Be Adam and Eve

Question 1:

Gyan Raga, the mind creates questions. They may look very relevant and rational, but they are against experience, against existence. And because the whole world is communicating with each other only through the mind, nobody raises his voice against such questions, that they are basically wrong.

For example, this question is fundamentally wrong. It is out of total misunderstanding. Love knows no responsibility, because love itself is responsibility. To separate love and responsibility is simply stupid. But all moral systems of the world separate it. Their idea of responsibility does not correspond with existence, but only with their logic.

And it has to be understood that logic is man-manufactured. It does not grow in the fields. It is not like the mountains and the stars and babies. It is simply a mind projection. And it has dominated humanity for centuries. It has destroyed many valuable possibilities, potentialities. It has closed many doors to the mysteries of life. It has made man almost blind to light, to consciousness, to bliss, to truth.

But its domination has been so long that it isn't easily apparent that it goes on committing mistakes against existence. I would like to dissect this question as minutely as possible. Only dissection of the question will make you aware that it does not need an answer.

Responsibility, according to all moral codes, is a kind of duty; and a duty is a burden. You have to do it, because you have been told to do it in spite of yourself. It is a should. And you feel guilty if you don't do it. You feel you are escaping from your responsibility. If you do it, you feel enslaved, destroyed as an individual, destroyed as freedom. So on both counts, you are in trouble.

Morality makes man psychologically sick. It gives ideas which are going to make you uneasy whatever you do. Whether you follow them or not makes no difference.

You are told, "This is your responsibility towards the nation." Now, the nation is a fiction. There are no nations in the world as far as nature is concerned, existence is concerned. All your maps are just meaningless and a better humanity is going to burn them all, because all the boundaries that discriminate against any part of humanity are ugly, insane.

I have told you a story ...

When India was divided into two nations, India and Pakistan, a rumor was heard that there was a madhouse just on the boundary. Neither India nor Pakistan was interested to take the madhouse.

But something had to be done. It had to go somewhere. Finally, the chief superintendent of the madhouse called all the mad people and asked them, "Do you want to go to India?"

They said, "No, we are perfectly happy here."

The superintendent said, "You will be here. Don't be worried about that. Just tell me - do you want to go to India?"

They all looked at each other and they said, "People think we are mad! Something has gone wrong with our superintendent. If we are going to be here then the question does not arise of going to India. Why should we go to India?"

The superintendent was in a difficulty how to explain to these insane people. He said, "Then would you like to go to Pakistan?"

They said, "No, not at all. We are perfectly happy here. Why should we go anywhere?"

He again tried to explain to them that, "You will be here, whether you choose India or Pakistan. You are not going anywhere."

Then they said, "It seems to be very strange. If we are not going anywhere, then why should we even be asked about it? We are here."

It was impossible to convince them that it is not a question of physically moving to India or Pakistan.

It is a political question: "Under which country, within which boundary do you want to remain?"

Finally it was decided by the officials that the madhouse should also be divided into two parts. One will be in India, one will be in Pakistan. They raised a huge wall, just dividing the whole madhouse in two.

And I have heard that the mad people still climb up on the wall, talk to the people on the other side and say, "We cannot figure it out. We are here, you are here, but you have gone to Pakistan and we have gone to India - just because they have raised this wall. And the strangest thing of all is that they think we are mad."

It is a mad world. All boundaries are absolute nonsense. Anything that divides man from man is inhuman, uncivilized, uncultured. But nobody asks whether nations are a fiction, and because you never ask you start believing in the reality of nations. Then arise questions of responsibility towards the nation. You even have to sacrifice your life for the nation which is a fiction. No such thing exists anywhere, no India, no Germany, no Japan, no America. It is a single planet, one humanity.

But because of the fiction, people go on killing each other. Real people are killed for an unreal idea.

Responsibility towards the nation has been the cause of all the wars. If all those people who had gone to the wars had refused: "We are not going to kill anybody for a fiction and we are not going to be killed for a fiction," there would have been no wars, no politicians. The world would have been a peaceful, beautiful place to live in.

For centuries we have done nothing else except fight, except kill. Our only profession seems to be war. Sometimes we fight, and sometimes we prepare for a future fight. But all the time we are engaged in a single profession, that of murderers, because we have been taught a stupid idea:

responsibility towards your nation, responsibility towards your religion. All the religions have been teaching that your life is not more valuable than your religion. It is such a strange idea. All these things should be for man, not vice versa. A religion exists to help man, not to destroy man. But all religions have been destroying man, none has been helping.

They say, "It is your responsibility, if your religion is in trouble or if your religion is trying to conquer bigger territories, to acquire more people, it is your responsibility to sacrifice." It reminds me of the primitive religions, because it is a relic of those days. In the ancient book of the Hindus, RIGVEDA, they sacrificed to a fictitious God. Nobody has seen him, nobody has any idea what you mean by the very word. There exists no proof, no evidence, no witness. But for that unreal, fictitious God, which is just a hypothesis, even men were sacrificed before a stone statue - a statue that you have made.

There is mention in RIGVEDA of narmedh yagna. Sacrificing man to God was the greatest ritual.

And the man who was ready to be sacrificed was thought to be a saint. Those who could not do such a thing were thought to be cowards, not fulfilling their responsibility. Dying for God - what can be more valuable than that?

After man, they started sacrificing animals. Today all the Hindus of this country continuously try to stop cow slaughter. But they are not aware that their forefathers in the RIGVEDA were themselves killing cows as a sacrifice to God. And they were eating the meat of the cows, because stone statues don't eat. You can offer and then you can take it back as a divine gift. Everything is yours: you are killing the cow, you are offering to a stone god who cannot eat and then you are taking it back and distributing it to all the worshippers. And these people are continuously trying to stop cow slaughter.

They were killing horses, they were killing all kinds of animals. They are still killing.

In Calcutta, at one of the most famous temples of the mother goddess Kali they still kill every day a few goats and then the goats' meat is distributed as prasad, as God's gift to the worshippers. And this is a vegetarian country. A strange kind of vegetarianism! But in the name of God, everything is allowed. When they stopped sacrificing man - because it became more and more hammered in by people like Gautam Buddha and Vardhamana Mahavira that this is absolutely ugly and uncivilized, it is just a strategy to hide your cannibalistic tendencies, in the name of religion you are eating man - because it was criticized so much, finally they dropped killing man.

But something had to be substituted. So even today, people who are using the substitute may not be aware what they are doing. They have found a substitute in the coconut, because it looks like the head of a man - with two eyes, a little nose, a small beard, hair - and in Hindi the head is called khopari, and the coconut is called khopera; there is not much difference. And if you want to visit any temple, you will have to take coconuts. You don't know what you are doing! The statues once were bathed in human blood. Now, that has become difficult. Coconuts are being used, so the statues are colored red. Why red? Blood red.

In the name of God, which is a fiction, your responsibility was to sacrifice yourself. In the name of religion, there have been crusades: Mohammedans killing Christians, Christians killing Mohammedans, Mohammedans killing Hindus, Hindus burning Buddhists alive. And the greatest problem is that what you are doing to man is in the name of something for which you cannot provide any existential proof.

But responsibility ...! Responsibility to your parents, responsibility to your wife, responsibility to your husband, responsibility to your children ... Perhaps you may never have thought about it that if you love your children, there is no question of responsibility. Because you love, you do things, you enjoy doing it. Nobody can enjoy responsibility. It is too big a word, too heavy. If you are educating your children, is it responsibility or your love?

If it is love, then there is no question of any burden; you are not doing something reluctantly in spite of yourself, because it has to be done. But you are concerned about respectability, what others will say. You will be condemned, so you have to take care of your old parents - out of responsibility, not out of love.

Love is completely forgotten, because love needs a revolution in your consciousness. It is not so cheap as responsibility. Responsibility can be taught to you by the priests, by the teachers. Nobody can teach you love. Love you have to find yourself, within your being, by raising your consciousness to higher levels. And when love comes, there is no question of responsibility. You do things because you enjoy doing them for the person you love. You are not obliging the person, you are not even wanting anything in return, not even gratitude.

On the contrary, you are grateful that the person has allowed you to do something for him. It was your joy, sheer joy. Love knows nothing of responsibility. It does many things, it is very creative; it shares all that it has, but it is not a responsibility, remember. Responsibility is an ugly word in comparison to love.

Love is natural. Responsibility is created by the cunning priests, politicians who want to dominate you in the name of God, in the name of the nation, in the name of family, in the name of religion - any fiction will do.

But they don't talk about love. On the contrary, they are all against love, because love is unable to be controlled by them. A man of love acts out of his own heart, not according to any moral code. A man of love will not join the army because it is his responsibility to fight for his nation. A man of love will say there are no nations, and there is no question of any fight.

When I was a student in the university, it was made compulsory for every student that they should join army training. Otherwise they would not be given their postgraduate certificates. It was my last year in the university. I went to the vice-chancellor and told him, "It goes against my consciousness, it goes against my heart to learn anything destructive. And I refuse absolutely to join any training that you are providing for students. I don't care whether you give me the certificate or not."

He immediately said, "But don't you feel any responsibility for your nation?"

I said, "Where is the nation? I have never come across it, except on the map."

And I told him a story about two men sitting on the sea beach who suddenly began to beat each other, so a crowd gathered. They were somehow separated and the police came, they were arrested and taken to the court and the magistrate said, "I know you both. You have been known in the city as the best of friends. What happened?"

They both felt very ashamed and they looked at each other. "You tell him what happened," and the other said, "Better you tell it."

The magistrate said, "What can be such a secret that you are having so much difficulty in saying it?"

They said, "It is not a secret. It is simply so shameful that we don't want to say it, but ... if you insist, we will have to speak. We were sitting - we are great friends - just sitting on the beach, and this person, my friend, said that he is going to purchase a buffalo. I said, 'Buffalo? But remember, she should not enter into my field. I am going to purchase a farm and if she enters into my farm, I will not tolerate your buffalo simply because you are my friend. I will kill your buffalo.'

"My friend said, 'This is too much. Buffaloes are buffaloes. And I cannot follow my buffalo the whole day wherever she goes. She will go into your farm and I will see then who kills my buffalo. I will kill anybody who kills my buffalo. I will not remember that you are my friend. You are my enemy if you kill my buffalo.'"

And the thing came to such a point that the man who had made it clear that he would not tolerate the buffalo, made a square with his finger and said, "This is my farm. Now let us see where your buffalo is." He does not have a farm yet, nor has the other any buffalo. Both are thinking to purchase. But the other said, "This is your farm," and he brought his finger running across the farm saying, "This is my buffalo. Now do what you want to do." And the fight started.

The magistrate said, "This is too much. Neither does he have the farm, nor do you have the buffalo.

You should at least have waited."

They said, "It was a hypothetical question, but we forgot that it was hypothetical. We became so hot.

Please forgive us."

We have all forgotten that many hypotheses are asking us to do things which we would never do in our senses, in our intelligence, in our consciousness.

You are asking, Raga, "What is the responsibility of love?" You don't understand those words.

And you don't understand because you have not loved yet. That's the only reason that you don't understand. If you had loved, you would have experienced a responsibility arising out of it, with no sense of duty, with no sense of burden, but just a sheer joy, a dance, a song of the heart. You are doing something that is needed. You never think that you are obliged.

Love never obliges anybody. Love is always obliged that you allowed the heart to shower upon you its flowers, its joys, its songs. Love is obliged to you for your receptivity. Responsibility always thinks, "I have done well and everybody should know it. And everybody should feel obliged. I have sacrificed so much for the freedom of the country; I have done so much in the war in defending the country; I am working so hard so that my children can be educated, can be well-nourished, so that I can provide facilities for my grandparents or my parents." But you find this a burden. You are crushed under it. It is not a joy, it is not blissfulness, it is not ecstasy.

My grandfather loved very much. He was old, very old, but he remained active to the very last breath. He loved nature almost too much. He lived in a faraway farm. Once in a while he would come to the city, but he never liked it. He always liked the wild world, where he lived.

Once in a while I used to go to him and he always liked somebody to massage his feet. He was becoming so old and he was working so hard, so I would massage his feet. But I told him, "Remember, I am not fulfilling any responsibility. I don't have any responsibility towards anyone in the world. I love you, and I will massage your feet but only up to the point where it is not troublesome to me. So when I stop, never ask me to do a little more. I will not. I am doing it out of my joy, not because you are my grandfather. I could have done the same to any beggar, any stranger, just out of love."

He understood the point. He said, "I never thought that responsibility and love are two things. But you are right. When I am working on the field, I always feel I am doing it for my children and their children, as a duty. It is heavy on my heart. But I will try to change this attitude of responsibility. I may be too old to change - it has become a fixation in my mind - but I will try to change."

I said to him, "There is no need. If you feel it is becoming a burden on you, you have done enough.

You rest. There is no need to continue working, unless you enjoy the open sky and the green field and love these trees and the birds. If you are doing it out of joy and you love your children and you want to do something for them, only then continue. Otherwise stop."

Although he was old, something synchronized between me and him. That never happened with any other member of my family. We were great friends. I was the youngest in the family and he was the oldest, just two polarities. And everybody in the house laughed, "What kind of friendship is this? You laugh together, you joke with each other, you play with each other, you run after each other. And he is so old and you are so young. And you don't communicate the same way with anybody else, nor does he communicate the same way with anybody else."

I said, "Something has happened between us. He loves me and I love him. Now it is no more a question of any relationship; neither am I his grandchild nor is he my grandfather. We are just two friends: one is old, one is young."

Once you taste love, you will drop the word responsibility completely. Hence your question, "What is the responsibility of love?" is simply irrelevant. Love needs no responsibility. And responsibility knows no love. And I don't teach you any responsibility, because I don't want you to be sacrificed in any fictitious name. I want you to live as naturally, existentially as possible. Don't live according to hypotheses. Don't live according to moral codes. Don't live according to Manu or Moses. Live according to your own heart and whatever you do will be right. Never ask anybody what is right.

Only a man who has no heart asks that kind of question. Let your heart respond to your question:

your answer is not going to come by any scripture, any holy tradition.

I have heard ... When God made the world, he went to the Babylonians and asked them: "Would you like to have a commandment?"

They said, "First tell us what the commandment is."

And he said, "Thou shall not commit adultery."

And the Babylonians said, "Then what shall we do? No, we don't want any such commandment."

He went to the Egyptians with the same result. He went to other people - the same. They all asked, "What is the commandment? Don't trick us into some trouble. First be completely clear: what is your commandment?"

And then finally he went to Moses and said, "Would you like to have a commandment?"

Moses said, "How much?" And God said, "It is free."

Moses said, "Then I will have ten."

And because of this Jewish mind, millions of Jews since that time have been living according to those ten commandments.

I was in Greece and one of my sannyasins, Amrito, told me that the Greek Orthodox church is very old-fashioned, very traditional. It insists on every woman being a virgin until she gets married. She has been one of the most beautiful women herself. When she was young she was chosen as the beauty queen of Greece and since then she has been a topmost model. She was telling me about this emphasis of the Greek church on virginity. I asked her, "But is it followed?" She said, "Don't ask such a question. You will not find a single virgin in the whole of Greece."

I remember she told me that in a church a priest was hammering hard the fact that, "If you are not a virgin, you will suffer eternal hellfire. So stand up if any woman is a virgin." Nobody stood up, everybody was looking down. He said, "I give you another chance. Stand up! At least for God's sake, one or two women should stand up." Finally, one woman with a small baby stood up. And the priest said, "You think you are a virgin?"

She said, "No, I am not a virgin. This baby is virgin. But she cannot stand on her own. And she is the only virgin in the whole congregation. She is only six months old, so I have to stand up."

People have been forced into all kinds of nonsense. And they have been made to feel guilty if they don't follow the codes. If they follow them, they become unnatural; they start becoming miserable, they become unnecessarily tense; they lose all juice in life, because they are going against life.

Love is not a religious commandment. Love is your very innermost longing, your very nature.

Responsibility is imposed from outside and it is needed only by those who have not grown up in love.

If you are grown up in love, you can throw away all responsibility. Love is enough unto itself.

Raga, your question makes me feel sad that you have not experienced love yet. But this is the situation of the greater part of humanity. Forget all about responsibility, search deep in your being for the space which we call love. Once you have found that space within you, it expands. On its own it starts growing. It goes spreading around you, radiating around you. It becomes your very aura, your very energy field, and whoever comes into that energy field is touched, deeply touched with your joy, with your celebrating realization, with your love. But it is not a responsibility at all.

Little Ernie is playing with the girl next door. "Let us play Adam and Eve," he says. "You tempt me to eat the apple and I will give in."

Be Adam and Eve, as if you are the first people in the world. You don't have any past, you don't have any Moses and you don't have any Manu and you don't have any Confucius. There is no past.

Adam and Eve had a certain freedom which you don't have, because they had no past, only an open future. You don't have any future, because you are always looking at the past and the past is gone.

You can see the dust a long way back on the road, but you cannot reach again to the same place.

What is gone, is gone.

And remember, existence has not given you eyes in your neck. If it was the intention of existence that you should look back, it would have given you eyes in the back of your head. What is the point of giving you eyes looking forward when you are not looking forward?

Responsibility is looking backward; love is looking forward. Be innocent like Adam and Eve, as if you have just arrived fresh and you don't have anything to do with the past. You have to find your own way; there is no guide, there is no holy scripture, there is no prophet, no savior. You are left alone to find your path. You will not find responsibility, you will find spontaneity. You will not find duty, you will find love.

And if your life is nothing but pure love, you don't need any other spirituality. Love is the best name you can give to God. Because love is something which is not a hypothesis. It is your intrinsic reality.

And it is the most precious thing in you.

A Jewish boy is courting a Catholic girl. "I'm sorry I could not see you last night," she says, "but I had to go to confession."

"I hope you don't tell the old priest all about the things we do when your parents are out," says the boy.

"Sure, I do," she says. "But don't worry. I just slip Father Murphy ten bucks and he makes things okay for me."

The next evening the Jewish boy arrives at the Catholic church to see the priest. "Aha," says Father Murphy. "My son, I suppose you have come for confession."

"No Father, not likely," says the boy. "I have come for my commission."

In fact, all your religions are nothing but business. And the boy is right to ask for a commission!

Love is not business and love is not a sin. Love is your greatest virtue. Love is your highest flowering.

Sharing it is sheer joy. Don't call it responsibility. That word has become too heavy by continuous use by those people whose vested interests are served by it. Love serves nobody. It gives you individuality and a tremendous sense of freedom. Love makes you courageous enough to assert your uniqueness in a world where only the crowd respects those who belong to the crowd.

The unique person does not belong to the crowd. He stands alone and aloof like a very tall tree reaching towards the stars. The small bushes, naturally, feel jealous. Hence every great man in the world is going to be condemned by the pygmies. They will find all kinds of excuses to condemn anyone who has something unique in him. Any individual who is not surrendering his freedom to the crowd is going to be condemned. But I want you to be individuals, not respectable people. They are the ugliest people in the world.

Yes, those who are thought to be respectable are the most condemnable, because they have sold their souls for their respectability. They have become slaves of a crowd which knows nothing of the higher things of life, the higher values of life.

Just be yourself, silent, peaceful, meditative, and love will arise in tidal waves and will go on coming to you from unknown sources which are hidden inside you. Those sources are as oceanic as any great ocean in the world. And you can share that love without humiliating anyone and without feeding your ego; these two things are done by responsibility, which feeds your ego, makes it stronger and humiliates the other person.

You may not be aware that whenever you do something because of responsibility, the other person can never forgive you. You have insulted him. But when you do something out of love, nobody feels any humiliation because love is humble, it cannot humiliate. Responsibility is not the quality of a humble person, it is the quality of the egoist who wants to make everybody obliged to him, who wants everybody to be a beggar and he the giver. He always wants to keep the upper hand. Nobody can forgive such a man. They may give him respect in the crowd, but behind his back, they all feel utterly insulted. And they take revenge.

Love never humiliates; hence there is no question of revenge. It simply rejoices in giving: it gives and it forgets. It does not even remember to whom it has given, what it has given. It does not keep an account of all that it has shared. It goes on, moment to moment, singing its song to whoever is capable of understanding it. Whoever is capable of receiving it will receive it. But he is not doing any social service, he is not a public servant. He is a man who knows how to celebrate. He is celebrating himself.

In the three hundred years of America, there have not been many men who can be compared to the great mystics of the world. Only one man, a poet, comes very close to the mystics, Walt Whitman.

One of his beautiful songs is: I CELEBRATE MYSELF. America has not paid much attention to Walt Whitman, but he is the only one in the three hundred years of America's life who has reached the highest peak possible.

When he says, "I celebrate myself," he is saying everything about love. "And if you can rejoice in my celebration, you are welcome. If you can be my guest, I invite you to celebrate." Love celebrates, it is not a responsibility at all.

Question 2:

Deva Vineeto, the question you have asked is the question of all those people who have been trained to be egoists. And unfortunately the whole of modern education, based on modern psychology, teaches everybody to be an egoist, strong, crystallized.

The idea is that you are being prepared by education for a world which is competitive. It is a constant battle. Everybody is your enemy, because everybody is your competitor. And unless you have a very strong ego, you will not become a president, you will not become a prime minister, you will not succeed in becoming the richest man in the world. You will remain a nobody, left by the side of the road, and the whole caravan of competitors will go on ahead of you. You will be crushed under everybody.

This fear has been created in every child from his very beginning that you have to be very strong, otherwise you will be crushed. Everybody is trying to be victorious in some way or other. Everybody is competing to reach ahead, to become somebody special. Your question has arisen because of this wrong teaching, this utterly inhuman teaching. You are a victim of a wrong world, of a wrong civilization, of a wrong educational system.

You are asking, "Why is it so hard to accept being a failure?" It hurts the ego; otherwise there is no problem.

I have told you one incident that I have never forgotten and will never forget.

In India, there is one day every year devoted to the worship of snakes. On that day, all over India, there are wrestling competitions. My school used to be for many years the champion of the whole district. This was due entirely to a single student who failed every year in matriculation. The school was happy about it, because he was a good wrestler.

The principal and the teachers all said to him, "Don't be worried. You can fail as much as you want, but every year you have to bring the championship to the school. And when you are tired, we will give you some employment in the school. Don't be worried about your employment, although you are not even a matriculate. We will make some arrangements, we can make you a peon: you do not need to be a matriculate."

And he was very happy that a job was guaranteed and every year he was the hero. But the year I reached my matric class that man unfortunately passed the examination. The whole school was sad and sorry. The principal called me and said, "Now find somebody, for up to now we have been winning."

I said, "It is a difficult thing to find a wrestler of his quality." He was doing nothing but exercises the whole day, morning till evening. And the school was providing him with as much milk as he needed, because every year he brought the championship ... "It will be very difficult to find somebody, but I will try."

In my class there was a man, a young man, not very strong and not in any way a wrestler, but a very beautiful person with a great sense of humor. I told him he would have to do this.

He said, "I have never fought anybody. I have never been in any competition. I have never done any exercise. And the people who will be coming from other schools are trained."

I said, "Don't be worried. Somebody has at least to participate. At the most you can be a failure."

He said, "If that is all, then I am ready." And what he did left an impact on everybody.

It was going to be decided in the semi-finals ... and because my school was continuously the champion every other school was afraid. They were still thinking that because of our man we would finally win. So they had brought a professional wrestler who was not a student. They could find no other way to defeat our man who had won continuously for ten years.

Naturally, they had to find some way. So they looked and found a wrestler who was not too old and they shaved him well and prepared him perfectly as if he were a student. But he was a trained wrestler and our candidate was not a wrestler at all. He asked me, "What am I supposed to do?"

I said, "Make it fun. Don't be worried." I had once seen a wrestler ... the village where I lived was famous throughout the area for wrestlers. There were so many gymnasiums in that small village and wrestlers from outside used to come to fight with the wrestlers of the village.

Once I had watched a wrestler and had become very friendly with him. His style was very new. First he would dance around. The other wrestler is standing in the center, looking embarrassed, and he would dance. And he had a very beautiful body. He would dance all over the place. And his dance made the other man feel embarrassed and a little afraid also: "If this man is dancing with such joy, there must be some strategy that will defeat me." And then he would suddenly jump to the ground.

He was not a very strong man, but he had a very beautiful body, a very proportionate body.

And he had made the man so much afraid by this time, by his dancing which was so out of the ordinary - nobody danced. There was no real need because most of the time he would win. I liked the man very much. He used to stay in a temple nearby, so I went to visit him and I said, "This is very beautiful. This is how things should be. You have a great psychological insight."

So I told the boy, "You do the same. First you dance around. Make the other fellow feel completely embarrassed. And we are here, because the competition is going to happen in our school. All the students, all the teachers will be there. We will clap when you dance. We will laugh and cheer you.

So you dance, and don't be worried about that man. Let him stand in the middle, embarrassed, worried: what is going to happen, what is happening?"

So he danced and we clapped and shouted and cheered and that man looked near defeat. Nothing happened. But the boy that I had chosen was no match for him. He was a wrestler and this boy had no idea. He danced and then he simply jumped into the middle and fell flat on the ground. In Indian wrestling, the person who falls on the ground with his back touching the ground and the other person sitting on his chest is thought to be defeated and the man sitting on the chest is the winner.

So that boy without fighting simply fell in front of him and we all cheered him and the man could not think what to do.

The boy said, "Sit on my chest. Sit down, and be victorious!" The man could not bring himself to sit down on the chest of this man who had fallen by himself. He looked all around and the boy was smiling.

And the referee came in and said, "What do you want to do with your opponent?"

He said, "I am simply puzzled. What kind of wrestling is going on? - because to sit on this poor boy's chest looks so ugly. I have not fought, how can I be victorious? And he is telling me to sit down. He is almost ordering me."

They were declared to be equal. And we took the boy on our shoulders and we danced around. And the principal called to me, "You managed ... at least to be equal. I had no hope that this was possible and when I saw that boy that you had chosen I thought the trophy was gone. But you trained him well."

I said, "I trained him only for dancing. What he did was absolutely spontaneous. Seeing the situation he said, 'I am going to be defeated. What is the point of fighting unnecessarily and being harassed.

Just lie down, rest.'"

But he was a very humble person with a great sense of humor.

You feel unnecessarily worried that you cannot accept being a failure. You are saying, "I would rather sacrifice my well-being than admit that I have failed."

Vineeto, the very idea of being competitive is egoistic. It is sick. There is nothing wrong in being a failure. Just be a total failure! Do everything that you can do and if failure comes out of it, accept it with dignity. Somebody has to fail, somebody has to win. You should not be so much attached to your own ego that you always have to win. Once in a while, just for a change, failing is not bad. As much can be learned by failure as can be learned by victory. You can learn egolessness, you can learn humbleness, you can learn accepting whatever life brings to you. And all these things will give you a maturity. Then who is bothered who is the winner and who is the failure?

People are unnecessarily concerned that the whole world is watching. Nobody has time. Everybody is interested in his own competition.

After being elected as President of America, Ronald Reagan returns to the small town where he grew up. "I suppose you folks here all know of the great honor that has been conferred on me?" he asks an old school friend.

"Yes," comes the reply.

"And what do they all say about it?" Reagan asks.

"They don't say anything," replies the man. "They just laugh."

Who cares? People simply laugh that this idiot has become the president. In fact, if you are a failure, you may have the sympathy of everybody. But if you are a winner, you won't get anybody's sympathy.

But one should take life almost like a playground. One should learn gamesmanship. One should know that somebody has to be the winner and somebody has to be the loser. And if you are a humble man, you would like yourself to be a failure rather than deprive somebody else of victory.

Perhaps you have never thought about the possibility of enjoying failure because you have given the chance to somebody else of enjoying the victory. His victory depends on you. You could have deprived him of victory.

But all that is needed is a deep awareness to think and to see that these are the only two possibilities.

Fight with your total energy and intensity, but it is not necessary that you should be the winner. And when the other wins, rejoice in his victory too. It was a beautiful game. Don't feel defeated. Your failure is a defeat only if you have not put your whole energy into it. If you do, you can make your failure more valuable than victory itself.

Deva Vineeto, you seem to be a very serious person. Take life as a game, enjoy every side of it: the failure, the victory, going astray or finding the right path, the darkness of the night and the beautiful dawn. Enjoy both sides, all the possibilities, and learn from every experience something that brings you more maturity. And learn to be a little less serious and a little more understanding. Have a little more sense of humor. Just for you, a small story ...

Three women die and arrive at the Pearly Gates, where they are met by Saint Peter. "Did you avoid sex on the earth?" he asks the first lady.

"I absolutely avoided it," she replies.

"Very good," says Peter. "Here is a golden key, it will open the doors of paradise."

Then he turns to the second woman and asks, "What about you?"

"Well," she replies, "about half and half."

"Okay," says Peter. "Here is a silver key, it will open the doors of purgatory."

Then he asks the third woman, "What about you?"

"Me?" she replies. "I did all the things you can imagine and also many things you can't imagine!"

"Great!" says Peter. "Here is the key to my room, I'll be coming there in a minute."

Okay, Maneesha?