You are my golden cornfield

The first question:

Question 1:

Yoga Pratima,

YOU are just holding on to something which is no more there. You are clinging to a shadow. You are. just clinging to a memory. And that is the case with many of my sannyasins - their egos are gone, just the traces, footprints, past memories are there. And they go on clinging to those past memories, thinking these are their egos.

It takes time to recognize the fact that "I am no more." Sometimes it can take years to understand that the ego has been left somewhere on the path long before.

And Pratima, about you I can say it absolutely: that it is only a shadow that is torturing you. The ego HAS disappeared, but you have not yet been able... alert... The ego has disappeared in deep love with me.

The ego disappears in two ways. When it disappears because of meditation one immediately becomes aware that it is gone, because meditation means awareness and nothing else, so there is no gap. On the path of awareness the disappearance of the ego and the recognition is instantaneous, simultaneous.

But on the path of love ego disappears and the recognition comes only later on. The path of love is the path of the drunkard. He is utterly drunk, so how can he recognize what has happened or what is happening? And when you are in love so much goes on happening that even to take note of it all becomes more and more difficult. And when deeper things happen, it really takes time for them to reach to your recognition.

Meditation is the way of the head. Recognition also is part of the head-function, so meditation happens, immediately recognition happens. Love happens in the heart, and there is a great distance between love and logic, the heart and the head.

Pratima, in the heart you are no more; the head is still clinging to an old idea. The bird has left the cage long before.... You are drowning in me more and more every day.

Dad was pretending to be asleep. "Maybe the kids will go away" he thought, "if I play possum." But they persisted in their efforts to try and rouse him from his delicious sleep. Finally his little daughter tried to open one of his eyelids, looked intently in, and reported to her brothers, "He is still in there!"

I have looked into you, Pratima, and I say you are not there. It will be difficult to believe what I am saying, because how can you believe it unless it becomes your own recognition? But my saying it will help; it will help the recognition to happen sooner than otherwise. The news has started travelling from the heart.

Physiologically the heart and the head are very close - maybe the distance is not more than eighteen inches - but spiritually the head and the heart, these two points, are FARTHEST apart. Even stars are closer to you than your own heart. This is the greatest distance that exists in existence, between the heart and the head, between love and logic, between intuition and intellect. Recognition happens in the intellect and love happens in the world of intuition.

And Pratima, you are in love. Your path is that of love. Don't be worried at all - you are gone and gone forever. You cannot return even if you want to return. And this is so with many of my sannyasins who are in deep love with me, who are following on the path with tremendous drunkenness, who have abandoned themselves, whose trust is total - but they will also need time. But who cares about the recognition? The real thing is the realization, not the recognition!

On the path of love it is always the Master who makes the disciple aware that "It has happened! Now don't worry about it. It is already dawn and the night is gone." It is always the Master who reminds, who helps the disciple to recognize.

But not on the path of awareness; there is no need. The disciple himself becomes alert; alertness is. his whole work.

The second question:

Question 2:

Ajit Saraswati,

YOU are not caught in the opposite: meditation is your path, awareness is going to be your key, the master key. Go totally with it, and don't be worried about the lovers. Many times many things will make you jealous too, because those who follow the path of love, they will dance, they will sing, they will laugh, they will celebrate. A thousand and one flowers will bloom on their path - their eyes will sparkle, will become candles; their lives will become more and more juicy.

On the path of awareness these things don't happen at all. Yes, a totally different kind of beauty happens - the beauty of the desert, the silence of the desert. And remember, the desert also has its own beauty; all that is needed is one who can understand that beauty. There are no trees, no greenery, just infinite expanses of sands and sands, and the patterns that the wind makes on the sands, and the starry night in the desert, and the silence, UTTER silence.

You cannot find that silence in a garden. The birds will go on chirping and the wind will go on blowing through the pine trees, and the fountains and the streams; and much goes on because it is a dance.

In the desert it is all stillness. Those who can appreciate the beauty of the garden may not be able to appreciate the beauty of the desert; those who can feel the beauty of the desert may sometimes feel jealous of those who are living in the gardens.

It is an ancient phenomenon: the follower on the path of awareness has always felt suspicious; many times doubts arise in him. That's what is happening to Ajit. The doubt is natural because the lover shows so many things that prove that something is happening, and the meditator simply starts disappearing into his own being, into his own interiority. No flower manifests, no song bursts forth; he becomes more and more aloof, distant. Others may even start thinking that he has become sad or serious.

Vivek always reminds me, "What is happening to Ajit Saraswati? Why does he look serious? He does not even laugh at the jokes, very rarely, and that too with effort, as if just not to feel out of company." Vivek reminds me because her path is of love; she cannot understand. It is impossible for the lover to understand that there can be any beauty in the desert, in being simply, utterly alone.

But both have their own beauties.

Ajit Saraswati, you need not worry, you are not attracted by the opposite. Meditation is your path.

On the path of the lover you would feel strange, that wouldn't suit with you. And this is not only in this life that you are following the path of meditation; for many lives you have been following it, on and off. But this time I think it is going to remain on! There is every possibility that this may be your last life. Enjoy it deeply! Enjoy this stillness, silence - which MAY appear to others as seriousness, even as sadness. Don't be confused by it, don't be shaken by it.

The third question:

Question 3:

Deva Gita,

WHO is not? To expose oneself creates great fear. It is natural, because to expose oneself means to expose all the rubbish that you carry in your mind, the garbage which has been piling up for centuries, for many, many lives. To expose oneself means to expose all one's weaknesses, limitations, faults. To expose oneself ultimately means to expose one's vulnerability. Death.... To expose oneself means to expose one's emptiness.

Behind all this garbage of the mind and the noise of the mind there is a dimension of utter emptiness.

One is hollow without God, one is just emptiness and nothing without God. One wants to hide this nakedness, this emptiness, this ugliness. One covers it with beautiful flowers, one decorates those covers. One at least pretends that one is something, somebody. And this is not something that is personal to you; this is universal, this is the case with everybody.

Nobody can open himself like a book. Fear grips: "What will people think about me?" From your very childhood you have been taught to wear masks, beautiful masks. There is no need to have a beautiful face, just a beautiful mask will do; and the mask is cheap. To transform your face is arduous, to paint your face is very simple.

Now suddenly to expose your real face gives you a shivering in the deepest core of your being. A trembling arises: will people like it? will people accept you? will people still love you, respect you?

Who knows? - because they have loved your mask, they have respected your character, they have glorified your garments. Now the fear arises: "If I suddenly become naked are they still going to love me, respect me, appreciate me, or will they all escape away from me? They may turn their backs, I may be left alone."

Hence people go on pretending. Out of fear is the pretension, out of fear arises all pseudoness.

One needs to be fearless to be authentic.

And one of the fundamental laws of life is this: whatsoever you hide goes on growing, and whatsoever you expose, if it is wrong it disappears, evaporates in the sun, and if it is right it is nourished. Just the opposite happens when you hide something: the right starts dying because it is not nourished. It needs the wind and the rain and the sun. It needs the whole of nature available to it. It can grow only with truth, it feeds on truth. Stop giving it its nourishment and it starts getting thinner and thinner.

And people are starving their reality and fattening their unreality. Your unreal faces feed upon lies, so you have to go on inventing more and more lies. To support one lie you will have to lie one hundred times more, because a lie can be supported only by bigger lies. So when you hide behind facades the real starts dying and the unreal thrives, becomes fatter and fatter. If you expose yourself the unreal will die, is bound to die, because the unreal cannot remain in the open. It can remain only in secrecy, it can remain only in darkness, it can only remain in the tunnels of your unconscious. If you bring it to consciousness it starts evaporating.

That's the whole secret of the success of psychoanalysis. It is a simple secret, but the WHOLE secret of psychoanalysis: the psychoanalyst helps to bring up all that is inside your unconscious, in the darker realms of your being, to the level of the conscious. He brings it to the surface where you can see it, others can see it, and a miracle happens: even your seeing it is the beginning of its death. And if you can relate it to somebody else - that's what you do in psychoanalysis, you expose yourself to your psychoanalyst - even exposing to a single person is enough to bring great changes in your being. But to expose to a psychoanalyst is limited: you have exposed only to one person, in deep privacy, with the condition that he is not going to make it public. That is part of the profession of the physician, psychoanalyst, therapist, that is part of his oath: that he will not tell it to anybody, it will be kept secret. So it is a very limited exposure, but still it helps. And it is a professional exposure; still it helps. It takes years, that's why; that which can be done within days takes years in psychoanalysis - four years, five years - and even then psychoanalysis is never complete. The world has not yet known a single case of total psychoanalysis, of the process completed, terminated, finished, no, not yet. Not even your psychoanalysts are completely psychoanalyzed - because the exposure itself is very limited and with conditions. The psychoanalyst listens to you as if he is not listening, because he is not to tell it to anybody. But even then it helps, it helps tremendously to unburden.

If you can expose yourself religiously - not in privacy, not to the professional, but simply in all your relationships - that's what sannyas is all about. It is self-psychoanalysis. It is twenty-four hour psychoanalysis, day in, day out. It is psychoanalysis in all kinds of situations: with the wife, with the friend, with the relative, with the enemy, with the stranger, with the boss, with the servant. For twenty-four hours you are relating.

If you go on exposing yourself... In the beginning it is going to be really very scary, but soon you will start gaining strength because once the truth is exposed it becomes stronger and the untruth dies. And with the truth becoming stronger you become rooted, YOU become centered. You start becoming an individual; the personality disappears and individuality appears.

Personality is bogus, individuality is substantial. Personality is just a facade, individuality is your truth. Personality is imposed from the outside; it is a persona, a mask. Individuality is your reality - it is as God has made you. Personality is social sophistication, social polishing. Individuality is raw, wild, strong, with tremendous power.

Only in the beginning, Gita, will the fear be there. Hence the need for a Master, so that in the beginning he can hold your hand, so that in the beginning he can support you, so that in the beginning he can take you a few steps with him. The Master is not a psychoanalyst; he is that and far more. The psychoanalyst is a professional, the Master is not a professional. It is not his profession to help people, it is his vocation. It is his love, it is his compassion. And because it is his compassion he takes you only as far as you need him. The moment he starts feeling that you can go on your own he starts slipping his hand out of your hands. Although you would like to go on clinging, he cannot allow that.

Once you are ready, courageous, daring, once you have tasted the freedom of truth, the freedom of exposing your reality, you can go on your own. You can be a light unto yourself.

But the fear is natural because from the very childhood you have been taught falsities, and you have become so much identified with the false that to drop it almost looks like committing suicide. And the fear arises because a great identity crisis arises.

For fifty years, sixty years, you have been a certain kind of person. Now Gita must be reaching sixty.

For sixty years you have been a certain kind of person. Now at this last phase of your life, dropping that identity and starting to learn about yourself from ABC is frightening. Death is coming closer and closer every day - is this the time to start a new lesson? Who knows if you will be able to complete it or not? Who knows? You may lose your old identity and you may not have time enough, energy enough, courage enough to attain to a new identity. So are you going to die without an identity? Are you going to live in the last phase of your life without an identity? That will be a kind of madness, to live without an identity; the heart sinks, the heart shrinks. One thinks, "Now it is okay to go on for a few days more. It is better to live with the old, the familiar, the secure, the convenient." You have become skillful about it. And it has been a great investment: you have put sixty years of your life into it. Somehow you have managed, somehow you have created an idea of who you are, and now I tell you to drop that idea because you are not THAT! No idea is needed to know yourself. In fact, all ideas have to be dropped, only then can you know who you are.

Fear is natural. Don't condemn it, and don't feel that it is something wrong. It is just part of this whole social upbringing. We have to accept it and go beyond it; without condemning it we have to go beyond it.

Expose, slowly, slowly - there is no need to take jumps that you cannot manage; go by steps, gradually. But soon you will learn the taste of the truth, and you will be surprised that all those sixty years have been a sheer wastage. Your old identity will be lost, you will have a totally new conception. It will not really be an identity but a new vision, a new way of seeing things, a new perspective. You will not be able to say 'I' again with something behind it; you will use the word because it is useful, but you will know all the time that the word carries no meaning, no substance, no existential substance at all; that behind this 'I' is hidden an ocean, infinite, vast, divine.

You will never attain to another identity; your old identity will be gone, and for the first time you will start feeling yourself as a wave in the ocean of God. That is not an identity because you are not in it. You have disappeared, God has overwhelmed you.

If you can risk the false, the truth can be yours. And it is worth it, because you risk only the false and you gain the truth. You risk nothing and you gain all.

My work here is to somehow persuade you, seduce you this way or that, to drop the old identity.

Many, many fears will come: many things that you have done in the past, and you have been able to hide them, and you have succeeded. Now again opening the closed chapters for no reason at all, the closed chambers, and releasing the ghosts of the past...

You may not have been faithful to your husband once in a while, but you have been able to manage a certain face of sincerity, faithfulness. Now unnecessarily exposing yourself is bound to create fear.

You may not have been faithful, now what is the point of exposing it? Or you may have been faithful in action but not in thought, but what is the point in exposing it? The mind will say, "There is no need!

There are so many problems already, why create new problems?"

You may have succeeded in telling many lies and circulating those lies as true. You may have succeeded, and those lies are almost truths for others now, and even for you. Now going back and looking again - it is very, very natural to be afraid, not to look back, not to go into all those nightmares.

Harry constantly irritated his friends with his eternal optimism. No matter how bad the situation was he would always say, "It could have been worse!"

To cure him of this annoying habit his friends decided to invent a situation so completely black, so dreadful, that even Harry would find no hope in it.

Approaching him at the club bar one day one of them said, "Harry, did you hear what happened to George? He came home last night, found his wife in bed with another man, shot them both, then turned the gun on himself."

"Terrible!" said Harry, "but it could have been worse."

"How in hell," asked the dumbfounded friend, "could it possibly have been worse?"

"Well," said Harry, "if it had happened the night before, I would be dead now!"

It is better to keep quiet, the mind says; it is better not to bring all the old ghosts, not to release them. It is better to go on sitting on them. For sixty years you have been able to manage a certain demeanor, a certain gracefulness, a certain personality - polished, civilized, respectable - now to suddenly expose it for no reason at all? Have you gone mad? The mind will say you have waited so long, you can wait a little more.

Little Siddhartha writes me again and again, "Osho, now I want to become part of the ashram." I have been telling him to just wait a little more, a little more, a little more, but he is persistent. After one month or two he asks for a darshan, and the only question he asks is, "When am I going to come into the ashram?"

Three or four days ago, again he wrote a letter asking, "Now it is time! When am I going to be in the ashram?" So I said to Laxmi, "Now tell him within four or five days. Make any arrangement and let him come in."

Laxmi told him, "Just wait four or five days." He said, "Why four or five days? Osho always says 'Do it now!' Why four or five days? Why wait? Why can't I come right now? Osho's insistence is always on the right now, here!"

Laxmi told him that the room had to be prepared, the room had to be painted - "You will find it very difficult right now." So he said, "Okay. If I can wait for so long, I can wait for four or five days more.

Okay, I will wait. It is only a question of four or five days more, so I CAN wait. And I have waited so long."

After sixty years of life the idea simply arises in the mind, "You have waited so long, why can't you wait for a few days more? Why create any disturbance? Why create any ripples unnecessarily?"

Things have settled, everybody respects you - your children respect you, your husband respects you, your society respects you. It has been a hard struggle - it has been a struggle with the outside, it has been a struggle with the inside. Somehow you have repressed all that is wild in you: you have repressed sex, anger, greed, jealousy; you have repressed all that the society condemns. You have somehow managed a beautiful character. Now why, in the last phase of your life, expose it? For what? What are you going to gain out of it?

Mind will give all these cunning reasonings; these are rationalizations.

If you have lived for sixty years in a false way, enough is enough! It is time now to drop that whole falsity. What can people take away from you now? Sooner or later you will be dead, and all respect and all character and everything will be gone; soon you will be forgotten. A few people will remember you for a few days, then they will die; then even your memory will be gone from the earth.

How many millions of people have lived on the earth? Nobody even knows their names now. In their own time they must have bragged about their character, personality, strength, truth, courage, religiousness, saintliness, this and that. Now nobody even knows their names.

When a person dies, almost ninety-nine percent of his life disappears; one percent lingers a little bit as memory in the few people who had known him. Yes, they will remember him once in a while; that is all that is left. Then THESE people will die and even that memory will disappear. Within a few years a person disappears so totally, as if he had never been there in the first place.

Now what have you to lose, Gita? You have nothing to lose and you have everything to gain. You are fortunate that in the last phase of your life you have come in contact with this energy-field. You are fortunate that in the evening of your life a door is opening, and the person who comes back home even in the evening should not be thought lost.

That is a proverb in India: Even in the evening when the sun is setting, if somebody comes back home he is not thought to be lost. He has arrived, finally he has arrived.

Life has gone down the drain; now don't miss this last phase. And the last is the most important phase, because it will bring death. And if you can die as truth you will not be born again. If you can die with all the falsities dropped, with all false identities disconnected from you, renounced, if you can die utterly naked before God, absolutely naked before God like a small child before his parents, your death will be the most beautiful experience that you have ever experienced.

Those who have known death, they say that life is nothing compared to death. Life has extension - seventy years, eighty years - it is spread out over eighty years. Hence it cannot have that intensity which death can have, and ONLY death can have, because death happens in a split second. Over eighty years you live and in a split second you die. Death has intensity, not extension but intensity.

It has depth.

Life is a long way to live - you can postpone for tomorrow and you can live in a lukewarm way - but death is so total. If you can die consciously... And you can die consciously only if you expose yourself totally, so all that the unconscious is carrying is poured out, all that the unconscious is repressing is released, so the unconscious becomes empty and there is nothing to hide; you can expose yourself in the moment of death totally and you can die consciously.

Remember, a person who has ANY repression cannot die consciously; repression creates the unconscious. The more repressed you are the bigger unconscious you have. What actually is the unconscious? It is that part of your mind that you don't want to see, it is that part of your mind that you bypass, it is that part of your house where you never go, the basement. You go on throwing all kinds of things in it and you never go into it.

The unconscious is not a natural phenomenon. The more man becomes civilized the more the unconscious becomes bigger. The uncivilized people have very small unconscious minds. You will be surprised to know that the aboriginals, the very primitive people who still exist in some parts of the world... In India, in some deep forests, in the hills, there are still people who are as primitive as you can find anywhere else; they are at least five thousand years behind.

One of the most important things about these people - I have' lived with them - is they don't dream.

It is tremendously important. It is very rare that a primitive dreams, because he has no unconscious.

He lives his life so naturally, so truthfully. He represses nothing. When you don't repress anything you cannot create dreams.

A dream is the boiling unconscious. The whole day you go on repressing, and in the night, when you fall asleep - when the repressor falls asleep - all that is repressed starts surfacing. That's what your dreaming is. And if your dreams are nightmares that simply means you are REALLY repressing.

Your repression is dangerous. You are repressing neurotic things inside your unconscious, and the deeper they go the more damage they do.

I have lived with the primitives; I have noted many things in them, but the most important is that they don't dream. If you ask them, "What was your dream last night?" they say, "What dream? We slept well." Yes, once in a while somebody dreams, only once in a while, and the person who dreams has a totally different kind of dream than you. His dream is not the dream that Freud, Jung and Adler study. His dream is intuitive, his dream is a prediction of the future, his dream is a foreshadowing of something that is going to happen.

So in a primitive society the dreamer becomes the seer. He becomes the SHAMAN; he becomes a tremendously important person because he can dream. In a civilized society the psychoanalyst becomes very important because he can analyze dreams, he can interpret dreams. In a primitive society the dreamer becomes the most important person - he becomes the religious head of the commune, because his dreams become predictions, his dreams always prove true. He does not dream about the past because he never represses it. If he dreams at all he dreams about the future, that which has not happened yet and is going to happen. And his dreams are almost always true.

Now his dreams have to be understood in a totally different way. Modern psychoanalysis will not be able to understand his dreams; it is too obsessed with the civilized man, his unconscious. The primitive man has no unconscious.

And the same happens to a Buddha: his unconscious disappears because he goes on exposing, pouring out whatsoever is in his being. He never represses it, he never creates the unconscious.

The unconscious is a creation of civilization: the more civilized you are the more unconscious you are. If you become absolutely civilized you will be robots, you will be absolutely unconscious. That's what is happening. That calamity is happening all over the world; it has to be stopped. And the only way to stop it is to help people to pour out their unconscious in meditations.

Gita, expose yourself That will be unburdening. And I am here - don't be worried and don't be afraid.

I am coming with you. I will keep company with you to the point where you don't need me. I will only leave you in the unknown when I see that now you can walk on your own. And then there will be no fear.

But don't miss this opportunity. This time, die consciously. But you have to start right now to live consciously; only then can you die consciously: Even if you can live consciously for a few years, that will be enough. Even a few months or even a few days and if intensity is great even a few minutes are enough to live consciously; then one becomes capable of dying consciously. And to die consciously is to be resurrected into a totally different dimension, the dimension of the divine.

I would like all of my sannyasins to die so deeply that they are never born again, so that they can disappear into the cosmos, become part of the whole.

The fourth question:

Question 4:

Anand Pragyan.

I AM certainly beckoning you continuously to come across, but who has told you to walk on the water? Why should you step out of your boat? Use the boat and just come across!

Once a man went to Ramakrishna. Ramakrishna was sitting on the bank of the Ganges. The man was a very famous yogi of those days. He had gone there to brag about himself - and that's what these so-called yogis go on doing. He said, "Ramakrishna, what are you doing sitting here? Let us go for a walk on the Ganges."

Ramakrishna asked him, "How many years did it take for you to walk on water?"

He said, "Eighteen years practising in the Himalayas, hard work, fasting, yoga postures. It has been difficult, very difficult. It was almost impossible, and many times I wanted to drop the whole project, but somehow I persisted. Now I have the SIDDHI, the power - I can walk on the water. Can't you walk on the water?"

Ramakrishna said, "I am not so foolish. When I want to go to the other bank I give the ferryman only two paise, and that's enough! Your eighteen years are worth just two paise. Get lost! I am not interested in it."

Only fools are interested in miracles.

Another story...

One day Hassan, a Sufi mystic, went to Rabiya, the great Sufi woman. He had just learned how to walk on water, so he told Rabiya, "Let us go and walk on water and have a little spiritual discourse, discussion." That spiritual discussion was just an excuse; he wanted to show Rabiya that he could walk on the water.

Rabiya said, "On the water? That does not appeal to me. Let us go to the clouds! We will sit on the clouds and have spiritual discourse."

Hassan said, "But I don't know how to go to the clouds and sit on the clouds."

Rabiya said, "Neither do I! But what is the point? Why can't we have a religious discourse here?

Why go to the water or to the clouds?"

All great mystics have been against miracles, and all fools are interested in miracles.

Pragyan, use your boat! Certainly you have to come to the other shore, but there is no need to get out of your boat. You have misunderstood my calling you.

A group of tourists were standing at a vantage point overlooking an awesome panorama of the Grand Canyon, when one of them could be heard saying, "You know, there is a tremendous updraught that happens here every afternoon caused by the warm air rushing up the canyon. A person can actually float upon it."

"You don't say!" replied his friend.

"Why yes, watch this!" as he stepped from the edge of the cliff and floated away and back easily.

"Wow!" said a person standing by, "I will try that!" And he stepped off and went plummetting to the bottom of the Canyon out of sight.

Said one person to the first, "You can be really mean sometimes, Superman."

And I cannot be mean to you!

Please Pragyan, don't get out of your boat. If you sink it is natural, it is not your fault. That's how it should be. Use the boat! What is the boat made for?

I am not for any stupid miracles, I am totally for the natural. Use the boat, use all natural means.

God is available only through nature, not through the cunning devices of man.

You say, "OSHO, EACH MORNING AT DISCOURSE I FEEL YOU ARE BECKONING ME WITH YOUR EYES TO WALK ACROSS THE WATER TO YOU. COURAGE ARISES AND I STEP FROM MY BOAT. EXHILARATED, I TAKE A FEW STEPS, BUT I BECOME AFRAID AND BEGIN TO SINK.

WHAT IS THIS?"

Stupidity, just pure stupidity! Next time courage arises, don't do it! Don't you have oars? Use them, use the boat.

There are two kinds of foolish people in the world: one, who would not like to use the boat, who would like to walk on the water; and the other, who will use the boat and when they have reached to the other shore they will not leave the boat. Just out of gratitude, they will carry the boat on their heads for their whole lives.

I go on beckoning you, but you have to understand rightly. Just a little misunderstanding, just a little misinterpretation, and you will be moving astray. That's where I am totally different, and you can see the difference.

The same story is there in Jesus: Jesus calls; he is walking on water. I don't know that these stories are true; these stories must have been invented by the priests. Priests are the greatest cunning, inventive people in the world. I cannot think that a man like Jesus can be so mean as to walk on water. Why should he?

These stories have been invented to convert the foolish people, because they are interested only in such things. But the story is that Jesus walked on the water. Thomas saw him coming; he was sitting in the boat. Great enthusiasm arose in him - just like you, Pragyan, great courage - and he said, "If the Master can do it. why can't I?" So he asked Jesus, "Can I come and follow you?" He said, "Certainly, come and follow me." And Thomas walked just two, three steps, then great doubt arose in him and he started sinking. Jesus somehow had to save him, and told him, "Don't be a doubting Thomas." Since then there has been the phrase 'doubting Thomas'.

If I had been in Jesus' place, in the first place I would not have walked on water. In the second place, if by chance I had walked, I would have stopped Thomas: "Be in the boat, don't be too courageous."

Intelligent people are always courageous, but not vice versa; courageous people are not necessarily intelligent. I would have told him, "Wait! There is no need to walk on the water. Follow ME into the dimension of the unknown, but there is no need to walk on the water; that is not a prerequisite for it."

I would have stopped him then and there rather than allowing him to walk a few steps and sink, and then saving him. I would not have liked all this trouble at all.

So Pragyan, next time this courage hits you, wait, close your eyes, take your oars, use the boat.

Don't misunderstand me. I would like you to trust, but very intelligently. Trust is the ultimate essence of intelligence; it is not blind faith. I am not against your doubt. You have to use your doubt in purifying your intelligence. You have to use your doubt in sharpening your intelligence. That is the function of doubt - to sharpen intelligence. Once intelligence is sharpened doubt disappears, trust arises. Doubt is not against trust; in fact doubt is a servant, it serves trust.

So I am not here to tell you to faithfully believe in me. Trust intelligently.

But people have their own understanding. I say one thing - they understand something else.

Charlie was taking his out-of-town pal for a stroll through the city. The friend observed a good-looking girl and asked Charlie if he knew her.

"Yes, that is Betty - twenty dollars."

"How about that one?"

"That is Dolores - forty dollars."

"Here comes one that is really first class. Do you know her?"

"That is Gloria - eighty dollars."

"My God! Aren't there any nice, respectable girls in this town?"

"Of course there are, but you couldn't afford their price!"

People have their own understanding. It is not much of an understanding, but that's what they have got, and they go on interpreting through it. He says, "Of course there are, but you could not afford their rates."

A man was discussing his problems with his next door neighbor. "That selfish wife of mine," he was saying, "you know what she did? She has rationed me, cut me down to a miserable once-a-week!"

"Don't feel too sorry for yourself," said the next door neighbor. "I know at least ten fellows living in our block she has completely cut off."

I am saying things which have to be meditated upon. Don't come to conclusions in a hasty, hurried way, because I am saying things which are really paradoxical. This is a paradox.

You have been told down the ages, "Believe, don't doubt." I am saying something totally different:

doubt, and doubt totally, so that your intelligence arises. And then trust arises of its own accord.

Nobody has ever said this to you, hence the world has remained blind, hence the people have remained just sheep. It has been good - good business for the priests, good business for the politicians, good business for the so-called leaders - because people are at a loss, they need leaders. In worldly matters, in other-worldly matters, they need leaders. In worldly matters the politician becomes their leader, and in other-worldly matters, the priest.

And the priests and the politicians have been in a conspiracy: don't allow people to become intelligent. Once they become intelligent they will not need any leader and they will not need any priest. They will learn how to walk on their own.

My approach is totally new: use doubt as a sharpener. I am not against doubt, I am all for it. Doubt very scientifically. And why am I not against doubt? - because I know if you really doubt it is bound to make your intelligence more and more clear. It is bound to give you more and more clarity. Belief confuses, doubt clarifies.

And there comes a point when doubt cannot doubt anymore. My trust in truth is so much that I can tell you to doubt, because I know that if you go on doubting a moment is bound to come when doubt dies of its own accord. When you see the truth, how can doubt exist? Then trust arises.

Trust is through knowing, not through believing. Don't believe me. Trust me certainly, but don't believe me. And if you want to trust me you will have to go on a long pilgrimage of doubt, of sharpening your intelligence. That's why I go on talking to you, creating a thousand and one doubts in you. I don't allow you to settle anywhere. You would like to settle very soon, because who wants to travel for ever and ever? One wants to make a house and settle. I say one thing one day, and just the opposite another day. I create doubt continuously, because my trust in truth is so tremendous that I know no doubt can disturb it. If you go on doubting, even doubt will bring you to truth.

All doors bring you to God, even the door of doubt. Sincerity is needed and intensity is needed and totality is needed.

The fifth question:

Question 5:

Hari Chetana,

I absolutely happy with you. I am one of the most fortunate Masters in the world, because a great many intelligent, alive, loving people have gathered around me. The VERY CREAM of the modern mind has gathered around me. I am tremendously happy, yes, just like a farmer when he looks on his golden cornfields.

You are my golden cornfield. The crop is becoming more and more ripe every day. Many are blossoming, many are coming to fruit. Many are growing - in love, in awareness, in trust, in EVERY possible way. I am tremendously happy that you are here with me.

It very rarely happens. Jesus was not so fortunate: he had only a few disciples, and those too were not very intelligent people either. They were asking REALLY stupid questions, even to the very end.

The night Jesus invited them to say goodbye, to dine and drink with him and dance with him - because this was the last night, he would be caught that night and the next day he might be killed - do you know what the disciples were asking? One disciple asked, "Lord, now that you are leaving us, please tell us one thing. We know perfectly well that in the kingdom of God you will be by the right side of God, you will be his right hand. And who amongst us will be by your side? And what will be our number and position?"

The Master is going to die and the disciples are talking politics! - "Who will be the first after you, and the second, and the third?" The Master is going to die and the disciples are feeling jealous of each other, competitive. They are thinking of the other world also in terms of this world. Jesus must have cried deep down in his heart.... These are the people on whom he had wasted his life, for whom he was ready to die.

And then he was caught, and then one disciple started following him. Others fled! Out of the twelve, one deceived him, Judas; he sold him for thirty silver coins.

When I read that the man who hanged Z. A. Bhutto of Pakistan got twenty-five rupees for hanging him, suddenly I remembered Jesus: he was sold for thirty rupees. The price has fallen down; now you get five rupees less! In fact, the price has fallen too much, because thirty rupees of pure silver in those days and twenty-five paper notes of this day... the difference is not only of five rupees, the difference is much more. Thirty rupees of those days must be equivalent to almost one thousand rupees of today.

But what kind of humanity is this? What kind of civilization and what progress do we go on talking about? Jesus was killed by Jews. The man who hanged Bhutto was a Christian; in a Mohammedan country, they could not find anybody else to hang Bhutto. A Christian! How can a Christian do such a thing? And how can he still remain a Christian? He is a professional. This is what they have been doing for many generations.

One of the great Indian martyrs, Sardar Bhagat Singh, was hanged by the father of this man. And a very strange coincidence: Bhagat Singh, a revolutionary, one of the greatest revolutionaries that India has produced in these hundred years, was hanged by this man's father in the same place where Z. A. Bhutto killed one of his enemies. Now there is no more jail, the jail has disappeared, has been demolished. Instead of the jail, a highway passes through the place.

Z. A. Bhutto killed one of his political opponents in the exact same place where Bhagat Singh was once hanged. And this opponent was the man who was the witness against Sardar Bhagat Singh, and instrumental in his being hanged. And now Bhutto is hanged by the son of the man who hanged Bhagat Singh.

History goes on spinning in a very mysterious way, weaving strange patterns. Life certainly is more strange than fiction.

The night Jesus was being taken away one disciple betrayed him for only thirty rupees. For just thirty rupees, one can sell a man like Jesus? And seeing the danger, the remaining ten fled immediately.

What kind of disciples were they? Only one remained, and that one also was not following Jesus but was hiding in the crowd. Just out of curiosity he had remained. And Jesus said, "Escape, because before the sunrise, before the cock crows, you will have betrayed me thrice!"

But the man thought in his heart, "No! Judas can betray you, others can flee, but I am not made of that stuff. I cannot deny you, I cannot renounce you. I will be true to you to the very last."

And it happened exactly the way Jesus had said: before the sunrise, the man had denied him thrice, because the crowd that was taking Jesus, making him a prisoner, became suspicious of this man many times. They were carrying torches, and this man looked a little like a stranger. They asked, "Who are you? Are you a follower of Jesus?" And he said, "No." And when he had said no thrice, Jesus looked back and he said, "Remember, now."

At the time of crucifixion not a single disciple was there, they had all escaped.

Jesus was not very fortunate. Buddha was far more fortunate. But I am even more fortunate than Buddha, because Buddha had only one kind of people around him. My disciples are multi- dimensional; they come from every nook and comer of the world. This is a universal brotherhood.

This is for the first time that religion is taking off - from local limitations, becoming airborne.

This is for the first time that religion is losing racial associations, national associations - Indian, Chinese, Japanese, German, Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian, Buddhist. We are creating a kind of religiousness without any name; a nameless religion can only be true to a nameless God.

Yes, Hari Chetana, I am tremendously happy. The moment I look at you my heart dances with immense joy. And this is only the beginning. Many, many more are going to come, they are on the way. You are just heralding the coming of millions more. Hence your responsibility is great, because you will be preparing the way; the others who will come will learn from you. The others will learn love, awareness, discipline, spontaneity, individuality, freedom, all of these dimensions, from you.

The new commune will have at least ten thousand sannyasins resident, and thousands and thousands will come and go. You are also fortunate because you will be the first bricks: out of you this great temple is going to be created, you will be in the foundation. Remember that responsibility, and remember that such a responsibility comes only as a benediction. The last question:

Question 6:

Christopher,

THIS is a really difficult question! In the first place, it matters not. It is irrelevant whether A is your father or B is your father. How does it matter? Christopher is Christopher, you are that which you are. From where your first cell came, from where, from what source, makes no difference now.

Sooner or later it will be impossible to decide who is whose father, because there are going to be just semen banks, like there are blood banks. People will donate their semen to the banks, and the doctors will decide the right type for a particular woman.

Why are you so worried about it? But such things sometimes become obsessions. Even if you come to know, even if I say that "This man is your father" - for example, if I say Paritosh, old Paritosh is your father, then what? Are you going to believe me? Then you will start doubting me, so it is better that you doubt your father! Or you may start doubting poor Paritosh, who has nothing to do with it!

Only your mother can answer. Even your father cannot answer, because even your father may not be right. Ask your mother.

A youngster went to his father and said, "Dad, I would like to marry Susy." "Don't marry her, son,"

said the old man. "When I was a kid I sowed my wild oats, and well, you know how it is."

About a week later the boy came to his father again and said, "Dad, I am in love with Mildred and I want to marry her."

The old salesman said, "She is your half-sister, son. You can't marry her."

"How about Mabel?" the kid asked a couple of weeks later.

"She is your half-sister too," said dad.

The youngster, who was anxious to get married, went to his mom and complained, "Pop says I should not marry Susy, Mildred or Mabel because they are my half-sisters. What do I do?"

Mom put her arms around her boy and consoled, "You can marry any one of them you like - he is not your father!"

So it is a very difficult thing unless your mother is truthful about it; nobody can give you a guarantee.

But I have heard about one machine that IBM has produced. I don't know whether it is true or not, but you can enquire.

A woman, having heard how fantastic the IBM machines are, enters the IBM saleas room to look around.

"You can ask the machine any question you like and it will give you the correct answer," explains the salesman.

The woman writes the question, "Where is my father?" and puts it into the machine. The answer comes back, "Your father is fishing off the west coast of Florida."

"Ridiculous!" exclaims the woman. "My father has been dead twenty years."

"The machine never makes a mistake," the salesman proclaims. "There is simply a misunderstanding. Rephrase your question and ask it again."

The woman writes down for the machine, "Where is my mother's husband?"

The IBM machine answers, "He has been dead twenty years, but your father is fishing off the west coast of Florida."

But please don't ask such questions of me, I am not an IBM machine - neither am I your mother!