Playfulness is Heaven

The first question:

Question 1:

SARJANA, THERE CANNOT BE ANY MAP TO THE LAND OF PLAYFULNESS. All maps lead to seriousness. Playfulness is when all maps have been burnt down. There is no way to playfulness, because playfulness is not a goal and cannot be a goal. When you forget about goals, when you are not going anywhere, when the very idea of going is dropped, then herenow playfulness starts growing in you, happening in you.

Playfulness is not then and there: it is herenow. So how can there be a road-map? You are not to go: you are just to be.

Seriousness is goal-oriented. And even when a serious person starts playing, he transforms the quality of the play - it becomes a game; it is no more play.

That is the difference between a game and a play. When a play becomes serious, it becomes a game.

People go to see wrestling, people go to see bull-fights or American football - ugly, violent, inhuman.

The people who are going to see these things are immature, a little perverted too. The spectators are as ungrown as the gladiators. And both are in some way catharting; in the name of the game, they are throwing their rubbish, they are simply vomiting their violence.

This is a very violent, violent world! That's why love cannot exist here. When human beings will really be human beings, things like bullfighting and wrestling will be unheard of, they will become part of history. Just to imagine that thousands of people have come to see a bullfight looks so ugly, disgusting. But people are serious. They change the play also into seriousness.

A play is something in which a goal is not at all concerned. The very being together is beautiful!

for the sheer joy of it! In a better world, with more understanding, games will disappear - there will only be plays. There will be nobody as a winner, nobody as the defeated - because the very idea of defeating and winning is inhuman. There is no NEED for it! Why can't we enjoy the sheer togetherness? There should be no counting, no marking. There should not be any result out of it.

If you are in love with playing football, play football! Just play it! Don't look for the result. If the result comes in, you become serious, the play is destroyed; it has become almost businesslike. Enjoy the sheer outpour of energy. Enjoy the moment - don't sacrifice it for anything else.

That's what LEELA IS, playfulness is. But you are in love and it becomes serious, and you start thinking of marriage and you start thinking of having children and you start thinking of having a family - and the whole thing has gone ugly! If these things happen, let them happen as by-products, not as results. Yes, if you love a woman, you would like to be with her - this is marriage! There should be no other marriage. There should not even be the idea, because the VERY idea makes things down-to-earth; the poetry is destroyed. It becomes mundane; the romance is destroyed.

But the moment you are in love, immediately your mind starts weaving and spinning... about family, how to have a family of one's own. Why should you need 'a family of one's own'? People possess things and people possess people too. If you possess things, it can be forgiven, but how can it be forgiven when you start possessing people? You say 'my wife', 'my husband', 'my child' - what have you DONE to call this child yours? Who are you? How do you come in? Can you create a child?

Can you create the child according to your own desire?

A child comes from the unknown, is a gift. You are not the creator, how can you be the possessor?

It IS NOT according to you that the child takes shape and form and being. You were longing for a beautiful child and you are hit with a lulu and still you call it 'my child'. You have been just a passage in the great play of existence.

Just as there are liberation movements, women's lib movement, so a new movement should be mounted: children's liberation movement. Nobody should be allowed to possess children.

Possessiveness should not be allowed! Nobody should say 'my child'. All children are of God.

You can only be a caretaker, not more than that. And you should be grateful that you have been chosen to be a caretaker of a new life evolving. That is more than enough! Enjoy the game of it! of being a caretaker of an evolving life, but don't start possessing.

But our mind is possessive. The possessiveness has gone to the very roots, and that has been the greatest hindrance in human growth.

When love is possessive it becomes exclusive. Then 'this woman is mine, and exclusively mine!' - then she cannot laugh with anybody else, then she cannot hold hands with anybody else, then she cannot look into the eyes of somebody else. What nonsense! Why? Who am I to possess? And how can love be possessive?

Love is always inclusive; it can never be exclusive. If I love the woman, I will love to see her happy in a thousand and one ways, with a thousand and one people. I would like her to be happy. That will be my joy. If she is happy dancing with somebody, I should not feel jealous - I love her! how can I feel jealous? I should be thrilled that she is happy. But when you claim that she is your wife, then you cannot allow this. You start crippling her. She starts paralyzing you in revenge. You both become destructive to each other.

Love is the greatest creative energy, but up to now it has been a misfortune, the greatest misfortune.

People have not been killed because of hatred: people have been killed because of love. Life has become so bitter, not because of anger: it has become so bitter because of love.

You fight for the love of a woman or a man; you fight for the love of your family or clan. You fight for the love of your ideology or religion; you fight for the love of your mother-country or father-country, father-land, motherland. You go on fighting for your love! All murders, all killings - all kinds of sufferings exist because of your so-called love.

Something is basically wrong with your love - your love is a fixated love; it is not a flowing play. It is serious, it is exclusive, it is possessive. It is full of stupidity.

One should be able to see all this - and just SEEING it, you start relaxing. You see the point of it and you start relaxing, and a new awareness arises in you.

Just.... I am surprised when I come across a man whose wife has died - and he is still crying and in anguish: his beloved has died. Why be so monopolistic? There are so many beautiful women still alive! This makes no sense. Your husband has died and for your whole life you will remain in a nightmare - because you cannot love anybody else? Your love is so tiny? so fixated? it was a kind of obsession? It was neurotic, it was not healthy. Otherwise, when the husband is dead, yes, there will be sadness, but you will say goodbye and you will move. You will not sacrifice your life - because sacrificing your life is dangerous. If you sacrifice your life and you become a martyr, you will take revenge on life; you will create guilt in your children, you will create guilt all around. And you WILL suffer! And when a person suffers, he creates vibes of suffering all around.

No, this makes no sense! The world is full of so many people, why should you be so fixated? But the fixation comes from the very beginning: the moment a child says 'my mother', and the mother feels very happy, the fixation has started. Now the child will remain obsessed his whole life.

And when the child is small, he is naturally dependent on the mother - and mothers and fathers have exploited that dependence immensely. He is helpless, he cannot survive on his or her own; he HAS to look up to the mother and the father. His helplessness is exploited. He knows if the mother is gone, he will be dead. If the mother is no more available, he will be dead, he will not be able to survive. This idea goes on and on getting deeper and deeper.... And the mother helps it, because the mother enjoys the ego trip that "You cannot survive without me." She threatens many times, "Listen to me, otherwise I will leave and go forever, or I will die - and THEN YOU will know!"

And the child is shaken to the very roots - he cannot survive without the mother.

This becomes, by and by, a conditioning. Later on it will be reflected in all his relationships. He will think the same about his wife: if the wife is no more, he will not be able to survive. This will become unconscious. He will think the same again and again about everything: "If this job is gone, then I am finished. If this house is no more with me, then where will I be? If this bank balance is no more with me, then where will I be?" His whole life he will think in terms of fixation, and his whole life will be a long long, unnecessary suffering. He is no more a child, but he remains childish because of the conditioning.

Love, and immediately you turn it into bitterness because you become serious about it. You start thinking of the future. Think of the future - marriage, children, security - and you have destroyed the play and it has become a game, and a very dangerous game. And you will be a loser - nobody is ever a winner.

With play, everybody is a winner. With seriousness, nobody is ever a winner - all are losers.

You come to meditate here and you become serious about it. And I go on insisting: Don't become serious. Meditation can happen only in playfulness, in utter playfulness, when you are not searching and seeking for anything, when you are simply dancing or singing or chanting; when you are not asking, when the activity is all and all in itself, no future is provoked, no future is involved in it... then it happens. Meditation is a happening. You cannot snatch it from God's hands. You cannot desire it and you cannot have it. You can only do one thing: you can become an empty receiving end - an;d that's what happens when you are playful.

Meditation is fun! Even the word looks absurd with meditation - meditation and fun? Down the ages, you have been taught that this is the seriousmost thing: go into the church and become serious - even if you don't have one, create a long face, then you will look as if you are in the church. Don't laugh, don't dance, don't be playful! - it is a serious affair. You are facing God.

This God seems to be somehow very strange! He cannot allow laughter, He cannot allow dance, He cannot allow love, He cannot allow joy. The Gods of the past were very revengeful, jealous Gods, violent Gods; ready to crush you and destroy you, ready to throw you into hell-fire. Even the idea of God was ugly.

Here with me, you will have to learn a new language: meditation is fun, prayer is love and laughter; and the temple, the church, the mosque, is the place to enjoy, the place to be drunk with life; the place to dance and hold hands, the place to share what God has given to you, the place to be absorbed utterly into the moment. That is the meaning of fun, that is the meaning of laughter, that is the meaning of joy: to be utterly absorbed in the moment as if no other moment exists. So how can you ask for a result? Result needs another moment in the future.

Become like small children - dancing, singing, shouting - and God will come to you unawares.

Suddenly one moment, you will find He is surrounding you; suddenly you will find you are not holding the hands of a woman - God is holding your hands; you are not holding the hands of a man - it is God. Looking into the eyes of the other, playfully, joyously, suddenly you will fall into a depth unknown to you, unknown to your mind. You will start disappearing into a deep abyss.

That's what God is! God is not in the scriptures - it is in the eyes of people, and in the flowers and in the rivers and in the moons. God is written all over the place! Don't go to the scriptures. And if you cannot find God in alive trees, green and red and gold, if you cannot find God there, you will not find Him in the Bible, the Koran and the Vedas. How can you find Him there if you cannot find Him here? Once you have found it here, you will find it anywhere... then He is everywhere.

Once found, God is everywhere - but you will have to find Him in life, in playfulness.

Playfulness makes you alive to the maximum. Seriousness cripples you. You become shrunken, frozen. You become closed, you become isolated. You become egoistic. That's why seriousness has been so much cherished by people because seriousness gives you the ego, and playfulness takes the ego away.

You ask me, Sarjana: I LIVE IN THE LAND OF SERIOUSNESS, IMPRISONED IN ITS BORDERS.

YOU CAN EXIST ONLY IN THE LAND OF SERIOUSNESS - you as an 'I'; and you can exist only imprisoned in the borders of seriousness - as an 'I'. If you want to be playful, you will have to drop the idea of 'I'. The 'I' cannot be playful; it resists play, because play is death to it. The 'I' is always serious.

Have you not watched it? When you laugh, just have a look inside: the 'I' disappears. That's why egoistic people cannot laugh - impossible! When you are dancing, a moment comes when the 'I' disappears. But egoistic people cannot dance; they cannot allow the 'I' to disappear ever. Naturally, they will remain imprisoned, they will be prisoners. But this is your choice!

If you want the ego, you will have to accept the prison, you will have to accept the boundaries. If you want a bigger and still bigger ego, the prison will become smaller and smaller, and the walls of the prison will come closer and closer. If you want to become the greatest ego in the world, you will be nothing but a prison, you will be surrounded by China Walls from everywhere, you will live in a straitjacket, behind iron walls.

But if you want to be alive, then the ego has to be dropped. Ego is a distraction from life.

I LIVE, you say, IN THE LAND OF SERIOUSNESS, IMPRISONED IN ITS BORDERS. CAN YOU DRAW ME A ROAD-MAP TO YOUR LAND OF LEELA?

And you are again asking about a road-map - that is a serious thing. I have none. If you want road-maps you will have to go to the churches and to the priests - they have. Actually! - in Indian temples there are maps of heaven, hell, and how to reach there, and what you will find... the whole geography! Who is who, and where God lives, and where the great saints live - everything you will find.

They have charted all the maps - all imaginary! because God cannot be caught in any map. And heaven is not a map, neither is hell; they are not geographical at all - they are psychological states.

When you are serious, you are in hell; seriousness is hell, playfulness is heaven.

You ask me: CAN YOU DRAW ME A ROAD-MAP TO YOUR LAND OF LEELA? HAVE I A DEFECTIVE GENE?

No - nobody has a defective gene. And a defective gene does not create the problem: the problem comes from the ego. And the ego has nothing to do with the body; the ego is a mind attitude.

You have a mind and that is your defect. I will not say that you have a defective mind - mind is the defect. You will have to drop the mind. And dropping it, suddenly you will find you have always been in the land of leela; not for a single moment had you left it - nobody can leave it. We can just forget about it. We can become serious and we can forget about it.

You are still the children playing on the sea beach. You are still the children searching for sea-shells on the beach. You are still the children collecting wild flowers. You are still the children trying to catch hold of a butterfly. That purity of childhood is still there; it has not been taken away from you - it has only been superimposed by seriousness, ego, mind. It is there! The rock is blocking the fountain, but the fountain has not disappeared. Remove the rock and the fountain flows again in all its splendour.

You say: I CANNOT FIND MY LAUGHTER OR LIGHT-HEARTEDNESS.

Seeking, you will never find it. Finding, or the effort to find it, is a serious thing. IT IS HERE! - you need not find it. Start enjoying it! Start being cheerful this very moment! Don't try to find it, because if you try to find it you will remain serious. How can a seeker be non-serious?

You are searching for happiness and laughter and joy - you have to be serious, otherwise how will you search? Meanwhile you will remain serious, and the seriousness is getting stronger every moment. Tomorrow again you will search; but one day has passed - twenty-four hours' more conditioning of seriousness is on you. You will find less laughter tomorrow; the day after tomorrow it will become even more difficult... and so on and so forth. And you will always be searching and seeking and trying to find.

Just be cheerful THIS moment! Just see the point of it! Don't postpone it - these are tricks of postponing, Sarjana. You don't WANT to be happy; you still want to remain unhappy. You still want some new excuse to be unhappy. Now this is the excuse: "I am searching for happiness, I am searching for joy. Right now I am unhappy. I will be happy when I have found - but how can I be happy right now? I will have to find, and the journey is long and the path is arduous, an uphill task."

So you can be happy with your unhappiness right now, and tomorrow we will see... and tomorrow never comes.

Don't try to postpone - these are tricks the mind goes on playing upon you. Be happy! Have a good laugh! Have a good dance!

In the beginning it may look a little awkward, because you have not laughed for so long. The lips may have lost their elasticity. But it will come... just give a little opportunity for the lips to learn it again. They cannot lose it. Maybe forgotten - it will be revived again.

One can never forget how to laugh. It is like swimming: you cannot forget it. Once you have known it, you cannot forget. You may not go to the river for fifty years; after fifty years, suddenly, you can swim. You will not even need to remember it.

And you have been laughing when you were a child. Every child is born laughing, and there are very very few fortunate people who die laughing. One who can die laughing has arrived. But if you want to die laughing, you will have to live laughing.

Once an old Parsi came to see me and he said, "Do you know? We have a beautiful story about Zarathustra - that he was born laughing."

I said, "That is nothing special - every child is born laughing."

Zarathustra is simply a symbol. Every child is born alive, full of joy! great energy, great love for life, great curiosity, infinite wonder, awe for small things. Every child is born an adventurer, an explorer.

And every child is born with great courage to go into the unknown. We cripple him. We stop him.

We prevent him. We start cultivating - and whatsoever we call cultivation is nothing but destroying all the possibilities, allowing only small holes for him to live in, taking his whole sky away and giving him a very small corner in the world.

He was born as all men, all women, all animals, all trees, all rivers, all mountains are. And what do we do with the child? We take all that he has brought away from him; we make him a doctor, an engineer, a businessman, a soldier, a politician - we confine him. He was born as all, as infinity; all the alternatives were open. We close all the alternatives and leave only one alternative open. We have killed him! We allow only a minute part of him to live.

Just think of a businessman: he simply lives as a businessman. Morning, afternoon, evening, night, he lives as a businessman. He dreams of business, he talks of business, he reads of business - his whole life has become business. What have you done to this man? What misfortune has happened to this man? He cannot be anything else! He does not know how to relax. He does not know how to slip out small hole in which he has started living - he calls it businessman, doctor, engineer, professor.

A man should be liquid; he should be able to be all. You should not live only as you - you should live as all humanity, past, future, present. You should live as a totality; multi-dimensional you should live, not one-dimensional, not linear. To live like a line is to live a very poor life.

There is no need! But we have all become focussed in small corners, tethered in small corners we call our minds, egos, this and that. And we are so much obsessed with those small places, caves - -dirty and dark, dismal and sad. But we have become accustomed to those places and we are afraid of the open air and we are afraid of the open sky and the sun and the sand, and we never go out of those small spaces. Hence, laughter has disappeared.

Life has disappeared! - how can laughter live without life? Your spirit is dead. And this is a miracle, that your so-called spiritual people are the MOST spiritless people - and you call them spiritual. My definition of the word 'spiritual' is: one who is spirited, one who lives a passionate life, with intensity; who lives at the maximum, not at the minimum; who does not live a lukewarm life.

Be courageous! and laughter will follow. Be courageous and live intensely! and you will not need to ask how to be playful. Out of the maximum, playfulness happens of its own accord - because when you live at the maximum you start overflowing. That overflowing of energies is what playfulness is - there is no map to it, there is no technique to it. Just understanding.

The second question:

Question 2:

Rejoice in its collapse!

The third question:

Question 3:

PADMA, GUILT IS ONE OF THE GREATEST PROBLEMS everybody has to encounter. The whole past of humanity has been guilt-ridden. And each generation goes on giving its diseases to the new generation. And they go on becoming more and more. Naturally. They accumulate with each generation. And each new generation is more burdened than the previous one.

But guilt has been one of the basic strategies of the priests to exploit people. The priest cannot exist without guilt. When you feel guilty, remember, the priest is around you. When you feel guilty, remember, the priest's hands are around your neck - he is killing you. Guilt is a strategy to exploit people, to turn people into slaves.

Try to understand the mechanism of it. Only that understanding will help you to get out of it. What exactly is guilt?

First: it is a condemnation of life; it is a life-negative attitude. You have been told something is basically wrong with life; you have been told that you are born a sinner. You have been told that nothing good can come out of life or out of you or out of anybody else. Nothing good is possible on this earth! Good is with God. And you have to find a saviour - a Christ, a Krishna - you have to find a saviour who can save you from yourselves, who can take you to God.

Life is not worth living - -avoid living! If you live, you will get deeper and deeper into sin - life is sin.

Avoid life. Withdraw yourself from life. And whenever you feel you are attracted towards life, guilt arises. You start feeling you are going to do something wrong.

And life is immensely beautiful. It has great attraction, gravitation to it. It is natural to be attracted by life. It is natural to be in love. It is natural to enjoy, it is natural to laugh, it is natural to dance. But ALL that is natural has been condemned. You have to go against nature - that has been the teaching down the ages.

The puritans have poisoned your natural sources of life; they have made you against yourself! They have created a split in you. They could not corrupt the body, but they have corrupted the mind. So the mind exists according to the priests, and the body exists according to nature - and there is no meeting.

The body desires the joys of life - all joys. The body is life-affirmative and the mind is life-negative.

The mind represents the priests - Christian, Hindu, Jain. The mind goes on talking in the language of the priests; it goes on saying "This is wrong!" If you are eating food and you enjoy the taste, Mahatma Gandhi speaks from your mind: "This is wrong - don't enjoy the taste. To enjoy taste is sin."

In Mahatma Gandhi's ashram one of the basic disciplines was ASWAD - no taste. You have to eat just to fulfill bodily needs, but you should not take any taste, you should not enjoy the flavour of the food, the smell of the food. You should destroy the food so it doesn't taste, and you should destroy your tongue too so it loses sensitivity to taste. When you lose taste, you have become a mahatma.

The same has been true about other things: if you fall in love with a woman, you are falling in sin, something wrong is happening. If you see the beautiful face of a woman or a man, and you are thrilled, fascinated, great guilt arises what are you doing? This is irreligious!

And if you are a married man, then more so. You have a wife, you have committed yourself to her.

Now, even to appreciate the beauty of another woman is impossible. You will go home feeling guilty.

You have not done anything! You had just seen a beautiful woman pass by. Now, this is an ugly state of affairs. You will feel guilty; you will feel defensive. When you go back home you will try to hide yourself. You will not allow your wife to know that on the road you saw a beautiful woman and it was a great joy to see her - because if you say that, there will be trouble. And why create trouble?

You will lie. And when you lie you will feel guilty again because you are lying, and one should not lie to one's own wife. Now, so on and so forth.... One guilt creates another, and so on and so forth, ad nauseam. It goes on and on. There is no end to it. Then you become guilt-ridden; you carry a Himalaya of guilt on your heart.

And EACH thing has been condemned.

You will not get rid of the guilt unless you understand the whole mechanism of it - how it is through guilt that the priest has dominated humanity, how the priest has created a slavery, and a subtle slavery. You don't have chains on your hands, you don't have chains on your feet, but you have chains deep inside your soul.

To be free of guilt is to be free of all priesthood. To be free of guilt is to be free of all past. And to be free of guilt is to become one, because then the split disappears. To be free of guilt is to drop schizophrenia. And then there is great joy, because you are no longer fighting with yourself. You start living!

How can you live if you are continuously fighting? You cannot live if you go on fighting with yourself.

You can live only when the fight has been dropped. Then life has its own rhythm, its own melody.

And life is such a blessing. And only in that harmony, when you are one, with NO guilt, with NO repression, with no taboos, with NO inhibitions, with NO priest interfering in your life - Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian - when you are on your own, uninterfered with, your own master, then only can you contact God.

The priest has made it impossible! If you cannot contact life, how can you contact life abundant?

If you cannot contact flowers, how can you contact the one who has created them? If you Cannot contact beauty, joy, love, how can you contact the one from where all beauty, love and joy comes, flows? Impossible. The priest has made it impossible.

The priest is the cause why the earth has become irreligious. Without destroying priesthoods and the old churches and old religions, the world will remain irreligious.

I teach you a new religion! Not Christianity, not Hinduism, not Jainism, not Buddhism. I teach you a new kind of religiousness - guilt-free, tabooless, non-repressive. I teach you a religion of joy, acceptance, naturalness, spontaneity.

Padma, you ask: WHY IS IT THAT 'GOING WITH THE FLOW' MAKES ME FEEL GUILTY?

BECAUSE GOING WITH THE FLOW MAKES YOU FEEL HAPPY - that's why. And you cannot allow happiness. Happiness has become associated' with guilt. Go back, Padma, to your childhood - you will find causes there. Just remember, go backwards; try to find out when it happened.

A small child knows nothing of guilt; he is wild and primitive. That's why to see a small child is such a joy. He is as yet uncrippled, he is as yet uncivilized. He has not been introduced to the disease called civilization - that's why he has so much energy, so much flow. The child is streaming, vibrating; he is a great dynamo; he is all dance. He cannot contain himself - he has so much that he is overflowing.

You cannot make a child sit silently. Why? Because the energy is so much, uncontainable.

The child wants to enjoy everything, and the parents are guilt-ridden. The child wants to shout and he enjoys shouting; that is his expression, that is his creativity. That shout, if helped and not destroyed, will become his song - that is the beginning of the song. But we stop him. We say, "Don't shout! This is ugly, this is bad, this is unmannerly. This is not done in the society. You belong to a famous family, you belong to a great, respectable family - you should not do this. This is okay for the urchins, but not for you. You represent us: look how serious we are. We never shout - and you are shouting?"

And the child was enjoying the shouting so much. In fact, when you stop him shouting you have condemned his joy - that's what he will understand deep down, existentially. What will happen to him? He cannot understand why shouting is wrong; he has as yet no mind to understand that kind of rubbishness. He was enjoying - that he understands; that shouting brings such joy, such flow.

He feels so high, he feels so turned on. Just by shouting, his energy starts moving, he becomes a riverlike flow, he becomes a roaring phenomenon, a tidal wave.

Now you say, "Don't shout - this is bad." What are you saying actually? How will the child translate it? The child will think, "My joy is not accepted."

The child does not want to go to sleep; he is feeling so alive and you force him and you drag him to the bed. He is trying to get away from you and he is saying, "I am NOT feeling like sleep. I DON'T want to go to sleep. I want to play a little more!" But you don't listen. You say, "It is time and you have to go to sleep."

Now what are you doing to the child? You are rejecting - you are rejecting his instinctive understandings. He does not feel like going to sleep right now - how can he be made to sleep?

There is no way! You can force him; he will lie there underneath the blanket and will weep and cry and will feel rejected, will feel unaccepted by the family, will feel guilty about why he cannot go to sleep when the mother wants him to. Now, what can he do? The sleep is not coming. And in the morning when he is feeling sleepy, you drag him out and you say, "Get out! It is time to get up." And he wants to sleep a little more.

Now you interfere - wherever he feels joy, you interfere. Naturally, you make him feel again and again that his joy is wrong.

That gets deep into your bloodstream. That's what has happened to you, Padma. So whenever you are going with the flow it means something is wrong. You are feeling happy? you immediately hear your mother's voice: "Padma, what are you doing? Feeling happy? Betraying me? Betraying your dad, betraying your family? Look how serious we are - and is it good to betray your mother? Look at what long faces we have - and what are you doing? flowing with the flow? going with the flow?

Never has it happened in our family! And it should not happen. "

You start feeling guilty. Just watch when you start feeling guilty, listen silently... you will find your parental voices, your mother, your father, your teacher, saying, "This is not right."

While you make love to a man, you will feel guilty, because your mother has told you that this is wrong, this is the greatest sin. When you start making love to a man, something in you feels it is not right - -the mother is standing there, the father is standing there, and it looks so embarrassing with the parents standing... and you are making love to a man?! What are you doing? Stop it! You may not stop, but you will not go totally into it - which is far worse than stopping. It is better to stop! You cannot stop either, because then your whole nature feels discontented. And you cannot go totally in it because your mind says this is wrong. So you go half-heartedly, half way, and you exist in a limbo.

You never go to the totality of it - SO YOU NEVER FEEL SATISFIED. Out of it you only gather more frustration; you again find you have failed once more, that's all. It has not happened this time again.

And you start wondering whether this orgasm is just an invention, whether some masochistic people have invented it, or some sadistic people have invented it, just to make people feel tortured - because it is not happening to me!

You will be surprised: this is the first century after at least five thousand years that a few women are feeling orgasm. For five thousand years, women have NOT felt orgasm. That too is happening only in the Western hemisphere. I have not come across a single Indian woman who feels orgasm - she has not even heard about the word. In Indian languages we don't have any word for orgasm - because the thing has not existed so the word was never needed. Even in the West, only ten, twelve percent of women are feeling orgasm. This is ugly!

And what to say about men? Do you think men feel orgasm? Ejaculation is not orgasm. Orgasm is a very very different phenomenon. So man can deceive himself easily because he can feel ejaculation, so he thinks he has orgasm - that is not so. Ejaculation is a very local phenomenon, just the triggering of a physical mechanism - a release, a relief, nothing more.

Orgasm is ecstasy. Orgasm is getting lost into timelessness. Orgasm is when your whole body vibrates with some unknown energy that you have never come across. Orgasm is when you are very close to God.

The word orgasm comes from ORGIA - it was a religious ceremony, a pagan ceremony, when people became ecstatic, so ecstatic, that their whole body was full of divine energy, and they were bursting with energy, and they were lost in that energy - that was called ORGIA. It was a religious pagan ceremony; it was something like Tantra. It was Dionysian. The word 'orgasm' comes from that ceremony.

Men also rarely feel it. When your whole body throbs, not only your sexual organ but your whole body throbs, from toe to head you become a sexual orgasm, you become a sexual organ.... That is the symbol of Shiva; you must have seen in India the Shiva-linga. You may sometimes be wondering, "Where are the eyes and where is the nose and where is the mouth and where are the legs? and what kind of image is this?"

This is the symbol of orgasm: when the whole body turns into a sexual organ. From eyes, mouth, body, mind - all disappear into sexuality, into sensuality, into a kind of immense sensitivity. That is the meaning of Shiva-linga.

Orgasm has become impossible because you cannot go totally with the flow. And with orgasm becoming impossible, a thousand and one diseases have become prevalent in man. Wilhelm Reich is right that if we can bring orgasm back to humanity, almost ninety percent of mental diseases will IMMEDIATELY disappear - like dewdrops in the morning when the sun comes.

Ninety percent of mental diseases exist because man has forgotten how to be rejuvenated with God, how to fall into divine energy, and come back again resurrected. Those blocked energies are creating problems. But now... first the priest created the guilt, now the psychoanalyst is against Wilhelm Reich - because, the psychoanalyst, where will he go if ninety percent of mental diseases disappear? If Reich is right, then what about the Freudians and the Adlerians and the Jungians and others - what will happen to them? Reich was condemned as mad, was forced into imprisonment - and he was one of the greatest geniuses of this age, who had a real insight. But this is what we always do: we crucify! He died condemned as a madman in a prison.

Man has not changed much Two thousand years have passed, but we go on doing the same as w e did with Jesus. Now, this man was releasing a very very significant truth - that man's mental illnesses will continue and will go on becoming bigger and bigger, and soon it will be impossible to treat man. Out of four, three persons are already abnormal, and the fourth is just on the way, any moment.... This is not a good situation!

Reich is right that something has to be done. First the priest was involved, now the modern priest is the psychoanalyst. First the priest had the investment in making people feel guilty; he created guilt.

Because of guilt, he stopped people's being orgasmic. And now the psychoanalyst is enjoying the results - his profession is flourishing like anything. His is the most needed profession, and the most respected.

Physicians are no more needed as much as the psychoanalyst is needed, because the body is getting better and better every day and mind is getting worse and worse every day.

Guilt has created human pathology.

In the future, the priest is not needed, neither is the psychoanalyst needed. Both those professions are anti-human; they should go. But they can go only if man is freed of guilt, otherwise they cannot go.

So, Padma, even if you feel guilty, go with the flow. Ignore the guilt. Let the guilt be there; in spite of it, go with the flow! The more you go with the flow, the more you will become able to catch yourself and avoid getting caught into the trap of guilt you will be able to catch yourself in time. You will be able to slip out of that guilt prison.

One has to get out of it, otherwise life will be a long, sad, meaningless anguish.

The fourth question:

Question 4:

ANURAG, THIS AND ONLY THIS CAN BE THE NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTION: I resolve never to make any resolutions because all resolutions are restrictions for the future. All resolutions are imprisonments. You decide today for tomorrow? You have destroyed tomorrow.

Allow the tomorrow to have its own being. Let it COME in its own way! Let it bring its own gifts.

Resolution means you will allow only this and you will not allow that. Resolution means you would like the sun to rise in the west and not in the east. If it rises in the east, you will not open your windows; you will keep your windows open to the west.

What is resolution? Resolution is struggle. Resolution is ego. Resolution is saying, "I cannot live spontaneously." And if you cannot live spontaneously, you don't live at all - you only pretend.

So let only one resolution be there: I will never make any resolutions. Drop all resolutions! Let life be a natural spontaneity. The only golden rule is that there are no golden rules.