Deeper and deeper into the mysterious, the miraculous

Question 1:

There is no end to it.

There is infinitely more.

You cannot exhaust it.

But one condition has to be remembered: You should not ask for it. You should not see it, because it comes on its own. It is not a desire from your side. Desire kills it. It is the abundance of existence that simply goes on flowering towards you if you are available.

Just remain available, and there will be more and more and more. But from your mind, the idea of getting more has to be dropped entirely. The moment you ask for more there will be less. If you become too ambitious, there is every possibility you will lose it completely.

So it is a slightly delicate matter. You keep your doors and windows open and enjoy whatsoever happens. And so much happens that you cannot conceive more is possible, but when more happens you will be surprised. And this more goes on happening. BUt remember the word "happening." It is nothing like an effort, a plan, a project on your part. You have to be just an empty receiver.

Just as water flows downwards towards the ocean, beauty, truth, love - all that is valuable in existence - flows towards a person who is nobody.

Question 2:

Much is the matter with you.

There are half a million sannyasins around the world. Everybody wants the same thing you are asking, that he should possess me totally, that there should be nobody else who shares me. But please, think of me too. Just you and me.... Are you bent upon boring me to death? And remember, this is the desire of every sannyasin. You have to understand it. Why this fear and helplessness with the commune?

The commune is nothing but my expanded being. If you really love me, you will automatically love the commune. If you are feeling beautiful winds blowing when I am with you, then in the commune you will feel even more, because I am there in many forms. I have lost my personality completely. I am just an opening. Whoever enters into me also becomes part of the infinite.

If you are somehow fearful and detest the commune, that simply means you have not yet come close to me - not at all. You say you feel you understand me clearly, every word that I utter, you understand it, and yet you have the feeling that you don't understand me at all. Your second part is right, you don't understand me at all. You only understand the words that I speak. And the words that I speak are just simple, ordinary, day-to-day use words. Anybody can understand those words.

I am not a scholar, I am not a theologian. I am not crazy enough to be esoteric.

I am speaking to you - not even giving a discourse. It is just a heart-to-heart talk. Words you understand - that gives you the misconception. To understand my words is not the real thing. There is something more between the words, between the lines, in the moments when I suddenly pause in the middle of a sentence. If you understand those pauses, those moments of silence, those gaps between two words, no dictionary is needed. No dictionary can manage to explain those gaps, those intervals.

That wordlessness is my real message.

I am using words only to create wordlessness as a contrast. Forget everything that I have told you, but remember all those moments when I was silent. It is a strange way of speaking - nobody speaks that way. But when I stop, you are also in a stop... waiting, awaiting what I am going to say. Catch those wordless moments. I am there, and you will find yourself also there.

THE BIBLE says, "In the beginning there was the word." This is sheer stupidity. In the beginning - if there was any beginning - there was wordlessness. THE BIBLE says, "And the word was with God."

What kind of reasoning is this? First you say, "In the beginning there was only the word." Then from where does this God come? And THE BIBLE says not only this, it says, "The word was with God and the word was God." It is just the opposite of reality.

In the beginning there was wordlessness - and there was no God with wordlessness. And the question of God being one with wordlessness is absolutely stupid, because "god" itself is a word and nothing else.

That silence was not only in the beginning; it is in the middle too, it is in the end too. It is always. It surrounds you twenty-four hours a day. But the difficulty is, not only a single word but millions of words are with you. They make a very thick wall between you and existence. You are encaged in words - Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan, Buddhist. The sermons in the churches, in the synagogues, are just words.

I am not giving you a sermon, I am simply creating a device, using two words to make you aware of the pause in between; only then will you understand. And it is not a question of understanding me, understanding is simply understanding.

When you bring a lighted torch into a dark room, it shows you the whole room, all that is there: the paintings on the walls, the furniture, the floor, the ceiling. Understanding is a quality in you. It has not to be connected with me. It is not linear, it is multidimensional. The moment you understand, the whole existence is an open book for you. Then all the mystifications of the religions disappear.

Remember, I am saying "mystifications," I am not saying the "mysteries."

In fact, when all the mystifications of the religions disappear and you suddenly find yourself just in a moment of understanding, life is an open book, but tremendously mysterious. When mystifications are no longer there, then there is mystery. Then each moment of your life is a mystery, and every moment of your life goes on leading you deeper and deeper into the mysterious, the miraculous.

All the religions have committed a great crime against humanity. They have tried to explain to you what is not explainable. In their effort to explain to you the mystery of life, they have really explained it away. By inventing a God they destroyed the mystery of creativity. They created a God as creator; they continually conditioned you that existence is the creation. But existence is not schizophrenic, it is not split in two - the creator and the creation - it is simply creativity.

Hence I say to you that sometimes poets, singers, dancers, have come very close to the mystery - but I don't recall any saint, theologian, philosopher having come close to the mystery of existence.

In fact, their whole attempt is to demystify existence. They are trying to put before you a certain dogma which explains everything and leaves nothing for you. Those are mere words, empty, ugly.

I don't want to give you words; you are already burdened too much. I want to take all words from you. And I am using words for a very strange reason - because if you have a thorn in your foot, you have to use another thorn to take it out. I am destroying your words by my words, and giving you a chance continuously to listen to the pauses, the silent moments.

You are right that you feel you understand my words - anybody can do that. I don't use big words, I don't use any jargon. And you are also right that the feeling arises that you don't understand me at all. You will have to choose. Either you go on understanding my words and become a great pundit, a scholar... and a scholar is farthest away from existence. You may become very knowledgeable, but your knowledge is just an effort to cover up your ignorance.

But if you choose the silent periods, then suddenly all the mysteries of life become available to you - not as explanations; you don't get reality as an answer, you get it as an experience. And with that mystery you also become a mystery.

This is not ignorance, this is innocence.

You become the child.

Question 3:

This is great! One can commit suicide only once, and you have attempted many times - and you are still alive. Those attempts were not true, they were all bogus, and you knew it even then.

I have heard.... Mulla Nasruddin wanted to commit suicide. Being a man of great cleverness, he made all the arrangements, left no loopholes. Perhaps nobody else had attempted suicide in that way.

He went on top of a hill, taking a pistol with him. Just underneath the hill, deep down, was a river, very dangerous, deep, and surrounded by all kinds of rocks. On the hill there was a tree - he had also brought a rope. Not to take any chances, he figured out all the possible things so that suicide was absolutely certain. He also carried with him a big container full of kerosene oil.

He hanged himself from the tree, but because he was going to do many more things, he could not take his feet from the earth - because then how was he going to do other things? So he was hanging from the tree and standing on the earth. Then he poured kerosene oil over himself; he had brought a lighter too. He created a fire, the kerosene oil was burning all around him. But he was not a man to take any chances, so he also shot a bullet into his head. But the bullet cut the rope, he fell down into the river, and the river water destroyed the fire!

Desperately, he was coming back home when I met him. I asked, "You are still alive after all that arrangement?"

He said, "What to do? I know how to swim!" Everything failed!

You say you have attempted suicide many times. One thing is certain: you don't want to commit suicide, you want to play with the idea. And you feel also that there is fear about death and there is also a certain joy. This is not only your situation. It is a very common human phenomenon.

Life is a torture, a burden; it is anguish. One wants to get rid of it. To get rid of it means getting rid of all the anguish, the despair, the hopelessness, the meaninglessness - this wife, this husband, these kids, this job. Hence there is an attraction towards death, because death will put an end to all your misery. But it will also put an end to you - that creates fear.

You really want to live, and live forever, but you want to live in paradise. And you are living in a hell!

You want to get rid of the hell, you don't want to get rid of yourself. And I want to emphasize that you are your own hell. So suicide is attractive from one side in that it will put an end to all your miseries, but on the other hand there is a great fear: it will finish you too.

Isn't there some way that the miseries can be finished and you can live more intensely?

I also teach you that a certain suicide can help you - the suicide of the ego, not of you. Let the ego die, and then see that with it all problems disappear. You are left full of joy, blessedness, and each moment goes on opening new doors to new mysteries. Each moment becomes a moment of discovery - and it is an unending process.

You have attempted so many times to commit suicide. This time you commit suicide my style. And anyway, you have failed so much that you must have become very much of an expert in failing. And deep down you don't want to die because you are afraid of death - which is natural. Why should one put an end to one's life when life has not even been lived? You have not even tasted it, you have not explored the multidimensional beauties, joys and blessings of life.

Naturally you are afraid. But still you go on attempting it, because you don't know how to get rid of all the miseries. Suicide seems to be the simplest way. You are in a split: half of your mind says, "Commit suicide and be finished with all this nonsense - enough is enough." The other part tries to sabotage your effort, because the other part wants to live. You have not lived yet.

Suicide is not going to help. Only more life, more abundant life, is going to help. So this time kill the ego, and see the miracle happen. With the ego gone, there is no misery, no anguish, and no need to commit suicide. With the ego gone, all the doors that were closed by the ego suddenly open and you are available to the sun, to the moon, to the stars.

And it is easier, because to kill the ego you don't need a pistol, kerosene oil, a rope to hang the ego, fire to burn the ego, and if everything fails, then a deep mountainous river underneath to finish the ego. You don't need any of these things, because the ego is only a creation of the society, of the religions, of the culture. It does not exist in fact. You have only to look deeply into it; it is a shadow.

You have to look into it, and it is not there.

Meditation is simply a method of looking into what this ego is. And whoever has ever looked in has not found it. Without any exception, throughout the history of man, whoever has looked inwards has not come across any ego.

This is the suicide of the ego. Nothing has to be done, just a little turning in. And once you know it is not there, then all the sufferings that you were carrying because of a non-existential ego disappear.

They cannot have any nourishment anymore. All these things have been created in your mind by conditioning, by programming; that's what the society has done to you. We have lived the whole of history in an ugly way.

One of my professors did not agree with me, that something can be created by other people when it is not there at all. So I said, "I will show it to you."

I was very much loved by the man; his wife was also very loving towards me. I went to his wife and told her, "Tomorrow morning when the professor gets up, you have to pretend that you are shocked, and say to him, 'What has happened to you? When you went to bed you were perfectly okay; now your face is looking pale. Are you sick or something?'"

The next morning the professor simply denied it. He said, "What nonsense are you talking? I am perfectly okay."

I had told his gardener, "When he comes into the garden, you simply say, 'My God! What has happened to you? You cannot walk, you are wobbling. Something is wrong with you. Just go inside and rest and I will go and call the doctor.'"

And I had said to both these people, "Whatsoever he says, exactly in his own words, you write it down. I will collect those notes."

To the gardener he said, "Yes, it seems something is wrong. Perhaps I should rest, I should not go to the university. But I don't see any need to call the doctor." He was perfectly healthy and there was no problem, so finally he decided that at least for half an hour or an hour he would go to the university.

On the way I had said to many people whom I trusted.... On the way there was the postmaster. I told him, "Even if you are busy, don't miss: when the professor passes by you shout at him, 'What are you doing? Where are you going? Are you mad? Your body is absolutely sick! You come into my house, rest. I will call the doctor.'" I collected all these notes. The professor said, "Yes, since last night I have this feeling that something is going wrong. I am not exactly sure what is going wrong, but something is wrong. I feel a certain trembling inside, a fear, as if I am not going to last long."

His house and the university philosophy department were almost one mile apart, and he had always walked - but that day, in the middle, he stopped another professor's car and told him, "I don't think I will be able to reach the university department."

The university was on a hilly place, up and down. From his house it was an uphill task to reach the department; the department was on the top of the hill and his house was in the valley.

He said, "I am huffing, huffing... my body is trembling. I think there is fever, and there is much more which I cannot figure out." So he wanted a lift.

And the professor who had passed him was sent by me: "Just when he is in a very bad situation, you stop your car and ask, 'What is the matter?'" In the car he said, "You should not have come, you should have called the doctor. Your eyes look as if they have lost all luster. Your face looks dry, faded; you look like a faded painting. Just in one night! Had you a heart attack in the night? It must have been serious."

And he said, "It seems that I had a heart attack and I was not aware because I was asleep, but now I know. All the symptoms are showing that my life is at the very end."

When he entered the university department, the peon who used to sit in front of the department.... I had told him, "When he comes, you simply jump and hold him."

He said, "But he will be very angry. And what kind of thing are you asking? You have never asked anything before."

I said, "We are doing an experiment - me and the professor. Don't interfere, you simply do what I say. You just hold him and tell him, 'You are going to fall.'" He did that and the professor thanked him. And the peon had no need to tell him that he was going to fall; the professor said himself, "If you had not been here I would have fallen."

Inside the department I was waiting for him. I said, "Jesus! You look like a ghost! What calamity has happened to you?" I took hold of him, put him in a reclining chair.

And he said, "Just one thing I want to tell you. My children are small" - he had only two children - "my wife is young, inexperienced. I don't have any family; my father is dead, my mother is dead. I don't know anybody who can take care of them when I am gone. I can think only of you."

I said, "You don't be worried. I will take care of your children, your wife - better than you are doing.

But before you decide to leave the world, I have to show you a few notes."

He said, "A few... what notes?"

I said, "I will have to go and collect them."

He said, "From whom?"

I said "From your wife, from the gardener, from the postmaster, from the professor who drove you here, from the peon who saved you from falling."

He said, "But how do you know?"

I said, "It was all planned. And you say that man cannot be deceived by something nonexistential?"

I went down, collected all the notes, and I showed him them one by one. And I said, "Look how you are getting caught up. To your wife you absolutely denied there was anything wrong. To the gardener you said 'Perhaps something is wrong.' But it was "perhaps," you were not certain yet. But the idea was getting in. To the postmaster you said, 'Yes, something must have happened. From the very evening I was feeling bad, sick, apprehensive.'

"With the professor in the car you accepted that you must have had a heart attack while you were asleep. You were feeling so weak" - and he was a strong man - "that you could not conceive yourself walking uphill to the department. And to the peon who jumped and took hold of you, you said, 'I am grateful to you. I was just going to fail, to collapse.' Now this is a simple idea," I told him, "that has been implanted in you."

Now do you see the point? This man can even die, you just have to keep on going. I was only proving a point on which he was not agreeing, so this was only an argument - I did not want him to die. Otherwise, I would have talked to the doctor and had him say to him, "Your days are finished, so whatever you want to do - write your will or anything - do it quickly. It is not something that I can help with, your heart is simply finished; any moment it is going to stop." I could have killed that man just by an idea.

Seeing the notes, immediately he was back, perfectly healthy. He walked down the hill laughing, and told the peon, "You should not listen to this man, he is dangerous. He almost killed me!" He told the other professor, "This is not right, that you suggested to me that I must have had a heart attack."

He told the postmaster, "You are my neighbor, and is this right, to push me towards death?"

He was very angry with his wife. He said, "I can think that he persuaded other people - he has everybody impressed by him - but I cannot believe that my own wife deceived me, listened to him.

We were in an argument; it was a question of my prestige, and you destroyed it!" But the wife said, "You should be grateful to him. He has given proof that man can be programmed for something which does not exist at all."

You think you are a Christian? It is just an idea implanted in you. Do you think there is a God? An idea implanted in you. Do you think there is a heaven and hell? It is nothing but programming. You are all programmed.

My work with you is to deprogram you. And I am showing you all the notes - day after day, continuously - that these are the things that have made you almost dull, stupid, even attracted towards suicide, towards death. My religion is unique in this way: all the religions of the past have programmed people; I deprogram you, and then I leave you alone, to yourself.

People have been asking me, "What is your religion? What is your philosophy? Can't you give us something like a Christian catechism so we can understand that these are your principles?"

I have none, because that will be programming you again. When a Hindu becomes a Christian, what happens? The Christians deprogram him as a Hindu, and reprogram him as a Christian. There is no difference. From one ditch he has fallen into another ditch. Perhaps the newness of it may keep him happy for a few days, but soon he will start looking for another ditch. Now he is addicted to ditches!

And in this way he is simply digging his own grave. That is the final ditch into which he will fall.

I deprogram you, and I don't give you any other program. I leave you alone, empty, just a zero. In that zero, the ego disappears and all the blessings start showering on you.

Question 4:

It is nothing. It is not a strange phenomenon, it is just the Oregonian sun and its heat.

You should simply go to Pythagoras - you need medical treatment. And of course, I am not a medicine man. First, get medical treatment, and when you start seeing me the way everybody else is seeing me, then if you have any question I can help.

Question 5:

It all depends who is going to do it. If the politicians are going to do it, or the so-called religions are going to do it, then it is against nature. They cannot do anything natural, they are against nature.

But if it is being done by an international academy of scientists - I say International academy of scientists - it can be a tremendous, progressive step, and it will not be against nature. It will be nature's growth.

But it all depends on who is doing it. The experiments themselves are neutral. No experiment has any vested interest, it is neutral. You can use poison to kill you; the same poison can be used by medical people to save you. It all depends who is doing it.

For example, the discovery of atomic energy was a step of tremendously great progress, a quantum leap. We had found a key to transform the earth into paradise - so much energy in such a small atom. And they are in everything... just in a dewdrop there are millions of atoms. Any atom, if it is exploded, releases so much energy that you can make the whole earth live in luxury. Or you can create Hiroshima and Nagasaki - thousands of people dead within seconds.

But because atomic energy, after its invention, went into the hands of the politicians, it became a servant of death. Now there are even more advanced nuclear weapons which can destroy the whole earth. The already existing weapons are enough to destroy this earth seven times. One simply wonders why nations are going to develop more and more nuclear power. Seven times destroying the earth is not enough? In fact, you can destroy the earth only once.

But scientific progress falls into the hands of the politicians because only they can provide enough finance to make these discoveries possible. The scientists of the whole world should think it over:

their genius is being used by idiots! The scientists should disconnect themselves from any nation - whether it is the Soviet Union or America. They should create an international academy of sciences.

And it is not difficult. If all the scientists of the world are together, finances can be made available, and these discoveries can help man tremendously.

The international academy of scientists can be in this international city. We can give them land, and every possible support. But they should be the decisive factors in what is going to happen through their experiments. And it is time the scientists should recognize their great responsibility. If a third world war happens then the scientists will be the greatest criminals, because they supplied all kinds of inventions to the politicians.

Science should not be the monopoly of any nation, any country. The whole idea is stupid. How can science be monopolized? And every country is trying to monopolize the scientists, keep their inventions secret. This is against humanity, against nature, against existence. Whatever a genius discovers should be in the service of the whole.

You are asking whether discoveries like changing human hearts or human brains are progressive steps. They are of great importance to bring a new humanity on the earth. If Einstein's body is no longer capable of living, do you think it would not be good if his whole brain is transplanted into a young, healthy man? The new man will become an Einstein, because all the genius of Einstein is transplanted to a younger body.

This way bodies may go on changing, but we can keep the genius of Albert Einstein growing for centuries. And if a man in a seventy-year life can give so much, you can imagine if his brain continues for centuries how much benefit it will be for humanity, for the whole universe.

This is really a wastage: the container gets rotten, and you throw the content also. The body is only a container. If the container has become dirty, old, unusable, change the container, but don't throw away the content. The genius mind can live for eternity in different bodies; that is nothing against nature.

You heart, if it starts failing, and if you are of immense value to humanity... what is the fear of exchanging the heart? Somebody may be dying from cancer, but his heart is perfectly healthy; that heart can be planted in a man who is talented, a genius, and is healthy, but whose heart is not strong. This is simple; there is nothing in it against nature.

But with politicians and the power in their hands, of course every advance has gone against nature.

Everything that human genius has discovered, invented, finally is in the service of death. So are the priests. Now science is no longer a child, that it has to depend on others. Science is now grown-up enough, it is adult. Just a little courage....

I give the invitation to all the scientists of the world; we have the place, we have intelligent people here to help you in every possible way. And if you want to make an international academy here, we are capable of managing finances for you.

It will be a great revolution in the history of man. The whole power will be in the hands of the scientists, who have never done any harm to anybody. And once all the power is in the hands of the scientists, politicians will fade away of their own accord. They have been exploiting scientists for their own purposes, and to be exploited by anybody is not an act of dignity.

The scientists should recognize their dignity, they should recognize their individuality. They should recognize that they have been exploited down the ages by the priests and the politicians. Now it is time to declare that science is going to stand on its own feet. This will be a great freedom.

Then all these experiments, such as laboratory babies, will be of a different caliber, because you can arrange what kind of genius you want. Up to now it has been just accidental, and because it has been accidental, ninety-nine percent of the people have nothing to contribute. They contribute only problems to the world.

Now, what has Ethiopia contributed to the world? What have the poor countries contributed to the world - or even the rich countries? Except problems, wars, there is no contribution on their part.

But if you can give birth to a child in a scientific lab.... It is possible, there is no problem in it. The male semen and the woman's egg can meet in a tube. There is no need to go on in the old bullock cart way. We can look and we can have the whole picture of what this child is going to be. If we want more poets, we can create more poets. If we want more musicians, we can create more musicians.

And we can create only geniuses; there is no need for mediocre people - they have had their day.

We can give the child strength, long life. We can make sure that he never becomes sick, that he will never becomes old. It is just a question of managing and finding the right egg and the right male contribution to the egg. What we have been doing is just utterly unintelligent.

And this will free man also from guilt, possessiveness, jealousy, because you will not be producing children. Sex, for the first time, will be simply fun! Children will be produced in the lab. They will belong to all. And because you are not going to produce children in the old way - it should be illegal and criminal to do so, you will be behind bars if you do it - then many problems of your life will be simply dissolved.

Why is the man so insistent...? Throughout the ages the insistence has remained there: he wants to be certain that the child born out of his wife's womb is his. Why? Who are you anyway? It is a question of property, because your child will become the inheritor of all that you have accumulated.

You want to be certain that it is your child, not your neighbor's child.

Women have been kept almost imprisoned, for the simple fear that if they start mixing with people it will be difficult to decide whose child it is. Only the mother will know, or even she may not know.

Once production of life goes into the hands of science, sex will be transformed. Then you are not jealous, then you are not a monopolist, then monogamy is absurd. Then sex is just fun, the way you enjoy tennis. And you don't bother that the partners should remain monogamous - two bodies enjoying each other.... And there will be no fear that the wife may get pregnant and there will be problems, financial and other.

Sex will no longer be a problem for the world population; it will no longer be a problem for the priest.

In fact, if children are produced in the scientific lab, many of the troubles of the world will dissolve.

And we can create the best people: beautiful, healthy, capable of living as long as we want. Old age is not necessary - a man can remain young, healthy, without sickness.

All these hospitals and so many people, so much money involved.... Do you know? America spends more money on laxatives than on education. Great idea! Who cares about education? The question is laxatives!

But the basic thing should be remembered. Scientists have to be courageous enough and declare that they don't belong to any nation, to any religion, that whatsoever they will be doing will be for the whole humanity. And I don't see that there is anything impossible in it.

I am absolutely for those progressive inventions which can make man happier, live longer, be younger, healthier, and which make his life more of a play, fun, and less of a torturous journey from the cradle to the grave.