Love is showering on your boyfriend too!

Question 1:

Nandan, love has many layers: the biological, the social, the spiritual. They need not be in conflict but I can understand your problem. For centuries man has been told that either you love the world or you love the beyond, you can't have both together.

This has been one of the most stupid teachings that has destroyed man's possibility of blissfulness.

This world and the beyond are not two; the beyond has roots in this world. Your love to your boyfriend and your love to me are not competitive. On the contrary, the more you love me, the more you will be able to love your boyfriend. Love is a deepening inside, a cleansing and a flowering. Your boyfriend may be just a small rosebush but that does not mean that that rosebush cannot be a part of a great garden.

There is no necessity to divide them. If you love your boyfriend, you will love the garden. The boyfriend is perhaps your kindergarten where you learn how to love, but love should not be limited, it should spread. It should spread finally to the whole universe. Even your love to me should not be a bondage. Because of this fact Gautam Buddha used to say to his disciples, "If on the path of meditation going inwards you meet me, kill me immediately."

I should not be a hindrance. I am here to help you, not to hinder you. And I will be happy that your love becomes so big that it contains the song of the birds and the trees in silence enjoying the sun.

Your love should be your sky.

But we have been brought up in such wrong ways that love has become another name of jealousy.

It has become another name of competition, another name of domination. But that condition has to be erased; it can be erased. That's the whole work of meditation: to erase all conditions so that you are as vast as the whole.

When I first came across the statement of P.D. Ouspensky... He was one of the greatest mathematicians of this age and he wrote one of the most beautiful books ever written. The name of the book is TERTIUM ORGANUM. And in the very beginning he declares that the first book was written by Aristotle; it's name was ORGANUM. 'Organum' means the principle of knowledge.

The second book was written by Bacon, NOVUM ORGANUM. On the same lines he goes far beyond Aristotle. 'Novum organum' means the new principle of knowledge. With absolute humbleness and humility said Ouspensky, "I am going to call my book TERTIUM ORGANUM, the third canon of thought, the third principle of knowledge."

Up to that point it was okay. Certainly he has much more to offer now than Bacon. But he goes on, saying, "I want to make a statement that the third canon of thought existed even before the first canon of thought of Aristotle. It was just not discovered."

All these three books are concerned with mathematics. In TERTIUM ORGANUM is the statement:

"What I am going to write is not mathematics but supermathematics." In mathematics the part can never be equal to the whole - it is obvious. But in supermathematics, Ouspensky says, "The part can be as big as the whole."

The part can become the whole. When a dewdrop disappears into the ocean, slipping from the lotus leaf, do you think it remains still a dewdrop? Or do you think it is smaller than the ocean?

The moment it slips into the ocean, it becomes the ocean. Then the part and the whole are one.

Love is the art of being one with the whole.

On the path you will find many lovers. Don't make them hindrances and don't think of them as obstacles. That's what has been taught to you by all religions of the world, that if you love things of the world your spiritual growth is retarded. You will never go to the beyond, you will never open your wings to the whole sky - just like an eagle flying across the sun. You will be caught somewhere.

Your boyfriend is simply a first taste, a small taste of love. He is not a hindrance. If you love me and the love towards your boyfriend disappears, then that love was not true. And you cannot be certain about your love for me, because there are greater realities. If you come across them, your love towards me will disappear. No, you are thinking in a very wrong way.

My love should make your love with your boyfriend more pure, more meditative, more musical, more authentic. I should not be a competitor, I should be a nourishment to your love. You have to learn this new language which the society has prevented. There have been reasons why the societies around the world have been preventing it: jealousies of all kinds, competitions of all kinds, fear of all kinds... that if you even love a newspaper, your wife will take it away and throw it out, "While I am here, how dare you...!" And it is true that you were hiding yourself behind the newspaper so as not to see the woman. You were keeping that newspaper upside down, you were not reading it. It was just to keep a coexistence with your wife to whom you say, "I love you."

The American philosopher Dale Carnegie, who is the most stupid philosopher I have come across, suggests in a book how to influence people and win friends - but you know in America everything is superficial, a hypocrisy. He is teaching a hypocrisy; he says: "At least three times a day, you should say to your wife, 'I love you darling.'" It does not matter whether you love or not. It is a question of coexistence; otherwise she is going to create trouble. Bring roses and ice cream and Coca Cola just as symbols of your love.

But in America data has been collected showing that everything has a life of only three years:

marriages last only three years - that is the average; jobs last only three years; people change cities every three years... Every fashion goes out of existence within three years. Strange! The number three seems to be a very Christian number: God, the holy ghost and the son. America seems to be really Christian - follows the ideology. But this is the average. In the name of love, so many other things go on.

I have heard...

In a marriage registrar's office, a couple were signing the forms. The woman signed and then the man signed. And the woman said, "That's enough. I want a divorce." Even the magistrate could not believe - nothing had happened: "Why do you want a divorce?"

The woman said, "You can see my signature and he has written his signature in such big words... it is going to be a conflict of the egos. It is better to stop it from the very beginning. Why unnecessarily torture? He is not even polite enough to sign just the way I have signed. He has written as if he is teaching school children on a blackboard... such big words. What is the need? He is filling the whole form with his signature. This is the declaration that this is going to be our relationship: 'You are going to be a nonentity.' I don't want to be a nonentity."

In the name of love, people can pretend or can even believe that they love. But it is biology, it is hormones. Just give an injection of different hormones and the love will disappear and you will hate each other. This is not love, this is physiology, biology, chemistry. Have you ever observed married people moving together, happy? The honeymoon lasts only one week or at the most two weeks.

And every story says, "After the honeymoon they lived in happiness forever." Nobody describes what happened after the honeymoon. The honeymoon is a fiction created by your biology - a romance.

You are not the master of it.

Once those hormones are satisfied - you have known the woman, the woman has known you, and you are acquainted with each other's geography perfectly - then the question arises how to get rid of... And every society helps you to get married and prevents you from divorce. There is a significant psychology behind it: if divorce is as easy as marriage, then there will be a turmoil, chaos. People will go on honeymoon and then will go directly to the magistrate for a divorce. They are finished; they cannot tolerate each other's presence - this is not love.

So first you have to understand clearly what love should mean. I have been watching married couples. They look so sad when they are together. And if you see a man with a woman, happy, it is certain the woman is somebody else's woman. Happiness is impossible because twenty-four hours together becomes a torture.

The same conflict, "Why are you late? Where have you been?" And every husband on his way home is trying to figure out the questions - where he has been... what he has been doing....

It is not only that the husband is trying to figure it out, his wife knows that all that he is going to say is nothing but lies. Even if he tells the truth, the wife is not going to believe it. Nor does the man believe.... Husbands and wives become detectives, watching each other out of the corners of their eyes - what is going on...?

A woman was a hypochondriac. Every day, she was picking up some new disease from television advertisements about medicines. She enjoyed it because it is a very dominating position: you are sick, you are ill - the husband cannot be hard on you, he has to be sympathetic. He has to say, "Darling, I will take you to the doctor."

But the doctors were saying that she did not have the disease. "What am I going to treat?" So she would force the husband to go to another doctor for another opinion....

But fortunately, she died. She left a will saying, "On my grave nothing else should be written except:

Now you know - or do you still think I was a hypochondriac?"

One loves only if one finds a communion of the spirit. It is not against biology or anything. Those are strategies of nature to continue the species. If one loves as a communion of spirit, the indication, the absolute certainty will be that there will not be any jealousy. Because if the wife finds herself happy with someone one day, and you love her, then you should be happy because she is happy.

Love wants everybody whom it loves to be happy. If there is a communion of spirit, there will be no secretiveness. The wife can say, "Look at that man, how beautiful he is," and the husband will not be offended. He will appreciate his wife's aesthetic sense. That's what she is saying; she is not saying anything else.

In nature, no animal is happy while making love. Ordinarily, we don't come across other animals, only the stray dogs... but have you seen their faces? They are so sad while they are making love, and people make them even more sad. People start hitting them with stones. Strange people... you want to love and you don't want anybody else to love. The dogs are not doing any harm to anybody, and a crowd follows them and they are dragging each other in agony.

That's why in the animal world there are only seasons when animals make love. For the remaining year they forget about love completely; that one season was enough. It takes at least nine months to forget what happened.

But man is more stupid. He hates it - every night thinking, "This is the end! Let tomorrow come..."

And by the evening he starts thinking again, "Why not take another chance? What is the harm?

Then I can stop..."

It never stops, and the strangest thing is, your love, your lovemaking is not making your life more joyful, more musical, more poetic, more dancing. On the contrary, it is making it dry, desertlike. You somehow carry... It is a problem rather than a joy. Yes, in the beginning it seems to be a great blessing, but only in the beginning. The more intelligent you are, the sooner you will be finished with the idea of blessing.

If your love is just of this lower, the lowest kind of biology, then certainly when you love me your love with your boyfriend will disappear. Before the higher can be, the lower has to disappear. This should give you an indication that you have to raise your love higher so that it does not disappear but is more nourished.

My love is not only showering on you, Nandan, it is showering on your boyfriend too. You both should dance, you both should feel nourished; new flowers should blossom for both of you.

I am not anti-life as other religions are. I am absolutely for life, and life in its essence means love.

I don't even want your love to be confined to me - there are higher realms. I am only a door. If I can take you to higher realms of love where love is no longer a dialogue between two persons, but transformed into a lovingness, you don't need a lover. You are love and wherever you move, you are surrounded with the aura of love. You will shower your love on the trees, not with effort; you will radiate love even if there is no one, in emptiness.

The ultimate love is lovingness - where the other is no longer addressed; where everyone, the whole of existence becomes your beloved. The master is only the door to the infinity, to the eternity, to the freedom from duality.

The most important French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, has insisted again and again that the other is hell - and in a way, he is right. To be with the other, it is very difficult not to create misery for yourself and for the other.

Nobody is made for you. You have your likings; the other has his own likings. You are not one; the rhythm of your heart is not one. You live together, you have to live together because you are not capable of living alone. To you, aloneness appears as loneliness, despair - as if you are deserted, abandoned.

You don't know that aloneness is not loneliness. Aloneness is the highest peak of consciousness.

And when love is alone, unaddressed, or addressed in all directions, then it becomes a paradise.

But we have to learn step by step, we have to fall and we have to rise. If your love for your boyfriend deepens only when I am not coming out, I will not come out. Because I will not commit that

kind of sin - destroying poor Nandan's love. When I come out she becomes enlightened - and enlightened women don't have boyfriends. It is an idiotic idea. Why? Enlightened women should have enlightened boyfriends, so rather than deserting the poor boy... help him to be enlightened so I can also come out. Because if I don't come out... you see all these people... they will kill you, you and your boyfriend - both.

So, change your strategy. I am not against your love, I am absolutely for it. Love deeply, love without jealousy, love blissfully and help each other to be more meditative. Because what else can we do and what can we share? Man is born naked without anything. Love should be the beginning of sharing something - not all that rubbish that Dale Carnegie is suggesting.

The only sharing is of silence, joy, celebration. Slowly, slowly your hearts start melting and merging into each other. Your love becomes a spiritual phenomenon. And your love helps you to come closer to the master, because the master is not separating you, but joining you.

It is an ugly fact, that even people like Gautam Buddha or Mahavira insisted on renouncing your wives, your husbands, your children. Nobody even talks about how many people - millions must be the number in twenty-five centuries - have been deserted, and for wrong reasons people have become sannyasins. It was the easiest divorce and very respectable: you don't have to go to the registrar's office, and you don't have to be condemned by the society.

On the contrary, if you renounce your wife and your children in the name of religion.... Are you aware of the implications? Millions of women will suffer poverty, will become prostitutes. Millions of children will become beggars, thieves, criminals. Who is responsible for all this? Your great so-called leaders.

A few years back I read the life story of a Jaina monk....

He was very much respected, and the respect came because he was not born a Jaina, he was born as a Hindu goldsmith. Whenever people convert to other religions, in the new religion they are respected greatly because they are giving you the confidence that your religion is higher, greater, truer than their religion. They are becoming a certain argument in favor of your philosophy.

There were other Jaina monks but this man had more respect than anybody else. I was looking at his biography. He renounced his wife and twenty-six years later, the wife died, poor, doing small things in people's houses - cleaning, washing their dishes, their clothes. The conditioning is such that she was still happy that her husband had become a great saint.

The day the saint received the message that his wife had died, his statement remained with me; I cannot forget it because I cannot forgive it. He said, "My last anxiety is finished." After twenty-six years... he left the woman in utter poverty.... What was his anxiety? It is easy to renounce a woman, but it is not easy to renounce sex. So although he had renounced - because so much honor and so much respect - deep down the sex must have been fooling him. His statement: "My last anxiety..."

means that for twenty-six years he had been carrying the anxiety, he had not really renounced. But this has been happening all over the world.

I want to transform the quality of your love.

I don't want you to renounce anything.

Renunciation is for the retarded; transformation is for those who are intelligent.

I cannot have millions of people around me for the simple reason that millions of intelligent people don't exist. All kinds of retarded people...

After the first world war, for the first time psychological tests were devised to calculate the mental age of a man. Up to that point it was never thought that there are two ages: the age of the body and the age of the mind. And it was such a shock to discover that the average state of the mind is very retarded; its average age is fourteen years. The man may be seventy - that is his physical age - but his mind, his psychology is only fourteen years of age.

My effort is to bring your mind equal to the age of your body. In fact, it is possible if a man can be seventy and his mind can be only fourteen, that the vice versa is possible.

Somebody asked Emerson, "What is your age?"

He said, "Three hundred and sixty years." Emerson was a man of truth and the man could not believe that he could tell such a lie.

Three hundred and sixty...? He pretended that he had not heard. He said, "I am a little deaf. Please repeat. What is your age?"

Emerson said, "You have heard it, but I will repeat, three hundred and sixty."

The man said, "I cannot accept this. You don't look more than sixty."

Emerson said, "Yes, that's true. That is the age of my body. I am talking about my age, the age of my psychology, and that is at least six times more than my physical age."

First, I have to cleanse all the garbage that the old generations have poured in your mind. Your intelligence has to be cleansed, your love has to be cleansed. You have to be given maturity, a centering, an individuality and then there are not two worlds as all the religions say.

I emphatically deny that there are two worlds. The other world is simply a fiction, a consolation for the retarded, for the poor, for the miserable to give them a hope, to give them opium so they can somehow manage to drag themselves to their graves.

This is the only world. It does not mean that with your death comes the end. It simply means that with your death, you move into a higher quality of life. It all depends on you. If in this life, you can manage to get rid of jealousies, to get rid of biological and physiological attractions... if in this life you can get in tune, in love; if this life can become a celebration, your innermost consciousness will continue celebrating on higher levels. But there are not two worlds, it is one world, one eternity.

The people who divided it into two were very cunning because that gave them the scope: "If you are poor here, don't be worried. Just pray to God and in the next life you will be in paradise with all the pleasures that you are being denied here." That paradise of all the religions is just a consolation for the poor, for the suffering, for the miserable. It does not give you growth, it does not give you more consciousness. On the contrary, it simply gives you a hope which is not going to be fulfilled.

Nobody has written from the other world. At least they could have sent a Christmas card saying, "We are happy here." No evidence for it exists, no proof and no argument. It is the greatest fiction - the God, the paradise and all the joys of paradise.

Jesus says, "Blessed are the poor" - and everybody knows who is blessed. If the poor are blessed then we should destroy all the riches that exist on the earth. Make everybody a beggar, make everybody blessed - because only the blessed ones, the poor, will enter into the kingdom of God!

And their different religions for different climates, different geographies, different problems have managed to give, promised to give... You will find beautiful women there; here you have to renounce a poor woman, and there you will find beautiful women who never age. They always remain young, fixed... sixteen years of age. They can only be made of plastic; they cannot be real.

Those women have been offered to millions of saints who have entered paradise. You can't find a prostitute on the earth comparable to the prostitutes that are offered in paradise. And you can see a strange thing: beautiful women are provided because all religions are man-made. Beautiful boys are not provided - who cares about women?

Yes, only one religion provides beautiful boys - for homosexuality; that is also for men, not for women. Rivers of wine... Here, wine is condemned and in paradise you swim in wine, you drink, you drown. Whatever you want to do, you can do. And such utterly nonsensical ideas have been prevalent for centuries all over the world.

I have heard...

Swami Muktananda died; in fact, he was never alive, but theoretically he died. One of his chief disciples could not manage to be separated from the master. He committed suicide and rushed as fast as he could into paradise. Just under a beautiful tree with thousands of flowers, poor Muktananda was lying down and on top of him was lying an American actress, Marilyn Monroe.

The disciple said, "My God, this is not right." And Muktananda was always saying to be celibate...

what is happening? Then he realized that the values had changed: this was paradise. He fell into the feet of the couple who were making love and he said, "Forgive me. For a moment, a doubt has arisen because I forgot that values have changed. This is not the earth; this is paradise. You are well rewarded: the woman is really beautiful."

Before Muktananda could speak, the woman said, "You idiot, you don't understand a thing. This old guy is not rewarded, I have been punished. They could not find a more ugly punishment for me."

There is no other world, but consciousness is eternal. Existence has always been here and will always be here. It is up to you - absolutely up to you - to make the best of this great opportunity.

Purify your love and it becomes prayer.

Purify your intelligence and it becomes your wisdom.

Purify yourself completely and you become one with the whole. And to be one with the whole is the ultimate benediction, the blissfulness, the experience for which thousands of people have been searching down the ages on wrong paths.

This world has to be loved, this world has to be respected, this world has to be your temple, your mosque, your church. This world has to be your gratefulness, your gratitude.

Nandan, enlightenment is not something of another world. Enlightenment happens now and here.

And enlightenment is nothing but a purity of everything that you are. It is not renunciation, it is rejoicing.

I am changing the very definition of sannyas. Up to now sannyas has been defined as renouncing the world. That has been a calamity. Millions of people have renounced the world who could have created a better world, more beautiful. I change the definition of sannyas. I say it is not renouncing, it is rejoicing.

Rejoice in your love, rejoice in your songs.

Rejoice in your music, rejoice in your dance.

Rejoice in these beautiful trees - these innocent sounds of the birds.

Rejoice in the night full of stars.

We have the most perfect world and there is no other world - but we have to get in tune with it. We have to become one with it.

Enlightenment is not something special, it is simply a purified consciousness in which thousands of flowers of love and intelligence and truth and peace and silence grow on their own accord.

Nandan, you created a very serious silence - the trees don't like it. They wait for your laughter; it is their nourishment. When you laugh the birds understand perfectly the language of laughter. They don't understand Arabic or Sanskrit or Hebrew, but they understand laughter.

A few things for the trees and for the birds....

Paddy is explaining to Seamus what happened when he went into the new Zorba the Buddha self- service restaurant.

"I got myself a cup of coffee," he says, "and set it on the table. Then I went back for a piece of pie, but when I came back with the pie, the coffee was gone. So I set down the pie and went back for another cup of coffee... the pie was gone. So I wrote a card. It read: 'I put my finger in the coffee.'

Then I stuck the card alongside the cup. I went for another piece of pie, but when I came back the coffee cup was empty and someone had written on the card, 'I drank your coffee but I could not find your finger.'"

Herschel Goldberg goes up to his father, Hymie, and says, "Dad, I want to marry Suzy."

"Don't marry her, my son," says Hymie. "When I was a young man, I was pretty wild and to put it bluntly, she is your half-sister."

Sometime later, Herschel comes up to Hymie and says, "Dad, I am in love with Mildred and I want to marry her."

"You can't," says Hymie, "she is your half-sister."

"How about Mabel?" asks Herschel, a few weeks later.

"Sorry," says Hymie, "she is your half-sister too."

Herschel is really determined to get married, so he goes to his mother and complains.

"Dad says I can't marry Suzy, Mildred or Mabel because they are all my half-sisters. What can I...?"

"Don't worry," says Becky, "you marry any of them you like - he is not your father!"

Okay, Maneesha?

Yes, Beloved Master.