The dimension of the mysterious

The first question:

Walter Hultzsch, science is a demystification of existence, hence it is absolutely impossible to feel any sense of the mysterious through science; the very method of science prohibits it. It is just like somebody who is blind trying to see through the ears, or somebody who is deaf trying to listen to music through the eyes: the very method becomes the barrier.

Science has a definite methodology and that makes it limited; it gives it a demarcation, a definition. And it is absolutely necessary for science to be defined, otherwise there would be no difference at all between science and meditation, between science and religious consciousness.

Science means being definite, being absolutely definite, about facts. And if you are very definite about facts then you cannot feel mysterious -- the more definite you are the more mystery evaporates. Mystery needs a certain vagueness; mystery needs something undefined, undemarcated. Science is factual; mystery is not factual, it is existential.

A fact is only a part of existence, a very small part, and science deals with parts because it is easier to deal with parts. They are smaller, you can analyze them, you are not overwhelmed by them, you can possess them in your hands, you can dissect them, you can label them, you can be absolutely certain about their qualities, quantities, possibilities -- but in that very process mystery is being killed.

Science is the murder of mystery.

If you want to experience the mysterious you will have to enter through another door, from a totally different dimension. The dimension of the mind is the dimension of science, and the dimension of meditation is the dimension of the miraculous, the mysterious.

Meditation makes everything undefined. Meditation takes you into the unknown, the uncharted. Meditation takes you slowly slowly into a kind of dissolution where the observer and the observed become one. Now, that is not possible in science. The observer has to be the observer and the observed has to be the observed and a clear-cut distinction has to be maintained continuously. Not even for a single moment should you forget yourself, not even for a single moment should you become interested, dissolved, overwhelmed, passionate, loving towards the object of your inquiry. You have to be detached, you have to be very cold -- cold, absolutely indifferent. And indifference kills mystery.

Between the world of meditation and the mind there is a bridge; that bridge is called the heart. The heart is just exactly in between the two. Hence, the poet lives in a twilight land:

something of him can be scientific and something of him can be mystic. But that is the anxiety of the poet also, because he lives in two dimensions, diametrically opposite to each other.

Hence, poets tend to go mad, tend to commit suicide; they are always known as a little bit crazy, outlandish. Something about them remains berserk for the simple reason that they are not settled anywhere. They are neither in the world of facts nor in the world of existentials; they are in a limbo.

The poet can have a certain taste of the mysterious, but that too only rarely; it comes and goes. The mystic LIVES there, the poet only jumps once in awhile and feels the joy of jumping beyond gravitation. But within a minute or within seconds he is back, crushed against the forces of gravitation.

Poetry is a kind of hopping. Once in awhile you are in the sky, for a moment you feel as if you have wings, but only for a moment. Hence, the despair of the poet, because he falls again and again from his peaks. He gathers a few glimpses... The greatest poets too have been able to gather only a few glimpses of the beyond.

But the mystic lives in the world of mystery. His approach is absolutely transcendental to science. He is neither in the mind nor in the heart, but in the beyond; he has transcended both.

Walter, if you really want the experience of the mysterious then you will have to open a new door in your being. I am not saying stop being a scientist, I am simply saying that science can remain a peripheral activity to you. When in the lab be a scientist, but when you come out of the lab forget all about science. Then listen to the birds -- and not in a scientific way! Look at the flowers -- and not in a scientific way, because when you look at a rose in a scientific way it is a totally different kind of thing that you are looking at. It is not the same rose that a poet experiences.

The experience does not depend on the object, the experience depends on the experiencer, on the quality of experiencing. When the scientist looks at the rose he thinks of colors, chemistry, physics, atoms, electrons, neutrons and whatnot -- except beauty. Beauty does not come into his vision, and that's what the rose is.

To the poet, to the painter, the rose is a totally different experience: the rose is a manifestation of the unknown, of the transcendental, of the secret of life itself. It represents something of the divine, it brings into existence something of the sky, something of faraway stars. It grows on the earth, it is rooted in the earth, but it is not just part of the earth; it contains far more than that. It is not the sum total of its constituent parts. The scientist only comes to know it as a sum total of its constituent parts -- there is nothing more to it -- but the poet starts feeling something plus.

The moment you dissect the rose, the beauty disappears. The rose was only an opportunity for the beauty to descend, a receptivity of the earth to the sky, a receptivity of the gross to the subtle. The poet feels that; but it is a feeling, it is not a thought.

So when you come out of your lab, forget all about atoms, forget all about the cosmos; rather, start looking afresh, with a different vision -- the vision of a child, the vision of a poet, the vision of a lover. When you look at the woman you love never think of her in terms of biology, otherwise you will have missed the whole point. She is not biology, she has a being far greater than any biology can contain. When you kiss your woman don't think in terms of what is being transferred from lips to lips chemically, otherwise you will be disgusted! You won't see any poetry, you will be puzzled by what all these poets have been talking about. It is only an exchange of bacteria, germs, millions of germs -- dangerous too. It can be a matter of life and death -- beware!

When you are making love to your woman don't think in terms of hormones, avoid that nonsense, otherwise the whole love act will simply be a mechanical phenomenon. You will be there and yet not there. You will be just an observer, not a participant. And the poet's whole secret is participation.

Looking at a flower, become the flower, dance around the flower, sing a song. The wind is cool and crisp, the sun is warm, and the flower is in its prime; the flower is dancing in the wind, rejoicing, singing a song, singing alleluia. Participate with it! Drop indifference, objectivity, detachment. Drop all your scientific attitudes. Become a little more fluid, more melting, more merging. Let the flower speak to your heart, let the flower enter your being.

Invite him -- he is a guest! And then you will have some taste of mystery.

This is the first step towards the mysterious, and the ultimate step is: if you can be a participant for a moment, you have known the key, the secret. Then become a participant in everything that you are doing. Walking, don't just do it mechanically, don't just go on watching it -- be it. Dancing, don't do it technically; technique is irrelevant You may be technically correct and yet you will miss the whole joy of it. Dissolve yourself in the dance, become the dance, forget about the dancer.

When such deep unity starts happening in many many phases of your life; when all around you start having such tremendous experiences of disappearance, egolessness, nothingness; when the flower is there and you are not, the rainbow is there and you are not; when the clouds are roaming in the sky both within and without and you are not; when there is utter silence as far as you are concerned; when there is nobody in you, just a pure silence, a virgin silence, undistracted, undisturbed by logic, thought, emotion, feeling, that is the moment of meditation. Mind is gone, and when mind is gone mystery enters.

Mystery and mind cannot exist together; they are not, by their very nature, coexistential.

Just like darkness and light: you cannot have both in your room. If you want darkness you have to extinguish the light; if you want light then you have to lose darkness. You can only have one, for the simple reason that the presence of light is the absence of darkness, the presence of darkness is the absence of light; they are not two things, in fact. The same phenomenon, present, is light; absent, is darkness. Now you cannot manage both, to be present and absent together.

Mind is the presence of the non-mysterious, the logical, and meditation is the presence of the mysterious, the miraculous.

Hence, move from the mind. Let art, poetry, painting, dancing become more important -- they will bring you closer to meditation -- and finally take the plunge. If you have tasted something of poetry you will gather enough courage to take the ultimate plunge.

Hence, to me religion consists of three layers; the first layer is of science. Just as your body consists of material, atomic constituents, so religion consists first, the most peripheral part, of science. I am not against science -- science is an absolute need -- but it is only a peripheral phenomenon, the most superficial, the first concentric circle around your center.

Then comes the second concentric circle, which is deeper than science; that is of art, aesthetics. And then the third; that is meditation. And if you have entered these three concentric circles, slowly slowly you will attain to the fourth.

The fourth in the East is called TURIYA; we have not given it any name, we have simply given it a number, "the fourth." Nothing can be said about it, that's why no name has been given to it. It is even beyond mystery. Meditation will take you into the mysterious, but there is still something more than that; that is inexpressible. Nothing can be said about it, nothing has ever been said about it, nothing will ever be said about it, but it has been experienced.

Only at that ultimate peak of experience, in that ultimate ecstasy, Walter, will you know what it is to be.

You ask me:

Whether it goes twice or thrice, how can it help you to feel that you are part of the cosmos? It may go thousands of times -- it is irrelevant!

You say:

No fact can help you. You will have to travel the whole terrain in a totally different dimension.

You also ask:

Not as a scientist, there is no chance. I cannot give you false hope. As a scientist you have no chance to know the mysterious; but that does not mean that you have to stop being a scientist, that simply means that you can let science be one of the aspects of your life. Why make it your whole life? Why become synonymous with it? It is perfectly good to use your logical mind, your analytical mind -- it is perfectly good, it is beneficial. The world needs technology, the world needs science, and you can be of immense service to humanity, but that is a totally different matter.

You should not think that this can be your whole life, otherwise you will live only on the porch of the palace and you will think that this is the palace and you will suffer all kinds of things on the porch. Sometimes it will be too cold and sometimes it will be too hot, and sometimes the rain will start coming in -- it is only an open porch! And the palace is there, available; you could have entered the palace. I am not against the porch, remember, I am not telling you to demolish it. The porch is a necessity, but a porch is a porch. Pass through it, use it, but you have a beautiful palace -- why not explore the whole palace of your being?

Explore poetry, explore music, explore dance, explore meditation, and finally and ultimately disappear into the fourth. Then, and only then, the goose is out!

The second question:

Prem Jyoti, who has ever heard of serious people becoming enlightened? The serious person cannot become enlightened. Seriousness is a disease; it is the cancer of the soul.

Seriousness is a wrong, utterly wrong approach to life. How can you come to truth through a wrong approach? The serious person is simply ill, pathological. Of course, for thousands of years serious people have dominated us because that is their only joy in life, there is no other joy for them -- the joy of dominating.

There is a beautiful parable of Kahlil Gibran:

Every day he goes for a morning walk and he comes across a field where a scarecrow has been put. The scarecrow has a purpose: he drives wild animals away, birds away from the crops.

One day Kahlil Gibran asks the scarecrow, "You have been standing here year in, year out -- you must be getting very tired, very bored?"

And the scarecrow says, "No, I may look bored, I may look very serious, but I am enjoying my job."

Kahlil Gibran says, "What kind of enjoyment can you have? I don't see anything here for you to enjoy."

He says, "The very joy of making people afraid gives me such a thrill. Day in, day out, I am driving animals, birds crazy! They run away from me. I am the supreme-most around here, I am the most powerful person. Everybody is afraid of me. Don't you think that's more than one can expect from life?"

The serious person has been doing that for centuries. In the name of politics, in the name of religion, in the name of education, in the name of morality, he has been torturing people; that is his only joy. He is basically a sado-masochist.

No sado-masochist can become enlightened, and out of one hundred people that you think have become enlightened, ninety-nine point nine percent are not enlightened. Just the traditional idea, and you go on carrying it. You have been told that this man is "enlightened."

No criterion exists for you to judge him by -- because Jesus is enlightened to the Christians, to the Jainas he is not; they have a different criterion. You will be surprised: to the Christians, Mahavira may not look enlightened at all; they have a different criterion.

Christians say Jesus never laughed in his whole life. This must be an absolute lie. I cannot believe it, that he never laughed; his whole life shows a different flavor. It is impossible to think that he never laughed, but Christians say that he never laughed. Why? -- because an enlightened person has to be serious, very serious, burdened with all the problems of the world. He has come to solve all the problems, he has come to save humanity. He is the savior, the messiah; he has to save you from your past sins, and the future possibilities too. Naturally -- he is carrying on his shoulders a Himalayan weight -- how can he laugh? It is impossible.

But the whole idea that somebody has to save you is ugly; the whole idea destroys your freedom. You are not even allowed to suffer for your sins, somebody else has to suffer Your whole responsibility is taken away.

That is not the vision of other traditions. For example, Buddha will not agree with it. He says, "Be a light unto yourself. Nobody else can save you." Hence, Buddha is not so serious; there is no need, there is no reason to be serious. He is free from all his own problems, he is released. There is a subtle joy in him.

But Christians will think that Buddha is selfish, he is only thinking of himself. And how can an enlightened person be selfish? Jesus is enlightened because he is thinking of the whole of humanity.

Mahavira lived naked. That is the Jainas' concept of an enlightened man: that the enlightened person will renounce everything, he will live naked, and because he is completely free from all sins he cannot suffer. And Jesus suffers much on the cross. Now, according to Jaina philosophy you suffer only because of your past bad karmas. If Jesus had to suffer on the cross that simply shows that his past karmas were still there -- he had to pay for it; each act has to be paid for.

For Mahavira, they say that if Mahavira walks -- and he walks naked, barefoot -- and if on the path there is a thorn, the thorn will immediately turn upside down, seeing that Mahavira is coming, because Mahavira has no more sins left, hence the thorn cannot give any pain to Mahavira, so what to say about crucifixion? But Mahavira is serious.

Krishna is not serious. Krishna is dancing, singing, playing on his flute.

When Bodhidharma became enlightened, for seven days he could not stop laughing. Asked again and again, he only said this much: "I am laughing because the whole thing was ridiculous. The goose has always been out, and I was trying to bring it out of the bottle, and the bottle never existed. The whole effort was sheer absurdity, ridiculous! I am laughing at myself and I am laughing at the whole world, because people are trying to do something which need not be done at all. People are trying hard, and the harder they try the more difficult it becomes. Their very effort is the barrier!"

How are you going to decide who is enlightened and who is not?

Just the other day I received a letter saying: "If you are really enlightened then you should hide yourself in the Himalayas, because enlightened people always remain in hiding. They remain unknown, they remain unsung."

Now, if this man is right, then Mahavira, Buddha, Jesus, Krishna, Rama, Zarathustra, Mohammed -- none of them is enlightened, because they are all well-known, world-known.

They were not hiding in the Himalayas, they did not live anonymously, they did not die unsung.

And then one more question arises: how has this man come to know about a few people who have lived hiding in the Himalayas, unsung, unknown, the people he thinks are the real enlightened people? Then how has he come to know about them? And if he knows, then they are not unknown -- unless he is the only one who is allowed to know the secret!

But these fools abound; they go on parading their own prejudices.

I will not tell you who is enlightened and who is not enlightened, but I will tell you of a simple phenomenon which you can understand and which can become a light for you. One thing is absolutely certain: that the sado-masochist cannot be enlightened. One who tortures himself and tortures others, enjoys torturing, cannot be enlightened.

Enlightenment is blissfulness, it cannot be serious. It can be sincere but not serious. It will be sheer joy! It will be pure ecstasy!

Prem Jyoti, you ask me:

I have never heard of any! And if you have heard of any sad and serious people becoming enlightened, then either they were not sad and serious or you have heard wrong. Serious and sad people become something else, they don't become enlightened. They become popes, Mother Teresas, Mahatma Gandhis, Morarji Desais, SHANKARACHARYAS, Ayatollah Khomaniacs, IMAMS, priests. The churches, the synagogues, the temples, the mosques, the GURUDWARAS -- they are full of these people; they are serious people. They gather around an enlightened person and they start destroying all that he has brought into the springtime.

They start creating a dead tradition -- and the tradition has to be serious, the tradition cannot be non-serious.

The enlightened person is always joyous, but the tradition, the convention cannot be joyous. The whole structure of a tradition is basically political; it is there to dominate, it is there to oppress, it is there to exploit. And you cannot exploit people playfully, you have to be very serious. You have to make them so sad, so afraid of life itself, you have to create so much trembling in their being, that out of that fear they fall into your hands; they become objects of your manipulation.

A man like me cannot exploit you, because this whole place is more like a tavern than a temple. It is more playful than serious. We are engaged in a beautiful game! The moment you think of it as a game, all seriousness disappears, things become lighter. You can walk in a dancing way; there is no weight on you.

But the priests cannot do it; their whole prestige depends on their seriousness. The more serious they are, the more somber-looking, the more "holier-than-thou" they can pretend to be... And they will do everything -- they will fast... naturally, when a person fasts he becomes serious, he cannot laugh. When you are hungry, starving, you cannot laugh -- and you cannot allow anybody else to laugh either. It is not a laughing matter! You are starving, sacrificing, crucifying yourself, and people are laughing! It cannot be pardoned, it cannot be forgiven.

Naturally, when you go to a fasting person you become serious -- you have to be serious.

That is simple manners. Now, a person who is distorting his body in every possible way, who is torturing his body in every possible way -- how can you laugh? The very scene is sad; you feel burdened. It is very difficult to be with these so-called saints. That's why people just go to pay their respects and escape immediately, because to sit with them means they will make you burdened, they will create guilt in you.

For example, if they are fasting and you are well-fed, guilt is bound to be created. If they are standing on their heads and you are simply standing on your feet, you are doing something wrong. Naturally, you will feel, "I am not yet a perfect man -- this man who is standing on his head is perfect." You see the sheer stupidity of it all? If God wanted you to stand on your head he would have managed it!

If God had wanted homosexuality in the world he would have created Adam and Bruce -- it is so simple! Why bring in Eve? Unnecessary trouble! But these stupid people go on doing the unnatural, and their very unnatural approach to life naturally makes them serious. They are going against the current, they are exhausted, tired, bored, but their only joy is that they can also bore you.

Moishe cannot decide about his son's future. So he goes to the rabbi and asks his advice.

The rabbi says, "That's very easy. We put the Talmud, the Torah and some money on the table, and let him choose. If he takes the Talmud he will become a rabbi. If he takes the Torah he will become a lawyer. If he takes the money he will become a shopkeeper."

Moishe agrees and they call his son. The son looks at all the things on the table and then takes them all.

Moishe is perplexed. "What will happen now?" he asks the rabbi.

"He will become a Catholic priest," replied the rabbi.

These sad people become Catholic priests, Hindu SHANKARACHARYAS, Mohammedan IMAM, and what-not. These serious people lose their humanity; they become parrots. But it pays. You need not have much intelligence to be a parrot, you need not have much courage to be a parrot; if you just have a little bit of memory and you can recite the Vedas, the Gita, the Koran, you will be respected and honored. You are not doing anything creative, you are not adding anything to the beauty of the world, you are not contributing to the earth and its joys, on the contrary, you are destroying. But people have been conditioned for thousands of years, and they go on doing things according to their conditioning. Parrots are worshipped.

A farmer owns a parrot who always screams, "Heil Hitler!"

One day the farmer gets fed up with the parrot and locks it in the hen-house. The cock walks over to the parrot and asks, "Tell me, why did the farmer lock you in here?" The parrot remains silent.

"I'll give you four of my hens if you tell me," continues the cock, but the parrot remains silent.

"Listen, if you tell me why he locked you in here, I'll give you ten of my hens."

The parrot turns around and screams, "Can't you leave me alone? I'm a political prisoner!"

These sad people, they either become priests or politicians or they become great pedagogues, professors, philosophers, theologians. But they never become enlightened; that much is absolutely certain -- that cannot happen in the very nature of things.

To become enlightened one needs the lightness of a flower, the lightness of a feather, the multi-dimensional colors of a rainbow. One needs the joy of the birds in the morning, one needs the freedom of the clouds. One needs only one thing: a heart full of ecstasy -- not the ecstasy of something ultimate, not the ecstasy of something in paradise, but ecstasy here and now, ecstasy this very moment, when your eyes are full of this very moment, when there is nothing else, no past, no future, when this moment pervades you so totally, so intensely, so passionately that nothing is left behind. Only these few people have become enlightened.

Hence, I say, if you live in joyous ordinariness you are enlightened. There is no need for any spiritual nonsense, for any esoteric nonsense.

The toilet seat in the Rabinowitz home was chipped. On his day off, Sidney promised to paint it. He had some nice bright green enamel in the garage and applied a fresh shiny coat.

Ethel went in with a magazine, sat down to meditate and read. When she tried to get up she found she was stuck! She yelled for Sid.

He tugged and tugged but could not pry her loose. Ethel, in desperation, cried, "So what are you standing there for! Call me a doctor! If plaster gets stuck, he at least knows how to remove it without tearing off the skin!"

Sidney dashed to the telephone and pleaded with the doctor to come right over. This was a real emergency! The doctor explained that he had an office full of patients and that he could not possibly get there for at least two hours.

Sid had a bright idea. He would unscrew the hinges and she could lie on the bed on her stomach and wait for the doctor. The two hours seemed like four but the doctor finally arrived.

Sidney directed him into the bedroom and pointing to his wife said, "Doc, ain't that something? What d'ya think of that?"

The doctor looked thoughtfully and declared, "Very nice... but why such a cheap frame?"

Life has to be taken hilariously! Life is so full of laughter, it is so ridiculous, it is so funny that unless your juices have gone completely dry you cannot be serious. I have looked around at life in every possible way and it is always funny, whatever way you look at it! It gets funnier and funnier! It is such a beautiful gift of the beyond.

Prem Jyoti, I am against all seriousness. My whole approach is that of humor, and the greatest religious quality is a sense of humor -- not truth, not God, not virtue, but a sense of humor. If we can fill the whole earth with laughter, with dancing and singing -- people singing and swinging! -- if we can make the earth a carnival of joy, a festival of lights, we will have brought for the first time a true sense of religiousness to the earth.

The third question:

I am amused! The Polacks I have always loved. The Pope is secondary, the Polack is the real thing. The Polack is the elephant and the Pope is just the last part of the elephant, the tail part!

I am certainly not a pope, I cannot be -- I am not that serious a man, I am not that religious either. I am very ordinary! To be a pope one needs to be very extraordinary. As far as charisma is concerned, I have none. I am just as ordinary as anybody else in the world. The whole idea of charisma is anti-human, it divides people. And the whole strategy of creating a charisma is nothing but the process of conditioning.

If you go to see a naked Jaina monk you will not see any charisma because you are not conditioned for that. You will simply see an ugly, disgusting-looking person, pale, ill, ill at ease, eyes almost dead, no intelligence in the face, the whole body shrunken. Yes, one thing will be big -- the belly -- because the Jaina monk eats only once a day so he has to eat too much. The whole figure of a Jaina monk, if you are not conditioned by Jaina ideas, will appear to you like a caricature, a cartoon, but to the Jainas themselves there is charisma, great charisma.

Jaina monks, particularly the DIGAMBARA Jaina monks who live naked, every year tear their hair out with their own hands. If you look at it, it will look insane, ugly, violent, but the Jainas watch with great respect -- something of immense value is happening. The man is simply tearing his hair out! You must have seen your wife sometimes in anger, or if you go to a mad asylum you will find people tearing their hair out -- just angry at themselves, violent with themselves, repressed anger and nothing else. But to the Jaina mind it is charismatic:

"What sacrifice!"

If you go to a Christian church and see the cross, if you are conditioned by Christianity then you will not see that death is being worshipped -- but the cross represents death. There is every possibility if Jesus had not been crucified there would have been no Christianity at all. It is not Jesus who has dominated the Christian mind, it is the cross. Hence, I don't call Christianity "Christianity," I call it "Crossianity"! The cross simply symbolizes death, suicide; it is not a life-affirmative symbol. But to the Christian it symbolizes the great sacrifice of Jesus for the whole of humanity.

Charisma is created by a certain conditioning. The same Pope was not charismatic two years ago -- suddenly he has become charismatic. What miracle has happened? Just because he was chosen to be the pope, he has been voted pope, and he has become charismatic. Now millions of people are impressed by him; nobody would have cared... The same man has been there for more than sixty years; nobody had ever bothered about him. This is just a created illusion.

The same man, if he becomes the president of a country, starts having charisma, and once he is no longer a president he loses all charisma; then he is nobody.

When the revolution in Russia happened there was a very charismatic leader, Kerensky; he was the Prime Minister of Russia. During the revolution he escaped, and for fifty years nothing was heard about that charismatic leader. People had completely forgotten about him, and before Lenin he was the most important man in Russia; he had dominated the whole scene. After fifty years he died in New York as a grocer! When he died it was found that he was none other than Kerensky. For fifty years he was tending a grocery store and nobody ever thought of him as charismatic.

I am not charismatic, and I don't believe in all such nonsensical things. I exalt the simple, the unconditioned, the innocent, the ordinary, and I want all categories to be dissolved: the category of the sinner and the saint, the unholy and the holy, the profane and the sacred, the moral and the immoral. I want to dissolve ALL categories! Man is simply man.

So I would not like to be compared with the Pope. In fact, I don't like any comparison at all because comparison is basically a wrong approach. I am myself! I don't want to be compared even with Jesus, what to say about the Pope. I don't want to be compared with Buddha, with Zarathustra, with Lao Tzu, because all comparison is basically wrong. Lao Tzu is Lao Tzu, I am who I am; there is no question of comparison.

How can you compare a rose bush with a cedar of Lebanon? There is no question of comparison. How can you compare the lotus with the marigold? In fact, two lotus flowers cannot even be compared with each other; they have their own uniqueness.

But we have been living with this idea of comparison for centuries. We always compare, we always put people into categories, we always put people into boxes -- who is who, to what category one belongs.

My whole effort here is to dissolve all categories and to declare the uniqueness of the individual. Never compare me with anybody else. I am simply myself. Good, bad, holy, unholy, whatsoever I am, I am simply myself. The very idea is disgusting, to be compared with anybody else. God never creates carbon copies, he always creates originals, and everybody comes with his own original face.

But Polacks I love -- that much I have to concede!

A Polack walks into the office of a circus and offers to jump to the ground from ten meters up, head first, without a net. The manager does not believe this so they go to the stage. The Polack gets up to about ten meters height, takes a deep breath and jumps head first. He crashes down on his head, lies still for a few moments and then gets up.

The manager is fascinated. "That's incredible!" he exclaims. "I'll pay you one hundred dollars a night."

The Polack shakes his head.

"Okay, okay, I'll pay you three hundred dollars a night."

"No," replies the Polack.

"I'll pay you a thousand dollars!" says the manager.

"No," says the Polack, "I've changed my mind -- I don't want to jump anymore. I didn't know it would hurt so much!"

A Polack discovered that he had three balls. He was so anxious to tell it to someone that he stopped the first man he met on the road and told him, "Do you want to bet that together we have five balls?"

He lost his bet... the other guy had only one ball!

The Polack woman was dying. With her last breath she turned to her husband and asked, "Before I die, make love to me just one more time."

The Polack husband answered, "How could you ask me to do such a thing? It will kill you!"

The wife pleaded, "Everyone is entitled to one last request before they die, you should grant me this last wish."

The Polack replied, "Okay." He got into bed and made love to her. No sooner did he finish than she hopped out of bed completely cured and ran downstairs and started to flick a chicken and yell into the living room, where her children were sitting, that dinner would be ready in an hour.

The children were astounded and ran up the stairs to their father who was sitting in a chair and crying. They said, "Papa, why are you crying? It's a miracle! Mama is completely cured!"

He replied, "I know, but when I think what I could have done for Eleanor Roosevelt!"

The Polack mind has its own way of working! It is the most intriguing mind in the world!

SPIEGEL has done one good thing -- it has reminded me of the Polack Pope.

The old Polack general lived with his young wife in a lonely villa. They kept two guards in front of the house to protect them against intruders.

One night the guards saw that the lights in the general's bedroom were on for a very long time. Suspicious, they snuck up to the window and peeped in. The general's wife was lying on the bed naked, looking quite bored. The Polack general, also naked, was anxiously walking around the room with a pistol in his hand.

Suddenly he stopped, looked down at his groin and shouted, "Stand up like a man or I'll shoot!"

Do you remember the famous proverb: "The bread never falls but on its buttered side?"

However, there is a story of a Polack whose bread fell and landed buttered side up. He ran straight away to the Polack Pope to report this deviance from one of the basic rules of the universe.

At first the Pope would not believe him, but finally became convinced that it had happened. However, he didn't feel immediately ready to deal with the question and asked for time. He studied hard the old scriptures about it, prayed to God and did all kinds of things to find an infallible answer.

After months of waiting he finally came up with an answer. He said to the Polack, "The bread must have been buttered on the wrong side."

Deva Yachana, you ask me:

That is absolutely wrong because I am not here to help you to surrender to me. I don't want to stand between you and the whole. It is not a question of surrender. It is a question of surrender when you go to the Pope, here it is a love affair. There you surrender to the Pope because he represents God, represents the only begotten son of God, Jesus Christ. I don't represent anybody!

When you are with me you are living in a love affair; there is no question of surrender.

You are simply learning ways to relate with existence. I am only an opportunity, a device -- a catalytic agent at the most.

My sannyasins are not my followers. I am not creating a church, I am simply imparting what I have seen. I am simply sharing my love, my joy, my experience. Those who are here are fellow-travellers. You are not surrendered to me; but living with me, slowly slowly you will start enjoying a deep surrender to existence. That is a totally different matter; I have nothing to do with it. The credit will go to you, not to me. My presence can only help in one thing: to see the pattern of stupidity in which you are caught.

The Pope is simply enforcing the same stupid pattern in you. For thousands of years people have been surrendering to these popes and priests and nothing has happened.

I am not a priest and I am not interested in gathering crowds. I am not interested in creating a tradition, I am simply enjoying myself! Those who want to enjoy themselves, they are welcome. It is a place of joy. The very word "surrender" is irrelevant here! Nobody is surrendering to anybody else. You have to be yourself, authentically yourself, sincerely yourself, and then a miracle starts happening: the moment you discover your original face you enter into a communion with the whole.

SPIEGEL IS not right in saying that the same thing is happening to Poona pilgrims, but when people come and watch from the outside, these misunderstandings are bound to happen.

They are just onlookers.

To understand what is going on here one has to be a participant, not just an observer. Only then will some taste on your tongue reveal the secret.

I have heard that every year as part of the splendid Easter ceremonials at St. Peter's in Rome, the Chief Rabbi of the city would enter the Basilica in solemn procession during High Mass and present the Pope with an ancient scroll. And every year the Pope would take this scroll, bow to the Rabbi and hand it back, whereupon the Rabbi would return the bow, turn and leave.

This mysterious rite had been going on for so many hundreds of years that no one could remember the origins of it nor what it symbolized. But the first Eastertide of the Polack Pope's reign he decided to put an end to what had become a totally meaningless ritual, and so when the Chief Rabbi duly presented the scroll, His Holiness -- to the consternation of the entire Curia -- opened it up. It was a bill for the Last Supper.

The last question:

Yoga Lalita, then I will have to tell it again! In fact, there are four jokes. Three I will tell you today and the fourth you have to discover -- the TURIYA! I will give you forty-eight hours to discover it. If you cannot discover it then I will tell it too.

The first joke that I have been telling to you in your SUSHUPTI, the dreamless sleep...

Naturally, it is difficult to remember it. And Yoga Lalita is my librarian, so I have to remind her continuously of jokes so she goes on collecting jokes for me. I never see her, I never go to the library, so the only way to convey the message is while she is asleep.

The first joke:

A minister, a priest and a rabbi were discussing how they "divined" what part of the collection money each retained for personal needs and what part was turned in to their respective institutions.

"I draw a line," said the minister, "on the floor. All the money I toss in the air -- what lands to the right of the line I keep, to the left of the line is the Lord's."

The priest nodded, saying, "My system is essentially the same, only I use a circle. What lands inside is mine, outside is his."

The rabbi smiled and said, "I do the same thing. I toss all the money into the air and whatever God grabs is his!"

The second joke, Lalita, has been told to you in the state of SWAPNA, the dream state.

Something of it you may remember -- just a few fragments here and there.

The distraught young man was perched on the fortieth-floor ledge of a midtown hotel and threatening to jump. The closest the police could get was the roof of an adjacent building a few feet below. However, all pleas to the man to return to safety were of no avail. A priest from the nearest parish was summoned, and he hastened to the scene.

"Think, my son," he intoned to the would-be suicide. "Think of your mother and father who love you."

"Aw, they don't love me," the man replied. "I'm jumping!" "No! Stop!" cried the priest.

"Think of the woman who loves you!"

"Nobody loves me! I'm jumping!" came the response.

"But think," the priest implored, "think of Jesus and Mary and Joseph who love you!"

"Jesus, Mary and Joseph?" the man queried, "who are they?"

At which point the cleric yelled back, "Jump, you Jew bastard, jump!"

And the third has been told to you in JAGRUTI, the so-called awakening state -- which is not much of an awakening state. Maybe that's what goes on keeping you laughing.

Lalita says:

This may be the joke:

The family managed to bring the patriarchal grandfather from Hungary and he came to live with his daughter and her family. The old man was fascinated by New York and all it had to offer. One day, his grandson Yankel took him to the zoo in Central Park. Most of the animals were familiar to the old man. However, they came to the cage where the laughing hyena was confined and the old man became curious. "Yankel, in the old country I never heard of an animal that laughed."

Yankel noticed the keeper standing nearby and approached him. "My grandfather recently came here from Europe. He says they don't have laughing hyenas there. Could you tell me something about it so that I can, in turn, tell him?"

The keeper said, "Well, he eats once a day."

Yankel turned to his grandfather and in Yiddish translated, "Zayda, he eats once a day."

The keeper continued, "He takes a bath once a week."

"Zayda, he bathes once a week."

The old man listened intently.

The keeper added, "He mates once a year."

"Zayda, he mates once a year."

The old man shook his head up and down and said thoughtfully, "All right, he eats once a day, he bathes once a week, but if he mates only once a year, why is he laughing?"