The real riches

Question 1:

The state when you are relaxed and become very sharply awake takes you closer to the superconscious. And the state when you are relaxed but fall into a peaceful sleep leads you towards the unconscious mind. Certainly the first state is far superior to the second, but the second may also be necessary for you; otherwise it would not have been happening.

Remember one principle: whatever happens is somehow needed, whether we understand it or not.

They look totally different - not only different, but diametrically opposite - but they may be helping each other. When you are tired, relaxation will take you to a calm and quiet sleep that rejuvenates you, revitalizes you, brings your energy back. It is healthy; nothing is wrong with it. It will give you a certain well-being, which may become the ground for the first state. You are fully revitalized, rejuvenated, full of energy, and you relax - but the energy is so much that you cannot fall asleep.

To fall asleep you need to be tired, exhausted, but if the energy is so much then sleep is not possible - and that is when the first state will happen, a sharp awareness.

So they look opposite, but only intellectually - in reality they support each other. When you are sharply awake you are consuming a vast amount of energy, more than you ordinarily consume in your so-called waking state. Naturally you will need a deeper, calmer, more quiet sleep than your ordinary sleep, which is a turmoil, so that you can regain the energy that has been used in being sharply alert.

So they are just like two hands; both are yours. So whatever happens, enjoy it. In that moment that is your need; don't try to change it. That's where trouble starts: you start thinking to be sharply aware is higher, then why not be sharply aware all the time? You cannot do that. You will need periods of deep rest.

So you don't interfere. You just relax. Do the exercise you are doing, and whatever happens, enjoy it because that must be the need.

Question 2:

Every child would be angry if he understood what the poor parents have been doing to him unknowingly, unconsciously. All their efforts are for the good of the child. Their intentions are good but their consciousness is nil. And good intentions in the hands of unconscious people are dangerous; they cannot bring about the result they are intending. They may create just the opposite.

Every parent is trying to bring a beautiful child into the world, but looking at the world it seems it is an orphanage. There has been no parent at all. In fact if it were an orphanage, it would have been far better, because you would at least have been yourself - no parents to interfere with you.

So the anger is natural, but useless. To be angry does not help your parents and it harms you.

Gautam Buddha is reported to have made a very strange statement: In your anger you punish yourself for somebody else's fault. It looks very strange the first time you come across the statement that in anger you punish yourself for somebody else's fault.

Your parents have done something twenty years back, thirty years back, and you are angry now.

Your anger is not going to help anyone; it is simply going to create more wounds in you. And being near me, close to me... I am trying to explain to you the whole mechanism of how children are being brought up, you should become more understanding that whatever has happened had to happen.

Your parents were conditioned by their parents. You cannot find out who was really responsible to begin with. It has been passed from generation to generation.

Your parents are doing exactly what has been done to them. They have been victims. You will feel compassion for them and you will feel joyous that you are not going to repeat the same thing in your life. If you decide to have children you will feel joyous that you are going to break the vicious circle, that you are going to jump out of the line that goes back to the very beginning and continues up to you, that you can become the dead end. You will not do it to your children or to any other person's children.

You should feel fortunate that you have a master with you to explain what has been happening between parents and children - the complex upbringing, good intentions, bad results, where everybody is trying to do the best and the world goes on becoming worse and worse.

Your parents were not so fortunate to have a master - and you are being angry at them. You should feel kind, compassionate, loving. Whatever they did was unconscious. They could not have done otherwise. All that they knew they have tried on you. They were miserable, and they have created another miserable human being in the world.

They had no clarity about why they were miserable. You have the clarity to understand why one becomes miserable. And once you understand how misery is created, you can avoid causing the same in somebody else.

But feel for your parents. They worked hard; they did everything that they could, but they had no idea how psychology functions. Instead of being taught how to become a mother or how to become a father, they were being taught how to become a Christian, how to become a Marxist, how to become a tailor, how to become a plumber, how to become a philosopher - all these things are good and needed, but the basic thing is missing. If they are going to produce children, then their most significant teaching should be how to become a mother, how to become a father.

It has been taken for granted that by giving birth you know how to become a mother and how to become a father. Yes, as far as giving birth to a child... it is a biological act, you don't have to be psychologically trained for it. Animals are doing perfectly well, birds are doing perfectly well, trees are doing perfectly well. But giving birth to a child biologically is one thing and to be a mother or to be a father is totally different. It needs great education because you are creating a human being.

Animals are not creating anything, they are simply producing carbon copies. And now science has come to a point where they have discovered that carbon copies can really be produced! It is a very dangerous idea. If we make banks - and sooner or later we are going to make them; once an idea is there it is going to become a reality. And scientifically it is proved that it is one hundred percent possible... there is no problem.

We can have banks in the hospitals for both the male sperms and female eggs. And we can create exactly the same two sperms and exactly the same two eggs, so two children are born which are exactly the same. One child will be released into the world; the other will grow in a fridge, unconscious, but all his parts will be exactly the same as the other person. And if the first person is in an accident and loses a leg or loses a kidney, or has to be operated on, there is no problem:

his carbon copy is waiting in the hospital. From the carbon copy a kidney can be taken out - he is growing exactly at the same rate, he is just unconscious - and it will be exactly the same as the kidney that has been lost. It can be replaced.

That carbon copy will always be available for replacing any parts - even the brain. You can fall into a coma or you can even have a heart attack... Your brain can remain alive even after a heart attack for at least four minutes - but not more than that. If during these four minutes an identical brain is inserted, an identical heart is inserted, you will never feel that anything has changed or anything has happened to you. Perhaps you fell asleep and now you are awake. You will never know that your brain has been changed, that your heart has been changed.

This idea of having carbon copies seems to be a great advancement in medical science in a way, but it is dangerous - dangerous in the sense that man becomes a machine with replaceable parts, just like any machine. When something goes wrong you replace the part. And if every part can be replaced then man will be falling farther and farther away from spiritual growth, because he will start thinking of himself as just a machine. That's what half of the world, the communist world, thinks - that man is a machine.

You are fortunate that you can understand the situation your parents were in. They have not done anything specifically to you; they would have done the same to any child that was born to them.

They were programmed for that. They were helpless. And to be angry against helpless people is simply not right. It is unjust, unfair, and moreover it is harmful to you.

If your parents cannot understand me, you should not be worried about it. The whole world cannot understand me. Your parents are normal people; they just follow the crowd, which is safer. You have fallen out of the crowd. You have chosen a risky and dangerous path. If they don't want to go into a dangerous lifestyle, it is their choice; that should not be a cause for your anger.

In fact you can help them by really becoming the individual that I am talking about: more conscious, more alert, more loving. Seeing you can only change them. Seeing you so radically changed can only make them think twice, that perhaps they are wrong. There is no other way. You cannot intellectually convince them. Intellectually they can argue, and argument never changes anybody.

The only thing that changes people is the charisma, the magnetism, the magic, of your individuality.

Then whatever you touch becomes golden.

So rather than wasting your time and energy in being angry and fighting against the past which no longer exists, put your whole energy into becoming the magic of your individuality. So when your parents see you they cannot remain untouched by the new qualities that you have grown, qualities which are automatically impressive: your freshness, your understanding, your unconditional lovingness, your kindness even in a situation where anger would have been more appropriate.

Only these things can be the real arguments. You need not say a word. Your eyes, your face, your actions, your behavior, your response, will make the change in them. They will start enquiring about what has happened to you, how it has happened to you - because everybody wants these qualities.

These are the real riches. Nobody is so rich that he can afford not to have the things that I am telling you.

So put your energy into transforming yourself. That will help you, that will help your parents. Perhaps it may create a chain reaction. Your parents may have other children, they may have friends, and it will go on and on.

It is just like you are sitting on the bank of a silent lake and you throw a small pebble into the lake.

The pebble is so small that it creates a small circle at first, but circle after circle... and they go on spreading to the far ends, as far as the lake can take them. And it was only a small pebble.

We are living in a certain kind of new sphere, a new psychological lake, in which whatever you do creates certain vibrations around you. It touches people, reaches to unknown sources.

Just create a small ripple of right individuality and it will reach to many people - and certainly to those who are most closely related to you. They will see it first, and they will understand with great awe. They will not believe their eyes because all that they know of religion is the Sunday church, where nothing happens. They have been going every Sunday their whole lives, and they come back home just the same.

In the name of religion they know only the BIBLE or the KORAN or the GITA and they have been reading it and nothing happens, because they don't know one thing - that you are a living being and a book is dead. And the man in the church who is delivering a sermon is just a professional. He has prepared the sermon from the books, and he goes on repeating the same sermons. Nobody listens, so nobody catches him. He is repeating the same sermon that he delivered two months before.

Nobody listened that time, and nobody is listening this time. And you know that that sermon cannot change you because that sermon has not changed the preacher himself. He is just as mundane as you are - perhaps more.

I used to know a Jaina monk who was a very simple man, almost a simpleton. He asked me, "How many lectures do you have?"

I said, "This is a very difficult question. Until I am finished with my life, I will not know."

He said, "I have only three: one is for ten minutes, one is for twenty minutes, one is for thirty minutes, depending on the occasion. Sometimes in a conference you have only ten minutes. I have a ready- made, ten minute lecture. If they give me twenty minutes, I have a twenty minute lecture. If they give me thirty minutes, I have a thirty minute one. More than that is not possible, because nobody is interested in listening too much. People want a short cut."

I said, "That's great. You have found a really great idea."

And he said, "It works."

And I asked, "People have not found it out?"

He said, "Nobody has said anything about it to me, and I have been using these three lectures my whole life. Wherever I go - to the temples, colleges, and universities where I talk - I ask, ?How many minutes? Ten, twenty, thirty?' Whatever they want, my lecture is ready. And I have repeated the same lecture so many times that now I don't feel nervous. I can repeat the lecture without thinking at all!"

Now do you think listening to such a man is going to transform you? - or anybody? But every Christian missionary is doing that.

One of the most famous, world-renowned Christian missionaries was Stanley Jones. He was very friendly with me but he became very angry and then the friendship was broken. He was an old man, a friend of Mahatma Gandhi, and Mahatma Gandhi respected him very much. He used to come to the city where I was living and he stayed in the house of one of my friends. He had printed cards - ten cards or twenty cards for his whole lecture - and he would put the cards on the table. He would start lecturing, and he would go on changing the cards.

He became very angry with me because I mixed up his cards! So he was saying something and it was not on the card. He almost had a nervous breakdown. He looked at all the cards and it was not there. That card I had taken out. And he said, "Today I am not feeling well. I am feeling sick, so I will not be speaking."

And he asked the host, "Who has done this?"

The host said, "Your friend."

Stanley Jones was very angry. He said, "Are you my friend or my enemy? You destroyed my whole lecture!"

I said, "Once in a while you should speak from your heart, not from these cards. I have looked in your suitcase, and you have almost fifty sets of these cards, so you can go on repeating these speeches.

And do you think this is going to help anybody? - these dead cards that you have repeated your whole life? And today just because one card was missing and the numbers were mixed up, you lost your temper, you lost your integrity. You were almost in a state of madness. And what do you think people thought who had come to listen to you?"

He had written many books. I have gone through those books: he writes well, beautifully, but it is all stolen. Nothing is his own. Nothing is his own experience. Unless something is your own experience it is not going to impress anybody.

So feel blissful. Here you have a chance to get totally transformed. And help your poor parents, because they did not have such a chance; feel sorry for them.

Question 3:

There is no need to worry - and don't be greedy! Whatever is happening is so much. If listening to me a silence descends on you, thoughts disappear, and you feel a center, a new space, and you also feel that this space is always available... it is true. The moment you feel your center, the feeling that this center is always available is part of it. It is part of the experience, an essential part; hence it has an authority.

Or, in the morning when you wake up and the mind is silent... and now that you have become aware of silence, you can recognize it. Everybody wakes up in the morning with a silent mind, but that remains for only a few seconds. And even in those few seconds he does not realize that he is without any thought, because he has had no taste of it, no previous experience of it. So those two or three moments just pass - and they are the most important in your twenty-four-hour day.

But because you are experiencing it in the morning lecture and in the evening lecture, twice - for hours the space is there, the silence is there - you have now a certain experience. You feel it when waking up; soon you will feel silence when you are going to sleep - but that is a little difficult. That's why first you feel it after you wake up, because waking up means that sleep has cleaned out much rubbish in dreams and has given rest. And now when you are coming out of the rest, it is easy to recognize silence. And those moments will become more and more. And then the lecture is there; again you are... so it remains a continuity.

Soon it will become the beginning of the night also. It happens when you go to sleep also. Before you fall asleep the mind stops for two or three seconds so that sleep can settle. If the mind continues, then sleep cannot settle. But because you are coming from the world of the mind - the whole day the mind making noise - you may not recognize it. But soon you will recognize it.

Your problem is that after the lecture when you start working, then suddenly you fall unconscious. It is natural. In the beginning you cannot be so conscious, so silent. In fact, because you are silent for two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening the four hours' gibberish of the mind waits, and with revenge it grabs your neck, because it has to work its way out.

So don't be worried. That is natural, balancing. Accept it. Slowly slowly, as less and less rubbish is gathered, even in your work you will start finding gaps of silence. And a time comes when silence becomes your twenty-four-hour experience. When you want to use your mind for something, then you use it. If you don't want to use it, then it remains silent. It does not work autonomously, as it works ordinarily.

But feeling a silent, beautiful space within yourself even for four hours is more than one can ask for - and it is coming in other moments also. Waking up, you are finding it; soon you will find it falling asleep. And then in other moments, while working, it will come without giving any notice. Suddenly you will become awake: there is silence and mind is non-functioning. Don't be worried. At that time also one starts becoming afraid: if mind completely stops, then what?

One of the professors who was my colleague wanted to learn meditation. I had a small school of meditators there. He participated, and the first day he experienced silence he simply jumped out of the small temple where we used to sit and ran away! I could not understand what had happened. I had to follow him. He would look back at me, and as he looked at me following him, he ran faster. I thought, "This is something. What happened to this man?"

I yelled, "You wait, Nityananda!" - his name was Nityananda Chatterji - "just wait for a moment!" He just waved his hand, meaning "finished" and said, "I don't want to meditate. You are a dangerous man!"

Finally I got hold of him just before he entered his house. He could not run anywhere else now. I said, "You better tell me what happened."

He said, "What you did I don't know, but I became so silent - and you know me, I am a chatterbox"

- Chatterji was his name, too. He was a Bengali. "In the morning I start talking, and I talk till I fall asleep... almost in the middle of a sentence - I continuously talk. It keeps me engaged, unworried, with no problems. I know there are problems, but talking to anybody... if nobody is there I talk alone.

"And there, sitting with you, suddenly talking stopped. I was blank. And I said, ?My God, I am going mad! If this happens to me twenty-four hours - finished. Nityananda Chatterji,' I said, ?your life is finished. If the mind does not come back again... before this silence goes further, escape from here.

And why are these thirty, forty people sitting here with closed eyes? - but that is their problem.

Everybody has to take care of himself.' So I escaped."

I said, "Don't be worried. Silence is not something that destroys your mind, it simply helps the mind to rest. And to you it happened so easily because you are a chatterbox; the mind is tired. It does not usually happen so easily. Those other people are sitting. It is not so easy that when for the first time you sit to meditate, your mind becomes silent.

"You have bothered the mind so much your whole life, people are afraid of you. Your wife is afraid, your children are afraid. In the university the professors are afraid. If you are sitting in the common room, the whole common room becomes empty; everybody escapes from there. It is because of too much use of the mind. It is a mechanism, it needs a little rest.

"Scientists say that even metal gets tired; it also needs rest. The mind is a very sophisticated phenomenon, the most sophisticated thing in the whole universe, and you have used it so much that finding a chance to become silent it immediately became silent. You should be happy."

He said, "But will it start again or not?"

I said, "It will, whenever you want."

He said, "I became afraid that if it does not start again... then Nityananda Chatterji, your life is finished. You will be in a madhouse. Why, in the first place, did you ask this man about meditation?"

And I said, "I was also asking myself why you want to meditate."

He said, "I was simply talking about it, just the way I talk about everything - and you grabbed me.

You said, ?That's perfectly okay. You come with me in the car.' I had never meant... I talk about everything - whether I know about it or not, it does not matter. I can talk for hours. Just because you were sitting in the common hall and there was nobody else, I thought, ?What subject will be right?'

Seeing you I thought, ?Meditation is the only subject you may be interested to talk about,' so I talked.

And you grabbed me; you brought me in the car.

"And I thought, ?What harm can it be? My house is just a few minutes away from your house so it is good to go in the car. And all the way I will talk.' And all the way I talked about meditation. And that's how I got into your trap, because then I could not turn back. You pushed me into that temple where forty people were sitting, so I had to sit. I wanted to escape from the very beginning. I never wanted to meditate, because I don't want to get into anything if I don't know where it will lead.

"And just as I was sitting there, everything became silent. I opened my eyes, I looked around, and everybody was with closed eyes, silent. I thought, ?This is the time that I should escape.' And you are such a man that you won't let me even run away. The whole street saw that I am escaping and you are following. And I was saying, ?I am not going to stop.' Just I became very much afraid. I am afraid of silence. Talking is perfectly okay."

I said, "You are fortunate because you have talked so much that your mind is ready to relax. Don't miss this opportunity. And don't be afraid. Can't you see me? - I can talk. You will be able to talk whenever you want. Right now talking is not within your power; it simply goes on by itself. You are simply a gramophone record, and silence will make you a master."

He said, "Well, if you promise, I trust you and I will come every day. But remember, I don't want to lose my mind. I have children, I have a wife, I have old parents."

I said, "Don't be worried. You will not lose your mind."

And you will be surprised that that man progressed in meditation better than anyone else. That gave me the idea of a special meditation, and I started a new technique, gibberish. It was not absolutely new, but nobody had used it as a device for many people to meditate.

In India we used to have camps where, in the afternoon, for one hour there would be a gibberish period, everybody saying whatsoever he wants to say - one thousand people together. It is not a conversation, because you are not talking to anybody, you are simply talking.

It was a rare experience - because I was the only listener and because of what people were saying!

One day a man in front of me was phoning, actually talking on the phone. And I heard, "Hello, hello."

Everyone looked: "What are you doing?" He was talking on a long-distance call with no phone, nothing. He was a businessman and just the habit... But it was a tremendously relaxing experience for people. After one hour talking nonsense...

One of my very intimate sannyasins... what happened to him was that just talking and shouting, he went and started pushing the car in which I had come. It was standing there on a slope. He was a very sane man but he was pushing the car and he was talking all the time against Jayantibhai, whose car it was that he was going to throw into the ditch. And they were friends - but something must have been incomplete in his mind. Somehow a few people stood up and prevented him. Because he was prevented, he climbed up a tree... and he is not mad! He started waving the branch of a tree so strongly that it seemed that it would break and he would come down on the whole group who was sitting underneath. And all the time he was shouting at Jayantibhai.

With difficulty he was brought down. And nobody had ever thought that this man would do such a thing.

After the hour was over he was so silent - more silent than anybody.

I asked him, "How are you feeling?"

He said, "I am feeling more relaxed then I have ever felt in my life. Even though I have been doing stupid things... but you allowed us to do everything that we wanted to do, and I am feeling very relieved. A lot of burden is thrown away, and I am feeling so much love for Jayantibhai. All anger is gone."

The camp used to be for five days or seven days and that man on the phone continued for seven days, "Hello," and he was very serious. As the meditation would begin he would start phoning and he was certainly listening to something, and answering, and deciding about business. "Put this money there, and do this, and purchase that. This is the time to purchase it. Prices are going up." And so serious that finally the last day I asked him, "How are you feeling?"

He said, "I also wonder... this meditation is strange. I am not mad, and I know that there is no phone but that is the only idea that comes to me. And you have said, ?You have to allow it.' And afterwards I feel for hours absolutely silent, joyous. A great burden..." It must have been his daily routine and he was missing it.

It has never been used by groups, but the very word ?gibberish' comes from the name of a Sufi mystic, Jabbar. He used to talk nonsense. You would ask about the moon, and he would talk about the sun; he never answered the question he was asked. He would make up his own words.

It is because of his name, Jabbar, that the word gibberish came into being; it is the language of Jabbar. He is one of the enlightened Sufi masters. He used gibberish for others; otherwise he was silent. For days, if nobody came, he would be silent. If anybody came and said anything to him, then that person triggered him. Then he would say anything - sentences without meaning, words without meaning. You could not make any sense out of what he was saying.

Jabbar was asked again and again by his disciples, "Why do you do such things? - otherwise you are so silent. Not only do people laugh at you, we all feel embarrassed that we are your disciples.

And they think that we are idiots: what can we learn with this man?"

Only to his disciples would he say, "You know that these people are unnecessarily coming with questions. They don't intend to understand or to change, and my gibberish stops them from coming so I can work in silence with you. And it is good for my mind too, because most of the time I am silent. It is good, just as an exercise for the mind: if it is needed, I can use it. So just to check that it is still working, I use all this gibberish."

So I told Nityananda Chatterji, "You don't be worried. You have been doing gibberish so much that you are going to certainly attain a deep silence."

And he became very silent. The whole university was shocked. They could not believe what I have done to him. Now people would approach him, want him to talk, and he would say, "No, enough.

When I used to talk, you all used to escape. I am finished. Just leave me alone."

He was promoted but he refused and went on pension, so his wife and children could live and he could continue his silence. I saw him after ten years. He had become a totally new man, so fresh and so young, as if a bud is just opening and becoming a rose - with that freshness. And he didn't talk; for hours he would come and sit, and there would be no talk.

So whatever is happening, allow it to happen. The mind is accustomed to a certain quantity of inner talk. Because these four hours of discourse are cut out, when it finds the chance immediately it will jump in, and then it will not be simply walking, but running fast. Let it do that. It is not harmful, and soon it will become accustomed.

Mind is only a mechanism - it can talk, it can be silent. The only problem is, it should not be the master, it should be the servant. As a servant it is great; as a master it is dangerous. You should be the master of it.