Existence has no hurry

Question 1:

Man is not a machine but an organism, and the difference between the two is very significant to understand. The machine has parts, the organism has members. You can take the parts apart; nothing dies. You can put the parts together again and the machine starts functioning. But in an organism if you take the members apart, something dies. You can put them together again, but the organism will not be alive again. The organism is a living unity; everything is connected with everything else.

Whatever happens to you, in the body or in the mind or in the heart or in your awareness, is going to change everything in the whole organism. You are going to be affected as a whole. The members of the organic unity are not just parts put together, there is something more.

A machine is simply a sum total of its parts. An organism is something more than the sum total of its parts - and that "more" is your soul which penetrates everything in you. So every change, wherever it happens, is going to ring bells all over your being.

That's why there are different systems. For example, yoga is one of the most prominent systems for those who are working for self-realization. But almost its whole function is with the body, the body postures. It is a tremendous research - the people who have done it, have done an almost impossible job. They have found in what postures your mind takes a certain attitude, your heart takes a certain rhythm, your awareness becomes more acute or less acute. They have developed all the body postures in such a way that just working on the body, not touching anything else, they will change your total being.

It is long, tedious, difficult work, because the body is an absolutely unconscious part of your being.

To train it, and in strange postures which are not natural, is bound to be a difficult job. You will be surprised to know that because the yoga system found that this life is too short to work on all the postures of the body, to change the whole inner being, they were the first in the world to think of lengthening the life so that they can accomplish the task in this life.

The difficulty with the body is, you may have worked your whole life - sixty years, seventy years - and you may have come to a certain state, but this body will die. And when you get a new body, you will have to start from scratch; you cannot start from where you had stopped in the past life. This was such a great difficulty for the yoga system that they started looking at how to lengthen the body's life span. They found exact ways, which are now confirmed by science from other investigations.

Science is still not involved in looking at what yoga has found, but working on different things, psychologists have come to know that if you eat less, you live longer. You will be thin, you won't look so beautiful, but your life will be lengthened. If you eat more, you may look good, but your life will be shortened.

Even today there are people who eat so little that you cannot conceive how they survive, but they survive longer than anybody else - I used to know a man who died in his one hundred and fortieth year. And the whole process is just to take as little food as possible. The reason is not that they want to live long; the reason is that they have developed a system that is concerned with the body, and the body is our most unconscious part: it does not change easily. It takes a long time, but it does change.

I have found people who have done almost miracles just by body postures which look irrelevant, because consciousness is such a faraway thing. But just sitting in a certain posture you will be surprised: you can watch how you change. Everybody knows about the lotus posture in which you see Buddha sitting. That is the most famous posture. It has been found now that gravitation has the least effect on you if sit in the lotus posture with your spine absolutely straight and the whole body relaxed. And it is gravitation that kills you; the more you are affected by gravitation, the more you are pulled towards the grave.

It became perfectly clear when Einstein declared that if we can find vehicles moving with the same velocity, the same speed, as light, then the people who go in those vehicles will not age - not at all.

If they leave the earth and come back after fifty years, all their contemporaries will be dead. Perhaps one or two may still be alive - on their deathbeds - but they will come back exactly the same age as when they left.

His idea was that at the speed of light, aging stops. But that is only an hypothesis, there is no experiment to prove it. It is difficult to find a vehicle which will move with the speed of light, because at that speed everything will burn up. There is no metal, there is no material, out of which you can make the vehicle, so it seems to be impossible.

But Einstein was not aware of the yoga explanation. The yoga explanation is that the person can come back to the earth the same age because he has been out of the field of gravitation - that's why he cannot age. And that seems to be far more practical, far more scientific - not just an hypothesis.

Thousands of yogis have lived longer than anybody else. Just sitting in that posture, gravitation has the least effect on them.

And why does eating less or fasting help to lengthen life? The yoga system has found that when you eat, your food is doing two things. One, it is giving you nourishment. That we know; that's why we eat. Second - of which we are not aware - is that eating is tiring your digestive system; it is becoming older. The more it has to digest the less young it is. Your life depends on your digestive system.

So if you eat less, your nourishment will be less, you will be thin - you will not be a Mohammed Ali, you will not be able to do boxing - but you can live long because your digestive system will remain young, fresh, almost clean. So much work has been dropped that the digestive system can work much longer. The digestive system working longer, and gravitation having the least effect on you, can easily make your life one hundred and fifty, sixty years long. And the reason for living long was not lust for life but because they had chosen a very slow vehicle of transformation: the body.

But through the body people have reached to enlightenment. They have not done anything but change body postures. In a certain posture the mind functions in a certain way. In one posture it stops functioning, in another posture you become very alert; and you know it, but you have never cared to go deeper into it.

When you go to sleep why do you lie down? That is simply changing the posture. Sitting and sleeping is difficult, standing and sleeping is more difficult, standing on your head and sleeping is almost impossible. If you are standing on your head and you try to sleep... You can make arrangements, you can tie your feet to something and have every protection so that even if you fall asleep you will not fall down on the earth - even then you will not be able to sleep, because so much blood is rushing into your head. For sleep, the blood should not be going into the head with great speed, in great amounts. It should be going less - that's why everybody uses a pillow: it is a yoga posture.

Yoga has been thinking of every detail - like why do you want a pillow? Without a pillow it is difficult to sleep because the flood of blood remains equal in the feet and in the head. But with a pillow the head automatically receives less blood and the activity in the head slows down. Intellectuals need two pillows so that that big quantity of blood is cut off completely; otherwise they cannot sleep.

You can see this happening in ordinary life also: with every mood, emotion, thought, your body takes a certain posture. If you are just watchful you will see that there is a relationship, and the relationship is such that you cannot change it. For example a person like me, if you tie down both my hands I cannot speak. I simply cannot speak. I will simply be at a loss for what to do, because my hands are so deeply connected with my expressions.

And you must know that each hand is connected to one hemisphere of the mind, the left hand with the right hemisphere, the right hand with the left hemisphere. They are extensions of your mind. So whenever I speak, I am speaking through two mediums: through words and through hands. Each gesture of the hand helps me to give expression to a certain idea. If my hands are tied down, it is impossible for me to say anything. I have tried it, and I suddenly find speaking absolutely difficult. I want to say something, and I say something else. The whole thing is that the rhythm with my hands is disturbed.

I have heard about two Jews walking on a beach on a cold winter morning and one was talking great business, offering things at half price. But the other man said, "Whatever you do, I cannot speak."

The man asked, "Why can't you speak? I am offering you things because I want to get out of this business. I can give you even more of a discount."

He said, "Even if you give them to me for free, at this moment it is so cold that I cannot take my hands out of my pockets, and without taking my hands out of my pockets, I cannot speak."

From the lowest - that is the body - everything is connected. Yoga has worked on the body; it is a long, arduous process and perhaps has no future unless science joins hands with it and helps it.

Then perhaps it may have an explosion. Yoga is one of the most ancient sciences developed by man. It is at least five thousand years old. If science is not going to join hands with it, then yoga is asking too much. Modern man cannot afford that much; shorter ways have to be found.

If you are working with the mind... that is a shorter way than the body and the work is easier, because with the mind nothing much has to be done, only awareness, only watchfulness... no psychoanalysis. That is again prolonging the process unnecessarily.

Yoga at least comes to an end. Psychoanalysis never comes to an end because the mind goes on creating garbage every day; it is very productive. You go on sorting out dreams and it goes on creating new dreams. It is so clever that it can manage a dream in which you see that you are sleeping and having a dream, and in the dream you have fallen asleep and are again having a dream. It can be very complicated. And analyzing all this rubbish helps a little bit, gives a little relief, but it is an unending process.

Those who have really worked with the mind have worked with watchfulness, witnessing; and as you witness the mind, the mind slowly starts becoming silent, stops its gibberish, becomes calm and quiet. And as the mind becomes calm and quiet your body will go through changes, amazing changes, and that's what is happening. You will see that the body is behaving in new ways; it has never behaved like this. It is walking differently, its gestures have changed.

You know perfectly well, just by seeing somebody walk you can say whether the man is homosexual or heterosexual. What does the walk have to do with homosexuality? But the homosexual's mind changes his walk. Although he cannot manage to walk like a woman because he does not have a womb - without the womb he cannot walk like a woman - he cannot walk like a man either, because mentally he has dropped out of heterosexuality. He is walking in a certain way which is neither of man nor of woman - and you can see it. It is universal. Anywhere the homosexual will walk the same way, and he will be recognized by his walk.

Now there are many governments making homosexuality illegal, criminal, and homosexuals are thinking to go underground. They cannot go: their walk will reveal them, they will be caught immediately. Thieves can go underground because there is nothing visible by which you can catch hold of them, but homosexuals cannot change their walk. If they change their walk, their homosexuality will change; they are interconnected.

So when your mind becomes calm and quiet, your body also starts becoming calm and quiet - a certain stillness in the body, a certain aliveness that you had never felt before. You have been in it, but you have never been in such deep touch with it because the mind was continuously keeping you engaged. It was a barrier, so your awareness was never bridged with your body.

Now that the mind is silent, the awareness for the first time becomes alert about the body. So a buddha has his own gestures; his walk is different, his look is different. Everything is different because now there is no mind. The body is now not following the mind; mind is not in the way. Now it is following awareness, the innermost quality of your being.

So any changes that are happening in the body, watch them and rejoice. Be more alert and more changes will happen. Be more conscious and you will see that even the body starts having a consciousness of its own.

In the presence of a master you start feeling a different vibration around you. It is his awareness radiating through his body. He may speak, he may not speak, but his presence... Those who are alert will immediately become connected with the master's body. It vibrates differently.

Now we know that you can put vibrations on gramophone records. Nothing is written, there are only lines; certain vibrations have been caught in those lines. You cannot read them but you can listen to them. With tape, the same technology has become even better: you can erase the vibrations, and you can put on other vibrations.

In the ancient literature of tantra they have a very strange idea which, in the contemporary world, the Theosophical Movement introduced again. It was the idea of akashic records; akash means the sky. The tantra idea is that anyone who is enlightened creates vibrations which are recorded by the sky itself because those vibrations are the treasure of existence. And tantra treatises indicate that there are methods by which you can listen to those records. But there has been a great calamity.

People destroyed...

Just the way they are against me, they have always been against anything that was strange - and tantra was one of the most strange things. And because it was basically about the sublimation of sexual energy, the whole orthodox mind became against it. They never bothered that it has many other ideas which are very significant. Fanatics don't care. They destroyed their temples, they destroyed their scriptures, they destroyed and killed their masters.

They prevented tantra from exploring its different dimensions further, and this dimension remained incomplete, but I feel there is some truth in it. If existence wants every conscious being to become enlightened, then when he becomes enlightened his record, his vibrations, his words, his silences, should become part of a treasure.

The tantra idea was that that treasure can be opened through certain methods, and we can know for certain whether Krishna existed or not, whether Mahavira existed or not, whether Buddha existed or not, whether Jesus was really enlightened or not. Those records will reveal everything. But because the scriptures have been destroyed and burned, we don't know what methods they were suggesting or what methods they had tried.

But my own experience is, that wherever anybody has become enlightened there are certain vibrations still. Thousands of years may have passed but those vibrations are still there - in the trees, in the earth, in the mountains. You can still feel some strange kind of presence. The man is not there, the singer may have died, but his record is still there and you can hear the voice again.

So be watchful of whatever happens to your body. As you are becoming more alert and more aware you will feel more loving towards your body, more compassionate towards your body; you will feel more close, more intimate, a kind of new friendship arising. Up to now you have simply used it. You have never said even a thank you to your body - and it has been serving you in every possible way.

So it is a good experience. Let it become more intense and help it. And the only way to help is to become more alert.

Question 2:

Man as a collectivity has not evolved. Whatever little bit of humanity has happened to the collective mass is because of those few seekers who became enlightened. But you should understand the proportion. It is like a spoonful of sugar you drop in the ocean to make it sweet; it is not going to do much to the ocean. The ocean is too vast. A spoonful of sugar was perfectly good for a cup of tea, but it is not good for the ocean.

An enlightened man is a cup of tea. Even his group - those who become attuned with him - are still so small that they cannot make much change in the collective mass, in its vast darkness, unconsciousness.

But in thousands of years so many people have become enlightened that a little bit of change in humanity you can see. But the credit does not go to man - that's why I say man has not evolved.

The credit goes to those few enlightened people. They simply disperse their consciousness in this ocean - but they cannot make it sweet. It has a little effect, but so small that it is negligible. The credit goes to those few people who lived and died to help humanity. And the same humanity for whom they lived, kills them, crucifies them. It cannot do otherwise, its darkness is such.

Some slight changes can be traced, but they are so slight that they are not worth mentioning. For example, they could crucify Jesus without any feeling of guilt. In fact they felt relieved that this nuisance is finished. He was becoming more and more a torture to their tradition, to their orthodox mind. They felt light.

They cannot crucify me that easily - this is the slight change. They may prevent me from coming into a country, they may prevent me from staying in a country, they may arrest me and throw me out of a country, they may destroy my communes. They may in every way harass my people, but still they cannot crucify me. A slight change has happened. They feel ashamed.

They would have liked to; still deep down they would have liked to. That would be simpler. Rather than all the parliaments of the world deciding against me, and every government informing other governments... why make it such a complex thing? But they feel that if I am crucified they will not be able to feel light or unburdened or relieved; in fact they may feel guilty.

These are the changes that in the long run will help man, but the credit goes to those few people who sacrificed everything, sacrificed their lives in the service of this humanity. And this humanity has paid them back with crucifixion and poison and stoning them to death. Still they died with a smile.

Mansoor's crucifixion is remarkable. It was far more barbarous than Jesus' crucifixion because they cut off each of his limbs slowly. They cut off his legs, they cut off his hands, they took out his eyes.

They tortured him as no man has ever been tortured, and still he smiled.

One man in the crowed asked, "Mansoor, why are you smiling?"

And he said, "I am smiling because these people are killing a person who was trying to give them more life, more light. But these people are strange - they are killing their own friend. And I am also smiling because they don't know that by destroying my body they cannot destroy me. They are killing somebody else! So Mansoor is laughing."

And while all this was going on - people were throwing stones, rotten eggs, just to humiliate Mansoor - his own master, Junnaid, was present in the crowd. And just not to be seen as not being with the crowd, Junnaid also threw something - a flower.

He knew Mansoor: Mansoor was his disciple, and he knew he was right. Junnaid had been telling him, "You are right, but don't say it. Don't declare: ?I myself am the ultimate truth. There is no other god; everybody is carrying his god within himself.' Don't say it! I know it, but I have remained quiet because my master said, ?Keep your mouth shut; otherwise they will simply kill you. So what is the point?' "

Mansoor said, "I have been trying not to say it, but what to do? People ask questions and I forget, and what is real comes out."

So Junnaid was sad. He was serving two purposes by throwing a beautiful rose. First, the masses would think that he is also throwing stones or rotten eggs. In that crowd who knows what is thrown by whom? Secondly, Mansoor will be able to understand that a roseflower has hit his face and that it cannot be from anybody else than his master. Only he can understand.

But at that moment tears came to Mansoor's eyes, the smile disappeared. Again somebody asked, "Just now you were smiling, and now there are tears. What has happened?"

He said, "Something has happened. The people who were throwing stones, rotten eggs, tomatoes, bananas and all kinds of things - that was okay. They don't understand. But somebody has thrown a roseflower. I know who he is. His roseflower hurts me more than anything else because although he knows what is true, he is not courageous enough to declare it. These tears are for his uncourageous, disgraceful behavior."

So these people have raised human consciousness a little bit - but the whole credit goes to them.

Man cannot behave that way now, today. You cannot do the same to me as you did to al-Hillaj Mansoor just one thousand years ago. Even the people who are against me, in private they are not against me; they are against me because the masses are against me.

Now, here again the same question arises: they want me to stay here, but the problem is who is going to sign the papers? The president is willing for me to stay here, but he does not want to take the responsibility of signing the papers. The foreign minister is afraid, and the minister of the interior is afraid. He is willing... it is absolutely right, there is no problem: I should stay here. But how can I stay here? Nobody is ready to take the responsibility. They have their fears. If something happens tomorrow, then that person will be caught; then his political career will be lost.

The foreign minister is supported by the American government to be chosen as secretary-general of the U.N. Now he wants me to be here but he cannot sign, because if he signs his career is finished.

Then he cannot be the secretary-general of the U.N.

These people have changed. At least, as far as they are concerned, they are ready to accept me here; just they don't want to take the responsibility wholly on themselves. That much courage is not in them. But this is also a development. Perhaps somebody may gather courage, risk his ambitions or politics. It is risky, because once anybody signs papers then the whole force of the American government and the Spanish government and the German government will be used to throw that man out. That man should not remain in the ministry because he did not listen to all these governments' advice and he went against them.

And the people who are all saying yes, in such a situation will say, "We had warned you before. You did not listen."

So there has been a little development, but not much. And the credit is not for the masses themselves. They have not made any progress, any evolution. These are just by-products of a few unique individuals who lived like flames and left their mark on human consciousness. But human consciousness is such a vast, oceanic field that it will take thousands of years for it to evolve in this way.

That's why my effort is not to work with too many people, but to concentrate on a limited number of people with such intensity that they all become enlightened in this life. Perhaps a group of two hundred people becoming enlightened at the same time may give a great push to human evolution.

We can just try. And it is such a joy, such an excitement, to try it.

I don't think that al-Hillaj Mansoor was angry. He could understand that what these people are doing is perfectly expected. I am not angry: whatever is being done against me is perfectly expected. But this is how evolution happens, very slowly. Existence has no hurry in any way. Eternity is available.

We think in terms of time; existence has no time limit. That's why we become a little worried about why evolution is not happening - because our time scale is very small. Looking at existence's eternity... our time cannot even be equal to seconds.

So there is nothing to be worried about. Changes are happening, and perhaps the days ahead are going to be very, very dangerous. Man may have to change in spite of himself. The nuclear war is a great hope - not in the sense that it happens, but that it creates the situation in which man has to change. Otherwise war is going to happen. Perhaps this big humanity needs such a dangerous situation just in order to change; otherwise it cannot change. That situation is coming closer, and we are fortunate that we have reached here at the right time.

Question 3:

No need to give an apology. I need you to be here. Don't disappear too soon; much work has to be done! I am reminded of a story. In Ramakrishna's ashram there was a very simple man. His name was Kalu. He had many gods in his small room, and almost half the day was wasted in worshipping all those gods.

Vivekananda - who was an intellectual giant, not a spiritual man - was always after poor Kalu:

"You are stupid! What are you doing? Why do you waste almost half the day? You don't even have space for yourself in your room. It is full of gods!"

And Hindus make gods out of anything. Any round stone and they will paint it red and it becomes a god. And immediately worship starts! It is so simple. The Hindu god is the simplest god. You don't have to find a beautiful statue or anything costly, just a beautiful stone by the side of the river. You bring it and just paint it red, and it becomes a god. Gods don't have a face and don't have hands, so there is no need of any statue. It is only a question of your faith, and if it is in a stone, that stone turns into a god.

Ramakrishna's ashram was just on the bank of the Ganges. There were so many stones... and not only Kalu was bringing them, others were torturing him by bringing stones for him. Finally the situation became so difficult that he had no place to sleep. He was sleeping outside the room because the whole room was full of gods - and each god had to be taken care of separately; otherwise they became angry.

Vivekananda was making jokes about Kalu and proving him to be a fool. He could not answer.

Then one day before Vivekananda was going to America to attend a world religious conference Ramakrishna gave Vivekananda a certain technique to meditate with. Ramakrishna wanted him not just to be an intellectual - that is not really representative of him or of India. An intellectual knows much, but it is all bookish.

So he told Vivekananda, "You start meditating, just a little bit. Even that will be enough, because in that conference there will be nobody else who has been meditating."

So Vivekananda started meditating that day. After two or three hours in silence suddenly an idea came to him: "This is the time when Kalu must be finishing his worship." And he felt a certain power after the meditation: "A certain power is here. If I say something - just from here - Kalu will have to follow it." So he ordered - just silently, sitting in his room - "Kalu, you take all your gods and drown them in the Ganges. Say goodbye to them because their work is finished."

Poor Kalu thought that if somebody is saying something to him, it must be some divine power; otherwise who is going to say it? There was nobody. He was just finishing his worship, so he started collecting all the gods. He put them all together in a big cloth and started dragging them out of his room.

Ramakrishna was sitting outside under a tree. He asked, "Kalu, what are you doing?"

Kalu said, "Some divine inspiration has come that I should drown all the gods in the Ganges."

Ramakrishna said, "Stop! It is not divine or anything. Just go and bring Vivekananda to me."

Vivekananda was called and Ramakrishna said, "This is not right. I have not told you to meditate in order to do such things. So now you need not meditate anymore. I will keep your key. You have to do other things. And whenever the time is ripe - in this life or in a life to come - the key will be given back to you."

Vivekananda never became a meditator. He died when he was only thirty-three, and the key was never returned.

So Maneesha, don't try to disappear; otherwise the key will be taken back! And it will be difficult to get it back again. Remain here. Much has to be done.

And you will all be getting ready for the day when disappearance is needed. I will be the first to say to you, "Okay, Maneesha, now disappear!" But before that, never think of it again. Okay?