Two empty skies meeting

Question 1:

THE FIRST THING to be understood is about the words 'individuality' and 'personality'. 'Individuality' means one who is indivisible, one who has become a unity, one who is no more divided. It is a beautiful word. In this sense, Buddha, Jesus, Zarathustra, can be called individuals - in this root meaning of the word, not the way you use it.

Your use of 'individuality' is almost a synonym for 'personality'. 'Personality' has different orientations. It comes from greek drama. In greek drama the actors used to have 'personas', masks. They would be hiding behind the mask. You could not have seen their faces, you could have only heard their voice. 'Sona' means sound.

'Persona' means you can have a contact only with their sounds, not with their faces. They are hiding somewhere. From that comes the word 'personality'.

In that sense Buddha, Jesus, Zarathustra, Lao Tzu, have no personalities. They are just there in front of you, not hiding anything. They are naked, confronting you in their absolute purity. There is nothing to hide. You can see them through and through, they are transparent beings.

So you cannot say rightly that they have personalities or that they are persons.

They are individuals, but remember the meaning of the word - they cannot be divided. They don't have fragments. They are not a crowd. They are not polypsychic. They don't have many minds. Their manyness has disappeared and they have become one, and their oneness is such that there is no way to divide it.

No sword can cut them in two. Their indivisibility is ultimate.

In that sense you can call them individuals. But it is dangerous. Because this oneness comes only when the many is lost. When the many is lost how can you say even that one is one? Because one can be called meaningfully one only when the possibility for many exists. But the very possibility has disappeared.

Buddha is not many, but how can you call him one? That's why in India we call god advaita, non-dual. We could have called him one, but we have resisted that temptation. We have never called him one, because the moment that you call something one, the two has entered - because one cannot exist without the two, the three, the four. One is meaningful only in a series. One is meaningful only in a hierarchy.

If really one has become one, how can you call him one? The word loses meaning. You can call him only not-many; you can call him non-dual, advaita, not two. But you cannot call him one. Not-two is beautiful. It simply says that the twoness, the manyness, has disappeared. It does not say what has appeared, it simply says what has disappeared. It is a negative term.

Anything that can be said about the ultimate truth has to be negative. We can say what god is not, we cannot say what he is. Because to say what he is, we define him. Every definition is a limitation. Once god is defined he is no more infinite, he becomes finite.

So in a way you can call Buddha an individual, but it will be better to resist the temptation. He is certainly not a person, he has no personality, but to call him individual is also not right - better than calling him a person, but still not perfect. He is not a person, he is not an individual - because he is not.

The very idea of his being has disappeared. He is just a vast emptiness. He is space. He has no boundaries now.

Remember, if you have boundaries you can be divided. Anything that is finite can be divided. Ask the physicists. They say you can divide the molecule - it is very small, but you can divide it because it has a boundary. You can divide the atom. It is very minute, but still it has a boundary; you can divide it. You can divide the electron, the neutron, the proton, because they also have boundaries.

But beyond that, division is impossible because boundaries disappear; beyond that, matter loses all limitation; beyond that is the infinite pure space. You cannot divide. It is impossible to divide pure space.

So somebody becomes an individual only when he has become infinite. It will look paradoxical, but let me say it: somebody becomes individual only when he has become universal, when he is one with the whole. Then somebody is an individual. But then to call him an individual will be stretching the meaning of the word too far. It will be a little too outlandish. It is better to call Buddha a nobody - neither a person nor an individual. All those things have been left far behind. He has transcended all limitations.

The question is from Prem Divya. She asks, PLEASE CLARIFY THE CONCEPTS OF PERSONALITY, EGO, INDIVIDUALITY AND SELF.

Personality and ego are two aspects of the same coin, just as individuality and self are two aspects of the same coin. The personality has a center - that center is called the ego. Because personality itself is false, the center is also false, because a false circumference cannot have a real center and a real center cannot have a false circumference.

Personality is unreal. Personality is that which you pretend to be, but you are not. Personality is that which you show, but you are not. Personality is your exhibition, not your reality. Personality is that which you create around yourself - a fiction to deceive - but you are not. This personality has a false center, as false as it is itself. That false center is the ego. When you drop personality, ego disappears. Or you drop the ego and the personality collapses to the ground, to the dust.

Remember not to pretend that which you are not, otherwise you will never be able to drop the ego. Then you go on feeding the ego. Never try to look in any way different than you are. Whatsoever the cost, be true to yourself. Don't try to decorate it, to clothe it in manners, etiquettes, a thousand and one falsities. Be naked as you are. Let people feel your real pulse, and you will not be at loss.

In the beginning you may see that you are getting into trouble, but soon you will find that you are never at a loss. With reality nobody ever loses. With unreality you only think you are gaining, you go on losing. That's how many people destroy their whole life - by being unreal - and then they say that they are not happy. How can an unreal person be happy?

It is as if you have put stones in the soil instead of seeds and you are waiting, you are waiting for them to sprout and bloom and fill your life with flowers and fruits. It is impossible - those stones cannot grow. Those stones are not seeds of something, they don't have any potentiality. They may look like seeds, you may have coloured them in such a way, you may have painted them in such a way that they look like seeds, but they are not seeds, they cannot grow.

The ego cannot grow. It is dead, a false entity. It is not alive. You can go on and on living with it, but your whole life will become like a desert... empty. No fulfillment, no contentment, no bliss will ever knock at your door.

You can wait for eternity, nobody will ever come. Because in the very beginning you missed something - something very essential and basic. Only you can grow, not the pretensions.

I told you the word 'personality' comes from 'persona'. If you have a mask, the mask will not grow. You will grow. You may have put the mask on your face when you were a child, now you may be a young man - but the mask will remain the same... a dirty old thing, rotten. It will simply rot, it cannot grow. You will be growing behind it, and it will give you many pains because it will be a confinement. It cannot grow and you are growing. It is as if you are still wearing your childhood clothes. You are growing and those clothes are not growing, so they have become a bondage. They don't give you freedom, they confine you, they crush you. You feel continuously a pressure, a tension, an anguish.

You can try it. You can wear shoes which are smaller than for your feet, and walk - and you will know what is happening to millions of people. Their personalities are too small and their being is growing. Try to walk with shoes two sizes too small....

One day I was sitting with Mulla Nasrudin. He looked at a woman and said, 'This woman is trying to do the impossible.'

I said, 'What do you mean?'

He said, 'She's wearing shoes two inches too small.'

I asked, 'How do you know?'

He said, 'I know because she is my wife. Look at her face - in such agony, in such anguish.'

Look at the faces of people - their agony and anguish is written so clear. They are broadcasting nothing else but their agony and their anguish. And the problem is they are wearing a dead mask, a personality, which cannot grow with them. Of course it is always lagging behind. It cannot grow. They are growing continuously and it becomes a dead weight.

Remember, with the false you will be crushed. Never keep company with the false. If you really want to grow into a blooming being, if you really want to give freedom to your being, never keep company with the false. Be true, whatsoever the cost. I repeat again: in the beginning it may seem that these pretensions are very good. They are not. Your mind is deceiving you.

And if you try to keep company with the true, ego will disappear on its own accord. Otherwise it goes on finding new ways, new methods to feed itself.

People have become so false that you cannot imagine. I was reading an anecdote:

Sadie Perlmutter was sent to the finest, most expensive finishing school in New York. There she learned all there was to know about etiquette. Despite the expense, her mother was very proud of her. Then one dark night Sadie staggered into their Park Avenue apartment with her clothes all ripped. 'I have been raped on Central Park South,' Sadie sobbed.

'You know who did it?'

'No, I don't.'

'You mean, after all the etiquette you studied you did not even ask, "With whom am I having the pleasure?"'

People go on keeping their etiquette, their mannerisms, their falsities, their pretensions, even in such situations where it is unimaginable.

I know one man whose house was on fire, but the first thing that he did running out of the house was to tie his tie. The house is on fire and he could not run out of it without his tie. The personality becomes so clinging to you and you become so clinging to it.

I have heard about a great professor who was so polite that even when he was angry he would be polite - even in the expression of his anger. One day he was so angry with a student that he was boiling hot, and he said, 'Please go to hell!'...

Please go to hell?

Just watch yourself. Personality is the father of the ego. If you drop personality you will find the ego has died on its own accord.

I have heard:

An elderly woman visited an art gallery showing abstract paintings and asked the attendant, 'What is that?'

'That is the painter, lady.'

'And that?'

'The painter's wife, lady.' The attendant was a little annoyed.

'Well,' the woman commented, 'I hope they are not planning to have any children.'

The ego is the child of the personality. Many people would like to drop the ego, but they don't understand the inner connection. They would like to drop the ego because it gives so much misery. It continuously hurts, it is like a wound. It never allows you any rest, it always keeps you restless. It is a disease. Many people by and by start feeling that it is better if they can get rid of the ego, but they never think that this is the child of the personality. If you want to get rid of the ego, you will have to drop your personality.

That's why Buddha left the palace - because it was impossible to drop the personality and still be a prince. Mahavira became naked, he dropped even his clothes - he was one of the most courageous men the world has ever known - because he came to realize that even clothes are not for the body; they are just part of a social mannerism, just part of a social etiquette. Of course he suffered for it. He was chased out of towns - people used to throw stones at him. They thought he had gone crazy. He suffered for it, but his achievement was tremendous out of it.

By and by his personality completely eroded, disappeared. When the personality disappeared, when all that he had learned from the society was dropped - all pretensions, all exhibitionistic tricks, all ego-trips - suddenly he saw that ego has also disappeared.

He left his palace, his father's palace, he dropped his clothes, and he dropped language also: for twelve years he didn't speak a single word. His logic was absolutely correct, because in our very language our personalities have entered.

The way you speak, the way you use words, may be part of your personality.

You can see it. If a man comes from a village you can see by his language that he is a villager. If a man comes from a very rich, cultured family, you can see by his language that he comes from a cultured family - and of course Mahavira was a prince. In the very language personality enters - in your expressions, in your gestures.

Mahavira for twelve years completely dropped everything. He was the perfect dropout. Language, clothes, society, security, everything he dropped. Then by and by his innocence surfaced; all the layers of personality dropped, ego disappeared.

Remember, ego is very tricky. It is very subtle, its ways are very subtle. You drop it from one side, it comes from another. Unless you become very very alert how it arises, how it feeds....

Divya is a primal therapist, she will enjoy this anecdote.

Three primal therapists were standing on a street corner arguing about which one of them had the greatest memory, who could go farthest back.

'Hey man,' bragged the first, 'I can remember my mama wheeling me in my carriage down 125th Street, hear?'

'That's nothing,' scoffed the second guy. 'I can recall the day I was born and the doctor slapping my bottom.'

'You call that remembering, dude?' challenged the third. 'I can remember the night I went to a party with my daddy and I came home with my mama.'

The ego can find food from anywhere. Whatsoever the game, I am the top.

Whatsoever the game - the name of the game may be humbleness, but I am the topmost humble man. The names can be different. Always remember that whenever you start feeling that you are the topmost - maybe it is humbleness, it makes no difference; maybe it is egolessness, it makes no difference - if you think that you are the most egoless person in the world you are again in the same trap.

The ego lives on claims. The ego is competitive and personality goes on feeding it through subtle ways. Personality is the circumference of your pretensions, of your exhibitions, of your deceptions, and ego is the center. They go together, they remain together.

Now the second couple: individuality and self. Individuality is the circumference, self is the center. They are more real than personality and ego, they are more real than the first couple, but still not ultimately real.

When personality is dropped, you become individual. When you become individual then a sense of self arises - 'I am.' It has no claim, it is not competitive.

Self is not competitive: it does not say that I am better or worse, that I am ahead or far behind. It does not compare, it is not comparative. It simply says 'I am'. It is not relative to others. Individuality is a simple expression of whosoever you are, and a deep sense of 'I am'.

But Buddha or Jesus cannot be even called individuals because they go a little further, where even the sense of self disappears.

The ego is comparative, very ill; the self is a little healthy, not so ill - it has no comparison with anybody - but still the very idea that 'I am' divides, separates from the total unity. The way of Jesus is: 'My father and I are one.' That is his way of saying, 'I am not a self, my father is myself.' You can translate it better if you say that the center of the whole is my center; then the language becomes more scientific.

Buddha is even more keen. He will not use any wishy-washy expressions. He says simply, 'I am not.' Because the danger is - saying that I am god, or god is my center - the danger is that the 'I' may enter again from the backdoor. Buddha says, 'I am not.' He simply goes on dissecting the very phenomenon of 'I', and comes to a point where nothing is left. Just as matter disappears in the hands of the physicist, self disappears in the hands of Buddha.

I have heard:

One day an elephant went walking through the jungle. He was feeling in the pink, ready to challenge the whole world. As he walked along he met a lion. He threw out his chest, issued a loud trumpeting noise and said, 'Why are you not as big as I am?'

'I don't know,' the lion gasped, walking away.

Next the elephant met a hyena. He swelled out his chest and asked, 'Why are you not as big as I am?'

'I don't know,' said the hyena as he walked away as well.

Then the elephant met a poor little mouse with a runny nose and pink eyes.

'Why are you not as big as I am?' he roared.

The mouse looked up at him and said, 'I have been very sick lately.'

Everybody, even a mouse, has his own ego. Everybody, even a religious man, has his own ego. Even while declaring, 'I am just dust underneath your feet,' you are gathering ego.

The ego and the personality have to be dropped, then you will find individuality arising... a feeling of uniqueness. Yes, you are unique. Everybody else is also unique. In this world only unique people exist, so comparison is just stupid, because you alone are like yourself. There is nobody like you, so how to compare?

Comparison is possible if there are many people alike, similar to each other, but this existence is so tremendously creative, so originally creative, it never repeats.

It does not believe in carbon copies. It makes everybody an individual, unique.

When personality is dropped you suddenly feel you are unique - but remember, you also feel everybody else is also unique. Uniqueness is a common quality of all, there is nothing to brag about. It is the universal quality of every being.

With the individuality you have a subtle center of a feeling - 'I am'. Buddha goes far beyond it. Mahavira, Krishna, Jesus, they don't say anything beyond this.

Maybe they think it is not possible to say the beyond - they stick to individuality and the feeling of 'I-amness'. But Buddha goes to the very end of his logic. He says personality has been dropped, now drop this individuality also. The ego has been dropped, now drop this 'I-amness' also, this self-hood also.

Then nothing is left, then only nothing is left, and in that emptiness you become virgin, uncorrupted. Emptiness cannot be corrupted. Being is, but there is no feeling of 'I am'.

Have you not ever come to some moments when you are, tremendously you are, but still there is no feeling of 'I am'? Those are the moments of grandeur, grace.

They happen to everybody. You may not have noticed, you may not have accepted them, you may not remember them, you may have rejected them because they seem so outlandish. They don't fit with your life - with your life of the ego and personality. They don't fit. They are not consistent with your routine way of life, so you drop them, you forget them. You think that they may be just the imagination, a dream.

But to everybody those moments come. I have not come across a single human being who has not in some way or other, in some moment or other, felt himself tremendously there and yet with no sense of 'I'. Those are the moments when you feel beauty, when you feel love, when you feel wonder.

Looking at the stars in the night suddenly something disappears, suddenly an emptiness arises in you... virgin, uncorrupted, unpolluted by society, culture, civilization, religion, scripture, tradition. Again you are pure, innocent. You are.

In fact, for the first time you are very substantial but with no 'I' anywhere. There is empty sky and the stars shining, and here you are - empty - and the stars reflecting. Two skies, both empty, meeting.

These are the religious moments - moments of prayer, beauty, wonder, awe.

They come to everybody. Sometimes making love, suddenly you are not there and still you are. This is the paradox. You are for the first time, very very real, absolutely real, and yet no weight of the ego, no sense of 'I'. Making love, sometimes you are simply pure energy.

The experience of ecstasy is very natural to love - if you are ready to lose yourself in it. If you still continue controlling, you still remain in the ego, then you miss the very door that love opens. You miss orgasm. Orgasm is a door to the infinite. It is a point for your ego to evaporate, to melt, to disappear. But if you go on controlling.... This misfortune has happened all over the world - you go on controlling.

And now, in the West particularly, people have become too much manipulators.

The man goes on thinking whether he is making love perfectly or not, whether he is making love according to the experts or not - Masters and Johnson and others - whether he is going according to the reports of Kinsey or not - and he's trying, making all efforts to satisfy the woman. And the woman is trying to satisfy the man. And both are missing because both are too much in the ego.

The woman is trying to satisfy her man as no other woman can satisfy; the man is trying to satisfy his woman as no other man can satisfy. Both are on an ego-trip and both remain dissatisfied. Because satisfaction comes only when nobody is trying to satisfy anybody; when everybody is simply disappearing into that vagueness, that merger, where personalities are no more separate, where things overlap, when one never knows who is who.

The man continues to be the man, the woman continues to be the woman - then you miss that rare opportunity that love makes available. You remain closed to that door. The door opens and; closes, but you cannot enter into it. You are engaged somewhere else, with small things, trivia.

In deep lovemaking you can attain first glimpses of samadhi - or in music, or in dancing, or looking at the sunset, or just sitting silently not doing anything.

But remember, whenever you are a doer you are missing, because the doer carries his ego. The doer is the ego.

Whenever you are a non-doer there is a possibility you may fall into line with the whole, you may fall into harmony with the whole - what Buddha calls the way, the dhamma. You will become one with the dhamma, and suddenly a rush of bliss - it rains all around, your whole being becomes saturated with a new benediction that you have not known before.

Personality has to go. With personality goes the ego. Then individuality has also to go, and with individuality goes the self. Then nothing is left and you are at home. Gone - you have arrived.

One of Buddha's names is tathagata. It means 'who has gone very skilfully, disappeared very skilfully'. Gata means gone. Another of Buddha's names is sugata - well gone, who has gone so well that you cannot find a trace behind...

nothing is left, just pure innocence. Become a sugata, become a tathagata. Allow yourself to evaporate and disappear. Only then will you find who you are.

You are not you. Your very sense of 'I' is a confinement, a bondage, an imprisonment, a cage. When the cage disappears the whole sky is yours; even the sky is not your limit. You contain the sky in your inner being. You are vaster than the sky, bigger than the space.

Question 2:

This question is from Prem Vartya. She is a dancer from Korea. She is my first korean sannyasin and has much potential. I can understand what she means. The story is really beautiful. A very small story, nothing much in it, and yet tremendous is its content.

Just a one sentence story, but the story can be the story of the whole humanity.

This is what is happening.

Love is possible, but it never rises above sex. Hence all the cheeks are full of tears... wet. I can see your cheeks full of tears, tears rolling down. One of the greatest miseries in human life is that one remains with sexuality and never moves beyond it and never achieves a moment of love.

Love is born in sexuality but sexuality is not love. The lotus is born in the mud, but the lotus is not just mud. And if mud remains mud of course there are bound to be tears on the cheeks.

You are waiting to become a lotus, you are waiting to flower in higher space, and you remain rooted. This is happening down the centuries. There have been very few individuals who attained to love. Then they have smiles on their faces, then you can see the grace, the beauty, the beauty of the unknown descending in them. Love transforms.

Sex at the most is a release. Hygienic, healthy, I'm not against it, it's natural, but it is not the end, just the beginning. It is the very alphabet of love, but you have to make poetry out of it. All the poetry can be reduced to the alphabet.

It happened once that a friend of Mark Twain's, a great religious preacher, invited him to come to his talk. He had been inviting him many times down the years and Mark Twain would not go, but that day he said, 'Okay, I am coming.'

The priest prepared his talk, as beautiful a talk as he had ever delivered - and he was a great preacher. Thousands of people listened to him in deep rapture. Mark Twain was just sitting in front of him, and that was his climax. The audience was spell-bound, as if there was nobody... there was such dense silence - and the speaker was again and again looking from the corner of his eyes at Mark Twain, at what was happening to him - and he was sitting there, bored!

When they were going back in the car, for a few minutes the preacher could not gather courage to ask. Then eventually when Mark Twain was getting out of the car at his house, he asked, 'Can I ask you how it was? Did you like it?'

Mark Twain said, 'All nonsense and all borrowed. By chance I have been reading a book these days and all that you said is in that book.'

The preacher could not believe, because he had not copied from anywhere.

Maybe a few sentences could be found here and there, but the whole speech?

And Mark Twain said, 'Word by word, you have simply repeated. It is a robbery.'

The preacher said, 'I would like to see the book.'

The next day Mark Twain sent him the book. It was a dictionary. Of course, in a dictionary every word is there.

Every poem can be reduced to the alphabet, but poetry is not just alphabet. All Buddha's sayings can be reduced to the alphabet, but those sayings are not just alphabet. That's what Freud has done - he has reduced all love into sex.

Sex is only the alphabet of love, bricks out of which you can make a Taj Mahal.

But Taj Mahal is not just bricks. You can pile up bricks; it will not become a Taj Mahal. Taj Mahal is a composition of infinite love, of infinite creativity. Bricks are only the visible part of it. Taj Mahal is something invisible. Bricks have made that invisible visible in a certain way and you can feel it. Bricks help the invisible to be felt, but the bricks are not the invisible.

Sex is just like bricks. And if you go on piling sex, one is bound to feel in tears.

The woman must have been a woman of deep understanding.

People look at each other, but they don't look at each other at all. They are just looking for the sex object. A woman passes. Have you ever seen a woman as a being? Sometimes you become interested in a woman, but not as a being. You feel a certain attraction, but not as a being, but as a sex object. Or sometimes you are repelled, that too is sexual. Or sometimes you are not interested - bored, neither repelled nor attracted, just indifferent - but that too is sexual.

And unless you can come across a person who can look at you in your eyes as a being, not just as a sexual object; who can love you as a being... then you have found your friend, not before it.

We go on looking for only that which we have a desire for. Men looking at women, women looking at men, are not looking at each other. They are looking for something. They are looking for their own food. They have an appetite, a hunger - that hunger is sexual. Hence whenever somebody looks at you as a sex object you feel offended, because he is reducing your identity to a very muddy state. He is reducing you to the lowest denominator, to the lowest rung of your being.

A person can love you without reducing you. In fact, love never reduces you.

Love helps you to rise above the ordinariness, love helps you to soar high. It makes you meditative, ecstatic. Love becomes the first proof that god exists, that life is not just matter, and man is not just body, that soul exists, that there is the world of the beyond.

That woman must have been missing it. She may have loved many people, but whenever she looked into their souls there was nothing but a desire for sex.

Many women have told me that they weep and cry when their man makes love to them - because men make love and then they fall into sleep. It is a ritual. It helps to fall asleep, it is like a tranquilliser. And the woman goes on crying and weeping. She has been used and thrown away. Like a plastic thing - you use it and throw it away. There is no need to be bothered at all now. Your need is fulfilled.

We look at the other person only through our need; then that look is offensive.

When you look at the other person as a beauty in its own right, a grandeur, a divinity, a god or a goddess.... Yes, that's what I would like to tell you - that each man is a god and each woman is a goddess. When you look at the other as a god and a goddess then the other is fulfilled; that very look enhances grace, that very look helps the other to soar high.

In all the languages of the world we have such expressions as 'falling in love'.

That is ridiculous. Why 'falling in love'? Why not 'rising in love'? 'Falling in love'

indicates the very idea that love is just a trick - really you want to fall into sex, you want to go low; you pretend.

I have heard The new maternity ward had been open for six months during which time over five hundred babies had been delivered and every one of them a girl. During the early part of the seventh month a boy was born there and the nurses held a party to celebrate the occasion. At the height of the party a reporter arrived and asked whether the baby looked like his father or his mother.

'I don't know,' answered one of the nurses. 'We have not looked at his face yet.'

Just for six months only girls were born. Who bothers about his face now?

When a person looks at you with sexuality and passion in his eyes, he is looking at your genital organs, not at you. He is insulting you, he is reducing you to your genital organs. He is simply saying you are just an appendage. He is saying, 'I am interested in your sexuality, in your genital organs. I am not interested in you. You are just a situation, nothing more, but my interest is in your sexuality - in you as a man, in you as a woman.' That is offensive, insulting, degrading, humiliating.

That woman must have been a woman of deep love. And if you have deep love you will feel always tears on your cheeks, because it will be very difficult to fulfill it.

Only lower needs can be fulfilled in this world, because people have fallen very low. If you have any higher need, you will suffer, if you have any higher need you will not find a right partner; if you have a higher need you will remain alone. That was the problem with the woman. And this I see as the problem of all human beings who are intelligent, who have some understanding.

People have reduced everything to money or to sex. These two things seem to be the real gods - either money or sex. And people are after money also only for sex, because money can help.

I have heard:

A Jew went to a whorehouse and told the madam that he wanted the cheapest chippie in the place.

'We have a black girl for ten dollars,' she told him.

'But I only have four dollars,' he protested.

After a long argument the madam consented to take him on herself for four dollars.

The Jew did not return to the whorehouse for another ten years. When he did, the madam greeted him cordially and told him that as a result of their relationship years ago, he had a nine-year-old son. She called the boy out and introduced him to his father.

'So you are my dad,' said the boy. 'You know, ever since I was born I've wondered what my last name was. Tell me, dad, what is my last name?'

'Goldberg,' the father replied.

'My god!' exclaimed the boy, 'you mean I am jewish?'

'Don't knock it, boy,' he replied. 'If I had had six dollars more ten years ago you would have been black too.'

The whole thing seems to be either money or sex. And everybody seems to be reducing life to be just a whorehouse. All sacredness of life is damaged. And then it is natural that if you have a heart which is waiting for love you will remain unfulfilled.

Never look at another human being as if he or she is only sexuality. Look at human beings as really they are. Sexuality is part of them, but they are not just sexuality. A very small part, a beautiful part in itself, nothing wrong about it, but if that part becomes the whole then everything goes ugly. Whenever any part claims to be the whole then things go ugly.

If it is your head which claims your whole personality, you are ugly. Then you have lost your roots into wholeness. If it is sex that claims your whole personality and you start living for it, then again you are reduced - reduced to the earth, your sky is lost. Then you are reduced only to the roots and you don't have any branches which can spread into the sky and greet the sun and the rains and meet with the clouds and communicate with the sky.

Sex is good, healthy, beautiful, in its own place. Try to understand me: if sex follows as a shadow of love it is tremendously holy. But if love is nothing but a seductive measure, if love is nothing but a salesmanship, if love is nothing but a seduction and only sex is the goal, then sex is ugly, love is ugly; then your whole being, by and by, will become ugly. You will exist like a wound, not like a flower.

Never reduce anybody to being just a sexual object, and never allow anybody to reduce you to being just a sexual object. If sex follows love, if it becomes a harmony in love, it has a totally different quality to it. Then it is no more sexual.

When it comes as a part of love... you love a person, you want to share everything with the person. When you love the person you want to share your mind, you want to share your body, you want to share your soul, you want to share your meditation, you want to share your... whatsoever you have. If you have an aesthetic sense, you want the person you love to share your poetry, to share your painting, to share your vision, to share your dreams.

Of course, when you love a person you also want to share your sexuality; then it is beautiful, then it has nothing like sex in it, then it is not the libido of Sigmund Freud. Then the energy has a totally different quality to it, and then it helps you to go higher and higher.

Nothing helps you to go higher than love. Nothing can help you as much as love can help you to go higher - because it becomes such a tranquillity, such a calmness, such content, one feels as if one has arrived. One feels grateful, one feels at home in existence. One is no more a stranger.

Remember: while you are relating with a person never relate only for sexuality, otherwise your whole being will become absurd. And treat sexuality as prayer. It is one of the doors towards the divine. Don't do any sacrilegious act about it.

I have heard:

A pregnant jewish girl asked her doctor what position she would have to lie in to give birth to her baby.

'The same position you were in when you started it,' the doctor told her.

'My god!' she exclaimed. 'Do you mean I will have to drive around Berlin in a taxi for two hours with my feet hanging out the window?'

But this is happening. Your aquaintance with love happens in such odd and ugly places. Now the back seat of a taxi! It should happen in a church, in a temple.

The very association is ugly.

One should make love only when one is feeling tremendously beautiful, happy, celebrating. One should dance before one makes love, one should sing and pray before one makes love, one should read a few sayings of Buddha, or a few sayings of Jesus, or one should recite the Koran - it is beautiful before one makes love.

Love should be entered as a shrine of god. Then love will give you such fulfillment as nothing else can give.

Question 3:

Mm? It is from Krishna Radha. But she is asking like a magistrate: 'Please explain!'

It is just the other way around - the clock follows me, and I look at the clock just to see whether it is following or not.

Let me tell you one anecdote:

Mulla Nasrudin was testifying in court. He noticed that everything he was saying was being taken down by the court reporter. As he went along he began talking faster and still faster. Finally the reporter was frantic to keep up with him. Suddenly the Mulla said, 'Good gracious, mister. Don't write so fast. I cannot keep up with you.'

I am not following the clock at all. But I have come to understand my body. I have come to feel its needs. I have learned much by listening to it. And if you also listen and you become attentive to your body, you will start having a discipline which cannot be called a discipline.

I have not forced it on myself. I have tried all sorts of things in my life. I have been continuously experimenting just to feel where my body fits perfectly. Once I used to get up early, at three o'clock in the morning. Then at four o'clock, then at five o'clock. Now I have been getting up at six for many years. By and by I watched what fits with my body. One has to be very sensitive.

Now physiologists say that everybody's body, while sleeping, loses its normal temperature for two hours; the temperature falls by two degrees. It may happen to you between three and five, or two and four, or four and six, but everybody's body falls two degrees in temperature every night. And those two hours are the deepest for sleep. If you get up in between those two hours, the whole day you will feel disoriented. You may have slept six, seven hours; that makes no difference. If you get up between those two hours when the temperature was low, then you will feel the whole day tired, sleepy, yawning. And you will feel that something is missing. You will be more disturbed. The body will feel unhealthy.

If you get up exactly after two hours, when those two hours have passed, that is the right moment for you to get up. Then you are perfectly fresh. If you can sleep only two hours even that will do. Six, seven, eight hours are not needed. If you sleep only for those two hours when the temperature is two degrees lower, you will feel perfectly happy, at ease. The whole day you will feel a grace, silence, health, wholeness, well-being.

Now everybody has to watch when those two hours are. Don't follow any discipline from the outside, because that discipline may have been good for the person who created it.... Vinoba gets up at three o'clock in the morning. It must be fitting well with him, but then the whole ashram, then all his followers get up at three o'clock and they feel dull the whole day. I have seen his followers - dullards. And then they think that they are not capable of such an ordinary discipline. Then they feel guilty. They try hard but they cannot win and then they think that Vinoba seems to be very exceptional, very great. He's never dull.

But it simply suits with him.

You have to find your own body, its way, what suits - that's right for you. And once you have found it, you can easily allow it, and it will not be enforced because it will be in tune with the body, so there is nothing as if you are imposing it; there is no struggle, no effort. Watch, while eating, what suits you.

People go on eating all sorts of things. Then they get disturbed. Then their mind gets affected. Never follow anybody's discipline, because nobody is like you, so nobody can say what is going to suit you.

That's why I give you only one discipline and that is of self-awareness, that is of freedom. You listen to your own body. The body has a great wisdom in it. If you listen to it, you will always be right. If you don't listen to it and you go on enforcing things on it, you will never be happy; you will be unhappy, ill, ill at ease, and always disturbed and distracted, disoriented.

This has been a long experimentation. I have eaten almost all sorts of things, and then by and by I eliminated all that was not suiting me. Now whatsoever suits, I eat only that. Vivek is in trouble, because she has to cook almost the same thing every day and she cannot believe how I go on eating and go on enjoying it.

Eating is okay - but enjoying it?

If it suits, you can enjoy the same thing again and again. It is not a repetition for you. If it doesn't suit, then there is trouble.

It happened:

One Thursday night Mulla Nasrudin came home to supper. His wife served him baked beans. He threw his plate of beans against the wall and shouted, 'I hate baked beans!'

'Mulla, I can't figure you out,' his wife said. 'Monday night you liked baked beans, Tuesday night you liked baked beans, Wednesday night you liked baked beans, and now all of a sudden on Thursday night you say you hate baked beans.

This is inconsistent!'

Ordinarily you cannot eat the same thing every day. But the reason is not that it is the same thing, the reason is that it doesn't suit you. One day you can tolerate, another day it becomes too much. And how can you tolerate it every day? If it suits you then there is no problem; you can live your whole life on it, and every day you can enjoy it, because it brings such harmony. It simply fits with you, it is in accord with you.

You go on breathing; it is the same breath. You go on taking a bath; it is the same water. You go on sleeping; it is the same sleep. But it suits, then everything is okay. Then it is not a repetition at all.

Repetition is your attitude. If you are living perfectly in harmony with nature, then you don't bother about the yesterday that has gone, you don't carry it in your mind. You don't compare your yesterdays with your today and you don't project your tomorrows. You simply live here and now, you enjoy this moment.

Enjoyment of the moment has nothing to do with new things. Enjoyment of the moment has certainly something to do with harmony. You can go on changing new things every day, but if they don't suit, you will always be running from here to there and never finding any rest.

But whatsoever I'm doing is not enforced, it is spontaneous. That's how by and by I became aware of my body's needs. I always listen to my body. I would never impose my mind on the body. Do likewise and you will have a happier, a more blissful life.

Question 4:

It depends on the listeners. It has nothing to do with Buddha or with me. It depends on the listeners. If you are en rapport with me, then you feel grace; if you are en rapport with Buddha, then you feel grace. If you are en rapport, that is the thing.

You can listen to me with a very logical mind, then you may be even annoyed.

You can listen with your accumulated knowledge, then you may even feel disturbed - because if I am contradicting whatsoever you know, you will be disturbed. Or, you can listen with argumentativeness: then here I am speaking and there you are also speaking inside your mind - contradicting, saying yes, no, arguing. Then there will be no grace.

If you are just listening... the knowledge has been put aside and you are listening to me as one listens to a musical instrument, to a melody; as one listens to wind passing through the trees; as one listens to dead leaves falling on the ground, whispering to the ground... if you are listening to me en rapport, in tune with me, grace will arise. It depends on the listener.

And it also depends on the listener what you hear. It is not so important what I am saying, the more important thing is what you are hearing. It is not necessarily the same thing. I may be saying something else, you may be hearing something else.

I have heard:

Two men were walking along a crowded sidewalk in a downtown business area.

Suddenly one exclaimed, 'Listen to the lovely sound of that cricket!' But the other could not hear. He asked his companion how he could detect the sound of a cricket amidst the din of people and traffic. The first man, who was a zoologist, had trained himself to listen to the voices of nature, but he did not explain. He simply took a coin out of his pocket and dropped it on the sidewalk, whereupon a dozen people began to look about them.

'We hear,' he said, 'what we listen for.'

There are people who can listen only to the sound of a falling rupee on the ground - that's their only music. Poor people. They think they are rich, but they are poor people, whose whole music consists only in the sound of a rupee falling on the ground. Very poor people... starving. They don't know what life consists of. They don't know the infinite possibilities, they don't know the infinite melodies surrounding you - the multidimensional richness. You hear only that which you listen for.

If you listen en rapport, in a deep merger with me, then grace will happen. The same grace has been happening always to all those who, whenever a Buddha, a Jesus, a Krishna was walking on the earth, were courageous enough to walk with these people. If you walk with me, if you sit with me en rapport, then you will be fulfilled. I am pouring something in you, but if you don't open your heart I cannot fulfill you, I cannot fill you. But if you open your heart soon you will be overflowing and that overflowing will make you a lotus out of the mud.

The lotus is nothing but an overflowing energy. Hence in the East we have respected the flower of lotus like nothing else. It has become the ultimate symbol of growth. We call the last center in your being, sahasrar - one thousand- petalled lotus. Sex is the lowest center, sahasrar the highest. By sex you become joined with nature, by sahasrar you are in tune with god, or with the whole.

Move from the mud, transcend the mud, and hope and pray and wait for the lotus to open and flower in you.

It is possible. These moments that you are here with me are of tremendous import - but you can hear only that which you listen for.