The Birth of the New

The first question:

Question 1:

Growth is painful because you have been avoiding a thousand and one pains in your life. By avoiding you cannot destroy them - they go on accumulating. You go on swallowing your pains; they remain in your system. That's why growth is painful - when you start growing, when you decide to grow, you have to face all the pains that you have repressed. You cannot just bypass them.

You have been brought up in a wrong way. Unfortunately, until now, not a single society has existed on the earth which has not been repressive of pain. All societies depend on repression. Two things they repress: one is pain, another is pleasure. And they repress pleasure also because of pain. Their reasoning is that if you are not too happy you will never become too unhappy; if joy is destroyed you will never be deep in pain. To avoid pain they avoid pleasure. To avoid death they avoid life.

And the logic has something in it. Both grow together - if you want to have a life of ecstasy you will have to accept many agonies. If you want the peaks of the Himalayas then you will also have the valleys. But nothing is wrong with the valleys; your approach just has to be different. You can enjoy both - the peak is beautiful, so is the valley. And there are moments when one should enjoy the peak and there are moments when one should relax in the valley.

The peak is sunlit, it is in a dialogue with the sky. The valley is dark, but whenever you want to relax you have to move into the darkness of the valley. If you want to have peaks you will need to grow roots into the valley - the deeper your roots go, the higher your tree will grow. The tree cannot grow without roots and the roots have to move deep into the soil.

Pain and pleasure are intrinsic parts of life. People are so much afraid of pain that they repress pain, they avoid any situation that brings pain, they go on dodging pain. And finally they stumble upon the fact that if you really want to avoid pain you will have to avoid pleasure. That's why your monks avoid pleasure they are afraid of pleasure. In fact they are simply avoiding all possibilities of pain. They know that if you avoid pleasure then naturally great pain is not possible; it comes only as a shadow of pleasure. Then you walk on the plain ground - you never move on the peaks and you never fall into the valleys. But then you are living dead, then you are not alive.

Life exists between this polarity. This tension between pain and pleasure makes you capable of creating great music; music exists only in this tension. Destroy the polarity and you will be dull, you will be stale, you will be dusty - you won't have any meaning and you will never know what splendor is. You will have missed life.

The man who wants to know life and live life has to accept and embrace death. They come together, they are two aspects of a single phenomenon.

That's why growth is painful. You have to go into all those pains that you have been avoiding. It hurts. You have to go through all those wounds that somehow you have managed not to look at. But the deeper you go into pain, the deeper is your capacity to go into pleasure. If you can go into pain to the uttermost limit, you will be able to touch heaven.

I have heard: A man came to a Zen master and asked 'How shall we avoid heat and cold?'

Metaphorically, he is asking 'How should we avoid pleasure and pain?' That is the Zen way of talking about pleasure and pain: heat and cold. 'How shall we avoid heat and cold?'

The master answered 'Be hot, be cold.'

To be free of pain the pain has to be accepted, inevitably and naturally. Pain is pain - a simple painful fact. Suffering however is only and always the refusal of pain, the claim that life should not be painful. It is the rejection of a fact, the denial of life and of the nature of things. Death is the mind that minds dying. Where there is no fear of death, who is there to die?

Man is unique among creatures in his knowledge of death and in his laughter. Wonderfully then, he can even make of death a new thing: he can die laughing. It is only man who knows laughter; no other animal laughs. It is only man who knows death; no other animal knows death - animals simply die, they are not conscious of the phenomenon of death.

Man is aware of two things which no animal is: one is laughter, another is death. Then a new synthesis is possible. It is only man who can die laughing - he can join the consciousness of death and the capacity to laugh. And if you can die laughing, only then will you give a valid proof that you must have lived laughing. Death is the final statement of your whole life - the conclusion, the concluding remark. How you have lived will be shown by your death, how you die. Can you die laughing? Then you were a grown-up person. If you die crying, weeping, clinging, then you were a child. You were not grown-up, you were immature. If you die crying, weeping, clinging to life, that simply shows you have been avoiding death and you have been avoiding all pains, all kinds of pains.

Growth is facing the reality, encountering the fact, whatsoever it is. And let me repeat: Pain is simply pain; there is no suffering in it. Suffering comes from your desire that the pain should not be there, that there is something wrong in pain. Watch, witness, and you will be surprised. You have a headache: the pain is there but suffering is not there. Suffering is a secondary phenomenon, pain is primary. The headache is there, the pain is there; it is simply a fact. There is no judgment about it - you don't call it good or bad, you don't give it any value; it is just a fact.

The rose is a fact, so is the thorn. The day is a fact, so is the night. The head is a fact, so is the headache. You simply take note of it.

Buddha taught his disciples that when you have a headache simply say twice 'Headache, headache.'

Take note. But don't evaluate, don't say 'Why? Why has this headache happened to me? It should not happen to me.' The moment you say 'It should not' you bring suffering in. Now suffering is created by you, not by the headache. Suffering is your antagonistic interpretation, suffering is your denial of the fact.

And the moment you say 'It should not be' you have started avoiding it, you have started turning yourself away from it. You would like to be occupied in something so that you can forget it. You turn the radio or the tell on or you go to the club or you start reading or you go and start working in the garden - you divert yourself, you distract yourself. Now that pain has not been witnessed; you have simply distracted yourself. That pain will be absorbed by the system. Let this key be very deeply understood: If you can witness your headache without taking any antagonistic attitude, without avoiding it, without escaping from it; if you can just be there, meditatively there - 'Headache, headache' - if you can just simply see it, the headache will go in its time. I am not saying that it will go miraculously, that just by your seeing it will go. It will go in its time. But it will not be absorbed by your system, it will not poison your system. It will be there, you will take note of it, and it will be gone. It will be released.

When you witness a certain thing in yourself it cannot enter into your system. It always enters when you avoid it, when you escape from it. When you become absent then it enters into your system.

Only when you are absent can a pain become part of your being - if you are present your very presence prevents it from becoming part of your being.

And if you can go on seeing your pains you will not be accumulating them. You have not teen taught the right clue, so you go on avoiding. Then you accumulate so much pain, you are afraid to face it, you are afraid to accept it. Growth becomes painful - it is because of wrong conditioning. Otherwise growth is not painful, growth is utterly pleasant.

When the tree grows and becomes bigger do you think there is pain? There is no pain. Even when a child is born, if the mother accepts it there will be no pain. But the mother rejects it; the mother is afraid. She becomes tense, she tries to hold the child inside - which is not possible. The child is ready to go out into the world, the child is ready to leave the mother. He is ripe, the womb cannot contain him any more. If the womb contains him any more the mother will die and the child will die.

But the mother is afraid. She has heard that it is very painful to give birth to a child - birth pangs, birth pain - she is afraid. And out of fear she becomes tense and closed.

Otherwise - in primitive societies those tribes still exist - childbirth is so simple, with no pain at all. On the contrary, you will be surprised, the greatest ecstasy happens to the woman in childbirth - not pain, not agony at all, but the greatest ecstasy. No sexual orgasm is so satisfying and so tremendous as the orgasm that happens to the woman when she gives birth to the child naturally.

The whole sexual mechanism of the woman pulsates as it cannot pulsate in any lovemaking.

The child is coming from the deepest core of the woman. No man can ever penetrate a woman to that core. And the pulsation arises from the inside. The pulsation is a must - that pulsation will come like waves, great tidal waves of joy. Only that will help the child to come out, only that will help the passage to open for the child. So there will be great pulsation and the whole sexual being of the woman will have tremendous joy.

But what actually has happened to humanity is just the opposite: the woman comes to feel the greatest agony of her life. And this is a mind creation, this is wrong upbringing. The birth can be natural if you accept it. And so it is with your birth. Growth means you are being born every day.

Birth does not end the day you were born - on that day it simply starts; it is only a beginning. The day you left the womb of your mother you were not born, you STARTED being born; that was just the beginning. And a man goes on being born till he dies. It is not that you are born in a single moment. Your birth process continues for seventy, eighty, ninety years, however long you live. It is a continuum.

And every day you will feel joy - growing new leaves, new foliage, new flowers, new branches, rising higher and higher and touching new altitudes. You will be getting deeper, higher, you will be reaching to peaks. Growth will not be painful. But growth IS painful - it is because of you, your wrong conditioning. You have been taught not to grow; you have been taught to remain static, you have been taught to cling to the familiar and the known. That's why each time the known disappears from your hands you start crying. A toy has been broken, a pacifier has been taken away.

Just the other day, one man wrote to me: 'You spoke against transcendental meditation - and I was planning to go to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to learn levitation. Now I cannot take a jump into you, otherwise I will never be able to levitate.'

He was very hurt. A pacifier has been taken away. TM is a pacifier, a pseudo-tit: you can go on sucking it and it keeps you pacified. He was very hurt that I called TM mantra 'a lullaby'

I can change my statement: let us call each lullaby a TM mantra, if it satisfies you. And what are you going to do? Even if you learn levitation, how is it going to help your growth? In the first place, don't be foolish, don't be deceived. In the second place, for the argument's sake if it is accepted that you have learnt levitating, that you can rise four feet high above the earth, what are you going to do?

Why bother? You can sit in a chair four feet high! and enjoy it! Even if you are four feet high without the chair, how does it help spiritual growth? Even if you can fly like a crow...

Chetna has asked me 'Osho, do you come sometimes in the form of a crow flying?' She must be reading Carlos Castaneda. Now, don't be victims of spiritual fiction. But your mind feels very good with these things, you start feeling something is happening - you can levitate, you can walk on water, you can fly like a crow. But you will be YOU! The same stupid person. Nothing will have changed. You won't become more intelligent by flying like a crow - otherwise all crows would have been enlightened. And by levitation you will not become a Buddha.

Do the real thing; don't go after toys. People go on getting involved with toys their whole life.

A man came to Ramakrishna, and he said 'I can walk on the Ganges.' Ramakrishna asked seriously 'How long did it take for you to walk on the Ganges?' The man said 'Eighteen years. I had to work hard with a Himalayan master in Tibet.' Ramakrishna said 'But it puzzles me - because whenever I want to go, just one paisa to the ferry man and he takes me to the. other side. Eighteen years?

Worth one paisa! It puzzles me - are you stupid or mad or something?'

Remember, only one thing is going to help you: awareness - nothing else. Growth will remain painful if you don't accept life in all its ups and downs. The summer has to be accepted and the winter too.

This is what I call meditation. Meditation is when you are emptied of all that is old and told and done to death. Then you see. Or rather, then there is seeing: the birth of the new. But you will have to go through many pains, many agonies. It is because you have lived in a certain society, in a certain culture - Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian, Indian, German, Japanese. These are different ways of avoiding pain, and nothing else. You have been part of a culture, that's why growth is painful - because culture tries to make you not grow; it wants you to remain juvenile. It does not allow you to move psychologically as you move physiologically.

In the First World War and then again in the Second World War, psychologists became aware of a very strange fact - that man's average mental age is not more than twelve or thirteen. Even the man who is seventy, his mental age is somewhere between ten and thirteen. What does it mean? It simply means he stopped growing at ten; the body continued but the mind stopped.

No society allows grown-up minds. Why? Because grown-up minds are dangerous for the social structure; they are rebellious. They are dangerous for the social structure because they will see all the kinds of stupidities that go on in the name of culture, society, nation. Now see: the earth is one, and man still remains divided. All the problems of humanity can be solved if nations disappear. There is no problem, actually there is no problem; the basic problem is the boundaries of the nations. Now the technology is there which can feed all the people of the world, there is no need for any starvation.

But that is not possible, because those boundaries won't allow it.

Once nations disappear, the problems can be solved. But if the problems can be solved, then where will the politician be? He is there only to solve your problems. He exists there and becomes very important because you have problems - because there is starvation and there is war and there is this and that. If all these problems can be solved... and they can be solved now by science. In fact politics is outdated. There is no need for any politics any more; science has come of age and can solve all the problems. But then the politicians will be gone - they will be gone with the problems.

So they go on talking about how to solve the problems and they go on creating situations so that problems are not to be solved. These nations, their boundaries, prevent it.

A grown-up person will be able to see all this nonsense - a grown-up person will be able to see it through and through. A grown-up person cannot be reduced to a slave.

Now in Soviet Russia, people have to be forced to remain juvenile, immature. Otherwise they would throw out this foolish kind of government that exists there, they would throw out this dictatorial totalitarian regime - they would not be able to tolerate it for a single moment if they were grown-ups.

Now the Soviet society has to force them to remain ungrown-up - dependent, that's what I mean by 'ungrown-up'. Remain dependent.

There is not a single society which is communist, neither Russia nor China; no society which is socialist - because the basic element of socialism is missing there: the freedom to grow. In fact, it will look paradoxical, but the capitalist countries are more socialistic than the communist countries. If socialism exists anywhere else in little bits it is in the capitalistic world, not in the so called communistic or socialistic countries - because the basic ingredient of socialism is that each individual has a birthright to growl to be himself. You cannot be your-self in a communist world.

The communist society can exist only if you are a juvenile, if you are kept pressed down into your childhood and you remain dependent.

That's why a country becomes 'the mother country', or it even foolishly becomes a fatherland or a motherland. Why mother and father? What do countries have to do with mother and father? There is a certain logic in it. No father wants his son to be really grown-up, because if the son is really grown-up then he will go on his own. No mother wants her daughter to be really grown-up; if she is really grown-up she is gone. Every mother tries unconsciously to keep the daughter juvenile, dependent. Then she will always look up towards the mother; whenever she is in a difficulty she will search for the mother.

In India, it happens - a person may be sixty years of age and may not feel independent, because his father is still alive. In India a man becomes grown-up only when the father dies. This is ugly. You have to wait for that - when your father dies then you will be able to be on your own. But a man who has lived for sixty years as a dependent, how can he become independent suddenly when the father dies? He will only pretend; deep down he will remain dependent.

The family depends on dependence, the society depends on dependence - they all depend on your non-growing selves, they all try to keep you stuck somewhere. That's why there is pain. The pain is not because of growth but because your culture, your society, has a great investment in you and it does not allow you to grow.

Take hold of your being. Face your pains and throw off all kinds of bond ages - because only by being free of all bond ages will you be able to sing your song and dance your dance. And that's what prayer is. If you have been able to sing the song that you brought in your heart, you are fulfilled.

Then you are a tree which has bloomed.

IN SPRING, HUNDREDS OF FLOWERS; IN AUTUMN, A HARVEST MOON.

IN SUMMER, A REFRESHING BREEZE; IN WINTER, SNOW.

IF USELESS THINGS DO NOT HANG IN YOUR MIND, ANY SEASON IS A GOOD SEASON.

It is a Zen saying. 'If useless things don't hang in your mind...' Growth is painful because you are carrying so many useless things in your mind. You should have dropped them long before. But you have not been taught to drop anything, you have only been taught to hold everything - meaningful, meaningless. Because you are carrying so many hangups, hence the growth is difficult. Otherwise growth will be so smooth, just like a bud opens into a flower.

The second question:

Question 2:

THAT'S what I was saying just now. You have been programmed in such a way that you cannot live joyously. All joy has been contaminated, all joy has been poisoned, all joy has been condemned.

And you have heard it repeated so many times - from the priest, from the parent, from the teachers, from everybody - that it has he come a very very ingrained Idea in you that there is something wrong in being joyous.

Go back, remember your childhood days. Whenever you were happy somebody was bound to come across and say 'What are you doing? Why are you shouting? Why are you dancing? Daddy is reading his newspaper, it will be disturbed.' Daddy and his foolish newspaper, and suddenly your joy is crippled. You wanted to run in the sun and it was not allowed; you were forced to sit in the room in a dark corner. You wanted to climb the trees but that silly homework was there and it had to be done. You wanted to talk to the birds and play with the dogs and the children and you were forced to sit in a prison-like school for six hours, seven hours...

You don't see what you are doing to your children, you don't see what has been done to you. Small children are being forced to become prisoners; their life starts being crippled from there. They are not allowed to move - and they are bubbling energies. They would like to sing, they would like to burst into songs and dance and they would like to climb trees and mountains and they would like to swim in the rivers and the oceans. But that dance is not allowed, that celebration is not allowed.

What is allowed is unnatural and what is not allowed is natural.

We have to find a human kind of education in the world; the education that exists is very inhuman.

We have to find ways so that children can play in the sun and still learn a little arithmetic. That can be done - once we know that arithmetic is not so important as playing in the sun, once that thing has been decided, then we can find ways. A little arithmetic can be taught, and a little is needed.

Everybody is not going to become an Albert Einstein. And those who are going to become Albert Einsteins, they won't bother playing in the sun - their joy is arithmetic, that is their poetry. Then it is different, then it is totally different; then the growth is not hindered and guilt is not created.

I myself was never interested in my childhood in playing any games, but nobody was preventing me. I was more interested in great poetry, I was more interested in great philosophy, I was more interested in religion - that was my game, that was my play. That is another thing. If somebody enjoys poetry let him enjoy poetry, and if somebody enjoys working in a carpenter's workshop let him enjoy that - each according to his need.

And there should be no evaluation as to who is high and who is low. The carpenter is not low and the mathematician is not high; the mathematician is enjoying his thing an;l the carpenter is enjoying his thing. If anything has to be said, this is the thing - that the joyous person is right and the sad person is wrong.

So whatsoever brings joy to your life is virtue. But just the opposite has been taught to you:

Whatsoever brings joy to you is a sin, and whatsoever makes you miserable is virtue. The priest depends on it, the church depends on it; all kinds of exploitations are possible. Once a man has been distracted from his being, his joy, then all kinds of exploitations are possible.

You ask: I AM ALWAYS FEELING GUILTY AS IF I HAVE COMMITTED GREAT CRIMES.

You have not committed, nobody has committed great crimes. All crimes are small. Yes, the so- called great crimes are also small; great crimes don't exist. Man cannot do great things - neither great virtues nor great crimes. All that man can do is small. Man is small and limited. Great things can be done only by God - you forget about it. All that you can do with your small life is to have a little joy, to have a little light, to have a little laughter.

The priests, the popes, the so-called saints, are all against you. And if you look deep down into their beings you will be surprised: they are the same kind of people as you are. If they are courageous enough to confess you will be surprised: they are as human as you are. Their dreams are as much full of sexual fantasy as your dreams are - in fact more so, because they are more repressive.

Their dreams are absolutely sexual; you may have non-sexual dreams too, but priests cannot have anything else. When you fast, you have to feast in your dreams - the body wants it.

I have heard:

Two brothers died at the same time and arrived at the Pearly Gates together, where they were interviewed by Saint Peter. He said to the first brother 'Have you been good during your life on earth?'

And he replied 'Oh yes, Your Saintliness. I have been honest, sober and I industrious and I have never messed around with women.'

'Good lad' said Saint Peter and gave him a beautiful gleaming white Rolls Royce. 'There is your reward for being a good boy.' Then he said to the other brother 'And what about you?'

He said 'Well, I have always been very different from my brother. I have been crooked, drunk, idle, and a devil with the women.'

'Oh well' said Saint Peter 'boys will be boys. And at least you have owned up to it. You can have this, then.' And he gave him the keys to a Mini Minor.

The two brothers were about to get in their cars when the one who had been naughty started roaring with laughter. The other one said 'What's so funny, then?'

He said 'I have just seen the vicar riding a bike.'

Your so-called saints ;end priests, they are made of the same clay as you are. And I am not saying that there are not people who have transcended - there are. But those people are the people who have gone through the world deeply, who have suffer.l all its agonies and who have enjoyed all its pleasures. Those who have been totally in their living - they transcend. Not through repression but through experience, transcendence comes.

There have been people like Buddha and Christ, Kabir and Krishna - but these are the people who have not repressed. These are the people who have gone as deeply as possible into life, who have understood all its ways, who have seen all its possibilities. And seeing it, understanding it, becoming aware of it, they have gone beyond it. There comes a tranquility, a stillness, a silence, a purity, an innocence - but that is not cultivated. Nobody can cultivate innocence. If you cultivate innocence it will not be innocence, it will be something plastic, synthetic. It will be a cultivated innocence; it will not be true, it will not be authentic.

You cannot cultivate saintliness. It comes; it is a fragrance. When you live your life utterly involved, committed, it comes, it certainly comes. One day suddenly you see all has passed - days and nights, summers and winters, all has passed. You have looked all around, you have seen everything, you have understood all: in that understanding is transcendence. That understanding is transcendence.

Otherwise you can go on repressing. And repression is out of fear, not out of understanding. You are afraid of hell, you are afraid of being punished. You are afraid of greater sufferings, so you avoid pleasure. Here you suffer, and there you will also suffer. One who suffers in this world will suffer in the other too, because the other world arises out of this world. The other world is a continuity with this world - if you suffer in life you will suffer after death too. In fact you will have become so skillful in suffering that even if you go to heaven you will find some ways and means to suffer. You may stand on your head and do sirshasan there.

Nobody can prevent you from standing on your head, you can do it anywhere. You will find ways and means to torture yourself again. One becomes habituated if it becomes your style of life - and it becomes so.

My approach is Dionysian, I am a disciple of Dionysius: Live and love life. Enjoy this occasion as deeply as possible, as totally as possible, and out of this living experience you will grow. A maturity will come to you; you will ripen and you will carry the fragrance with you. That fragrance is heaven.

Nobody goes to heaven - those who go to heaven, they have to carry their heaven in their heart.

Nobody goes to hell - those who go to hell, they have to carry their hell in their heart.

I have heard:

A man died - a very rich man, a very politically powerful man, very cruel, very ambitious. The whole town went to give him the final send-off. People were feeling really happy that the calamity was gone, that this plague was gone - the procession was big. And when the procession was moving slowly towards the cemetery a truck full of fuel, wood, coal, by accident somehow got in the middle of the procession and started following; it was also moving in the same direction - it started following the dead man's body.

People started laughing. Somebody said 'This is too much. We know that he is going to hell, but we never knew that you have to carry your fuel too!'

But that's how it happens; you have to carry your fuel too. The hell type is one who lives constantly in misery, in guilt, in the fear of punishment. Whatsoever you fear will happen - because when you fear, you think about it constantly: you will make it happen.

Love life, don't be afraid. You belong to this universe, this is your home; you are not outsiders here. Relax - don't feel alien and don't be afraid. Forget that old God of the Old Testament. That God has died - that God died with the people who wrote the Old Testament; that form of God has disappeared. If you watch, observe, the growth of the Bible you will be surprised. First, the God is very cruel; the God of Abraham and Moses is very cruel. That is man's first glimpse of God - very crude, primitive. God says 'I am a jealous God, I am very revengeful. If you don't obey me you will suffer in hell.'

A God who is revengeful? God - and revengeful? That has nothing to do with God. That is the idea of the people who were creating it; that shows something about the people who created it.

They must have been revengeful people, they must have been angry aggressive people. That is a primitive concept.

Then, slowly slowly, God is no longer so revengeful. He becomes a just God, the God of justice - not revengeful but just. And by the time God reaches Jesus He becomes love - not even just, but loving.

In the Bible, God passes through three stages between the Old and the New Testament. Revengeful, violent, first. Then just. And then love, loving.

In the future, a new vision of God has to penetrate human consciousness: God as non-personal, God as no person. The world is full of godliness, but there is no God. This is the new concept I bring to you: The world is full of godliness, from rocks to the stars, but there is no personal God.

There is nobody to punish you - the idea of punishment is an invention of the priests to exploit you, to make you afraid. Remember, this is the mechanism: if you want to exploit somebody make him afraid. Make him tremble, let fear enter his soul, and he will never be a free man. Once fear enters into your soul you cannot be a free man. Then you are constantly afraid to do that which you want to do but for which there is punishment. And you go on doing that which you never wanted to do, just in order to get some rewards.

I have heard; Six friends went on a hunting trip. One of them would have to do all the cooking. The appointed cook would stay in the cabin, handle all the chores, and of course be excluded from the day's fun.

The arrangement would hold until someone complained about his cooking. Then the complainant would be obliged to become the cook.

There was great excitement when lots were drawn to determine just who would be saddled with the disagreeable task. Joe became the unfortunate one.

For two days, Joe fretted and sweated. On the third day he thought he'd go berserk. The other five were frolicking, shooting and having fun, and he was shut up in the hot stuffy room of the little cabin.

Joe decided that a desperate situation demanded a desperate remedy. So he flung a turd into the soup and stirred it till it was dissolved.

That night he served brown onion soup. Sam took a spoonful. As he put it to his lips and tasted the noxious liquid he blurted out 'My God! This tastes like shit!' Then, suddenly realizing what the penalty would be, he added 'Tastes just like shit - but I like it!'

That's what is happening to you. The fear of hell... So it tastes just like suit but you go on saying 'I like it.'

Be courageous and drop all this nonsense. There is no hell and there is no heaven; you create your heaven and you create your hell. There is nobody anywhere to punish you or reward you. Forget those childish ideas of God - that if you are good Daddy will come with toys, and if you are bad then you will have to miss your lunch or your dinner and you will be locked into the bathroom or something will happen. There is nobody. You are free.

But I am not saying that you cannot create hell for yourself - you can. The fundamental has to be understood; whether you want to create heaven or hell, the fundamental is the same.

Love, enjoy, celebrate, and you will be creating heaven - because whatsoever you are, if you are happy, if you are joyous, you share your happiness and your joy. You can share only that which you are - and when you share it, it rebounds on you. That is the law. Life reflects and echoes whatsoever you throw at life - it comes back, a thousandfold it comes back. Smile, and the whole existence smiles at you. Shout and abuse, and the whole existence shouts and abuses you. And you are the root cause; you create the whole process.

It is not that the existence is interested in shouting and abusing you. The existence is neutral; it simply reflects, it is a mirror. You make an ugly face, and you see an ugly face in the mirror. And you smile, and the mirror smiles.

And remember, the rewards and punishments don't come from the outside; you create them. You are the occasion for them, you are the soil. You are free - but by freedom I don't mean that you are irresponsible. In fact, in freedom you become utterly responsible - because you are responsible for yourself; nobody else is. No god is responsible for you, you are responsible. If you are miserable, remember, you must be creating it. Find out how. And you will find the reasons - try to search for the reasons and you will find them. If you are happy, then too, look within for why you are happy.

And go on creating those situations more and more: you will become more and more happy.

The third question:

Question 3:

There are many people here who go on listening to inner voices. These inner voices are just crap.

These are just fragments of your mind; they have no value at all. And sometimes you may think that you are listening to some inner guide or you are listening to some master from the beyond - Master K H, or some spirit, some Tibetan spirit - and you can go on imagining these things. And you will be simply be fooling yourself.

These are all your fragments. And if you go on following them you will go crazy - because one part will pull you to the north, another part to the south. You will start falling apart. Remember, this is neurosis - you have to learn to watch all these voices. Don't trust any. Only trust silence. Don't trust any voice, because all voices are from the mind. And you don't have one mind, you have many. That fallacy persists - we think we have only one mind. That is wrong.

You have many minds. In the morning, one mind is on top. By noon, another mind is on top. By the evening, a third mind - and you have many. Gurdjieff used to say that you have many selves, Mahavira has said that man is polypsychic. You are a crowd! If you go on listening to these voices and following them you will be simply destroying your whole life.

A young man was looking for work. In order to learn what he should do, he decided to meditate until he heard his inner voice. So he sat down and meditated for a very long time until he heard a voice from within. It said 'Be a carpenter.' So the young man took a job in a woodworking shop and on the first day he broke the saw. The second day he cut his hand. And on the third day he got sawdust in his eyes and had to leave.

That night he thought 'There is a lesson to be learned here, for everything that happens to us is for the purpose of learning. Nature is speaking to me, if only I can hear. I shall meditate and it will come to me.'

And while he meditated a new voice within him said 'The lesson is that you must persevere in your tasks.' So the next day the young man returned to the work again and ruined a fine cabinet. The following day he drilled a hole too deeply, hit a water pipe and caused a minor flood. Then he was fired. But he remained cheerful and said to himself 'All of this is for my benefit, it is to teach me some lesson for my own growth. I shall try again to listen and to understand.'

While he meditated another voice spoke from inside of him. It said 'The lesson is that you should not strive against nature. If your work is unfruitful do not work at all, for nature will always provide for you if your heart is open.'

So the young man spent the next day strolling through a pretty forest waiting for providence to supply his needs. As he passed beneath a large tree a branch suddenly broke off and fell on him, knocking him to the ground. He rubbed his bruises for a few minutes, then looked up at the clouds and addressed the sky. 'I don't understand. I have followed the advice of all my inner promptings, yet everything is going wrong.' But the sky made no reply and the young man sighed deeply and thought to himself 'I give up. I don't care what the lesson is. I shall do exactly as I please and I certainly won't listen to any more voices.'

Just then another voice inside of him said 'Aha! That is the lesson.'

You will go crazy. And you are asking me 'What should I do?' You should not do anything according to these voices. You should wait for silence to arise. Watch them - indifferent, aloof, distant. Simply look at them, observe them, without getting identified with any voice. It will take a little time for you to create the distance, because there are voices which are very very satisfying, there are voices which are very gratifying to the ego.

A man was saying to his friends in a teahouse 'Last night I was meditating, and an angel appeared.

And he said "You have been chosen by God to be the new prophet."'

One of the friends asked 'But why you?'

The man said 'I also asked the angel "Why me?" He said "Because you're goddamned gullible."'

Don't believe in any voice. Just remain aloof, just watch. And watching, they will disappear - because if you don't get identified you will not be feeding them and nourishing them. When all the voices have gone, then there is utter silence left. That silence is the voice of God.

Remember, God has no voice except silence. He never says anything. There is nothing to say; there is no verbal communication. But that silence, that utter si-lence, gives you clarity, gives you light, makes you capa-ble of moving rightly. Not that it gives any directions, not that it gives you any maps, not that it supplies you any guides - nothing of the sort. It simply gives you eyes to see your path.

And then you start moving in life with eyes. Ordinarily you are moving blind. A blind man needs guides a blind man needs voices a blind man needs maps. A man who has eyes needs nothing.

God comes to you as silence. God IS silence. Remember it: only trust silence an.l nothing else - otherwise you will get trapped by the mind again and again. And to be trapped by the mind is to be in misery. To be free of the mix(l is to know what bliss is, is to know what benediction is.

The last question:

Question 4:

They can see. They see it but they can't report it. You have to understand. The people who read the newspapers and the magazines are constantly searching for the negative, they are looking for the negative. To them, good news is no news. Only the bad news is news, only the negative has appeal for them. If somebody murders it is news, if somebody rapes it is news.

George Bernard Shaw used to say that when a dog bites a man it is not news, but when a man bites a dog it is news. Something unusual, something that should not be, has to be reported. Only then are people thrilled. People live on negativity. And the consumer decides; because he purchases, his needs have to be fulfilled.

The people who read the newspapers are sexually repressed; they are hankering for something sexual. That is a vicarious satisfaction but they are hankering for it. People are interested in money - their whole interest is in money, money is their god. So when the newspaper people come here, that is natural; they will only be looking for something negative. And if they can find it... and you can always find it; whatsoever you search for, you will find.

The rosebush has thorns too, and they only look for the thorns. And not only that, they magnify the thorns - because they have to make stories out of it. They simply don't talk about the flower.

Nobody is interested in the flower.

You can see - all your novels, all your stories, all your poetries, all your fiction, all your movies, they have the same theme: Sex and Violence, Sex and Death. These are the two taboos in the world; man has not been able to accept sex and death. And because man has rejected them they take revenge and they come from all sides - they are echoed and reechoed and they go on falling on man. Whatsoever is rejected will come and knock at your doors.

So don't be angry at the press people. They simply serve a certain need of the neurotic masses.

They don't come here to report about meditation - who is interested in meditation? They don't come here to report about inner growth - who is interested in inner growth? They come here to find something that they can report to their readers which the readers will feel is news.

I have heard:

An author who had been well established for a number of years brought a manuscript to his agent.

After a month or so, the agent returned the manuscript to him saying 'Jim, I'm sorry. I hate to tell you this but your stuff is now over the hill. Just too damn old-fashioned. Not enough zip in it. People nowadays only want to read something with sex in it. You gotta dish it out straight, and in large portions.'

'Okay' replied the writer 'I'll try it! See you in a month.'

Five weeks later, the writer came back with a new manuscript. The agent read a few paragraphs, handed it back, and said 'Jim, I'm sorry, but you don't have a chance with a thing like this.'

'What!' cried the author. 'Why, there's six fucks on the first page alone!'

'Yeh, I know' replied the agent. 'But in order to get to those you've gotta read halfway down the page.'

Nobody is patient enough even for that. Who bothers to read half the page? It has to be exactly in the title, otherwise nobody is interested. This simply shows a very very neurotic state of human mind. It has nothing to do with the press people, it has to do with humanity at large. Man's interest is morbid.

There was once another writer who submitted to 'The Readers Digest' a story that was titled 'The Day I Met a Grizzly Bear in the Great North Woods.'

'Good story' said the editors of the magazine 'but the title needs more juice.'

So the writer tried again. This time he titled the story 'How My Life Was Changed the Day I Met a Grizzly Bear in the Great North Woods.' 'You're on the right track' replied the editors. 'Give it another try.'

The exasperated writer then wrote 'How I Found God the Day I Met a Grizzly Bear in the Great North Woods.'

But the editors still were not satisfied and the story remained unpublished until the writer submitted it again a few weeks later under the title 'The Day I Fucked a Grizzly Bear and I Found God in the Great North Woods.'

It simply shows the utterly neurotic state of humanity. Don't be angry with those poor press people - help them to find something negative. Make them happy and make their readers happy.