Intelligence is our only treasure

Question 1:

Mind cannot be nonjudgmental. If you force it to be nonjudgmental, there will arise a block in your intelligence. Then the mind cannot function perfectly.

To be nonjudgmental is not something which comes within the area of the mind. Only a man who has gone beyond mind can be nonjudgmental; until then what appears to you to be factual, a valid statement, is just an appearance.

Everything that mind decides or states is polluted by its conditioning, by its prejudices - that's what makes it judgmental.

For example, you see a thief. It is a fact he has been stealing - no question about it - and you make a statement about the thief. And certainly stealing is not good, so when you call a man a thief your mind says, "It is valid. Your statement is true."

But why is a thief bad? - and what is badness? Why has he been forced to steal? And the act of stealing is a single act: on the grounds of a single act you are making a judgment about the whole person. You are calling him a thief. He does many other things too, not only stealing. He may be a good painter, he may be a good carpenter, he may be a good singer, a good dancer - there can be a thousand and one qualities in the man. The whole man is so big, and the fact of stealing is a single action.

On the grounds of a single act, you cannot make a statement about the whole person. You don't know the person at all. And you don't even know in what conditions the act happened. Perhaps in those conditions you would have stolen too. Perhaps in those conditions stealing was not bad...

because every act is relative to conditions.

I have told you many times the story of when Lao Tzu was made the supreme judge of China.

The first case was against a thief who had taken almost half the treasures of the richest man in the capital. And he was caught red-handed, so there was no question about his stealing. He had confessed too, that he had stolen.

Still, Lao Tzu called the man whose house the thief had broken into and stolen from, and told the man, "According to me, you are both criminals. Why in the first place have you accumulated so much wealth? The whole capital is starving and poor. You cannot eat your wealth and you go on exploiting these people, sucking their blood.

"This man was forced to steal. His mother is dying. He could not find a doctor who would come without asking for money; he could not get medicine without money. He is knocking on every door to get employment, and there is no employment. What do you want this man to do? He is ready to work, but work is not available. He has begged the doctors, but nobody is ready to listen. They say, ?Every day thousands of poor people are coming. How can we manage?' And from where can he get those costly medicines? It was as a last resort. This man is not a thief. Stealing was a last resort to save his dying mother.

"And to steal from your house is certainly not a crime. In the first place you have committed the basic crime of accumulating the wealth. And this thief, this so-called thief, is a man with a very fair mind: he has taken only half of the treasure. He could have taken all of it. He has left half of your treasure in your safe; he has simply divided it half and half.

"He is not a thief. Circumstances forced him to be a thief. But you are a born thief. Your father was exploiting these people, your father's father was exploiting these people; you are doing the same.

Because of you the whole place is poor and dying, starving.

"Now what do you want me to judge? I send you both to jail for six months. I am being unfair to the thief, because he has done a very small thing, while you are a born criminal and are stealing the whole day from the poor in different ways. And he has done only one act."

The rich man was certainly annoyed. He was not accustomed to listening to such things - he could have purchased these supreme court judges. He said, "You wait. First I would like to see the emperor." Even the emperor owed him money. When there was the need he had given money to the emperor for invading other countries or for defense.

He went to the emperor and said, "What kind of a man have you put as your supreme court chief justice? He is throwing me into jail for six months - with the thief! And he says he is being unfair to the thief because he has done only one act of stealing, and we have been doing the same thing in different names for generations; our whole life consists of exploitation. Remember, if I am going to jail, tomorrow your number is going to be up, because from where have you gathered all this money, all this empire? According to that man you are a bigger thief than me. If you want to save yourself, throw that man out."

Lao Tzu was relieved immediately. He said, "I told you before that I would not be suitable, because I don't function through the mind. To function through the mind is judgmental. I function through silence. I simply see the reality as it is - without any prejudice, without any opinion, without any conclusion reached before."

One of the courts in America had a case against me and the judge was choosing the jurors. Eleven jurors were needed, and he had to interview sixty persons, eminent persons of the area. He simply asked, "Can you be unprejudiced towards this man?" And they said they could not; they had an opinion about me. They were rejected. They could not find eleven jurors who could say, taking the oath, that they would not be prejudiced. Finally the judge had to take the case into his own hands.

But what is the guarantee that the judge is not judgmental?

There is a case against me in Bengal in India. It is so absurd that even somebody who knows nothing of law will cancel it at first glance. The day I entered India, in the first press conference I said a few things. From faraway Bengal, from an interior town, a summons reached me that a case was filed against me because I had made statements which had hurt this man's religious feelings.

And in his application he says that the statement that has hurt him from my press conference is printed in a Bengali newspaper. The date, the column, the page - everything he has given. And the magistrate immediately issued a summons. We looked in Delhi for the Bengali paper, because I had never made any statement which had hurt his feelings. There was a press conference just on my arrival, but there was no question of my making any statement that would hurt the religious feelings of a Bengali far away.

There was no statement: we got hold of the Bengali newspaper - in the Bengali paper there was no statement! My press report was there, but the statement he was talking about was not there. Now do you need any knowledge of law to dismiss this case? He is basing the case on a newspaper report in which what he says is not reported!

Without any difficulty, the case has to be dismissed: "You are mad! Where is the statement?" But it seems the judge himself was part of the game, because he has the same mind as the other people.

As far as the mind is concerned... you have not been able to create a state of no-mind in your judges. They are Hindus, they are Mohammedans, they are socialists, they are communists - how can they be nonjudgmental?

We appealed in the high court of Calcutta, and I was really surprised.... The case is so absurd.

When the statement is not there in the paper in which he says it is... it is simply a lie. In fact, the man should be immediately caught for trying to create a bogus case.

One of our sannyasins, Tathagata, went - he is an attorney, a high court attorney - and he presented the case to the supreme court. He showed the newspaper, and he said, "There is no statement at all. These are other papers' reports. No other paper has reported anything. And this is the Bengali paper that that gentleman is quoting. Those lines are not here at all. So you simply quash this."

But even the supreme court said, "It cannot be quashed so easily when somebody's religious feelings are hurt. It will have to go through a trial."

They knew that they would lose the case, but even the high court judges wanted to harass me, at least for a few hearings. And they would not grant that my attorney could attend... because there was no need for me. What could I have to say? - because I had said nothing. So just to harass me... These people all had their opinions; and they were projecting their own opinions. Mind cannot do otherwise.

So when parents teach their children not to be judgmental - and children are very clear that their parents are continuously judgmental - on one hand they lose respect from the children and on the other hand the children become hypocrites. Parents are judgmental but they start saying, "This is not judgmental; we are simply stating the fact."

It is not only that they are saying it to others, they say it to themselves. They convince themselves that this is simply a fact. But the problem is, even a fact may be just your opinion. In somebody else's opinion it may not be a fact, it may be a fiction. For example, God is a fact to millions of people's minds, and I say it is a fiction - the greatest fiction, the biggest lie.

You may think something is good, but you have got the idea of good from others - it is borrowed.

So you are simply reflecting the society's mind in saying that something is good, something is bad, something is beautiful, something is ugly. And you are absolutely certain that it is a fact.

But I will tell you how these facts disappear when you just look a little more deeply, with a little more awareness. For example, you may think some woman is beautiful; not only you may think so, it may be decided by a whole committee of judges that she is Miss America or Miss Germany, but every country has its own idea of beauty. Because you live in a certain area where everybody is convinced along with you, you never suspect that there may be other people who cannot think of her as beautiful.

In the East, none of those women who are chosen in the West as the most beautiful can be recognized as the most beautiful. The West goes about it very mechanically: the proportions of the body in inches, their weight - things which are not considered by other individuals to be beautiful.

Each section has a few marks - the facial beauty, the proportions of the body, the weight of the body.... But before falling in love with a woman has anybody ever made arrangements to weigh her and to measure her and then to decide if she is really beautiful?

I have seen these women's pictures, and I could not believe it, because in the East so little weight will not be accepted as beautiful. The East has a different concept of a woman. You can see the statues of Khajuraho. That will give you the idea of what the East thinks beautiful. The woman must have some fat, because the woman's basic function is to be a mother. In the West she is dieting in order to go into the competition, so all flesh disappears from the body and she is just a skeleton.

In the East, a woman a little on the fatter side will be accepted, because the fat is your reservoir, food, and the woman's basic function is to be a mother. Now just a skeleton woman, howsoever proportionate the body, cannot become a mother. She does not have enough fat, because for nine months it will be difficult for her to eat; she will have to live on her own fat. If she has no fat it is impossible for her to become a mother. And she needs breasts which can feed the child. That is part of her beauty in the Eastern concept.

So East and West will not agree on the same woman as beautiful. And if you consider other countries and other continents, like China, then there will be different things coming into it. Or Japan, then some other things - the grace of the woman... Now a woman who parades almost naked in front of thousands of people is not graceful. She is almost selling her body. All these competitions are pornographic. The people have come there to see different naked women; they are not interested in the contest.

But in India or Japan you cannot have that kind of contest. You will need a totally different perspective. The grace of the woman will be the basic thing, and that is not considered at all in the Western concept of beauty.

When Westerners reached China for the first time, they wrote home in letters, "These people are not human: they don't look like human beings, they are a very strange type. It must be some other animal that looks a little bit like man" - because they had never thought that a beard with six hairs is possible! And cheekbones protruding so much cannot be accepted.

But the Chinese also wrote about the Westerners who visited, and the records are still available.

"They look like monkeys. Perhaps Charles Darwin was right, but he was right only about these Western people, that they are evolved out of monkeys. Their behavior is so uncentered; their individuality is so without grace."

Now both are judging. Both are judgmental; neither is open. Neither is looking at the other without an opinion accumulated in childhood, from living in a certain society with a certain kind of people.

In India there is a section of Hindu society called Marwaris. They live in Rajasthan, but they have only their houses in Rajasthan; their businesses are all over India. Once in a while they come home; otherwise they are working everywhere. They are very clever businessmen.

I used to be very familiar with a Marwari family. Their daughter was going to be married, and the family who was going to take her as their daughter-in-law was enquiring about them in the town:

what kind of people are they? And somebody said they should ask me because I was very intimate with those people. So they asked me. I was puzzled, because they asked me one question: "How many times have they been bankrupt?"

I said, "This is a strange question!"

They said, "No, it is not strange. In our society this is the way we count the richness of a person.

We don't go bankrupt because we have lost the business or have had losses; no, we go bankrupt when we are at the peak. Each bankruptcy means at least one million rupees. So that is a simple way to count how much money this family has. If they have been bankrupt three times, that is good.

If they have never been bankrupt then this marriage cannot happen, because if they have not been bankrupt at all then they will not have enough money to give in dowry to the daughter. We cannot ask directly - that is thought to be ugly - so we have to enquire indirectly."

Now that way of thinking is special to them. I don't think anybody in the world will think that a person who has been bankrupt seven times has any wealth. And when they go bankrupt in one place, that place becomes unexploitable for them. They have exploited people so much and then gone bankrupt! They are pretending that they don't have any money.

So they move. Their real home is in Rajasthan; these are their temporary places where they earn and go bankrupt. Then they move from that town to another town far away where nobody knows that they have gone bankrupt. Again they start a business; again they will accumulate a lot of money and again the bankruptcy.

And all the money that goes on accumulating goes to Rajasthan, to their home. These other places are just for exploitation. They keep moving. Within five to seven years every Marwari moves, because in those seven years he has gained the confidence of people, managed to accumulate money, borrowed money, done everything he can do, and then he goes bankrupt.

Nobody else will say that bankruptcy is good, but if you are a Marwari, then be bankrupt as many times as you can manage! Then your prestige, your respectability, rises higher. Anywhere else, if you are bankrupt, your prestige falls down.

There is a tribe in India where, when they marry their daughter to anybody - it is an aboriginal tribe - they enquire how many crimes the boy has committed, because that is thought to be maturity. He has been to jail, he has learned the ways of life - in any case their daughter is not going to starve.

They are giving their daughter to a con man!

When I came to know about these people... Even murder is valuable because that means they are giving their daughter to a man who is capable of everything, including murder. Their daughter will be safe under his protection and there will be no problems, because he is a thief, he has been in jail - he knows everything... how to cheat people, exploit people, con people. That seems to be his qualification - but only in their tribe. Outside their tribe everything will be condemned. Who is going to marry their daughter to a man who is a murderer or who has been visiting jails often or who has committed all kinds of crimes? That will be a DISqualification.

If you look around the world and you see different people's conditionings, and their ideas of good and bad, right and wrong, you will be able to see for the first time that your mind is also part of a certain section of humanity. It does not represent anything about truth; it simply represents that certain section of humanity. And through this mind, whatever you see is judgmental.

Even your judges, who need to be impartial, are not impartial - cannot be. It should be made a clear condition that before a person becomes a judge he should go through deep meditation. He should renounce his religion, he should renounce any other kind of political ideology; he should renounce the past. Unless he proves his emptiness, that he is coming clean and clear, he will not be appointed as a judge. Only then can you expect that his findings will be factual - because he has no certain opinions beforehand. Otherwise they judge before they have even listened. They have already made up their minds long before.

And the same is true about everybody. If that is the case with judges who are expected to be absolutely nonjudgmental, to give equal opportunity to both sides of the case, to all the aspects of the case, and not bring their own opinion in... but that opinion is already in!

So I can understand your problem, but that block can be removed. Your parents have taught you not to be judgmental so you have tried not to be judgmental. But you cannot manage it because through the mind you can only be judgmental. So you will just change the name: you will say, "I am stating a fact. It is a statement of fact." But it cannot be a statement of fact.

With the mind nothing is your own, actual perception. Only with deep meditation, when you become disconnected from the mind and you can put the mind aside, can you state the fact, can you state the truth.

So what your parents were trying... they were trying the right thing with the wrong means. And that's what their parents have done with them: "Don't be judgmental." But then what can mind do? Mind cannot do otherwise. Nobody was teaching you how to be a no-mind, and only out of a state of no- mind can something come which will be simply the fact, without the interference of your prejudices.

In my high school days, it was almost every day that I was sent at least once to the principal's office to be punished for something or other. I did not think at that time - nor do I think now - that what I had done was wrong, but the principal, the teacher, they had their opinions.

For example, what can be wrong if I come to school riding on a horse? I don't think there is anything wrong in it, although in that part of the country nobody goes to school riding on a horse. Riding on a horse means creating havoc. All the students would gather there and say, "Now you have found a new thing!"

And the man whose horse I had taken was coming, running after me! I did not have any horse. In that town there were no horses except the horses that pulled a certain vehicle called a tanga. So there were tanga horses and whenever there was no train at the station all the horses were waiting in front of their houses eating grass. Any horse would do: I would simply get hold of it and ride it to the high school.

Now, my situation was: "What is wrong in it?" And their problem was that I unnecessarily created a disturbance. Now all the classes had stopped, and the students had run out to see what I had done today! The teachers were standing there shouting, "Don't go out!" But nobody was listening.

And the man was shouting, "The horse is mine! And this is strange, because this is train time and I have to go and catch the train and the passengers... and this boy suddenly jumped on my horse and brought it here!" So my principal became accustomed...

I said to the man whose horse it was, "How much are you going to get from the passengers? That much money I will give to you - forget this train. Why are you making an unnecessary fuss? You don't make much money: if you can make one rupee for taking four passengers from the train to the town, that is more than you can expect. So you take one rupee and have a good time, because you will not be wasting time going to the station. And I have been telling you, Since I rode your horse, I will give you one rupee. Don't be worried, but let me first reach my place. "

I gave the rupee to the man, and he was perfectly happy. He said, "If this is the case, you can take my horse any time."

I said to the headmaster, the principal, "You can see it: the man is happy, the horse is happy. Nobody is disturbed. If the students have run out, that is between you and your students. But in the school code there is nothing that prevents anybody from coming on a horse. I have read the school code many times and I have marked places in it, the loopholes that I can use."

And they said, "We had never thought that anybody would use the school code against the school.

It is true that there is no rule preventing it."

"Then why is there so much anger against me?"

Every day it was something or other. The principal used to tell me, "Just open your hand," and he would hit my hand with his cane. He stopped even asking what I had done.

And I said to him, "This is better: don't ask me, because even after asking me, you punish me, so what is the point of all this? They bring me here, you just punish me, and I go back."

One day it happened - a very rare thing - the teacher found the captain of the class smoking in the class, and that was a very great crime. He said to me, "This captain has been taking you to the principal every day; today you take him."

I said, "Perfectly good - although I don't agree with you. Remember the school code: no clause says that a student cannot smoke in the class. So I will take him to the principal, but I will make everything clear to him. And you should remember that you have been smoking in the class and we have not reported it simply because it is not in the code."

So I took the captain. The teacher came running behind me, and halfway there he said, "Don't mention about me, because I am a new, temporary appointment; they may throw me out."

I said, "Okay, I will not mention you, but you stop smoking in the class."

He said, "I promise."

I took the captain, but the principal was so accustomed to beating me that he did not ask who has brought whom. He simply said, "Open your hands," so I opened my hands and he started beating them.

I said, "Do it, but you will repent."

He said, "Why should I repent?"

I said, "Today things are different. I have brought this boy; I am not the criminal today. And you have already hit my hands. Now give me the cane and open your hands; otherwise I am going to create great trouble for you. First open your hands and I will hit you exactly the three times that you have hit me on my hands."

He said, "But...!"

I said, "There is no question of ?But!' You did not ask me. You have not been asking for many days. I have been silent, but this is too much." He had to open his hand, and I hit him three times and I told him, "Remember it."

He said, "I will remember it my whole life, because being a principal... a student is hitting me. How can I forget it! But please don't spread it all around."

I said, "I will not say anything to anybody, but I cannot say anything about this boy. He will say something; he will have to say something."

The principal asked, "What do you mean, ?He will have to say something'?"

I said, "I will make him say something. I will not say anything."

"How can you force him to say something?"

I said, "First I will protect him. He has been found smoking in the class; that's why he has been sent here. But there is no reason... you open your school code: where is it written that no student can smoke inside the class? Inside or outside, smoking is not prohibited. It was not mentioned because nobody ever thought that any student would smoke in the class."

He said, "Yes, that's true. We will have to make an amendment."

I said, "First you make an amendment, and then we will see; but right now you cannot punish him.

And because I am saving him, he will have to spread the news."

The principal said, "You seem to be strange. Have you come to study in this school or are you simply creating trouble?"

"I am not creating trouble. It is a simple bargain. I have saved him, and you have been beaten. Now it is his duty to spread it all over the school. I will keep absolutely silent." And without my saying, the boy did it, because he was very happy that I had taken him to be punished and I protected him instead.

I asked the principal that day, "You smoke, and almost every teacher in the school smokes, except one or two; then why this antagonism against smoking? And if smoking is bad, then you should start stopping the teachers, because the students will follow the teachers."

Parents smoke and don't allow their children to smoke; they simply create hypocrites. The children smoke, hiding here and there. This is a very clumsy society. Nobody knows exactly what they are trying to do, or how it can be done. They all say, "Don't judge" - but how to avoid being judgmental when on the other hand you are telling everybody, "This is good, this is bad, this is right, that is wrong"?

The whole teaching of your morality is judgmental, and in that very teaching this is also one part:

"Don't be judgmental." You are creating confusion, and the only way the child will be able to survive this confusion is to become a hypocrite. He will judge and he will say that he is not judgmental.

And he will believe that his judgment is a valid fact. But the reality is such that there is no valid fact:

even science has only relative facts, no valid facts. It can only be said that hypothetically it is true.

Tomorrow it may change; more research may change it.

Just a hundred years ago science was very stubborn about saying that whatever it said was a solid statement of reality. Now it is not so. The situation has come to a point where now you cannot write a big book on modern science, because by the time your book is finished everything that you have written will be out of date. So today there are only small periodicals and papers that are immediately printed and distributed and read in conferences, because you cannot be certain about tomorrow.

Tomorrow somebody will find some other fact and your whole work will collapse.

Everything is relative.

Mind cannot find the ultimate.

Mind cannot find the solid fact, because that is what truth is. It can find only approximate fictions which, somehow for the moment, help you to understand reality and to work with it.

So don't make it a problem and don't try to solve it at the level of the mind. Mind is condemned to be judgmental. So don't try to do what cannot be done. What can be done is to slip out of the mind.

Slowly slowly go beyond the mind, and start looking from a witnessing silence. Perhaps then what you see is the truth.

There is a Sufi story of Junnaid. One of his disciples said to him, "I trust in you absolutely."

Junnaid said, "Don't say such a thing because you are still in the mind, and absolute trust is not a quality of the mind. You have come here to me to reach the state where you can be in absolute trust, but right now don't say that."

But the disciple was stubborn. He said, "I trust you. And it is not something that can be shaken or taken away. I can give my life, but I will not drop my trust."

Junnaid said, "That I can believe. You can give your life, but as far as trust is concerned we will see later on."

A few days afterwards the disciple saw Junnaid sitting with a woman on the other side of the lake.

That was a great shock, because Sufi mystics are not allowed to be with women. And not only that:

the woman was pouring wine into a cup for Junnaid. Junnaid took the cup and drank the wine. And Sufis are against any kind of alcoholic beverages!

It was too much. The disciple went to the other side of the lake and said to Junnaid, "You have killed my trust."

Junnaid said, "I told you before that trust by the mind is not of much value."

The disciple said, "Don't try to still be a master. You have been cheating people! You are drinking wine, you are sitting with a woman." Of course the woman had a black veil on as Mohammedan women do.

Junnaid said, "Taste the wine. It is nothing but water, just colored so it looks like wine."

The disciple tasted it. He was puzzled. He asked, "But why did you do it?"

And Junnaid said, "Turn back the veil of the woman - she is my mother."

He turned back the veil; she was Junnaid's mother. He fell at Junnaid's feet and said, "Forgive me."

Junnaid said, "There is no need. I simply wanted to make it clear to you not to say things through the mind which the mind cannot manage: absolute truth, absolute trust. Now just a woman sitting by my side - if you had trust, you would not have bothered about it. That is not your business. You are not my master. You have not become my disciple on the condition that I will not sit by the side of a woman. You have not made the condition that you will be my disciple if I don't drink wine, so why should you be disturbed?"

The poor disciple was simply repeating his social conditioning. But one thing was clear now: to say things which the mind is not capable of saying is wrong.

So you need not be bothered about what your father said to you. All that is past, just dust on the mirror. Clean the mirror and come to a state where silence prevails. Then whatever you see or say will be a statement of fact because you don't have any opinion. But carrying those opinions along with you and trying to be nonjudgmental is fighting with yourself unnecessarily. And that fight is blocking your intelligence.

Any fight splits you into two. Any fight within you is dangerous to your intelligence. When you are not fighting with anything within you, when everything is calm and quiet, your intelligence has its total flavor, sharpness, beauty. And intelligence is our only treasure. It is through intelligence that we are going to find out everything about the mysteries of life.

But don't create a conflict. And don't be angry with your father. What he did must have been done to him. So parents simply go on transferring diseases from generation to generation; it is an unconscious process.

You can jump out of that whole vicious circle just with the simple alertness that whatever they have taught you they themselves were not aware of. They meant well, but they created a confusion in you.

Question 2:

The second part of your question is right. All questions, not only yours but everybody's, arise because you are not in touch with the heart. Mind is a question producing mechanism. It cannot find any answer, but it can produce millions of questions.

The heart has the answer.

The questions may be millions, but the answer is one. So if you are in touch with your heart, your questions disappear. This is the second part of your question.

But the first part is a totally different thing. You say, "When there is love everything looks beautiful, and when there is no love everything looks ugly." That is an hallucination.

Love creates a kind of hallucination. You are happy, you are joyous, you are covered with a haze of joy, and you project on everybody the same joy, the same beauty that you are feeling - but it is a projection, it is not a reality. And when the love disappears from your heart and turns sour or becomes hate, the same people start looking ugly. That too is a projection. Neither the first nor the second has anything to do with the reality of the people or things around you.

If you want to really know the truth about people, you have to go beyond all dualisms. Love and hate, day and night, life and death - all kinds of dualisms have to be dropped. And that is possible only by being a witness. Then you are a mirror. Then you simply mirror, you don't state anything.

Whether or not a person standing in front of you is beautiful, the mirror says nothing; it simply reflects the person. If the person is ugly, the mirror says nothing; it simply reflects the ugly person.

The witnessing consciousness simply reflects. It does not state, but it understands. What is the point of saying to anybody, "You are ugly"? What is the point of saying to someone, "You are beautiful"? - because whatever you say to people, your opinion becomes a disturbance in their life.

The witnessing consciousness is a very silent observer. It knows but it does not say. There is no need. A is A, B is B. What is the point of saying it? Why create disturbances in other people's minds?

Love is not a state of awakening. It is a kind of drug, it is hormonal.

I have heard about one supreme court chief justice in America. When he retired from the supreme court he had only one wish. Sixty years earlier he and his wife had got married and had gone to Paris for their honeymoon. His name was Parry, and he had only one wish: before they die they should again go to Paris.

So after retirement the first thing he did was take his old wife to Paris. They stayed in the same hotel, in the same room. They went to visit the same places - but something was missing. Finally Parry said to his wife, "Paris has changed so much - no longer that juice that used to be here, no longer that beauty, no longer that colorfulness. Everything seems to be stale, flat. I was thinking that in sixty years Paris would have become even juicier. I have not come here for this disillusionment."

His wife said, "If you don't mind, I would like to say that Paris is still the same Paris; it is Parry who has changed. We are now old, we have lost our juice. That was our honeymoon; this is not our honeymoon. We are half in our graves! Sixty years ago what we saw was not true: it was a projection of a couple on their honeymoon, in great love. This is also not true: this is the illusion of an old couple who have nothing in the future but death and darkness. This is also a projection." The wife was certainly right.

So your love may look as if it is giving beauty to things, and your hate, ugliness to things - but they are only projections. Don't depend on projections. If you want to know the reality, then just be a witness. And the witness is never young, never old; it is timeless. So there is no question of youth, old age, honeymoon and graveyard. They don't come in its path.

Whatever the witness sees is the case.

It is only a mirror.