The watcher is not amused

Question 1:

For the man of Zen everything is sacred - even taking a cup of tea. Whatever he does, he does as if he is in a holy space.

There is a story about Moses. When he went on Mount Sinai to meet God and to receive the Ten Commandments, he saw a miracle happening: a green bush, lush green, and inside it a beautiful flame, fire. As he approached it somebody shouted from the bush, "Take your shoes off. This is holy ground." The Judaic interpretation is that the flame was God himself. That's why the bush was not burning, because God's fire is cool. And Moses unconsciously was entering into the area which was like a temple or a synagogue: the living God was there. He took his shoes off and went in.

I don't think there is anything historical in it, but there is one thing significant: that wherever God is, the ground becomes holy.

Zen approaches things from the very other extreme: wherever there is sacredness, God is.

Wherever there is holiness, God is. Not vice versa - not that God's presence makes any place holy, but if you make any place holy, the presence of the divine, of godliness, is immediately felt there. So they have tried to bring the sacred into everything. No other religion has gone that far, that high, that deep. No other religion has even conceived the idea.

In Zen there is no God. In Zen there is only you and your consciousness. Your consciousness is the highest flowering in existence up to now. It can go still higher, and the way to take it higher is to create your whole life in such a way that it becomes sacred.

A cup of tea is the most ordinary thing, but they make in every monastery a special temple for drinking tea, surrounded by beautiful trees, ponds... a small temple. You enter into the temple, taking your shoes off, and Zen believes, "Where you leave your shoes, leave yourself too." So you enter into the temple absolutely pure, uncontaminated.

In the tea house, the tea temple, nobody talks. Only silence deepens. Everybody sits in the Zen meditative posture. The samovar is preparing the hot water for the tea, and the sound of the samovar has to be listened to as carefully as you have listened to your master. It does not matter what you are listening to, what matters is how you are listening.

Zen changes everything and takes a far more significant posture: it is not a question of what you are listening to, it is a question of how you are listening. So it doesn't matter whether the master is speaking or the sound of the samovar. And everybody is sitting there silently while the tea is being prepared.

Listening to the samovar... slowly the aroma, the fragrance of the tea leaves fills the temple. You have to be available to it as if it is divine grace. It is transforming everything small - the smallest, most negligible things - into something very significant, meaningful... giving it a religious color. And then the woman who is tending the tea will come to you. Her grace in pouring tea into your cups, and the silence, and the sound of the samovar, and the fragrance of fresh tea, creates a magic of its own.

Nobody speaks. Everybody starts sipping the tea, tasting as totally as possible, being in the moment as intensely as possible, as if the whole world has disappeared. Only the tea is there; you are there - and the silence.

Now a very mundane affair... all over the world people drink tea and coffee and everything, but nobody has been able to transform the character of the mundane into the sacred.

As the tea is finished, they bow down to the woman in respect. Slowly they go out of the temple without making any noise. In fact people all over the world don't enter into temples with such silence; in the temple all kinds of talking and gossips are going on. Women are enquiring about each other's jewelry and clothes - in fact they go there to show off their jewelry and clothes; they don't have any other place to exhibit their possessions. All the temples and churches are nothing but gossiping clubs where people go to gossip about all kinds of mundane things. They destroy the whole meaning.

And Zen has changed a very ordinary thing into an extraordinary experience. You will never forget drinking tea with a man of Zen. You will be fortunate if the master is present. Every gesture is filled with significance.

It is called a tea ceremony, not tea drinking. It is not a tea shop or a tea stall, it is a temple: here, ceremonies happen. This is only symbolic. In the whole of life, around the clock, you have to remember that wherever you are it is a holy land and whatever you are doing it is divine.

But just remembering will not be of much help. It is supported by meditation; otherwise it will remain a mind thing, it won't go deep. That meditation is always there to give it depth. So the whole day in a Zen monastery, from the morning when people get up till the night when they go to sleep, is a long prayer. They are not praying - there is no God to pray to - but they are prayerful, they are thankful, they are grateful. And with the meditation in the background, each small thing starts having new significances that you had never thought about.

Who had thought that a cup of tea could have some spiritual significance? But in Zen it has. If you look just on the surface it may look like a ritual. If you are an outsider, it may look like a ritual. You have to be an insider to understand that it is not a ritual; they are really living it, enjoying it, because behind it is the world of meditation, silence.

It is not only the silence in the temple; a greater silence is within them. It is not only the holiness outside; a greater holiness is within them. The whole day they are whole - whatever they are doing:

cleaning the grounds of the monastery, working in the garden, cutting wood, carrying water from the well, cooking food. Whatever they are doing, they are doing so totally that unless you are an insider you can see only their action. You will not be able to see from where that action arises - the oceanic depth within them.

It happened:

One emperor of Japan went to see Nan In, a famous Zen master and one of the strangest masters of all. The emperor had heard much about him. Many times he had invited Nan In to come to the court, to be a guest of the emperor, but he always received the message, "It is always the thirsty who goes to the well, not the well to the thirsty."

Finally, the emperor decided to go himself. When he went inside the gate of the monastery... it was on a mountain, surrounded with thick jungle, and one man was chopping wood. That was the first man he met.

The emperor asked him, "Where is the master? Can I see him?"

The man stopped and said, "Yes, you can see him. Just go directly ahead and you will reach the place where he lives." And he started chopping wood again.

And as the emperor was going on he shouted, "Don't disturb the place. Just sit down and wait. The master comes whenever he feels like coming. That is his mastery."

The emperor thought, "Strange people. Just a woodcutter, but he talks with the emperor in such a manner that if he were in the court he would have been beheaded! But here it is better to be silent and go."

So he went and sat at the cottage where the master was supposed to come. After a few minutes, the master came. And the emperor was puzzled, because he was dressed in the robe of the master, but his face looked exactly like the woodcutter.

Looking at his puzzled face, the master said, "Don't be worried, we have met before. I was chopping wood; I had directed you to this place."

The emperor said, "But why did you not say then and there that you are the master?"

He said, "At that time I was not. I was just a woodchopper, a woodcutter - so totally involved in it that I had absolutely no place left for the master. That's why I told you to wait, so that I could finish with my wood, take a shower, put on the master's robe, remember that now I am a master, and be total in it. Now I am ready. For what have you come?"

The emperor said, "I have completely forgotten for what I had come! Seeing the situation, that the master chops wood - don't you have disciples? I have heard that you have five hundred disciples."

He said, "Yes, I have. They are in the monastery, deeper in the forest. But chopping wood is such a joy that I would rather chop wood than be a master. It is such a sacred, such a blissful feeling, the cool breeze, the hot sun, the whole body perspiring, and each hit of the axe making the silence of the place deeper. Next time you come, join me! We do all kinds of things which are necessary, but one thing remains common, as a golden thread running through all actions, and that is meditation. And meditation makes everything divine. Then actions don't count. What counts is your consciousness at the moment of the action."

This is changing the whole ideology of ordinary mind: it judges the act, it never bothers about the consciousness out of which this action is born.

An action coming out of meditation becomes sacred, and the same action without meditation is mundane.

We have made our lives full of mundane things, mundane acts, because we don't know a simple secret that can transform the quality of everything that we do. And remember, if you don't know the secret of transformation, amongst those mundane things you are also mundane. Unless you have a consciousness which makes you sacred and holy, which is going to transform everything that you do into the same category in which you are...

Whatever you will touch will become sacred.

Whatever you will do will become holy.

Zen is the very essence of all religions, without their stupid rituals, nonsensical theologies. It has dropped everything that could be dropped. It has saved only that which is the very soul of religiousness.

So even drinking a cup of tea with a Zen master, you will find you are participating in a religious phenomenon.

Question 2:

People are escaping from places, from persons, from things, because they have an immediate, intuitive feeling that this is not the place where they belong - it is somewhere else. These are not the people to whom they belong. There must be some people somewhere to whom they belong.

Some children can be very acutely aware of the feeling.

And when you look into my eyes, the feeling disappears because you need those kind of eyes; you have been looking for them without knowing it. Your escape has been a search.

The word ?escape' is condemnatory. You have been searching, and because you were not finding in one place you were rushing to another place; not finding in one person you were rushing to another person. And this is happening all over the world: people are changing places, changing their lovers, changing their friends, changing their jobs, but somehow, nothing seems to fit. Their inner thirst remains the same. Not only the same, it goes on increasing as they grow up.

If it happens looking into my eyes that your desire to escape disappears, that means you have found the key. You need such a presence, you need such people, you need such eyes around you. You yourself need such eyes, with the same depth, with the same clarity, with the same insight - and you will find yourself at home.

And nobody escapes from home. Everybody is escaping for home, because everybody has been placed somewhere else. Nobody has taken care of your inner needs. Your parents, your society have taken care of your outer needs... and they cannot be condemned, because nobody has taken care of their inner needs. Inwardly they are empty.

Perhaps they cannot escape so easily because there are so many bonds. The wife is there, the children are there, the job is there.

That's why every younger generation is the one which is receptive to new ideas, to new experiences, to new spaces, because they are still not in a bondage. They can escape from things, in search of the home. And in this past thirty years the phenomenon has become very prominent, for the simple reason that in the past the younger generation never existed.

You will be surprised to know that the younger generation is a very contemporary phenomenon. In the old countries like India, where eighty percent of people live in villages and have no contact with the contemporary world, it is still the same: there is no generation gap, because there is no younger generation to create the gap.

Things move in such a way that by the time a child is six, he starts working with his father - small things he can do. If the father is a farmer, he goes to the farm, he takes his father's food to the farm - small things - he takes the cows from the farm to the house, whatever he can do. He has not yet become a young man; he is a child, and he has taken a quantum leap - he has taken responsibilities.

The time of youth between six years to twenty-five years is missed by him.

By the time he is ten or twelve he has almost learned the trade, the job. His father may be a goldsmith, and he is learning the secrets of it.

His father may be a gardener, and he is learning the secrets of it. When the time to escape and feel free comes, he is already in bondage.

By the age of twenty he will be married, have his own children, his own job, his own responsibilities - he cannot become a hippie; he cannot go to Kabul, to Kulu Manali, to Kathmandu, to Poona, to Goa. He cannot escape anywhere. The whole route every young person has to travel, he cannot - he has too many responsibilities. He has to follow his father, step by step, because his father is not only his father but his teacher too. He is teaching him his profession.

That's why in old cultures, in old civilizations - and they are still in existence - the older person is respected, because there is no way for the younger person to know more than the older person.

The only way to know is experience, and experience comes with age. You are respectful to the person who has more experience. The oldest person becomes the wise man because he has lived his whole life, and life has not been changing for centuries, it is just going on the same. So the wise man can suggest things to you which younger people cannot know; they have to be respectful.

It is in the contemporary world that a tremendous revolution has happened. It has created a new phenomenon - the younger generation. Because of the schools, colleges, and universities, these people have no responsibilities. The idea of child marriages is condemned, so they are not married.

They don't have children. They don't have any jobs. Their parents have all the responsibility for their education. So up to the age of twenty-five they are completely without responsibilities.

And this is the time when the mind is the most romantic, because this is the time - between fourteen to twenty-five - that they are most sexual. Their sexual energy makes them romantic, and their sexual energy makes them great idealists. Somebody becomes an anarchist, somebody becomes a communist, somebody starts thinking about utopias - how the world should be. Moreover, at the age of twenty-five, when they come home from the university, they cannot accept that the old people know more than they do.

Now a new dimension of knowing has opened - that is education. The older people may know much through experience, but the younger people have known a hundred times more through education.

Hence, all over the world the respect for the old, for the elders, has declined. It was resting on a certain foundation and that foundation has disappeared.

Now the latest knowledge is known by the younger person. The older person is carrying out-of-date ideas. And ideas are changing so fast, science is progressing so fast, that even professors have started feeling they are no longer respected because whatever they know is almost out of date.

When they graduated from their universities it was the right thing; now twenty years have passed.

In twenty years so much has changed that any intelligent student can beat them - about anything; he just has to go to the university library and look into books which have been published about the subject in these twenty years.

When I was in the university, I had proposed to my vice-chancellor that at least once in a year there should be a debating competition between the teachers and the students.

He said, "What are you saying?"

I said, "When you can have a tennis competition between teachers and students, a volleyball match between students and teachers, what is wrong with my suggestion? In fact those are physical things; this is far closer to the work of a university - an intellectual competition. And it will help the whole university to know how backward their professors are.

"And these professors continually demand that they should be respected. They don't know that in the old times elder people were respected - even professors were respected - but the reason for it has disappeared. It is good to make it clear to them that they can be respected only if they can remain ahead of the students."

He said, "You seem logical about it, but it is a dangerous thing. If some student wins the trophy and the professors lose, whatever respect is left will also disappear!"

I said, "It should disappear. They will have to learn. You will have to create new methods, refresher courses for the teachers. When students are on holidays for two months in the summer, the professors should go for a refresher course so they are not behind the students. They should remain ahead. Only then they can have respect; otherwise they cannot have respect."

And why are these young people so rebellious? They are really in search of their true identity.

Nobody has told them who they are. And they are doing all kinds of strange things... but it is on the way to finding themselves. They are being violent because they are feeling angry against the older generation, against their parents, against their teachers, and their anger turns into violence.

You have created a new generation, the younger generation, but you have not been able to provide something nourishing to them.

The younger generation is feeling very empty, and it has no responsibility, so it is trying to escape - from one thing to another thing, trying all kinds of things: drugs, yoga, anything that accidentally they come by, hoping "perhaps this is the thing for me." But there is no guidance, and the gap goes on becoming bigger. Parents and children are almost no longer on speaking terms, because children think these old people know nothing, and the old people think that these children are just a nuisance.

And the gap will be growing bigger and bigger every day, because science is finding means to lengthen your life. If your life is lengthened, if people start living one hundred years, one hundred and twenty years, then the only way will be to give to the younger generation even more years, so that everybody can become a Ph.D., everybody can have a D.Litt., a D.Sc., and we can create more education to fill their lives. Perhaps at the age of thirty-five they will be released from the university; otherwise what will they do?

The older people are experienced in their work and they are doing their work. But a person who has been completely without any responsibility up to the age of thirty-five will create a totally different kind of structure. He won't listen to anybody, and he will not have any identity of his own.

The situation can be changed into a very beautiful world. For example, I have been teaching in the university but no student has felt any generation gap between me and him, on any count. It was not only a question of knowledge...

The first day I entered my class the girls were sitting on one side and the boys were sitting on the other side, leaving six rows of benches in between. I said, "I cannot tolerate this. What nonsense is this? Am I going to talk to these benches? You just get up and be mixed, and sit in front of me."

"But," they said, "every professor says that girls should sit separately and boys should sit separately."

I said, "That is their problem, not mine. I don't like the girls sitting that far away from the boys, and the boys throwing small notes - ?I love you' - and the girls returning answers. I don't like this. Just be close, and whatever you want to say, say into each other's ears. There is no problem. This is the time to love, and you are wasting it in throwing paper notes. When you are going to love?"

I mixed them. They looked at each other with a great suspicion. They were still sitting in such a way that nobody touches anybody. I said, "This won't do. Sit relaxedly. Touching a girl or touching a boy is not a sin. It is a cold day and you will feel warmer. Be warmer!"

They said, "My God! If the vice-chancellor comes to know, they are going to throw this professor out!"

They loved me all the years I was in the university. And other professors were asking, "What is your secret? You have only ten students, but at least two hundred attend your class who are not your students. They are dropping out of their classes and coming to listen to you. What is your secret?"

I said, "There is no secret. I simply don't allow any gap between me and them. I am always ahead of them; they cannot be ahead of me."

I had told them, "Anybody who wants to go out of the class should go out; there is no need to ask me, because if you want to go out who am I to prevent you or to permit you? You simply go out - just don't disturb anybody. If you want to come in in the middle of the lecture, simply come in and silently sit somewhere. No need to ask, because that disturbs. Your coming and going does not disturb me."

But nobody was coming and going. The class was full before I came and I had made it clear to them that nobody stands when I come into the class. That was a routine: students should stand up to show their respect. I said, "That is absolutely unnecessary. No exercise of standing up and sitting down can make you respectful towards me. So just remain sitting."

The simple thing that was needed was there should be no gap in any way. I had told them, "Remember, if I don't come, wait for me for five minutes and then disperse silently. That means I am not coming. And this will be often, because I am out of town and I am without leave. The university cannot grant me so much leave. I will complete your courses, so don't be worried about it. Just wait five minutes for me and then leave the class silently.

"And if you don't want to come, I will wait five minutes for you, and then I will leave. Neither will I ask you why you don't want to come today, nor have you to ask me why I have not come. This is an agreement."

And for nine years continuously I was traveling all over the country, but I was supposed to be teaching in the university. Not a single student reported that I was outside the city and I had not taken any leave from the university. They all protected me because I was protective to them. I never took their attendance. I simply marked them present every day - and that too, not every day, but by the end of the month when the register would go to the office, I would just list everybody as present.

And almost everybody was present, unless there was something urgent - somebody was sick, or somebody had an accident; that was another matter. We had such an affinity that the whole lot of professors were jealous, because they were continuously in a fighting state with the students; the students were striking and fighting and fasting, and all kinds of things were going on, but not in my class. Because if they had told me, "We want to strike," I would have asked, "How many days? - so I can have a trip, because you will be on strike so I am free."

The new generation is really in a difficult situation; it cannot adjust with the old. It knows much more than the older generation. It knows that those old people are just senile, but it does not know where to go from here. What to do to find yourself? In the past nobody had that trouble. The goldsmith's son would become a goldsmith; it was destined. The carpenter's son would become a carpenter.

From such a young age he would start helping his father by bringing instruments, tools, and by and by he would become an apprentice to his own father. Finally he would replace his father. There was no time left as a gap.

And what a gap! A gap of at least twenty years in which you don't know who you are, where you are going, what you are doing, why you are doing it - all questions, so people are trying to escape.

Every place they reach, they find this is not for them.

It is natural. You are looking for your identity. You are looking for a group of people who feel like you, whose hearts beat like you. You are missing a guide which the older generations never missed.

Their fathers, their grandfathers were their guides. They found them ready-made in the home. There was no need to go anywhere.

The new generation cannot accept them because it knows much more than they know. It wants someone who knows more - not only knows more, but is more - who has more being.

That's why, looking into my eyes you feel that the fever of escaping from everywhere has disappeared.

We need more and more people who can give this sense to hundreds of young people, that they have found a guide, a friend whom they can trust, who can become their hope.

And that's my idea of what we will be opening in different countries. First I have to make the model of the mystery schools in one place. And we will be opening them all over the world, so the young people who have no guidance and fall into the hands of exploiters, fools, all kinds of con men... this can be stopped. These mystery schools can fill the gap - the generation gap. They can create respect for your parents and they can create the art of bringing up your own children when the time comes. And they can give you an experience of your own being.

This is a great necessity. If it doesn't happen, then the younger generation is going to be terrorist, or all kinds of things they will do - Hare Krishna movement, which is simply foolish, Witnesses of Jehovah... but they will be caught somewhere. If they cannot find the right place they are bound to be caught somewhere.

They used to become hippies; now that has gone out of fashion. Now there are punks, skinheads, and all kinds of stupids! - but really they are in a vacuum, and they want a certain identity. So any will do, and they will do all kinds of acts which are destructive for no reason at all, for the simple reason that they are doing something - something of great importance.

The mystery schools can manage all these people slowly slowly.

Thousands of hippies came to the Poona ashram - and changed. They had not come to change, they were just on their route towards Goa. And somebody told them that just in the middle is Poona - nothing to lose, just a one or two day visit. But they never left Poona. And nobody told them to change, just the whole atmosphere... and they dropped their dirty habits. They looked more human and smart and soon there was no way to find out who had come from the hippie lot and who had come from the straight people. There was no way, they were all alike.

All these people can be absorbed in the mystery schools. We just have to create magnets for every mystery school, which is not a difficult job.

Question 3:

The watcher cannot do anything except watch. If it is amused, it has lost its watching. There may be amusement but that will be part of the mind. The watcher will watch it, too.

The watcher cannot do anything else but be a watcher. The moment it does anything else, the watcher slips back and it is the mind.

The watcher is not amused.

And there is nothing in the world for the watcher to be amused about. The world is so miserable that if the watcher could weep and shed tears that may have been the right thing for it to do, but it has no eyes, no tear glands.

So remember it: even when you are feeling blissful, it is not the watcher who becomes blissful.

The watcher is still watching the blissfulness. Whatever happens, the watcher simply reflects it.

That's why, ultimately, when everything has gone, only the watcher remains. Its experience can be compared with no experience of your mind. Blissfulness, ecstasy, benediction - they are all below it; it is always behind them. It is simply the watching.

There is one temple in India. In that temple there is no statue. Just on a marble rock there are two eyes. They signify the watcher. No expression in those eyes.

That's why the ultimate experience cannot be expressed, because it is only a mirror which reflects nothing.

So the watcher is not amused. He is the mind which can be amused. The watcher is still watching it.