When the Coin Disappears

Question 1:

The mind goes on dividing on every level of being. Wherever the mind looks immediately it divides; division, to divide, is the nature of the mind. So we say above and below, we say up and down, we say this world and the other world, we say life and death, we say in and out, extroversion and introversion - but all these divisions are of the mind. The below is part of the above, the beginning of the above; up is nothing but the extension of down. Life and death are not two, but the same energy arising is life, the same energy dissolving is death. Out and in are not two, the division is only mental.

But we exist extrovertedly, we exist outside. The ordinary man exists outside, he never goes in. He moves further and further out, because desires can be fulfilled only in the outside; some object is needed to fulfill them. The object can be found in the outside, there is no object within - there is only subjectivity, there is only you. You need something to fulfill desires, so you move in the world.

The out is created because desires are moving outwardly.

Then a moment comes in everyone's life when you get frustrated with this whole business - desires, the search for them, the objects - and you come to realize that the whole thing is futile. Then the other extreme arises in the mind: "Don't go out, go in!" Then you simply reverse the whole process.

Before you were going out, now you start going in; before you were for the out, now you have become against it.

This type of mind which has become against the world, the out, is just the same man, the same mind, standing on its head. You are standing on your feet, he is standing on his head, but he is the same man, there is no difference. The difference comes into being only when you are not moving at all, neither out nor in, when the division between out and in has dropped.

And this can drop only when you are not. If you are, then you are bound to divide the within and the without. When the ego disappears, which is within? Where is within then? It was around your ego. If ego has disappeared, then where is within and where is without? They were in relation to your ego. When the ego has disappeared, out and in disappear - then there is no introversion and no extroversion. Man exists as extrovert or introvert, but when you transcend the ego you have transcended the man. Then you simply exist - the within and without have become one, the boundaries have disappeared.

Just as we are sitting inside this room... if these walls disappear, then what will be the inside and what will be the outside? Then the inside will become the outside and the outside will become the inside. In actuality, even now this very moment, is the space outside and the space within really divided? Can you divide it? You can create walls but you cannot divide it, you cannot cut space.

And you can use the inside only because of the doors; otherwise you cannot use the inside. And from the door it continues to be the same, from the door the inside and the outside are one.

Lao Tzu uses this symbol very much. He goes on saying that the room is valuable not because of the walls but because of the doors. The room has value not because of the walls but because of the doors - and doors mean no division between outside and inside. Doors are the link, you can come in and you can go out. But if you destroy the walls then the division disappears, when the ego drops the division disappears.

So Jung's psychology will be meaningless when the ego has disappeared. Jung divides mind into two, the extrovert mind and the introvert mind - but this is a division of the mind, not of consciousness. Consciousness is just like space, mind is just the walls. But you can use mind only because mind has a few doors, and through those doors the within moves into the without and the without goes on moving into the within.

A mystic is a person whose mind has disappeared, he has attained to no-mind. So if a mystic insists that "I am against the world," he is not a mystic really; he still belongs to the world, because he still carries the same division.

I will tell you an anecdote.

It happened once two Zen monks were returning to their monastery. The evening was near, the sun was just going to set, and they came upon a small stream. When they were just going to cross the stream they saw a very beautiful young girl there. One monk who was old, traditional, orthodox, immediately closed his eyes because it is not good to see a woman - desire may arise, lust may come in, passion may happen. Just to avoid he closed his eyes and moved into the stream.

The other monk who was a young man, newly ordained, not well trained in the orthodoxy of the sect, asked the girl, "Why are you standing here? The sun is going to set, soon it will be night, and this place is lonely."

The girl said, "I am afraid to go into the stream. Can't you help me a little? Can't you give me your hand?"

The monk said, "The stream is deep. It will be better if you come and sit on my shoulders and I will carry you."

The other monk, the old monk, reached the other shore and then he looked back: what was happening? And when he saw that the girl was sitting on the monk's shoulders he became very disturbed. His mind was revolving fast: "This is sin!" He himself also felt guilty, because he was older, senior; he should have told the other young monk to avoid the situation. This is sin and he would have to report it to the abbot.

The young monk crossed the stream, left the girl there, and started going towards the monastery.

The monastery must have been one or two miles away. They walked. The old monk was so angry that he couldn't speak. They walked in silence. Then they reached the door of the monastery, and when they were crossing the door the old monk stopped and said, "You have done wrong! It is prohibited! You should not have done this!"

The young monk was surprised. He said, "What? What are you saying? What have I done? I have remained completely silent. I have not even said a single word."

The old monk said, "I am not talking about these two miles you have walked with me, I am talking about that beautiful young girl you were carrying in the stream."

The young man said, "But I dropped the girl there and it seems you are still carrying her."

If a mystic is really a mystic he cannot carry any division. He cannot say, "That is outside and this is inside," because only ego can divide; ego is the boundary. Only mind can divide, no-mind cannot divide. Nothing is outside and nothing is in - the whole existence is advaita, one, nondual.

Divisibility is not possible - it is oneness, it is a harmony, no boundaries exist. But if somebody goes on condemning....

There are monks, millions of monks all over the world in Hindu monasteries, in Christian monasteries, in Buddhist monasteries, who are afraid of the outside and who go on condemning it. That shows they are really interested, still interested in the outside; otherwise, why condemn?

They have a deep unconscious lust for it, otherwise why condemn? Their condemnation shows they have some deep greed for it. When the greed really disappears how can there be condemnation?

How can you hate the world? The hate is possible if love is somewhere hidden behind. Love and hate are not two things, love-hate is the phenomenon; they are two aspects of the same coin. You can change the aspects, from love you can come to hate. When you were in love with the world hate was hidden behind; now you hate the world, love is hidden behind - the other aspect remains.

A real mystic is one for whom the coin has disappeared; there is no hate, no love - no hate-love relationship. He simply exists without dividing. And there is no difficulty in it. If you try to make a harmony between the two then there will be difficulty, if you try somehow to synthesize then there will be difficulty. You cannot synthesize. This has been tried.

Reading the Upanishad you may come to realize, intellectually of course, that the out and the in are one, within and without are the same. If you realize intellectually then you will start trying to make a synthesis of the division. In the first place division is wrong; in the second place, to try to synthesize is doubly wrong, because synthesis means that you still think they are divided and somehow they have to be joined. Then it is very difficult and your synthesis will remain superficial, deep down the division will exist. You can only whitewash it, that's all - you cannot do much.

But it is very simple if you disappear. Then there is no need to synthesize. When you disappear they are simply one - there is no need to synthesize, there is no need to join them together. They were never apart. They have always been joined, they have always been one. It was you, because of you the division existed.

Many people try many types of synthesis. In India this last century, many people have tried to synthesize all religions, the divisions of religions. Gandhi made much effort to synthesize Christianity, Hinduism, and Mohammedanism, but the whole effort was a failure. It was bound to be a failure, because in the first place he believed in the division - that they are separate - and then he tried a synthesis. The foundation was that they are separate and they have to be joined together, so at the most he could create a hodgepodge thing - not very meaningful, not alive. The real synthesis happens only when you can see there are no divisions. Not that you synthesize - simply you see there are no divisions. There is no need to join them together, they have never been apart.

A mystic is one who has disappeared. Through his disappearance all divisions simply disappear.

And I say all divisions, absolutely all divisions. He cannot divide between the good and the bad, he cannot divide between God and the Devil, he cannot divide between hell and heaven - simply he cannot divide. It is not only a question of in and out, because that's very simple. We can think, "Okay, maybe in and out are the same" - but heaven and hell? Devil and God?

You may not be aware that the English word devil comes from the same root as the word divine.

Both come from the Sanskrit root; the Sanskrit root is dev. Dev means god, divine, devata. From dev comes the English word divine, and from dev comes the English word devil. Both are divine.

Both are one. Good and bad.... Very difficult to conceive, because the mind persists. How can one think that the bad is also good and the good is also bad?

Look. For a moment try to look into the nondivided reality of things. Can you think of any man who is good if there exists no man who is bad? Can you think of Buddha, Krishna, Christ, without there existing a Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Napoleon, Alexander? You cannot conceive of it. A Buddha cannot exist without there being someone who is a Genghis Khan, a Tamerlane. Tamerlane is also impossible, cannot exist, if there exists no Buddha. Just look in your society: the sinner cannot exist without the saint and the saint cannot exist without the sinner - they are joined together.

Many people come from the West and ask me, "In India there have been so many saints, but the whole society seems to be of sinners. Why this paradox?" This is not a paradox, this is a simple, obvious fact; this must be so because saints can exist only amidst sinners. They are not two - the more saints, the more sinners. If you want sinners to disappear you will have to destroy saints first; when saints disappear sinners disappear.

Lao Tzu says in Tao Te Ching that when the world was really religious there were no saints. When there were saints immediately sinners appeared. So the saint cannot exist without the sinner. That means they are joined together somehow, they are part of one reality. Make one disappear and the other will disappear automatically.

It is just like hot and cold; make hot disappear completely and cold will disappear, because cold is nothing but a degree of hot. Make cold disappear completely and hot will disappear, because the difference is only of degrees, the quality is the same. And saints and sinners are just like hot and cold, they are degrees on the same thermometer. Destroy one, the other is destroyed immediately - they exist as polarities. People go on asking, "If God is good then why is there evil in this world?"

God cannot exist without the evil, the evil is because God is. The light cannot exist without darkness, neither can the darkness exist without light.

For Christianity this has been such a big problem that for twenty centuries Christian theologicians have been continuously working on this one problem: why does evil exist if God is good? They have not solved it, and they will never be able to solve it because they cannot see the simple reality that good and bad are two degrees of the same phenomenon. So they have to divide. They say, "All good belongs to God, and all bad belongs to the Devil."

And from where does this Devil come? If the Devil comes from God himself then why so much fuss about it? He belongs to God. If the Devil is a separate source from God then two Gods exist in this world, and then there is no necessity that the good God will win. The whole situation seems to be otherwise. If the Devil is also a separate source there is every possibility that he will win - because he is winning ninety-nine percent of the time every day! If they are separate sources then it is better to worship the Devil, because you are on the losing side if you go on worshipping God.

So Christian theologicians cannot say that the Devil is a separate source; they say that the Devil was also an angel of God, but then he disobeyed. They go on shifting the problem. Then from where does this disobedience come? If it comes from the Devil himself then he becomes a separate source. Or if God himself suggests it to him then it becomes a play, a game.

When I was saying last night that life is a game, a play, and God is playing this whole cosmic joke, one friend immediately wrote a letter saying that it cannot be conceived that Jesus being crucified is just God's play. The crucifixion of Jesus cannot be conceived of as just God's play, it must have some purpose.

The question is not whether any particular thing has some purpose or not, the question is whether the whole has a purpose or not. You are here. You had a purpose in coming here, that I know; without purpose you would not be here. Jesus may have had a purpose, or you may think that he had a purpose. Christians may think that he had a purpose - salvation was the purpose, to liberate humanity from the sin that Adam committed was the purpose. But this is your thinking. If Jesus is enlightened he cannot have any purpose, because purpose belongs to ignorance. He can only be in a play. And if he also thinks that whatsoever he is doing is very serious, purposive, then he belongs to the same business mind as you.

And the whole, the cosmos, cannot have any purpose, because purpose means something outside.

There is nothing outside the whole. And whenever we think that God must have some purpose we are talking in deep absurdities, because if God has any purpose, he is omnipotent so he can do it immediately. Why waste so much time? If he has only this purpose - that man should reach heaven - he can simply order, "Go to heaven!"... because when he can say, "Let there be light," and there is light; when he can say, "Let there be the world," and the world is there, then why can't he say, "Let there be only heaven," so that everybody is in heaven? Then why this whole nonsense of Adam committing sin, then Jesus helping people? Why this nonsense?

Purpose is absurd in terms of the total. Purpose may exist for individual egos because egos cannot exist without purpose, but for the cosmic there is no ego. It cannot be anything else than a cosmic play. Even Jesus' crucifixion is a play. That's why Jesus can go to the crucifixion so easily, not disturbed, as if it is just a drama, as if he is just acting a role. The man of knowledge is just an actor enacting a role. What is going to be the result is not his concern. Whatsoever the result, everything is good. There is neither good nor bad, there is neither in nor out, there is neither beginning nor end - but this happens only when you have disappeared.

You can misunderstand me. I am not saying to go and do evil because there is no difference. I am not saying to go and kill somebody because it is just a drama. And if you are really thinking of killing someone, then when you are sent to jail or killed, murdered by the court, then you will have to enjoy it - it is a game. If you are ready to accept the whole, then you can go and kill. But then don't complain - because in a game, in a play, complaining is useless.

To understand this intellect alone will not be of much help. It can only prepare the ground. Unless your being is transformed you cannot see this unity, you cannot see this vast unity of polar opposites.

They exist together, they disappear together. Gurdjieff used to say an apparently very absurd thing, but deep down a reality. He used to say that everything remains in the same quantity always, the proportion remains the same. The same proportion always remains between saints and sinners.

That cannot be disturbed, otherwise the world will lose balance. The same proportion exists between ignorant people and people who are wise - that cannot be disturbed.

Now modern psychology also has discovered a few facts which are relevant. One of them is this:

five percent of people, only five percent, are intelligent, talented, genius, and five percent of people are idiotic, stupid - exactly the same proportion. On one polarity five percent with intelligence, on another polarity five percent with complete absence of intelligence. And then there are other grades, and every grade has a proportionate grade on the other side. You can divide the whole world. It is like two polarities balancing each other; whenever something grows more, immediately the balance has to be regained.

It is just like a walker, a tightrope walker. The tightrope walker has a trick, a balancing trick.

Whenever he feels that he is losing balance and is leaning towards the left and will fall down, immediately he moves to the right. When he feels that he has moved too much to the right and will fall down, he again moves to the left. Walking on the rope, continuously he goes on moving from left to right, from right to left, regaining balance by the opposite.

The same happens in existence, the proportion remains almost the same. Whenever there is born a very saintly person, immediately a sinner is born somewhere. Whenever a wise man is born, immediately one idiot has to balance him, otherwise the world would disappear immediately.

Whenever you do a good act, know well that somewhere someone will have to do a bad act to balance you. So don't get too proud that you have done some good acts, because by doing them you have created the other also. Someone has to balance you because you unbalanced the world.

Whenever you do a bad act someone is bound to become a saint because of you.

I am not saying to do this or that. The Upanishads are not concerned with your doing, they are concerned with your understanding - that you understand well that the world exists in duality, and if you go on dividing you will remain a part of ignorance. Don't divide; transcend division and look at the world as one vast expanse. Once you know that the two are not two, the opposites are not opposites, you cannot be tense, because tension is possible only when you choose. When you say, "This must be and that must not be," when you say, "This is good and that is bad," you are creating anguish for yourself. You will create tension, you will create a conflict within the mind; expectations, hopes, frustrations - all will follow. Once you can understand that no choice is needed because everything is the same, suddenly all anguish disappears. And then you have a tranquility, a peace, a bliss, that can exist only when divisions have disappeared.

The second question:

Question 2:

IF ONE EXPERIENCES OR UNDERSTANDS INWARDLY THE DEEP FEELING OF BECOMING AS A DRY LEAF TO BE MOVED ONLY BY THE EXISTENCE ITSELF, THEN HOW CAN ONE PUSH ONESELF TO BREATHE OR JUMP OR DO ANYTHING AT ALL BUT LIE FLAT ON THE EARTH AND DISSOLVE?

First, to experience and to understand are two different things. If you experience this there is no need to ask the question - just lie down flat on the ground and dissolve. Why ask the question?

This is an act, you are doing something. No dry leaf has ever asked. But the very question shows that intellectually you understand, but you have not experienced any such thing - and intellectual understanding is not understanding at all. Intellectual understanding is just appearance of understanding, it is not understanding.

Why do I say this? I will read the sentence, you will feel why. "If one experiences or understands...."

You cannot use the "or" because they are not the same thing - either you experience or you don't experience. First thing, intellectual understanding is not equal to experience. "... Or understands inwardly the deep feeling of becoming as a dry leaf to be moved only by the existence itself, then how can one push oneself to breathe or jump or do anything at all but lie flat on the earth and dissolve?"

You will have to do that also - to lie flat. You will have to do that also - to lie flat on the earth. And if you can do that, why can't you push, jump and breathe?

I will tell you one anecdote.

It happened, one Zen monk, Dogen, used to tell his disciples, "Unless you die, you will not be reborn."

So one stupid disciple - and there are always many - thought, "If this is the key, then I must try it."

So one day he came and did just as you have said. He must have lain with closed eyes, flat out in front of the door of the master, just in the morning when the master was expected to come out for the morning prayer. The master opened the door and found that his disciple was lying there not breathing, as if dead. The master Dogen said, "Okay, doing well."

So the disciple opened one eye just to see the expression on the master's face, and Dogen said, "Stupid! Dead men don't open their eyes!"

You will have to do that also - to lie flat on the ground - but that will be your doing. And these breathing exercises are to help you so that it can happen and is not your doing. All these techniques of meditation are to help you to come to this realization when suddenly you feel that it is happening - you have fallen on the ground, dissolving. But that should not be something done on your part, you cannot do it. If it is a doing the whole point is lost. It must be a spontaneous happening.

And right now whatsoever you do will not be spontaneous, whatsoever you are doing you have to make effort. And I know that you have to make effort for breathing, for catharsis, for the mantra Hoo - and you have to bring all effort possible. These efforts are not going to become your enlightenment, because enlightenment is never achieved through effort, but these efforts will help you; they will bring you to a point where you can become effortless. And when you become effortless, enlightenment is always there. You can stop them, but just by stopping them nothing will happen. Continue them, and do them as totally as possible because then you will come to realize sooner that nothing can be achieved through effort.

Nothing can be achieved through effort - you have to realize this. I can say this, but this will not be of much help. I know well that just by breathing fast you are not going to enter into nirvana. I know it well. And just by crying and dancing no one has ever entered there. Even if their door is open they will close it, if they see that you are coming doing Dynamic Meditation they will close the door. This I know well.

I have heard, one Christian missionary was giving a sermon to some middle-school students, small boys and girls. After the sermon he asked, "Those who want to go to heaven should raise their hands."

So all the boys except one raised their hands. Only one boy, someone called Johnny, remained silent.

The missionary asked, "Don't you want to go to heaven?"

Johnny said, "Not with this bunch!"

So if you go doing Dynamic Meditation even I cannot enter with you, it is impossible. But I know that Dynamic Meditation is not the end, it is just to prepare you so that you can drop automatically. It is to exhaust you and your ego; it is to exhaust your mind, your body; it is to exhaust your individuality.

And when your individuality is exhausted completely you will drop on the ground like a dry leaf. But not like Dogen's disciple - if he could have done Dynamic Meditation the whole story would have been different. Then there would have been no need to lie down on the ground, he would have fallen on the ground.

And if you have to lie down, that shows only that you are withholding yourself, you are not really exhausted. If you simply move totally in whatsoever I am saying to do you will get exhausted. You have a certain amount of energy, a limited amount of energy - that energy can be exhausted. Once exhausted you will become a dry leaf, a dead leaf.

When you cannot do anything only then can nondoing happen. While you can do something, nondoing is not possible.

The third question:

Question 3:

DOES RETURNING TO THE HEART CENTER MEAN BECOMING MORE PASSIONATE? IS THE HEART ALSO THE SOURCE OF PASSION? CAN A MAN WHO IS AUTHENTICALLY CENTERED AT THE HEART BE CALLED PASSIONATE?

Heart is not the center of passion; rather, heart is the center of compassion. And the man who lives in the heart cannot be called passionate, but can be called compassionate. Passion comes from the sex center, all passion comes from the sex center. You can join the sex center and the heart, but from the heart only love flows, not passion.

Love is a very silent flow, nonaggressive, almost passive; it is a very silent breeze. Sex is passion, violence, aggression, with force, with strong energy - it attacks. The heart and the sex center can join together, then love becomes passionate. If heart is not joined with the sex center then love becomes compassionate. Then love is there in its total purity and only then, when there is no passion in it, is love pure. It is silent, passive, nonaggressive. You can invite it but it will not knock at your door. It will not even ask to be invited. You can persuade it to come, it can become your guest, but it will not come uninvited.

Love cannot rape, and sex always rapes in many ways. Even when legally it is not a rape, sex is rape. You may persuade the other person legally, in the way the society allows, but in the mind rape remains the center. You are just thinking to rape the other person, you are aggressive, and all that you do before it is just a foreplay, just to achieve the end. That's why, when two persons get married, foreplay disappears.

When you meet a girl or a boy for the first time, there is much foreplay! Before you enter into a sex relationship you have to go on playing, so that the sex doesn't look like a rape, but that is on the mind, that is in the mind. In your mind you are constantly thinking of the end, and everything is just persuasion, seduction, just to make the whole thing appear loving. But the more you become intimate with the girl or the boy, the less foreplay is there; if you get married, no foreplay. Then sex becomes just direct, something to be done and finished with.

Look at this. If two persons are really in love, then not only foreplay but afterplay also will be there. If two persons are not in love then sex will happen and they will go to sleep, there will be no afterplay.

Foreplay will not even be there, and afterplay is impossible, because what is the use? The thing has happened, the end has been achieved. Rape is in the mind.

The sex center knows only rape, it is the center of aggression. That's why the military doesn't allow sex for soldiers, because if they have sex relationships they cannot be good fighters. The aggression moves through the sex center. If sex is allowed and a soldier is living with his wife or with his beloved, he will not feel like fighting on the battleground.

This is one of the reasons why American soldiers are defeated everywhere: their girls follow them.

They cannot be aggressive because the center of aggression is sex. If sex is allowed, aggression flows out of you and then you don't feel like fighting. So the soldiers have to be prohibited from sex, they must suppress their sex; then the whole sex becomes aggression. Then rather than entering a woman's body they can enter anybody's body with a bullet. But it is the same thing - the entry. Your bullets, your knives, your guns, are just phallic symbols - to enter the other's body, to destroy.

The coaches of athletes who go to the Olympics tell them, "Don't have sex at least for two weeks before," because if you have sex you will not be a good runner. From where will you get the aggression to fight and run and compete? All religions all over the world - almost all, I will say, because only one wonderful sect, Tantra, is an exception - all religions all over the world have told their monks to be celibate, because they think that religion is also a sort of struggle. You have to fight with yourself, so retain the aggressive energy and fight with yourself.

Sex can easily become violence because it is passion, it is rape. Love, the heart center or the love center, is totally different. It is nonviolent, it is passive, not even active. It can come to you like a very silent perfume, and that too when you invite. That's why persons like Buddha or Jesus, they have much love, but we cannot feel their love, because we can feel love only when it is too violent. We have become addicted to violence. And Buddha's love is so silent. It showers on us but we cannot feel it, we have become so insensitive. Only when someone attacks do we start feeling.

The heart center is not the center of passion, but is the center of compassion. And compassion is absolutely different from passion, just the opposite. It is non-aggressive energy, moving without any noise, but you have to become very sensitive to feel it. So only very sensitive persons can become attracted to Buddha, because only very sensitive persons can feel that some love is flowing from him. If you are asking for strong doses of passion, then Buddha will just look dead; nothing is coming out of him.

Remember this: passion has to be transformed into compassion, only then will you move from the sex center to the heart center. Now even your heart has to follow your sex center, which is the higher following the lower. Then your sex center will follow the love center, the heart center - the lower following the higher. And this should be the order of your being - always the lower following the higher. Then the lower becomes totally different, the quality changes.

When sex follows love, sex becomes beautiful, a grace, a blessing. When love follows sex, love becomes ugly, a destructive force; you destroy each other through your love. All the courts of the world are filled with persons who have been in love and now are destructive to each other. Fifty percent of marriages break down completely, and the other fifty percent are continued somehow, not for love, but for other reasons - for children, for society, for family, for prestige, for money, for other reasons, but not for love. Fifty percent break down completely.

Love has become so destructive because it is following a lower center. Remember, this should be the law within you: always remember that the lower should follow the higher, then everything is beautiful and a blessing. Nothing is to be denied, there is no need to deny anything; only let the higher lead, because following the higher the lower changes its quality. And if the higher has to follow the lower everything becomes ugly.

The fourth question:

Question 4:

DID MULLA NASRUDDIN BECOME ENLIGHTENED?

He must have - because if he is not enlightened then nobody can be.

Mulla Nasruddin is a Sufi figure, one of the oldest figures of Sufi anecdotes, and he shows whatsoever I have been saying here: that the world is a cosmic joke - he represents that. He is a very serious joker, and if you can penetrate him and understand him, then many mysteries will be revealed to you.

Mulla Nasruddin illustrates that the world is not a tragedy but a comedy. And the world is a place where if you can learn how to laugh you have learned everything. If your prayer cannot become a deep laughter which comes from all over your being, if your prayer is sad and if you cannot joke with your god, then you are not really religious.

Christians, Jews and Mohammedans are very serious about their god; Hindus are not, they have joked a lot. And that shows how much they believe - because when you cannot joke with your god you don't believe in him. You feel that through your humor, your joke, he will be insulted. Your belief is shallow, it is not deep enough. Hindus say that the trust is so much that they can laugh; the trust is so much that just by laughing it cannot be broken.

One Buddhist, Bodhidharma, one of the greatest followers of Buddha, used to say to his disciples, "Whenever you take the name of Buddha immediately rinse out your mouth, because this name is dangerous and it makes the mouth impure." Another Buddhist monk, Bokuju, used to tell his disciples, "While meditating, if this fellow Gautam Buddha comes in kill him immediately, because once you allow him then he will cling to you and it will be difficult to be alone."

And they were great followers, they loved Buddha - but they could laugh. Why? The love was so intimate, so close, that there was no danger that something might be taken wrongly. But Christians have always been afraid, so immediately anything becomes blasphemy - anything. They cannot take anything humorously, and if you cannot take anything humorously, if you cannot laugh at yourself, at your god, then you are ill, you are not at home, and your god is something to be feared.

In English we have a word, God-fearing, for religious people. A God-fearing person can never be religious, because if you fear God you cannot love him. Love and fear cannot exist together. With fear, hate can exist, love cannot; with fear, anger can exist, love cannot; with fear you can bow down but you cannot surrender; with fear there can be a relationship between a slave and a master but there cannot be a love relationship. Hindus, Buddhists have a totally different attitude, and that attitude is different because they think the whole existence is a cosmic play, you can be playful.

Sufis are very playful; they created Mulla Nasruddin. And Mulla Nasruddin is an alive figure, you can go on adding to him - I go on adding. If some day he meets me there is bound to be difficulty, because I go on creating around him. To me he is a constantly alive figure, in many ways symbolic - symbolic of human stupidity. But he knows it and he laughs at it, and whenever he behaves like a stupid man he is just joking at you, at human beings at large.

And he is subtle enough. He will not hit you directly, he hits himself; but if you can penetrate him then you can look at the reality. And sometimes even great scriptures cannot go as deep as a joke can go, because the joke directly touches the heart. A scripture goes into the head, into the intellect; a joke directly touches the heart. Immediately something explodes within you and becomes your smile and your laughter.

Nasruddin must have attained enlightenment, or he is already an enlightened figure, there is no need to attain. I go on using him just to give you a feeling that to me religion is not serious. So I go on mixing Mulla Nasruddin with Mahavira - which is impossible, poles apart. I go on mixing Mulla Nasruddin with the Upanishads, because he gives a sweetness to the whole serious thing. And nothing is serious, nothing should be serious.

To me, to laugh wholeheartedly is the greatest celebration that can happen to a man - to laugh wholeheartedly, to become the laughter. Then no meditation is needed, it is enough.

I will take one or two anecdotes from Nasruddin.

Once it happened that Nasruddin and his friend Sheikh Abdullah lost their way in a forest. They tried and tried to find their way but then evening came, the night was descending, so they had to wait for the whole night under a tree. It was dangerous ground, there were many wild animals, and they had to keep awake because any moment they could be killed.

They tried every way to keep awake, but Mulla was tired, yawning, feeling sleepy, so he said to Sheikh Abdullah, "Invent something, because I am feeling sleepy and it seems impossible now to stay awake. The whole day we were traveling, and I am tired."

Sheikh Abdullah asked, "What should I do?"

Nasruddin said, "We should play a game, a game of guessing. You describe a film actress - just become the film actress and describe - and I will guess who this film actress is. Then I will do the same and you guess."

Even Abdullah became interested, it seemed to be a good game. So Abdullah said, "Okay." He contemplated and then he said, "My eyes are like Noor Jahan, my nose is like Cleopatra, my lips like Marilyn Monroe," and so on and so forth.

Mulla Nasruddin became very excited, his blood pressure rose high. Even in the dark you could have seen his eyes, they became so fiery. And then when Sheikh Abdullah said, "Now the measurements of my body - thirty-six, twenty-four, thirty-six." Nasruddin jumped over to Sheikh Abdullah. Sheikh Abdullah said, "Wait, guess!"

Nasruddin said, "Who is bothered about guessing? I don't care who you are. Quick! Kiss me!"

The human mind is such - imagination, desire, passion, projection. You project, you imagine, and then you become the victim. And this is not a joke, this is reality - and this is about you.

Enough for today.