Love gives your legs a dance

Question 1:

Jivan Kavya, life is not made of contradictions. It is made of complementaries. Only in the mind, do things appear to be opposite. Only in the mind, you cannot conceive how they both can be one.

That's why euclidean geometry says that parallel lines never meet, but in fact, it has been discovered that parallel lines also meet.

This whole existence is a meeting of many dimensions. That is its beauty, its variety, its unending procession of celebration. If you think about emptiness, you cannot think that fullness and emptiness can be the same. But if you experience you will be amazed that what mind has been always proposing, and what philosophers have always been supporting, is absolutely absurd.

All philosophies are absurd.

Only experience is truth, not theoretical considerations about experience. We teach people's minds contradictions: emptiness and fullness are absolutely contradictive. But when you come to a point of deep meditation, you are suddenly surprised and scared too, scared because of your conditioning - it is not supposed that emptiness and fullness should be one. But existence never bothers what your philosophers say, it goes on its own way.

When you are utterly empty, you are also utterly full, overflowing. In fact, emptiness itself becomes a tremendous fullness. Looked at from one side, you can call it empty; for example, if you remove all the furniture and all the junk from your house which people go on collecting... All are great collectors.

If you remove the whole junk, the room, the house is empty of the junk, but in itself, it is for the first time full of itself. All that furniture and all those things were destroying its fullness.

The meditator is bound to come to the point when he has thrown all junk from the mind, and suddenly he sees that emptiness is there. And also there is a fullness of which logically there is no explanation - but it is not a logical process at all.

Jivan Kavya, your experience is tremendously meaningful. It shows that you have touched a deep point where opposites meet and mingle, when enemies become friends, when life and death are one; when emptiness and fullness are not two separate things, but only two separate names given by the mind.

Mind is so small, it cannot conceive such a vast phenomenon that life and death are one, that emptiness and fullness are one. It can conceive emptiness is emptiness and fullness is fullness.

Those are the discriminations of the mind.

Meditation opens the doors of a vast world, existential not theoretical, where suddenly you are shocked for the first time that emptiness and fullness are one, life and death are one, that men and women are one. But it is not a question to be or not to be. Both are one: different names of the same reality.

So don't start thinking about it as if it is a contradiction. That is the mind interfering into your meditation. You have to be very alert - mind is cunning. It tries in every way because it is very well trained by all the educational systems and by all the societies. The more a man's mind is trained in being logical, the more he is accepted as a great intellectual. In fact, he has gone far away from existence with a very rare possibility of returning.

I make a difference between intellect and intelligence: intellect divides things into opposites; intelligence penetrates into opposites and creates bridges. Intellect makes walls; intelligence makes bridges. Meditation is the highest form of intelligence because it is the highest form of consciousness. You will come to such points more and more. This is just the beginning. Just say to the mind, "This is none of your business."

Mind has to understand that you are no longer in its power and in its grip. Once the mind understands it - that you have moved into a totally different world of existence - not of mere thoughts which are soap bubbles - it starts interfering less and less. The day mind stops interfering, and even great contradictions like life and death are accepted totally as one without any doubt, you have arrived home.

This is a great experience on the path of meditation, but mind will try in every way to create doubt.

Listen to existence and never to the mind, because the mind is a creation of the society. You have been trained by the society for years, so it has become very ingrained, but it has destroyed your purity, your clarity. Meditation is simply reclaiming your simplicity, your silence, your perceptivity - where all contradictions dissolve into each other, not as enemies but as friends.

I have heard...

A small child saw his father and mother making love - the window was just a little open. He could not believe that the father was torturing the mother. He rushed to his elder brother and he said, "What are you doing here? We have to do something, otherwise that brute, our father, he is going to kill our mother; he is sitting on her chest."

The elder brother said, "Be quiet. They are not fighting. It is a kind of exercise."

What else to say to the little brother...?

He said, "Exercise? You don't understand the grave situation. I am going to my uncle."

And the uncle said, "Come on. It is not exercise, it is just fooling around."

He said, "It is very strange. Everybody is giving different answers and nobody is doing anything.

And that poor woman, my mother is suffering under the weight of the heavyweight champion my father? Do something!"

The uncle said, "Don't be worried; they are making love."

Mind is a very small thing compared to the vast existence. It cannot understand that contradictions are in deep love with each other - not only in love, they are in fact one. This experience of oneness will give you such blissfulness, such peace, such tensionlessness that you have never experienced before. With these same eyes, you will start looking into the world with a totally different outlook.

Meditation simply changes your vision, your way of seeing, your way of understanding.

This whole existence is a love affair. Nobody is doing any exercise, and nobody is fighting. It is a tremendous balance between the opposites seen by the mind, but it doesn't see the balance - that there is something more than the apparent oppositions.

When one hundred girls are born, there are always one hundred and fifteen boys born at the same time. It seems to be something of a non-mathematical thing, fifteen boys more, but existence knows more than you know. These fifteen boys will have disappeared by the time they are sexually mature.

In fact, within the first two years, those fifteen boys will start disappearing, dying. Nature has to create those fifteen more, so that by the time of marriage, there is at least a similarity, an equality of numbers between men and women.

Nature has its own wisdom.

It is very strange... just at the beginning of this century, in poor countries like India, nine out of ten children would die before they were two years of age; only one would survive. But even at that time, nature was keeping a balance: more boys and less girls would be born. An equilibrium, a balance has to be maintained. With medical developments the situation has changed; just the opposite is happening today. Out of ten babies born, only one dies, nine live.

It is very mysterious how nature comes to know that the situation has changed, and you have to produce according to a new way. But the balance is kept; it has been kept since eternity. Perhaps they are both coming from the same source: two branches of one reality - but man has certainly disturbed the balance.

There are countries and religions which allow that a man can marry four women. Now, if a man marries four women, what about the three other men who will remain unnecessarily celibate? - forcibly. But it happened in countries where men were continuously warring with each other, killing each other. They would rape the women of the enemy but they would not kill them; they would kill the men. So naturally, there were few men and four times more women.

Out of such stupid situations, arbitrary moralities are created. Now those communities have spread all over the world. The situation is not the same but they insist that it is their religious right to marry four women. But if you marry four women, then you are certainly creating corruption in the society.

Those three men will start falling in love with other people's wives - they have to. For those three men, prostitutes will have to be created; otherwise, what is going to happen to their life energy? All kinds of perversions... but these perversions are man-made.

If they listen to the wisdom of nature, there is nothing perverted. Everything is very simple, very silently merging, melting with each other.

There is no conflict in existence.

I say unto you, there is no God and there is no Devil. The Devil was created by the people who created God because they could not think how God can exist without the polar opposite.

Everything exists with the polar opposite.

Even Friedrich Nietzsche missed the point when he said, "God is dead" - he forgot about the Devil.

The Devil continues to live because nobody has declared his death. I declare that both were two sides of the same fiction. When God died there was no need for the Devil.

When there is no other world, a heaven, there is no need for any hell. These are man-made polarities. Seeing that existence always lives with polarities, opposites, contradictions, man feels a little hesitant to accept that there is only heaven.... Then what about the sinners?

But the reality is the saint and the sinner are not opposites; deep down they depend on each other.

If there are no sinners, all saints will disappear. If there are no saints, there will be no sinners. They are not contradictions; they are just part of a beautiful polarity and balance.

In a small school, the teacher asks - for almost one hour she has been teaching - how not to sin, because those who sin will be thrown into hellfire for eternity. And if by mistake you have committed something which is sin, then pray. God is compassionate. He will forgive you and you will enter paradise with all its pleasures. Then she asked the class....

A small boy raised his hand.

She asks, "What is the way to reach paradise?"

The little boy said, "Sin."

She said, "My God, for one whole hour I have been insisting that if you sin you will fall into hell."

He said, "I understand. But unless you sin, you will not be forgiven either. How will you enter paradise? God will ask what sins you have committed. He is compassionate, he will forgive, but first you have to commit."

Sometimes children can see things in a very different perspective. The boy is right. God will be absolutely useless if nobody is sinning. What will he do with his compassion? - out of a job, unemployed... not even the possibility of a retirement pension...!

When we create fiction, we have to create the anti-fiction. Christians talk about the coming of the Antichrist. In the first place, Christ was an uneducated, poor fellow, a little whimsical: riding on his donkey, preaching to a few idiots - who are always available. And in his whole life, he could only find twelve followers. But Christians had to create the idea of Antichrist. Then only, Jesus becomes a real Christ, a real savior: he will save you from the Antichrist.

Two thousand years have passed. Nobody has encountered any Antichrist. Many have been condemned by Christianity as Antichrist, but just by your condemnation you are fulfilling your desire to make Christ a reality.

I was amazed to receive a letter from the president of the Nazi party who believes that Adolf Hitler is the reincarnation of an Old Testament prophet, Elijah. He wrote to me saying, "You have been speaking again and again against Adolf Hitler. Perhaps you don't know that he is a very religious person; he is the reincarnation of the Old Testament prophet Elijah. Please stop speaking against him."

I told my secretary to write to him and say, "I will continue whatever I want to do. Nobody can dictate to me but I can see that you are utterly stupid: Elijah in the Old Testament was a Jew, and a Jew and Adolf Hitler... Can you imagine how many Jews he killed? - six million. A great reincarnation of Elijah the Jewish prophet killing Jews." Seeing the point, he has not replied to me that it's true.

But you can find idiots who even think that Adolf Hitler is a religious man. And there is nothing in his life to make him religious. You have to go back to the rotten Old Testament to find a figure that nobody remembers, Elijah - and he becomes the incarnation. If he had been the incarnation of Elijah then he would have killed all the Germans and not the Jews.

And what was his reason for killing the Jews? - that the Jews are the cause of all misery and suffering in the world. A strange cause, because here almost half of you are Jews, and I don't think any Jew is creating suffering or misery for anybody. I have found them the nicest people.

I am reminded...

A rabbi was on his morning walk and he came across Adolf Hitler. Adolf Hitler said to him, "Rabbi, do you agree with me or not?"

The rabbi said, "I agree absolutely with you. The world is miserable, in suffering because people are using bicycles. Just destroy all bicycles and you will see the whole world becoming a paradise."

It is the same... it is arising again. Anando brought me news from Japan. In Japan there are not many Jews, but two very important books have appeared - and are being sold on a great scale - which say that the world is going towards destruction because of a Jewish conspiracy.

It is strange.... And man can be convinced by any stupid idea.

One old Jew was dying and his wife said to him, "Pray to God your last prayer."

He said, "Yes, I am praying. I was praying silently, but now I will pray openly so that you can all hear:

'God, you have chosen the Jews as your people. Now it is time you chose somebody else; we have suffered enough.'"

And it is true that Moses is in some way responsible for giving this idea to the Jews that they are the chosen people of God. It gave them an idea of superiority. That hurts everybody, particularly those who have similar kinds of ideas. Hindus think they are the chosen people of God. God gave the Hindus his first book, the RIGVEDA - and Hitler felt very inferior: "If Jews are the chosen people of God ... then who are the Germans?"

Somehow, some way had to be found - and Hitler found it. He had sent his people to India and to Tibet to find out some way so that he could declare. He found out that Jainism in India is the oldest religion in the whole world; its symbol is the swastika. That symbol was chosen by Adolf Hitler and he claimed that it was given to the Germans first, as an indication that they are the chosen people.

He started calling Germans "Aryans." Hindus and Jainas had been calling themselves Aryans.

Nobody had heard before that Germans were Aryans. But Aryans are the oldest race, perhaps Germans also are a branch of the Aryans. Becoming Aryans and having the symbol of the swastika, he declared his superiority over the Jews - and because he had the power, he killed six million Jews.

Only forty years have passed, and there are idiots who are writing books that there is an international Jewish conspiracy. Jews are not spread all over the world; they don't have power - they are in trouble in Israel. But rather than looking at reality, people always find excuses: it is a Jewish conspiracy; Jews have to be completely eradicated from the world, then the world will be happy!

There is no logic in it. The same logic as bicycles... destroy all the bicycles and suddenly you will see the world becoming richer, stronger, healthier. Those books are bestsellers - and in Japan, where there are very few Jews. It is dangerous, and when I received the letter from the president - I had never thought that there still existed a Nazi party, that there are still people who believe in Adolf Hitler as a religious leader....

Six million is the number of the Jews he killed. The total number of people killed because of him in the second world war was fifty-two million. These criminals... and then I inquired from my friends about the party and what is their program? Their program is that they are waiting for the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler.

Rather than collecting your energies and your intelligence to make you a beautiful and graceful being, people go on destroying their very energy which could have been a great transformation and enlightenment to them. So don't for a single moment, Jivan Kavya, allow the mind to interfere with your meditation.

Meditation is very delicate - and in the beginning very fragile. Mind is almost ten million years old; it is very strong, very stubborn. You have to protect your meditation and you have to be alert that the mind does not go on planting seeds destructive to your meditation.

That's the function of the communion of the seekers. Alone, perhaps you will find yourself very weak against the mind, but when there are so many people meditating and creating an ocean of meditative energy, you also feel the strength and you can put the mind aside. It may be ten million years old, it does not matter. It has no correspondence with reality.

Bernie Bernstein returns to his business in New York after a holiday in Miami where he enjoyed the company of a gorgeous blonde called Suzy.

Bernie has been back in his office for a few days, when Fagin Finkelstein the lawyer, pays him a visit.

"I am here," begins Fagin, "on behalf of my client, Suzy Lamour."

He then opens his briefcase and pulls out a stack of glossy photographs of Bernie and Suzy in all the various positions of their lovemaking.

"Well, Mr. Bernstein," smiles young Fagin, "what do you think of that?"

Bernie looks from one photograph to the next in horror and then in amazement.

Eventually he reaches a decision.

"Okay," he says, pointing at two of the photos, "I'll take two of this and two of this."

Mind finds some way, howsoever stupid, to get out of the reality. But the reality does not change; in fact, you should learn to get out of the mind and the reality changes tremendously. It changes because you can see it now as it is. It is not according to any theology and not according to any religion and not according to any philosophy.

Existence is so vast and philosophers are so small that their efforts are going to be found stupid.

They may find some small fragments of reality and make out of those fragments great systems. But existence needs not a system created by your mind, but an experience by your very being.

The being is not very far away - just a little distance. Only one station on the way, from the mind to the heart and from the heart to the being - and you have arrived. It is not a long journey, and you don't need any vehicle. You can simply slip inwards. The mind will try to persuade you not to do such a dangerous thing because "I am always here to help you; without me, you will be helpless."

Tell the mind: "Shut up! You have helped me enough and I don't need your help any more. For the first time I want to experience helplessness."

You have arrived at the heart which is still the same as it was when you were born, innocent. It still wonders, it still feels the mysterious, it still loves. It is still a music of the depths of your being.

But don't get stuck there. You can be a poet, a painter, a dancer which is far more beautiful than being a mathematician or a physicist. Don't get stuck there, just one step more: enjoy an overnight stay, drink the beauty of the heart, thank the heart and enter into your being. And the heart never prevents, but helps, shows you the way.

And once you are at your being, the whole universe of reality opens up. You cannot find a single contradiction, you cannot find anything against anything else. Everything is supportive to each other; the whole existence is a cosmic, organic whole.

And the moment you realize, "I am also one with this tremendous unity," the ecstasy that arises remains with you for eternity. But a little effort is needed to get out of the mind, because you are also convinced that your mind is a great help, is a great defense. It is nothing but an imprisonment - and a very small prison.

You are almost like a bird in a cage. Certainly the cage protects, but it has taken away your whole sky. It protects - but it has destroyed your joy and your dance in the sky, in the sun, to far away....

Against the whole sky, this defense of a small cage - it may be of gold - but it cuts your wings, it kills you. You are not the same bird flying in the sky in freedom as encaged in a golden cage, just a showpiece.

The moment your freedom dies, you have died too. The moment your wings are cut, you are only nominally alive.

Question 2:

Prem Prabhati, all passion is of the body - there is no passion of the heart. Yes, there is compassion of the heart and there is a tremendous difference between the two.

Passion is lust and ugly; compassion is love, beautiful, spiritual. But people go on living in fallacies, they go on thinking their body lust is their love. Mind knows nothing of love, because it does not appear in the curriculum of any university. It is not part of mathematics or physics or chemistry or geography.

Love simply does not exist for the mind.

Love exists in the heart.

But you never reach to the heart, you remain in the body, dominated by the mind. The body has only lust; it is nothing spiritual, it is very earthly. It is simply a biological strategy to continue the species, to create children.

The people of the head need to descend from the mind into the heart because all our social systems and educational programs are based on a very cunning device: they avoid the heart. Don't bring the heart because there is no place in any subject, there is no department in any university where love is being taught. On the contrary, every effort is made so that your whole energy moves into the head and remains closed there. It never blossoms like a flower.

Everybody has a heart, and certainly a right education will be divided into three parts: Education for the body - because the body has a mystery of its own. Education for the mind - because the mind has its own great strength as far as inquiry about objects is concerned. And education for the heart, for love - which is completely denied.

If you ask a physician or a doctor where the heart is, he will say, "There is no heart, there is only a pumping station for blood, for purifying blood; it has nothing to do with love and music and poetry."

And the physicians are not deceiving you, they are themselves deceived. The heart which the mystics have been talking about is not the pumping station. The heart is part of the body, but just behind the pumping station... an invisible force. All forces are invisible. Nobody has seen electricity. Have you seen electricity? Perhaps you will think you have seen it. You have seen only the expression of electricity.

It happened...

The man who worked the most on the subject of electricity was Thomas Alva Edison. He had gone for a holiday to a small village on the sea coast. They had a small school there, and just by coincidence he saw something was happening and inquired. They said, "The students have made things. It is their annual festival. And people are coming and going to see the things that the students have made."

So having no other work, he walked into the school. The school children had made an electric train, a small train: push the button and the train makes a circuit.

Edison just jokingly asked the student who was showing it, "What is the force that makes the train move?"

The boy said, "Electricity."

Edison said, "Have you seen electricity?"

He said, "I have not seen it, but perhaps my teacher - he is a graduate of science - he may have seen it."

So he called his teacher. The teacher said, "Seen electricity? I have not seen electricity. I have seen only the effects of electricity: it can become light, it can drive engines.... It can do many mechanical things, but what is it? Perhaps our principal who is a postgraduate in science may have seen it."

The principal was called. And the principal said, "Forgive me, nobody has ever asked. Energies cannot be seen. You can see only their effects."

Edison laughed. He said, "Don't be worried. Don't look so worried. My name is Thomas Alva Edison."

They said, "You are Edison? You have created so many electrical devices and you are asking this question?"

He said, "I am asking because I myself have not seen what electricity is."

Love is not part of your body system. Love is a hidden source in the body of pure energy which can make anybody rejoice, can quench the thirst. And unless your energy called the heart, blossoms, you are not perfectly alive, you are just a robot.

Mind is a computer. Just the other day I received the news that for fifteen years in Japan they have been keeping the head of a monkey without the body, wired with all kinds of nourishment that the brain needs. And because they have been successful, now they are going to try on human beings.

Just your head is enough; then mechanical lungs and mechanical wiring, blood that is needed for your brain - reaching through the wires, being purified by the mechanical lungs and you will be perfectly alive.

And the strangest thing is that you will feel love, you will feel emotions, you will be angry if somebody insults you. You will talk, you will answer questions which have been taught to you before this calamity, this scientific calamity happened to you.

This whole body has to be understood as a robot. Behind it is another body referred to in the esoteric schools as the astral body. The heart is part of the astral body. That's why love is such a nourishment. That's why love makes you so alive. That's why love gives your legs a dance - and if you allow it to fill your robot, for the first time you will feel what life is. And behind the astral body is your real being, your immortal body.

You are asking, Prabhati, if you have some spiritual passion of the heart that needs to drop away....

Don't jump ahead of yourself.

All that you have to do is to drop out of your mind - and that does not mean that you have to cut your head off. That simply means the energy that you are continuously giving to the mind, you need to change its route and divert it towards the astral, the heart.

The heart has no passion, but it has tremendous compassion. I am using the word 'compassion' because 'love' has been contaminated. People have used the word 'love' almost synonymously with 'lust'. Just say to someone, "I love you," and there will be no problem. But if you say, "I lust for you,"

there is going to be trouble. Then be prepared for the police station - "This man is dangerous."

In fact, when you say, "I love you," that's what you are saying. But a little homework is needed before you reach the bedroom, before lust can be accepted - it must not be announced! The very word seems to be somehow animalistic. Animals have lust - and you are human beings. But the reality is that all the introductions, and the parties, and meeting on the beach, and the gardens, and the presents... ultimately lead you to the animal.

Without all this introduction, if you are a very direct man, you will go to jail - "Why bother about this ice cream? Just let us do the thing." No, that is not human. Humanity has to be a little sophisticated:

first hold the hand, first talk about beautiful things, poetry and music... All the time you are thinking of something else, but you have to create this camouflage. To be straightforward would mean going into jail.

The heart has been completely ignored; society does not need it. It is the need of the individual and society does not need even individuals, it needs only personalities. It needs bogus people, obedient, always ready to follow the order, always ready to be enslaved.

A man of heart is a man in revolt - revolt against anything that is ugly, revolt against anything that is simply mechanical. Society does not want individuals because they will create trouble. So from very childhood, it starts destroying individuality, and the best way to destroy the individuality is to let them pass around the heart, not through the heart. All our educational systems are managed in such a way so that you can move without ever being aware that you have a heart.

I am using the word 'compassion' because 'love' has become mechanical. Everybody is "loving" - it has lost its depth.

A woman said to her husband when the hero in the movie kissed the heroine very lovingly, very romantically... She said to the husband, "Look, you never do that to me."

The man said, "That is only a film, it is not reality. And moreover, who knows whether that man is married to somebody else or that woman is married to somebody else. About these actors nobody is certain - and anyway, it is all acting. Do you want me to act?"

The woman said, "I know the woman personally. She is married to the hero in actual life."

The man said, "My God, then the hero is really an actor. To be so loving and so romantic to your own wife... I cannot do it. It is too difficult..."

The moment you remember that it is your own wife and what are you doing... it looks as if you are doing something nasty.

The movies, the films, television, the poets and literature have all reduced and contaminated the word 'love' - polluted it and destroyed its beauty. That's why I am saying the heart has compassion.

Compassion is the purest love which gives and asks nothing in return. You don't have to renounce it. You have to go deeper into it. You have to become it. Because by becoming it, you will come closer to your being.

Mendel Kravitz opens a new business and wants an international staff. So he hires Klaus a German, Paddy the Irishman, and Wu, a Japanese.

"Klaus," says Mendel, "I'm putting you in charge of production. I want you to make things efficient around here. And Paddy, you will be in charge of personnel. Make sure the morale stays good. And Wu," he says to the Japanese, "I am putting you in charge of supplies."

A couple of weeks later, Mendel is touring the business and finds Klaus and Paddy together.

"Everything is going smoothly?"

"Ja!" says Klaus. "Production is up double."

"Everyone's getting on great," says Paddy. "People are all liking each other."

"How is Wu doing in supplies?" asks Mendel.

But neither of them have seen Wu since the first day. Mendel starts to get worried and looks all through the factory.

As he is walking between some large stacks of boxes, suddenly Wu leaps out and shouts, "SUPLISE!"

It has been a good morning.... You listened silently to things which are very essential to your spiritual growth, and you laughed heartily. More than that is not needed - a good laughter and a deep silence together are enough to transform you.

You are on the right path, unless you get stuck somewhere. The path is simple and easy and all that it needs is a let-go - either in silence or in laughter, either in music or in dance.

Remember the most spiritual words in existence are let-go.

Okay, Maneesha?

Yes, Beloved Master.