Beware of the mind: it is blind

Question 1:

Deva Suparni, this is the dividing line between Western psychology and Eastern mysticism. Western psychology is an effort to understand the roots of your old patterns, but it does not help anybody to get rid of them.

You become more understanding, you become more sober, you become more normal; your mind is no longer a great mess. Things are settled a little better than they ever have been before, but every problem remains the same - it simply goes dormant. You can understand your jealousy, you can understand your anger, your hate, your greed, your ambitions, but all this understanding will remain intellectual. So even the greatest psychologists of the West are far away from the Eastern mystics.

The man who founded Western psychology, Sigmund Freud, was so much afraid of death that even the mention of the word "death" was enough to throw him into a coma; he would become unconscious, the paranoia of death was so great. It happened three times. He was so much afraid of ghosts that he would not pass by the side of a cemetery. Now, a man like Sigmund Freud who has tremendous intellectual acumen, who knows every root of the mind, who knows every subtle functioning of the mind, still remains confined in the mind.

Awareness leads you beyond the mind. It does not bother to understand the problems of the mind, their roots, it simply leaves the mind aside, it simply gets out of it. That is the reason why in the East there has been no development of psychology.

It is strange that for ten thousand years at least, the East has been consistently and one-pointedly working in the field of human consciousness, but it has not developed any psychology, any psychoanalysis or psychosynthesis. It is a great surprise that for ten thousand years nobody even touched the matter. Rather than understanding the mind, the East developed a totally different approach, and their approach was disidentifying with the mind: "I am not the mind." Once this awareness becomes crystallized in you, the mind becomes impotent.

The whole power of the mind is in your identification with it. So it was found to be useless to go unnecessarily digging for roots, finding causes behind causes, working out through dreams, analyzing dreams, interpreting dreams. And every psychologist finds a different root, finds a different interpretation, finds a different cause. Psychology is not yet a science; it is still fictitious.

If you go to Sigmund Freud, your dream will be interpreted in sexual terms. His mind is obsessed with sex. Bring anything and immediately he will find an interpretation that it is sexual.

Go to Alfred Adler, the man who founded another school of psychology - analytical psychology ... He is obsessed with another idea: will to power. So whatever you dream will be interpreted according to that idea - it is will to power. Go to Carl Gustav Jung, he interprets every dream as a faraway echo from your past lives. His interpretation is mythological. And there are many other schools.

There has been a great effort made by Assagioli - psychosynthesis - to bring all these schools together, but his psychosynthesis is absolutely useless. At least psychoanalysis has some truth in it, and analytical psychology also has some truth in it; but psychosynthesis is simply a hodge- podge. It has taken one part from one school, another part from another school, and it has joined them together.

Assagioli is a great intellectual; he could manage to put the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle in the right places. But what was significant in Sigmund Freud was significant in a certain context; that context is no longer there. He has only taken what appears to be significant, but without the context it loses all meaning. Hence, Assagioli has worked his whole life for some synthesis, but he has not been able to create anything significant. And all these schools have been working hard.

But the East simply bypassed the mind. Rather than finding out the causes and roots and reasons, they found out one thing: from where does the mind get its power? from where does the energy come to feed it? The energy to feed the mind comes from your identification that "I am it." They broke that bridge. That"s what awareness is: being aware that "I am not the body, I am not the mind.

I am not even the heart, I am simply pure awareness, a SAKSHI."

As this awareness deepens, becomes crystallized, the mind has more and more a shadow existence. Its impact on you loses all force. And when the awareness is a hundred percent settled, mind simply evaporates.

Western psychology has still to figure out why it is not succeeding. Thousands of people are going through psychoanalysis and through other therapeutic methods, but not a single one of them - not even the founder of those schools - can be called enlightened, can be said to be without problems, can be said to be without anxieties, anguishes, fears, paranoia. Everything exists in them as it exists in you.

Sigmund Freud was asked many times by his disciples, "You psychoanalyze all of us; we bring our dreams to you to be interpreted. It will be a great experiment if you allow us to psychoanalyze you. You give us your dreams and we will try to analyze and find out what they mean, from where they come, what they indicate." But Sigmund Freud never agreed to that. That shows an immense weakness in the whole framework of psychoanalysis. He was afraid that they would find the same things in his dreams that he was finding in their dreams. Then his superiority as a founder, as a master would be lost.

He was not aware at all of people like Gautam Buddha or Mahavira or Nagarjuna. Because these people don't dream, there is nothing to analyze. These people have come so far away from the mind that all connections are cut. They live out of awareness, not out of intellect. They respond out of awareness, not out of mind and its memories. And they don't repress anything; hence there is no need for any dreaming.

Dreaming is a by-product of repression. There are aboriginal tribes where people don't dream. Or if they dream, they dream only once in a while. They are surprised to know that civilized people dream almost the whole night. In eight hours" sleep, six hours you are dreaming. And the aboriginal is simply sleeping eight hours in deep silence, with no disturbance. Sigmund Freud was aware only of the sick Western people. He was not aware of a man of awareness; otherwise the whole history of Western psychology would have been different.

I will not tell you, Suparni, to make an effort to understand the roots of your mind and its patterns; it is simply a useless wastage of time. Just awareness is enough, more than enough. As you become aware, you come out of the grip of the mind, and the mind remains almost a dead fossil. There is no need to bother from where the greed came, the real question is how to get out of it. The question is not from where the ego arose - these are intellectual questions which are not significant for a seeker.

And then there will be many philosophical standpoints: from where greed arose, from where ego came in; from where your jealousy, from where your hate, from where your cruelty came in - looking for the beginnings of all this. And mind is a vast complex; in fact, life is too small to figure out all the problems of the mind and their origins. Their origins may be of thousands of lives. Slowly Western psychology is coming closer to it - for example, primal therapy.

Janov understood that unless we find the beginnings of the problems ... That means to him, being a Christian, believing only in one life - the roots must be found somewhere in childhood. So he started working to remind you of your childhood, and then he stumbled upon a new fact - that in deep hypnosis people not only remember their childhood, they remember their birth. They also remember the nine months in the mother"s womb, and a few very sensitive people even remember their previous life.

And then he became afraid himself, that he was going into a tunnel which seemed to be unending.

You go into the past life and that will take you again, through the whole long passage, to another life.

Your mind is many lives old, so you are not going to be able to find its root in the present. Perhaps you will have to travel backwards through thousands of lives, and it is not an easy thing. And then too, even if you come to understand from where the greed has come, it does not make any change.

You will have to then know how to drop it.

And there are so many problems that if you start dropping each problem separately, you will need millions of lives to be completely finished with the mind. And while you are figuring out about one problem, other problems are growing, gathering more energy, more vitality, more influence. It is a very stupid game.

In the East, not a single person in the whole past - in China, in India, in Japan, in Arabia - has ever bothered about it. It is fighting with shadows. They worked from a very different angle and they succeeded immensely. They simply pulled their awareness out of the mind. They stood outside the mind as a witness and they found a miracle happening: as they became a witness, the mind became impotent, it lost all power over them. And there was no need to understand anything.

Awareness goes on growing higher and the mind goes on growing smaller - in the same proportion.

If awareness is fifty percent then mind is cut to fifty percent. If awareness is seventy percent, only thirty percent of the mind remains. The day awareness is a hundred percent, there is no mind to be found at all.

Hence, the whole Eastern approach is to find a state of no-mind - that silence, that purity, that serenity. And mind is no longer there with all its problems, with all its roots; it has simply evaporated the way dewdrops evaporate in the sun in the morning, leaving no trace behind. Hence I will say to you, awareness is not only enough, it is more than enough. You don't need anything else.

Western psychology has no place for meditation in it yet, and that"s why it goes on going round and round, finding no solution. There are people who have been in psychoanalysis for fifteen years.

They have wasted fortunes on it - because psychoanalysis is the most highly paid profession.

Fifteen years in psychoanalysis and all that has happened is that they have become addicted to psychoanalysis. Now they cannot remain without it. Rather than solving any problem, a new problem has arisen. Now it has become almost like a drug addiction. So when they get fed up with one psychoanalyst, they start with another. If they are not being psychoanalyzed, then they feel something is missing.

But it has not helped anybody. Even they accept that there is not a single man in the whole West who has been completely analyzed. But such is the blindness of people that they cannot see the simple point, why a single person is not there - when there are thousands of psychoanalysts analyzing people - who has been perfectly analyzed and who has gone beyond mind.

Analysis cannot take you beyond. The way beyond is awareness, the way beyond mind is meditation.

It is a simple way and it has created thousands of enlightened people in the East. And they were not doing anything with the mind, they were doing something else: they were simply becoming aware, alert, conscious. They were using mind also as an object.

The way you see a tree, the way you see pillars, the way you see other people - they were trying to see the mind also as separate, and they succeeded. And the moment they succeeded in seeing the mind as separate, that was the death of the mind. In its place grows a clarity; intellect disappears, intelligence arises. One does not react anymore, one responds. Reaction is always based on your past experiences, and response is just like a mirror: you come in front of it and it responds, it shows your face. It does not carry any memory. The moment you have moved away, it is again pure, no reflection.

The meditator becomes finally a mirror. Any situation is reflected in him and he responds in the present moment, out of presence. Hence, his every response has a newness, a freshness, a clarity, a beauty, a grace. It is not some old idea that he is repeating. This is something to be understood, that no situation is ever exactly the same as any other situation that you have encountered before.

So if you are reacting out of the past, you are not able to tackle the situation; you are lagging far behind.

That is the cause of your failure. You don't see the situation, you are more concerned with your response; you are blind to the situation. The man of meditation is simply open with his eyes, available to see the situation and let the situation provoke the response in him. He is not carrying a ready-made answer to it.

A beautiful story about Gautam Buddha .... One morning a man asked him, "Is there a God?"

Buddha looked at the man, looked into his eyes and said, "No, there is no God."

That very day in the afternoon another man asked, "What do you think about God? Is there a God?"

Again he looked at the man and into his eyes and said, "Yes, there is a God."

Ananda, who was with him, became very much puzzled, but he was always very careful not to interfere in anything. He had his time when everybody had left in the night and Buddha was going to sleep; if he had to ask anything, he would ask at that time.

But by the evening, as the sun was setting, a third man came with almost the same question, formulated differently. He said, "There are people who believe in God, there are people who don't believe in God. I myself don't know with whom I should stand. You help me."

Ananda was very intensely listening now to what Buddha says. He had given two absolutely contradictory answers in the same day, and now the third opportunity has arisen - and there is no third answer. But Buddha gave him the third answer. He did not speak, he closed his eyes. It was a beautiful evening. The birds had settled in their trees - Buddha was staying in a mango grove - the sun had set, a cool breeze had started blowing. The man, seeing Buddha sitting with closed eyes, thought that perhaps this is his answer, so he also sat with closed eyes with him.

An hour passed, the man opened his eyes, touched the feet of Buddha and said, "Your compassion is great. You have given me the answer. I will always remain obliged to you."

Ananda could not believe it, because Buddha had not spoken a single word. And as the man went away, perfectly satisfied and contented, Ananda asked Buddha, "This is too much! You should think of me - you will drive me mad. I am just on the verge of a nervous breakdown. To one man you say there is no God, to another man you say there is a God, and to the third you don't answer. And that strange fellow says that he has received the answer and he is perfectly satisfied and obliged, and touches your feet. What is going on?"

Buddha said, "Ananda, the first thing you have to remember is, those were not your questions, those answers were not given to you. Why did you get unnecessarily concerned with other people"s problems? First solve your own problems."

Ananda said, "That"s true, they were not my questions and the answers were not given to me. But what can I do? I have ears and I hear, and I have heard and I have seen, and now my whole being is puzzled - what is right?"

Buddha said, "Right? Right is awareness. The first man was a theist. He wanted my support - he already believed in God. He had come with an answer, ready-made, just to solicit my support so that he can go around and say, "I am right, even Buddha thinks so." I had to say no to him, just to disturb his belief, because belief is not knowing. The second man was an atheist. He had also come with a ready-made answer, that there is no God, and he wanted my support to strengthen his disbelief and so he can go on proclaiming around that I agree with him. I had to say to him, "Yes, God exists." But my purpose was the same.

"If you see my purpose, there is no contradiction. I was disturbing the first man"s preconceived belief, I was disturbing the second person"s preconceived disbelief. Belief is positive, disbelief is negative, but both are the same. Neither of them was a knower and neither of them was a humble seeker; they were already carrying a prejudice.

"The third man was a seeker. He had no prejudice, he had opened his heart. He told me, "There are people who believe, there are people who don't believe. I myself don't know whether God exists or not. Help me." And the only help I could give was to teach him a lesson of silent awareness; words were useless. And as I closed my eyes he understood the hint. He was a man of certain intelligence - open, vulnerable. He closed his eyes.

"As I moved deeper into silence, as he became part of the field of my silence and my presence, he started moving into silence, moving into awareness. When one hour had passed, it seemed as if only a few minutes had passed. He had not received any answer in words, but he had received the authentic answer in silence: don't be bothered about God; it does not matter whether God exists or does not exist. What matters is whether silence exists, awareness exists or not. If you are silent and aware, you yourself are a god. God is not something far away from you; either you are a mind or you are a god. In silence and awareness mind melts and disappears and reveals your divineness to you. Although I have not said anything to him, he has received the answer, and received it in a perfectly right way."

Awareness brings you to a point where you are able to see with your own eyes the ultimate reality of yourself and the universe ... and a miraculous experience that you and the universe are not separate, that you are part of the whole. To me this is the only meaning of holy.

You have been trained for analysis, for understanding, for intellectual gymnastics. Those things are not going to help anybody; they have never helped anybody. That"s why the West lacks one most precious dimension - that of enlightenment, awakening. All its richness is nothing in comparison to the richness that comes from enlightenment, from achieving the state of no-mind.

So don't get entangled with the mind; rather become a watcher by the side of the road and let the mind pass on the road. Soon the road will be empty. The mind lives as a parasite. You are identified with it; that is its life. Your awareness cuts the connection, it becomes its death.

The ancient scriptures of the East say that the master is a death - a very strange statement, but of immense meaning. The master is a death because meditation is the death of the mind, meditation is the death of the ego. Meditation is the death of your personality and the birth and the resurrection of your essential being. And to know that essential being is to know all.

Becky Goldberg phoned down to the hotel manager. "I am up here in room five hundred and ten,"

she shouted angrily, "and I want you to know there is a man walking around the room across the way stark naked, and his blinds are up."

"I will be up right away," said the manager. He entered Becky"s room, peered through the window and said, "You are right Madam, the man does appear to be naked. But his window still covers him from the waist down, no matter where he is in the room."

"Ah, yes," yelled Becky. "Just stand on the bed, just stand on the bed!"

Mind is a strange fellow. Where there is no problem, it creates a problem. Why should you stand on the bed? Just to find that somebody is naked in his room? One has to be aware of all these stupidities of the mind. I don't agree with the theory of evolution of Charles Darwin, but I have a certain respect for the theory, because it may not be historically true that the monkeys became men, but it is certainly psychologically true - because man"s mind is just like a monkey ... stupid in every way.

There is no point in digging deep into the rubbish of the mind. It is not your being, it is not you; it is just the dust that you have gathered through many, many lives around you.

A young woman went to the doctor, afraid that she had gangrene because of two small spots, one on each of her thighs. The doctor examined her carefully and then told her it was not gangrene and she had nothing to worry about. "But by the way," he asked the girl as she was leaving, "is your boyfriend a gypsy?" "Yes," replied the girl, "as a matter of fact he is."

"Well," said the doctor, "tell him that his earrings are not gold."

These are mind"s functionings.

It is a great discoverer.

The old definition of a philosopher is that he is blind in a dark night, in a dark house where there is no light, and he is searching for a black cat which is not there. But this is not all: he finds her! And he writes great treatises, theses, systems, proves logically the existence of the black cat.

Beware of the mind: it is blind. It has never known anything but it is a great pretender. It pretends to know everything.

Socrates has categorized humanity into two classes. One class he calls the knowledgeably ignorant:

the people who think they know and they are basically ignorant; that is the work of the mind. And the second category he calls the ignorant knowers: the people who think, "We don't know." In their humbleness, in their innocence, descends knowing.

So there are pretenders of knowledge - that is the function of the mind - and there are humble people who say, "We don't know." In their innocence there is knowledge, and that is the work of meditation and awareness.

Question 2:

Anand Nirbija, the question that you have asked is significant for all meditators. The first experience of silence is heavy for the simple reason that it is the entry into the unknown. You are well accustomed to the known, familiar. With the unknown, entering into a space without boundaries, you are absolutely unfamiliar, and the same fear arises in you as the fear that arises in a dewdrop which is slipping from the lotus leaf into the ocean. It is a kind of death; it will never be again a dewdrop. It is losing itself into the vastness of the ocean. But it is only in the beginning. Soon the realization turns into a totally different experience.

When it happened to one of the mystics, one of the greatest mystics, Kabir, he wrote a small, beautiful poem, which means: I had gone in search for truth; truth is found but I am no more. There was the seeker - then the sought was not there. Now the sought is there but the seeker is no more.

My dewdrop existence has fallen into the ocean, and now there is no way to take it out.

Before dying, he told his son, Kamal, "Just write another statement. The first line remains the same:

I had gone to seek the truth; the truth is found but the seeker is lost. But change the second line: I was a dewdrop. Now the whole ocean has fallen into me and there is no way to be separated from the ocean."

In the beginning you will feel you are getting lost. In the end you will find that that which was false is lost and you have gained immense territory ... the infinite silence, unbounded bliss. You are no longer there as you used to be. You are no longer a mind, you are just a pure awareness. Hence, the first experience becomes unbearable. One trembles - the fear of getting lost ... One clings to the lotus leaf. The vast ocean creates a great danger - danger to your personality, danger to you as you have known yourself up to now. But it is just in the beginning.

One of the very significant statements of Gautam the Buddha is, "That which is sweet in the beginning, beware of it, because in the end it will turn into bitterness. And that which is bitter in the beginning ... have courage, it will turn into sweetness in the end." That bitterness in the beginning is your test, whether you are worthy to have that sweetness that is waiting for you in the end.

I will read your question: "At the end of the meditations I sometimes reach a quiet, expanding space inside me. It is like a feeling of vastness and relaxes me very much. Then, after some time I get tense and afraid and the vastness reaches a barrier and disappears. Each time, the silence during this experience has something unbearable in it. What is the barrier that I encounter?"

It is good news. Everyone who goes from the mundane to the sacred comes to a barrier. Finally he understands it is not a barrier but a bridge, but that is when he has passed it. From this side it looks like a barrier. Once you have passed to the other side you are surprised that it was a bridge, but it was so unknown that you could not have understood it as a bridge.

You have known barriers in your life; you have never known bridges. Hence, you interpreted it according to your experience. Next time, when you encounter that barrier, pass through it as if it is a bridge. Of course it will be only "as if" for you, but once you have passed it, that "as if" will drop.

You will have a good laughter at yourself. And silence seems to be unbearable because you are so accustomed to noise.

Aldous Huxley, one of the most intelligent people of this age, wanted to experience silence - Western style. So he went into a scientific lab where they had an absolutely soundproof room for their own experiments. Those experiments were going on at that time for the astronauts, because of all the problems that a man who is going to the moon is going to face after he leaves the two hundred miles of air around the earth, the greatest problem is the silence, deafening silence. So they were training the travelers in space for all those experiences that they may encounter and may find very difficult - but if they know something of it, it will be easier for them. That absolutely soundproof room was created for that purpose.

Aldous Huxley remembers that when he entered the room he could not believe that silence can be so heavy. He became so afraid, knowing perfectly well that he is in a room which is soundproof, no noise can enter it. But his ears, his body, everything was accustomed to vibrations all around. You are sitting here, you are listening to a few noises: the birds in the trees, I am speaking to you ... and there are many sounds which you are not listening to but your body feels the vibes.

All the radio waves are passing through you. You can catch any radio station with just a small transistor set. Do you think that transistor set creates those waves? Those waves are passing; the transistor set is simply capable of catching them. They are touching your body. You are surrounded by millions of radio waves which you are not hearing, but you are accustomed to them. That has been your whole life"s experience.

Aldous Huxley felt a few things: one, as if he was naked - and he was wearing his clothes! What happened? Why was he feeling naked? All those subtle clothes of vibrations that are surrounding you were no longer there. And his ears started hurting ... strange! One can feel one"s ears hurting when somebody is shouting or some great noise is there. But because there was no noise, the ears came into an absolutely unknown territory. It was unbelievable.

He had asked to remain there for one hour, but he remained only for five minutes, and he started knocking: "Open the door. It is too much! It feels ... I may burst, I may fall apart" - because the support of all the waves around you is keeping you together.

When you go into deep silence within you, it is also a very strange experience in the beginning. It creates fear - inside your silence you know that the identity you had of yourself is absolutely false.

Your name is false, your form is false, your body is just a separate thing from you, and you don't find anything solid inside to cling to. In fact, you find you are the silence ... a kind of nothingness, nobodiness.

Gautam Buddha has the right words for this experience. One is anatta; you feel a state of no- selfness. The second is shunyata; you find yourself just a zero. And the third is that there is no hint of any "I." The silence is so deafening - and you are it - that one feels like running out into the well- known world, howsoever miserable, howsoever full of suffering. But anyway we are accustomed to it.

The astronauts have gone through strange experiences, which mystics have always gone through - Eastern style - just by going inside. As the rocket leaves the gravitation sphere of the earth, for the first time you don't have any weight and it is such a shock. You start floating in the spacecraft.

Unless you keep your belt on, you cannot remain in your seat. You are just floating, touching the top, and everything else that is loose is also floating. Because there is no longer any gravitation, you don't have any weight.

Albert Einstein had an idea which most probably will be found to be accurate, because he was the man who worked the hardest as far as space travel is concerned. His idea is mind boggling. He himself kept it for many months and did not announce it to the scientific world because he was afraid that nobody was going to believe him. The idea was such that people would think he had gone cuckoo. But the idea was so significant that he finally decided that he could risk his sanity but he had to declare it.

The idea was that beyond gravitation you stop aging. If a man leaves the earth for a faraway star, and if it takes thirty years for him to reach that star and then coming back again another thirty years, and when he had left the earth he was thirty years old, then if you think that by the time he comes back he will be ninety years old, you are wrong. He will still be thirty years old. All his friends and colleagues may be already in their graves. Perhaps one or two may still be with one foot in the grave, one foot out. But he will be as young as when he had left.

The moment you are out of gravitation, the aging process stops. Aging is continuously a certain burden on your body. The earth goes on pulling you and you are fighting the pull. Your energy is disturbed and destroyed in this continuous fight. But when you are out of the gravitational field of the earth you simply remain as you were. You will not find your contemporaries; you will not find all those fashions that were current when you left. You will find that sixty years have passed.

But the feeling of going beyond gravitation can happen even in meditation - it happens. And that has misled many people. With your closed eyes, when you are absolutely silent you are out of gravitation.

But just your silence is out of gravitation, not your body. But in that moment you are identified with your silence, so you feel as if you are moving upwards; that is called by yoga "levitation."

And without opening your eyes you will feel not only that it is a feeling, but that your body is actually moving upwards. But that is only a fallacy. Your silence is beyond gravitation - that is a true experience. But because you are identified still with the body, you feel as if your body is moving. If you open your eyes you will find yourself sitting in the same posture on the ground.

Just now there is a case in the Supreme Court of America against Maharishi Mahesh Yogi by seven disciples, asking him for ninety million dollars for deceiving them - because he promised that they would be able to levitate with their body and that did not happen. Whenever they opened their eyes they were sitting on the ground, although when their eyes were closed they felt that it was happening.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi has been charging people for teaching them levitation, but he has not been able even to give one public demonstration. It is exploitation in the name of spirituality. Certainly those people feel it, but they should keep their eyes closed. If they open their eyes everything is disturbed, they are sitting on the ground. If you continue for hours the feeling of going up, going up, you can move beyond the house, you can move beyond the trees, you can move beyond the mountains - but don't open your eyes because you are sitting where you are sitting.

It is just the experience of your silence; your silence is moving beyond gravitation. And I don't think Maharishi Mahesh Yogi is going to prove anything in the Supreme Court. He has been asked again and again to give a public demonstration, but no public demonstration is possible. It is an old, known fact that meditators have always felt themselves going up, but that is purely a spiritual experience, nothing physical. What he has done is try to make it appear as if it is physical, and thousands of people have paid him two hundred and fifty dollars for the training.

It is very easy to exploit people in the name of spirituality and to give them a sense that they have not been exploited. The only condition is, keep your eyes closed and you will feel it, and you will go home with the feeling that you have attained levitation.

It is possible for you also to have that experience - don't be afraid, you are not going anywhere; you are sitting perfectly in your place. But all these experiences can create fear. Knowing it well that they create fear - but the fear is unfounded - one needs just a little courage to get accustomed to the unknown and the fear disappears.

A new group of husbands had just arrived in heaven. The welcoming angel looked them over and said, "Okay, all you men who were henpecked on the earth please step to the left. All those who were the boss of the house please step to the right."

The line quickly formed on the left. Only one man, Hymie Goldberg, stepped to the right. Seeing Hymie looking more like a mouse than a lion, the angel inquired, "And what makes you think that you belong on the right side?"

"Well," squeaked Hymie, "this is where my wife told me to stand."

A lifelong habit of listening to the wife ... even though he is dead, now there is no wife around. The gap is unbridgeable - the wife is in the world and he is in heaven - but the old habit ... The wife has even instructed him: "Don't stand in a crowd." And on the left certainly everybody was standing, so naturally he had to stand on the right.

Habits die hard, and we have so many mundane habits that when you enter into the world of the sacred you will feel you are being robbed of everything. But remember, whatever you are robbed of was false. Don't cling to it; that will become the barrier - let it go. Whatever is yours will always be yours, there is no way to rob you of it.

A man was in a Turkish bath when he looked up and saw someone stealing his clothes. He took off after the man, covering his private parts with his hat. As he turned the corner, he bumped straight into two girls who looked at him and burst out laughing. "If you were ladies," he shouted, "you would not laugh at a man in my circumstances!"

"And if you were a gentleman," replied one of the girls, "you would raise your hat."

This is our known world - ladies and gentlemen. When you enter into the unknown you are neither a man nor a woman, you are neither a mind nor a heart; you are something that can only be called "X." It is better not to give any name to it, because any name will come from your vocabulary of the known. Let it remain unknown, mysterious; just don't be worried, don't be afraid.

And I say this not because it is written in some scriptures, I say this because I have passed through the same problems, the same fear, the same desire to turn back, the same barrier which proved finally to be a bridge. So whatever I am saying to you, I am saying with the absolute authority of my own experience. I am not saying to believe me, I am saying just to experiment. Let my words be just hypothetical - perhaps your experiment will prove whether they are true or untrue - don't believe in them beforehand, remain open.

I can allow you to remain open; no religion leaves you open. They say, "Believe." And the reason is that the people who had experienced may have died twenty centuries before, and now the people who are representing them have no experience of their own. They are afraid that if you don't believe ... they themselves are not certain what they are saying, whether it is true or not. They believe; hence they insist that you believe.

I don't believe, I know. Hence, I insist: experiment without any belief and you will know.

Once somebody asked Raman Maharishi, "Do you believe in God?" and he said, "No." The man was shocked; he had come from far away, hearing that Raman Maharishi was an enlightened being. He thought perhaps he had been misunderstood, or he had misunderstood. He repeated his question.

Raman Maharishi said, "I have heard it rightly, you have heard it rightly; there is no need to repeat it. I don't believe in God because I know."

Belief is for those who do not know. My effort with you is not to give you belief systems, but to give you hypothetical ideas to experiment on. And I have a certainty that you will come to the same conclusions. There is no other possibility.

Okay, Maneesha?

Yes, Osho.