Taming the Bull

Truth liberates, and nothing else. Everything else creates a bondage, a burden. And truth cannot be found by intellectual effort, because truth is not a theory, it is an experience. To know it you have to live it - and that is where millions of people go wrong. They think that if they can cling to a belief, clinging will help them to find the truth. By and by they settle with the belief, and belief is not truth.

It is a theory about truth: as if somebody has settled just by words, scriptures, doctrines, dogmas; as if a blind man has started believing that light exists, or a hungry man reads a book on cooking, believes this way, that way, but all the time he remains hungry. That is not the way to satisfy hunger.

Truth is a food. One has to digest it, assimilate it; one has to allow it to circulate into one's blood, beat into one's heart. Truth has to be assimilated into your organic unity. Belief is never assimilated, it remains an unrelated phenomenon.

You may be a Hindu, but Hinduism remains just an intellectual concept. You may be a Christian, or a Mohammedan, but they are not organic parts of your being. Deep down, the doubt continues.

I have heard one story:

Titov, the Russian cosmonaut, returned from space and was asked by Nikita Khrushchev privately whether he had seen anyone there. The story goes that he replied, "Yes, I really did see God,"

to which Khrushchev answered: "I know that already, but you know our policy, so please don't tell anybody."

Later Titov was with the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church. The patriarch asked him whether he saw anyone in space. Titov, faithful to his instructions, replied, "No, there was no one."

"I know that already," replied the church leader, "but you know our policy, so please don't tell anybody."

Underneath your beliefs, whatsoever the belief, doubt continues. Doubt is at the center, and belief is on the periphery. So your life is basically determined by your doubt, not by your belief. You may be a communist, and still somewhere deep down the doubt continues. You may be a Catholic, a Christian, a theist, but deep down the doubt continues.

I have looked into so many people belonging to different beliefs, sects, but deep down - the same doubt. And the doubt is neither Hindu nor Christian nor Mohammedan. And the doubt is neither communist nor anti-communist. Doubt is pure - simply doubt. For this pure doubt you will need pure trust.

This pure doubt which has no adjective to it - Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan - cannot be destroyed by Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan concepts, beliefs, theories, philosophies. What to do about this doubt?

A real seeker is not searching for any belief to console himself. Rather, he is trying to find a deeper center in himself which goes beyond doubt. This has to be understood. You have to go deep in your own being to such a point of aliveness where doubt is left behind on the periphery. Rather than doing that, people go on clinging to beliefs on the periphery, and doubt remains deep down. Just the reverse has to be the case.

Go deeper into your being. Don't be worried about the doubt, bypass it. Let it be there! Don't try to hide yourself in a belief. Don't be an ostrich. Face the doubt - and go beyond it. Go deeper than the doubt. Then comes a moment in your being... because at the deepest core, at the very center, only life is. Once you have touched that deep core within yourself, the doubt is just a faraway peripheral thing. It can be dropped very easily.

And there is no need to cling to any belief in order to drop it. You simply see the stupidity of it. You simply see the ridiculousness of it. You simply see how the doubt has been destructive to your whole life, how the doubt is continuously eroding your being, how it has been poisonous. Just seeing the fact that doubt has been poisonous, and it has not allowed you to celebrate, a great opportunity is being missed. You simply drop it. It is not that instead of the doubt you cling to a belief.

A real man of trust has no belief - he simply trusts, because he has come to know how beautiful life is. And he has come to know how eternal, timeless, life is. He has come to know that just within himself is the kingdom of God. He becomes a king - and not a king in the ordinary sense of the word, because that kingdom which comes from without is a false kingdom, a dream kingdom.

I have heard about Shah Farouk, the king of Egypt: He was once asked how many kings there would be in the world after twenty-five years.

He replied without hesitation that there would be five, and then he explained: "The king of England, the king of hearts, the king of diamonds, the king of clubs and the king of spades."

The kingdom that comes from the outside is just a kingdom of dreams. You can be a king, but you will be a king of playing cards or, at the most, the king of England. Nothing much of value, worthless; just a bogus symbol, meaning nothing.

The real kingdom is within. And the most amazing fact is this: that you go on carrying it within yourself completely unaware, not knowing what treasures you are having, and what treasures are yours just to claim.

Religion is not a search for any belief. Religion is an effort to know the very ground of your being, to touch the very rock bottom of your existence. That experience of the rock bottom of your existence is what we mean when we use the word truth. It is existential. It is an experience.

So don't be too much befooled by beliefs. Be alert - they are deceptions. And because of these beliefs people don't search, because once you think you know, you believe you know, what is the point of searching? They are devices to avoid the search, because the search is arduous, the search is difficult. Many dreams will be shattered, many images will be shattered, and much, much pain you will have to pass through. That pain is a necessity: it cleanses, it gives you solidity, integrity; it matures you. Those pains are like birth pains, because through them you are going to be reborn.

Belief is cheap; it costs nothing. Just a nodding of the head and you become a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan. It is too cheap. Truth cannot be that cheap. You will have to sacrifice many cherished dreams. You will have to sacrifice your imaginary image. You will have to sacrifice many things which you value too much in your ignorance. You will have to come out of the cloudy state of your being in which you are right now. You will have to rise above it. And, of course, climbing a mountain is difficult - and there is no other mountain which is greater than you.

You are carrying the greatest peak, the Everest, within you. And, of course, the climbing is going to be difficult. But the difficulty pays, pays tremendously. Once you reach the peak, just the effort, the difficulties, the challenge, the arduousness of climbing - and something goes on crystallizing within you. The moment you reach the peak, it is not only a peak that you have reached - you have become the peak. You have attained to a height you had never known before. You were living in a dark valley; now you live in sunshine.

So the first thing for the seeker is to be aware that beliefs are barriers. If you come to me as a Christian, you cannot come to me. If you come to me as a Hindu, you appear only to have come to me - but you cannot come, because between me and you, your Hinduism, your Jainism, is creating a distance. And what you believe makes no difference to me. All beliefs - unconditionally, all beliefs - are barriers.

It happened in a capital: The party picket lines were pacing in front of the courthouse where some comrades were being indicted. A policeman, trying to keep order, shoved an onlooker.

"Don't shove me!" the onlooker complained. "I'm anti-communist."

The cop glared at him. "You just keep moving," he ordered. "I don't care what kind of communist you are!"

It makes no difference: the communist is a communist; the anti-communist is also a communist - because it makes no difference whether you believe in Marx, or Moses, or Manu, or Mahavira. It makes no difference. You believe; whether in Srimad Bhagavad Gita, or Das Kapital, or the holy Koran, it makes no difference - because the believer's mind is the wrong mind.

Drop the belief so that you can come to encounter your doubt. Facing doubt, encountering doubt, trust arises. If you allow the doubt to be there, and you don't hide somewhere else, if you face it in its nakedness - the very encounter and immediately you will have something new arising in you, and that is trust. Trust arises facing doubt, not escaping from it; belief is an escape. And belief is a false coin, a false substitute for trust; it looks like trust, it is not trust. In belief, the doubt continues underneath as an undercurrent.

In trust there is no doubt. Trust has never known doubt, trust has never encountered doubt. It is just as light has never encountered darkness: the moment light comes, the darkness disperses, disappears. But if you only believe in light, that is not going to help. You live in darkness and you go on believing in light - but you live in darkness! And your belief in light is not a help, it is a hindrance - because if you had no belief in light, you would have searched for light. Believing in light, you think it is going to happen. It is there. Some day or other, by the grace of God, it is going to happen. You go on living in darkness, so belief is a trick of the darkness to protect itself. Belief is a trick of the untrue to protect itself. Be on guard.

To believe is as if you have taken the symptoms to be the real disease. You go to a physician; he diagnoses your illness. He looks for symptoms, but symptoms are not diseases. Symptoms are only indicative that something is wrong somewhere deep inside. Doubt is an indication, just as when your fever goes high - a hundred and two, a hundred and three degrees - but the fever itself is not the disease.

So if somebody has a high fever, don't start giving him a cold shower. That is logical: if you think that fever itself is the disease, then cool down the body. The body is getting hotter and hotter, cool it down; give him an ice-cold shower bath. You are fighting with the symptoms - you may kill the patient. This is not the way. The illness is somewhere deep down; the fever is simply indicative that something has gone wrong within. Treat that something which has gone wrong within, and the temperature will come down to normal of its own accord.

Doubt is a symptom, it is not the disease. When you try to cling to a belief, you are misunderstanding doubt as the disease. So you think: If I believe, doubt will disappear. No, it won't disappear - it will just go underground. It will become unconscious. In the conscious you will believe in God; in the unconscious you will go on denying him.

Don't be afraid of doubt. Doubt is not the enemy; doubt is the friend. The doubt is simply saying to you that you have not searched within; hence, doubt is there. You have not looked into your own reality; hence, doubt is there. Look into your own reality, and doubt disappears like darkness. Bring light....

I have heard about one great Christian priest, Henry Ward Beecher. In his church there was a clock which was always either too fast or too slow, and people were always complaining about the clock.

It was an everyday problem. Whosoever came, he would talk to Beecher and he would say, "The clock is not right."

One day Beecher got tired of it all and put a sign on the clock: "Don't blame my hands," it read. "The trouble lies deeper."

The trouble always lies deeper. The trouble is not on the surface. The trouble is not with the hands of a clock, but deep in the mechanism. So don't try to change your mind from doubting into believing; that is not going to help. It is not a question of the mind - the trouble lies deeper, deeper than your mind, and you have to move deep within yourself.

This is the whole meaning of searching for the bull. The bull is life energy, the dynamism, the vitality.

The fifth sutra:

The sixth sutra:

Listen to every word as carefully as possible:

The whip is a symbol for awareness, and the rope is a symbol for inner discipline. Awareness and discipline are the most fundamental things for a seeker. If you discipline yourself without awareness, you will become a hypocrite. If you discipline yourself without awareness, you will become a zombie, a robot. You may not do harm to anybody, you may be known as a good man or even as a saint, but you will not be able to live your real life, you will not be able to celebrate it. There will be no delight in it. You will become too serious; the playfulness will be gone forever. And seriousness is a disease.

If discipline is without awareness, then you will enforce it and it will be a violence, a rape of your own being. It will not give you freedom; it will create more and more, bigger and bigger, imprisonments.

The discipline is right if it is based on awareness. The discipline goes completely wrong, becomes poisoned, when it is done not with awareness but by a blind, believing mind.

So the first thing is the whip - the awareness. And the second thing is the rope - the discipline.

What is the need of discipline? If you are aware, it seems awareness is enough. Eventually it is enough, but not in the beginning - because the mind has deep patterns, and the energy tends to move from the old habits and old patterns. New channels have to be created.

You may have become aware, but that itself will not be enough in the beginning - because the mind, finding any opportunity to move in any old pattern, immediately slips, in a split second. It takes no time to become angry. By the time you become aware, already anger has flashed. Later on, when your awareness has become total, when your awareness has become an absolute with you - before anything happens, awareness is always there, as an a priori; if anger comes, before anger awareness is there; if sexuality possesses you, before it awareness is there - when awareness has become a natural, spontaneous thing, like breathing, even in your sleep it is there, then discipline can be discarded. But in the beginning - no. In the beginning, when awareness is settling, discipline will be helpful.

Discipline simply is an effort to create new pathways for the energy to move on, so it need not move on the old pathway.

For many lives you have been continuously angry; the root is engraved. The moment you have energy, the energy automatically moves through anger. Hence, many religions prescribe fasting. If you are fasting - that means, if you are starving yourself - you don't have enough energy. Food creates energy. If you don't have enough energy, then you cannot become angry. But weakness is not a transformation; it is again a deception.

Many religions preach fasting so that you can overcome sex. Of course, if you fast too much and your body is starved, you will not have enough energy to move into sexuality. To move into sexuality you need overflowing energy, because sex is a luxury. When you have too much, only then does it happen. When you don't have too much, it disappears of its own accord - but that is not true brahmacharya. You are deceiving yourself. Energy should be overflowing, but it should move in a different dimension - the dimension of love. But for that you will have to create a discipline, so when the energy arises it moves in love not in sex, it moves in compassion not in passion, it moves in sharing not in greed.

Discipline is needed to create new pathways. So awareness and discipline should go together.

There are people who insist that only awareness will do. In a way they are right; but to get to that point of awareness where it is enough, where it is its own discipline, is very, very difficult. It rarely happens.

Krishnamurti goes on saying that only awareness is enough, no discipline is needed. And he is logically right! But it doesn't happen that way. Life is very illogical; it doesn't listen to logic. So people have been listening to Krishnamurti for forty years, and nothing has happened because they think only awareness will do. But to get to that awareness, tremendous effort is needed - and that they cannot afford. In fact, Krishnamurti has become an escape for these people, so they can avoid discipline and they can go on thinking that only awareness will do. And they go on living in their darkness, the peak never happens.

Then there are others who go on saying that discipline is enough, no need for awareness. They also are talking of the other extreme. Discipline alone cannot be enough. Then the man who goes on forcing discipline on himself becomes, by and by, a mechanical robot.

I have heard about one saint who died, but he was forced to go to hell. He could not believe it. He asked that he would like to see God and ask him what wrong he has done, because his whole life he was one of the purest of men. And God said to him, "You have never done anything bad, that's right, but you have never done anything good either because, in the first place, you have never been there. You were just like a robot."

A mechanism goes on doing something; it is neither good nor bad. The mechanism has no spirit, no soul in it. It simply goes on repeating. The repetition is dead. Repetition won't help. You can go and do your prayer every day - but only the mind's mechanism will be repeating it. You will not be in it.

You can go on serving people, helping people - the poor and the ill - but if you are just moving like a robot, if the discipline is all and there is no awareness in it, then you are like a computer. Your skill may be great, but you are not there.

Many religions have been teaching just discipline, morality, good actions and good deeds; that has not helped the world. People have not become alert, alive through it. Both opposites are half and half. Zen says both awareness and discipline have to be followed together. A rhythm has to be created between these two opposites. One should start by the whip and one should end with the rope.

The bull is well acquainted with many dusty roads, and if the whip and the rope are not applied, every possibility is that again the bull that you have caught will be lost.

Then there is no need for discipline. Then you have become a master.

Training is needed, but training is not the goal. Training is just a means. Finally, one has to come out of training, one has to forget all discipline. If you have to continue in your discipline, that simply shows the discipline is not yet natural.

In the beginning you remain alert, you create new pathways for your mind energy. By and by, there is no need - by and by, even to remain alert is not needed. One is simply alert; not that one tries to be alert. Only then is the flowering - when alertness is natural, when meditation is not to be done but simply goes on happening. It has become your very climate; you live in it. You are it.

The sixth sutra:

If you are not the master, then you go away, far away from home. If you are the master, you start coming back towards the original source. If you are not the master, then the energy moves away from you - towards things, persons, power, prestige, fame. The energy goes on moving away and away from you, towards the periphery. Once you are the master, the energy starts moving homeward.

Kabir, one of the great Indian mystics, has said, "The day I became enlightened, I saw the Ganges flowing upcurrent, flowing back to the source." He is right: the Ganges then no longer goes towards the ocean; it goes back towards Gangotri, the origin from where it comes in the Himalayas.

If you are the master, the mind follows you like a shadow. If you are not a master, you have to follow the mind like a shadow. And mind means outgoing energy, and meditation means incoming energy - the same energy. Just the direction is different.

And remember this: that if your search is not leading you towards more and more blissful states, where you can sing and dance, then something is wrong - then something is absolutely wrong.

Then you are on some wrong path. Your blissfulness, your singing and dancing, is the indication. It need not be extrovert: you need not sing so that others can hear it - but you will hear the singing there continuously within yourself. If you like, you can sing and share, but there will be a dance inside you. The more you come nearer home, the more you feel happy. Happiness is a quality of energy returning towards home.

That's how millions have joined Buddha, Jesus, Krishna - their song, their blissfulness, their ecstasy, is infectious. Once you hear, you cannot do anything but join. That's why people are afraid to hear.

People are afraid to come in contact with somebody who can change their direction, their life. They avoid them. They convince themselves that there is nothing to go for. But their argumentation is nothing but a rationalization of a deep, hidden fear.

People behave as if they are blind and deaf. This is the cunning mind which goes on saying: Don't move in this direction - there is danger. Danger for the mind, of course, but not for you. You will become for the first time masters of your being - but then you will have to allow somebody who has come to know to touch your heart and to give a rhythm to your heart, to allow so that he can share his harmony with you.

In the East we call it satsang. It means to be in the presence of a master, to be in the harmony of the master, to fall in line with the master. The master is there - you simply sit around him, not doing anything. But by and by you imbibe the climate, the milieu. By and by the energy of the master goes on overflowing, and you become open to it. By and by you relax, and you don't resist, and you don't fight, and you start tasting, and you start smelling something of the unknown - the flavor, the fragrance. The more you have the taste of it, the more trust arises.

Just by being in the presence of an enlightened man, tremendous possibilities open, your potentiality starts functioning, working. You can feel the hum, the humming sound of the newness that comes to you. But it is a sharing of a song, a sharing of a dance, a sharing of a celebration.

Remember this, let it be the criterion: if you are here with me and you become sad and long-faced and serious, then something is wrong - you have misunderstood me, your mind has misinterpreted me. If you are really here, vulnerable to me, open, then by and by you will see a song is bursting in you. You will feel walking is no longer a walking - it is getting a quality of dance. The heart is not simply pumping the blood - now it is beating a harmony. You will feel the orchestra of life in you.

Then you are on the right path. Then you have not misinterpreted me; then you have been imbibing me.

That's the meaning of sannyas: a simple gesture on your part that you are available - nothing else.

Just a simple gesture that you are no more resisting me, that you will not fight with me; that you are not going to waste the time in fighting; that you drop all defense measures. That is the meaning of sannyas - that you are getting ready for satsang, that now I can shower on you and you will be ready to receive. It simply shows a receptivity.

The same I say to you: Whoever hears this melody will join me.

Now, the prose comments. For the fifth sutra:

As you are, you cannot find truth. As you are, you can find only the untrue, because it is not a question of seeking and searching, it is a question of your consciousness. If you are untrue, how can you find truth? Once you become true, you find truth. Truth happens to those people who have become authentically true themselves. If you are false, you will meet with falsity wherever you go - because, in fact, it is not a question of the objective world, it is a question of your own subjectivity.

You create your world. You are your world. So if you are wrong, you create a wrong world around you. If you are false, then you create a world of lies around you, you project your own world. So don't be angry at the world - whatsoever world you have got, you have earned it. You deserve it.

The world is nothing but your own magnified mind.

Somebody asked Buddha once, "What is truth?" and he said, "Whatsoever an enlightened person is doing is true."

Somebody asked Mahavira, "Who is a real saint?" and Mahavira said, "Whosoever has become awakened."

It is not a question of acts. What you do does not matter - it is what you are. Ordinarily people think that though they are false, they can still do a few good things. That's not possible. They know that they are ignorant, but still they think that something, a few fragments of life, can be transformed, "At least that much we should do." But nothing is possible. You cannot do a few good things - it is impossible. It is not a question of what you do: it is a question of your being. If you are wrong, all that you do is wrong. Whatsoever the appearance, all that you do is wrong. You cannot do a right thing if you are not right in the first place. And if you are right in the first place, you cannot do anything wrong - whatsoever the appearance.

If Krishna goes and becomes a thief, that is right. It has been very difficult for the Western mind to understand the Eastern attitude, because the whole Eastern attitude depends on being and the whole Western attitude depends on doing. Goodness is something to be done; saintliness is concerned with actions - not so in the East, because you can perform a good action and you may not be good; then somewhere in the good action there will also be some bad intention. It has to be so. And if you are awakened, it is impossible to do anything wrong. Even if it appears to be wrong, even if the society decides it is wrong, the society is at fault - because out of an awakened heart it is impossible that a wrong can arise.

A fakir was invited to a dinner. The fakir was seated next to a man and during the evening he asked the man, "What are you living for?"

"I am a pharmacist," replied the man.

"Yes," said the fakir. "That's what you are doing to make a living - but what are you living for?"

There was a moment's hesitation. "Well, sir, I really have not thought about that," replied the pharmacist.

In the West, and particularly for the modern mind whether in the East or in the West, doing has become more and more important. And when doing becomes more and more important, you lose all contact with your being, you lose all contact with the source of life. Then you go on doing a thousand and one things - except the most essential. The most essential is to know oneself, and you cannot know yourself unless you shift your whole consciousness from doing to being.

Whenever somebody asks: Who are you? you say: I am a doctor, or, I am an engineer, or an architect, or something like that. These answers are wrong. This is what you are doing - this is not your being. When I ask you: Who are you? I am not asking you whether you are a doctor or an engineer. That's what you do. That is not your being. That's how you earn your living - that's not your life.

Who are you?

If you drop the ideas of being a doctor, engineer, a professor, then suddenly you will become aware of a certain emptiness within you... you don't know who you are. And what type of life is this in which you are not even aware of who you are?

One goes on avoiding this emptiness within oneself. One goes on fixing patches all around oneself, so from nowhere can you see this inner void. One goes on clinging to actions, and actions are not more than dreams - both good and bad. Good actions, good dreams; bad actions, nightmares. But both are dreams - and the whole effort in the East has been this: to know the dreamer.

Who is this dreamer?

Who is this consciousness on which dreams come, flow and go?

The world is not causing it: you are causing it. So never blame the world. Don't say, as people are prone to say, that the world is illusory, the world is maya. The world is not maya, the world is not illusory - it is your mind, it is your own subjectivity, which goes on creating maya, illusion, all around you.

For example: you are walking, you have gone for a morning walk and by the side of the road you see a diamond, a beautiful diamond, shining. It is valuable for you; the value is given by your mind - otherwise it is a stone like any other stone. If you ask other stones by the side of the road, they will simply laugh at you: "Maybe a shining stone, but what difference does it make? - a stone is a stone." If no man passes by the road, then there is no diamond. Once a man passes by the road, immediately a certain stone transforms itself into his mind and becomes a diamond.

That diamondness is given by the mind to the stone - it has never been there. Once humanity disappears from this earth, things will be there but in a totally different way. A roseflower will be as ordinary a flower as any flower; there will be no difference. The Ganges will not be a holy river; it will be an ordinary river as other rivers are. And there will be no difference between a church and a temple; they will be both just the same.

The difference is brought by the mind. Categories are created by the mind. Appreciation and condemnation are of the mind. Once mind is not there, everything is in its reality as it is. No evaluation arises.

One makes everything untrue if one is untrue. You go on projecting yourself - everything else functions as a screen.

In the beginning, the discipline has to be hard: HOLD TIGHT THE NOSE-RING AND DO NOT ALLOW EVEN A DOUBT. In the beginning, the work is going to be hard, arduous, because if you relax a little the mind moves into old patterns immediately. It brings the old miseries back again. It creates the whole nonsense again and again. In the beginning, you have to be really strict.

The night Buddha achieved enlightenment, he sat under the tree and he said: "I will not rise from this tree again in my life if I don't attain enlightenment. Finished!" he said, "I am finished with doing anything for it. I am going to sit here - this tree is going to become my death." A total decision. At that moment he dropped the 'decidophobia' completely - a total decision. Just meditate on it! And that very night, by the morning he became enlightened.

I have heard one story about a Sufi mystic, Baba Shaikh Farid:

Once a young man approached Farid and Farid was taking his bath in the Ganges river, and the man asked him how he might find God. Baba Shaikh Farid took hold of him, led him into the water, and when they had gone deep enough, he forced him under the water. The young man nearly drowned before the holy man released him.

"Why did you do that?" he gulped incredulously.

"When you long for God as much as you wanted air while you were underwater," replied Baba Shaikh Farid, "you will find him."

The desire should become so intense that you put all that you have at the stake. The passion to seek should be so total that not a single doubt is allowed to make you waver. The very intensity will bring truth. It can happen in a single moment! - just you need to become a total intensity of inner fire.

The decision should be total. It is arduous, of course, but everybody has to pass through that arduousness once. One has to pay for truth, and there is no other way to pay for it - you have to put your whole being on the altar. That is the only sacrifice that is needed.

The prose comment for the sixth sutra:

If the intensity is total, the struggle is over. If you are really interested in seeking the bull, then don't go on working for it half-heartedly. Either seek it, or don't seek it - because a lukewarm search is not going to help; it is a sheer wastage of energy. If you want to seek, then put yourself totally in it.

If you don't want to seek it, forget all about it. Move into the world totally. Some other day will be the right moment for the search to begin.

If you are not ready to put yourself completely in the search, to get involved with your whole heart, that simply shows that you are not yet finished with the world. The world still attracts you, desires still go on haunting you. You would still like to become a rich man, a powerful man, a president, or something like that. Greed is still hiding within you. You still have not come to that moment of awareness where one realizes that the real treasure is within and not without. Then go into the outside world. Don't be half-half; that is the most dangerous situation.

If you are half religious and half worldly, you will miss both. You will not be able to cope with the world; your religion will become an interference. And you will not be able to cope with the inner search; your worldly desires will continuously distract you. There is no need! If the world still attracts you, if you still feel that there is something which has to be attained, then go, and get frustrated completely. You will get frustrated. That means you need a little more wandering, going astray.

Nothing is wrong in it - go fast! Go totally, so you are finished sooner. Then you are ripe. Then your whole energy turns inwards. Frustrated by the without, energy moves inwards spontaneously.

But people are cunning. They want to have both worlds - they want to have the cake and eat it also.

They are trying to be clever, and this cleverness is going to prove their stupidity. This cleverness is not intelligence - because half-heartedly nothing is attained. All attainment needs intensity, total intensity.

In a single moment the struggle can be over.

And when the struggle is over, then one understands that everything was right. Gain and loss, both are assimilated. Going astray was also part of growth, and going into the world was also part of the search for God. It was needed! So when I say go into the world, I don't say it in any condemnatory sense. I simply say that it is needed. Be finished with it! You are yet not ripe, and if you try half- heartedly to come to your inner source it is going to be a suppression. And suppression divides, makes you ill.

I have heard an anecdote:

The boy, his mother and his father had been invited to dinner at an aunt's home. She was a fussy type and his parents had warned the boy to be on his best behavior. "Don't start asking for things at the table, or reaching for things," he was told. "Just wait until you are asked."

Somehow at the table the boy was overlooked as the good things were being served. He didn't say anything. Finally, he coughed a little. Nobody paid any heed.

At last, during a brief lull in the chatter, he said in a loud, clear voice, "Anybody want a clean plate?"

That is the mind of the suppressed man - always watching, waiting; always hankering, desiring. And the mind will find some way or other to cough, or to say: Does anybody need a clean plate?

Any suppressed desire is going to assert itself; it will find a way to assert itself. Never suppress a desire. Understand, but never suppress. Be aware, but never suppress. Desires are great lessons; if you suppress, you will miss the lesson. Live in them. Live consciously. Understand them, why they are there, what they are. And when I say understand them, the understanding is possible only if you don't condemn them. If you already condemn them, then you cannot understand them. Be neutral: don't decide what is wrong and what is right. Just watch.

When anger arises, don't say it is bad. In fact, don't say even that it is anger, because in the very word anger a condemnation has entered. Simply close your eyes, say X,Y,Z, anything - that X is arising. Just feel the difference when you say anger is arising and when you say X is arising.

Immediately there is a difference. With X you have no pro or con; with X you are neither in favor nor against; with X you are unprejudiced. With anger you are prejudiced - centuries of conditioning that anger is bad.

Just look, observe, watch. Anger is also energy - maybe not moving in the right direction, but still the energy is there, part of the bull. Watch it. Observe it. And just by watching and observing, you will see the energy is transforming. Observation is alchemical. It changes the energy, the quality of it. And soon you will see: the same energy that was going to be anger has transformed into compassion. Compassion is hidden in anger as the tree is hidden in the seed - just deep insight is needed.

So go into the world; be finished with the world. Don't be afraid of the world, because if you are afraid you will try to escape half ripe, and to be half ripe is the worst shape to be in. Let the heat of the world make you perfectly ripe. You are so much so frustrated, disillusioned, that now you are available to go on some other trip, into some other space.

And then a beautiful thing happens....

If you become repressive, you not only repress those things which have been condemned by the society - you also start repressing all those things which are natural and are not to be repressed.

But a beautiful thing happens. For example, sex will disappear, but that doesn't mean that love will disappear. A totally new kind of energy arises in you. Love will become strengthened, love will become vigorous. And if sex happens, it will be part of love; it will have a totally different context. So it is not good to call it sex.

Right now, if love happens at all, it happens as part of sex. Sex remains the basic thing. Love is just a shadow to it. When sex disappears, love disappears. When you become interested sexually in some other person, love disappears from the person you were sexually related to before.

When sex energy is transformed, moves in higher realms, you become urdhva-retus - the energy is not moving downward but upward; or not moving outward but inward, which is the same. The inward and the upward are the same dimension. Downward and outward are again the same dimension.

They are not two dimensions. When the energy is moving upward or inward, sex becomes a part, a shadow, of love. It is now no longer important in itself.

But if you are repressing and not becoming aware, then you will repress sex and you will repress love also, because you will become afraid: whenever love comes into your mind, sex will follow - immediately. So you will become afraid of love also. A repressive person becomes afraid of energy itself.

I have heard about one man: he was in love with a woman and he asked the woman to marry him.

But before she accepted she inquired, "Just one thing, Harry. Are you the sort of man who would expect a wife to go out to work?"

Harry said, "Look, Sybil. No wife of mine is ever going to have to go out and take a job - unless, of course, she wants food and clothes and luxuries like that."

Now food, clothes, are not luxuries - but if you repress, then you become afraid of everything. Then fear grips you. A repressed person is a frightened person, afraid of everything.

If you go and present some money to Vinoba Bhave, he will not touch it. He's afraid to touch money.

Not only that: he will move his head so he cannot see, or he will close his eyes. Now this seems a little too much. It seems as if the miser is standing on his head - the same type of mind.

The miser goes on accumulating money, and then one day, frustrated, he starts repressing his desire. Then he chooses just the reverse course, just the opposite pole. Then he is afraid even to see money. Now if money is worthless, then what is the fear in seeing it? And if money has no deep attachment in you, deep obsession in you, then why close your eyes? You don't close your eyes to other things. If you ask Vinoba he says: "Money is dirt."

One of his disciples came to me once and he said, "I asked Vinoba and he says money is dirt."

"But then," I said, "you go back and tell him: 'Then whenever you see dirt, close your eyes! And don't touch earth, don't walk on earth - hang yourself in the air. Because if money is dirt, then dirt is money. But you behave differently: with dirt you are not afraid! With money you are afraid.'"

No. I cannot believe that money is dirt. Money is still money, dirt is dirt. And when you call money dirt, you are simply showing some deep obsession. Otherwise, why is money dirt? It is a useful means. Use it, but don't be used by it! - that I can understand. Don't be used by it!

That is how a person who is aware functions in life. But if you repress, then you move to the opposite polarity. A miser stands on his head, becomes a great, great person who has renounced the world.

Remember: repression is not going to help.

Beautiful! One becomes like children - simple, innocent, happy in small things.

The old world calls me back. The old desires call me back. The old patterns call me back. But now it doesn't matter - I am moving towards the real treasure. So delusions cannot attract me any more, and everything has become beautiful - the clouds in the sky, and the song of the woodsman.

The real saint becomes like a small child: simple, almost like an idiot. Saint Francis used to call himself the fool of God. Lao Tzu says: The whole world is clever except me. I am an idiot.

One becomes like small children - with no logic; tremendously alive, but not hung up in the head.

Energy becomes a flow; now there are no blocks, nothing is frozen, and the boundaries are merged.

Then one is not separate from the whole, but simple like woodsmen and their simple song. Life becomes a simple song, and life becomes innocence.

Once you know what life is, tremendous beauty arises in your being. Everything becomes luminous, illumined with God. Each stone becomes a sermon. Each silence becomes a song. One feels the benediction constantly being showered upon oneself.

Enough for today.