcend the polar opposites of life, first you have to understand that they are not polar opposites but complementaries.

Second, you have to understand there is certainly something which is beyond duality. But to go beyond duality you have to become a witness of all that passes, moves, in your being: despair, ecstasy, a feeling of well-being or sickness, feeling love or hate.

Simply be a witness, don't get identified with anything that passes in your mind. Remember, everything passes, only the witness remains. So why unnecessarily get identified and in trouble?

Today you were sad, but you could not keep yourself separate. You could have said, "It is perfectly good. Let sadness pass. It is a cloud; soon the cloud will pass and there will be sunlight." But don't get identified with the sunlight either, because there are clouds coming again.

Life is constantly changing.

Only one thing is unchanging: that is your witnessing capacity.

You can see the anger flash by, you can see the compassion flash by; but the mirror before which they flash remains always unaffected - and that is your transcendence.

And that's what I call meditativeness.

Meditate on every state of mind so you can achieve the witness. Meditation is the way of detaching your witness from moods which go on passing.

There is a Sufi story.... A king told his court that he wants the whole of wisdom condensed into one sentence, and the sentence has to be as small as possible so that he can engrave it inside his diamond ring. And he will look at it only in a situation when there is no way out.

It was a difficult task. But one of his ministers said - "I will prepare it. Give me the ring. But don't look at it until every other possibility is finished and you are facing death - in the ultimate emergency, because only then will you understand it." The king was curious, but he had to give his word that he would not look at it.

Soon the day came when the country was invaded, the king was defeated; he escaped into the mountains to hide. He reached a point where there was the end of the mountain, and an abysmal depth facing him. There was no way to go further, and back he could not go. He could hear the enemy, the horses, approaching.

He waited for a few minutes. When he heard the steps of the horses so close that it was only a question of a few seconds till he would be caught, he took off the diamond ring, looked - and laughed in that silent place. The whole valley was full of his laughter, because what was written was a very simple sentence. In his ring it was engraved: "This too will pass."

The whole wisdom he had asked for - and this is the essence of the whole of wisdom: This too will pass.

And as it happened, the horses must have turned some other way, and he heard their steps going farther and farther away.

He gathered his army again, won back his country, and there was great celebration all over the capital because they had become again independent. He was garlanded, his chariot was full of flowers, and people were throwing flowers in joy, and dancing and singing. At that moment he again took off his diamond ring and read the sentence: This too will pass. And this moment became his enlightenment.

Sadness comes, joy comes, and everything passes by.

What remains always is the witness.

The witness is beyond all polarities.

It is the transcendental element in existence.

Question 3:

Anybody who wants to maintain excitement is bound to get bored. Just remember: This too will pass!