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Friends,

One friend has asked, "If Ronald Reagan and Mother Teresa both fall from a one hundred story building, who will reach to the earth first?"

In the first place, who cares?

In the second place, just by the way, it is good news; the sooner it happens, the better.

The Republican Party of India and the Dalit organization - both are organizations of the neo- Buddhists - have made a similar resolution to the government of India, that action should be taken against me because I have been comparing myself with Buddha.

In the first place, I have never compared myself with Buddha. I have always said definitively that he is life-negative, and I am absolutely life-affirmative. There is no possibility of any comparison.

He is a bullock cart, and you want it to be compared with my Rolls Royce? Of course, the basic principle of a bullock cart is the same - the four wheels - but still you cannot compare it with a Rolls Royce.

These organizations have told the government that their religious feelings are very much hurt.

In the first place, if you understand religion... it is in the transcendence of thoughts and feelings.

There are no religious feelings at all! Only idiots have religious feelings.

I have loved Buddha, just as I would have loved the inventor of a bullock cart; it was a great revolution. Buddha is the beginning of a great revolution, but only the beginning, not the end. Looking backwards, I can see he managed a little bit to go against the tradition, but not wholeheartedly.

I am absolutely against the past.

Although Buddha tried in every way... but he was at the beginning point; you could not expect him to create the whole science of transcendence. He has my respect, my love - but I cannot tolerate to be compared with Gautam Buddha!

In fact, the government has to take action against these two organizations.

Gautam Buddha is an escapist, and it is Gautam Buddha who is responsible for the poverty of this country. If so many thousands of people renounce the world, they become parasites on the society.

I don't want you to renounce the world. My whole teaching is: Rejoice in the world. What comparison can there be between me and Gautam Buddha?

Gautam Buddha is twenty-five centuries behind me. And as far as the allegation is concerned, that I have compared myself, it is an absolute lie!

These organizations should understand that if even a little bit of Buddha's experience had been their experience, then this revengeful resolution asking the government to take action against me does not show compassion, does not show meditation.

I want the government not to take any action against these two organizations. I, with all my friends, forgive them. The blind need forgiveness, the ignorant need compassion.

One thing should be understood definitively: I am a buddha in my own self - and the word 'buddha' is not the monopoly of anybody. It simply means the awakened one. It was not Gautam Buddha's name; his name was Gautam Siddharth. When he became awakened, those who understood his enlightenment started calling him Gautam Buddha.

But the word buddha, according to Gautam Buddha too, is simply inherent in every human being, and not only in every human being, but every living being. It is the intrinsic quality of everybody.

Everybody has the birthright to become a buddha.

These poor Buddhists don't understand at all the message of Gautam Buddha. How can they understand me? I have gone far beyond Gautam Buddha.

I have been teaching you all to be buddhas, but nobody has to be a Buddhist. To be a Buddhist is again falling into another prison. They have escaped from the Hindu fold, and now they have fallen into another fold. The names of the prisons are different, but you are all the same a prisoner. You were a Hindu, you were a prisoner; you can be a Christian... The prison will change, but not your slavery, not your consciousness.

People go on changing their prisons. That does not help any transformation in your being. You don't achieve freedom by changing prisons.

I teach my people freedom as the ultimate value. You should not belong to any organization, to any organized religion. It does not matter whether it is Buddhism, or Christianity, or Hinduism - these are different names. Perhaps the architecture of the prisons is different, but you will be all the same a prisoner.

Hence, I want my people to remember it absolutely: not to belong to any organization. All organizations are against individual freedom.

And if there is no individual freedom, there is no possibility of spiritual growth.

You should stand on your own. You don't need any organization, any church, to transform you. You have all that is needed within you; you can be a buddha in your own right. That does not mean you are comparing yourself with Gautam Buddha. Gautam Buddha is too backward.

And I have consistently said that Gautam Buddha is not a complete being, because in renouncing the outer, he has dropped one of his wings. Now he is flopping with one wing.

I want my people to have both the wings healthy. They are not against each other, they support each other. You cannot fly with one wing. You need two wings - the outer and the inner, the material and the spiritual, the visible and the invisible. Buddha is only half a man. I want you to be the whole man.

How can I compare myself with Gautam Buddha? I am a complete man! The outer world is my world, and the inner world is also my world, and I enjoy both, I love both. I love the flowers of the outer world, the rainbows, the dance of rains, the rivers, the mountains, the oceans. And at the same time, I know my inner treasures, my inner ecstasies. And I don't see in them any contradiction.

You don't have to renounce anything, you don't have to choose anything. You have to be choicelessly aware of both: the outer and the inner. Rejoice in both, and your enrichment will be far greater than any Gautam Buddha.

Just the other day I was talking to you about Brian Weiss and his book, MANY MASTERS, MANY LIVES. He has also come across... but he has been hiding it for years, just afraid of the society - particularly Christianity, because he lives in a Christian world. He has been practicing hypnosis and taking people to their past lives.

Now Christianity, Mohammedanism, Judaism - three great religions of the world don't believe in any past lives or future lives. They confine themselves only to one life. So for years he has been successfully working, but was not declaring it to his associates, to his colleagues.

Under hypnosis he took his patients into their past lives, and strangely enough whatever the patient was suffering psychologically, once he had found the source in the past life somewhere, immediately the symptom in this life disappeared. He has cured many people by just taking them to their past lives. Some wound, some hurt they have been carrying from past lives... You can go on psychoanalyzing their minds, but that won't help.

But I want Brian Weiss again to remember that the whole East has put its total genius into the revelation of past lives and reincarnation. We know much more about it than you can even dream of, for the simple reason that for almost ten thousand years this country is the only country in the world which has been working with different techniques and methods to reach to past lives.

But Brian Weiss' experiment is courageous. He will be disturbing the fundamentalist Christians, but he has come out. He says that what psychoanalysis cannot do in twenty years can be done in a few sessions of hypnosis. You just have to take the person to his past lives. He is carrying scars and wounds which are not of this life. Unless you reach to the sources, they will not disappear.

But there is a difficulty - perhaps he has not even taken account of it. The person may be simply imagining that he has reached the past life. How do you make the distinction? The man may be dreaming under hypnosis that he has reached the past life.

Even that imagination and hallucination and dreaming may be helpful to remove the symptoms, but you cannot be certain that he has reached really beyond the birth, beyond the death, to the past life.

And as far as many lives are concerned, the greater possibility is that under hypnosis the person will imagine.

Brian Weiss has to understand, because what I am saying is that unless first you teach your patients meditation...

Meditation cuts the very roots of imagination, thoughts, dreaming, hallucination, illusion. Meditation cuts the mind completely out of the way. In hypnosis, only after meditation can it be certain that the person has reached to the past life. And the basic symptom will be, not remembering the past life, but re-living it. In deep hypnosis, after meditative practices, one does not remember past lives, one starts re-living the past lives.

There is a vast difference between remembering and re-living. If just mind remembering can help to heal psychological wounds, you can understand perfectly well that re-living the past life will not only remove your mental sickness, it will remove all the darkness around your being. It will not only give you mental health, it will give you spiritual growth - and the difference is tremendous.

But he has broken the ice. I respect the man, but he has to learn much more before he can be definite that the patient is not dreaming, but exactly has entered into a different time space.

We are doing therapies with all kinds of meditations, ending the day with me in the deepest meditation, where you start feeling, recognizing, rejoicing, in a space which is called no-mind, your intrinsic buddha dhamma - your intrinsic nature of being a buddha. After these meditations, if some wounds remain, if your psychology still remains sick, you can go through hypnotic sessions which are available here, move into rebirth, go beyond this life.

But remember, you are not making any effort to remember your past life, you just allow the past life to reveal itself to you. The feeling will not be of remembrance, the feeling will be of re-living it.

Re-living the past lives cleans you completely.

It is not absolutely necessary; if you are doing meditations deeply, it is enough. If it is not enough, then perhaps re-living the past lives may be immensely helpful.

Dr. Brian Weiss is going to have tremendous trouble from Christianity, Judaism, Mohammedanism, and from his own colleagues who think that man is nothing more than one life. But he has taken a bold, a lion's step. I support him from the East. Ten thousand years' experimentation is in absolute accordance with his findings, although he is only a beginner.

That's why I have invited him to be here, so that he can understand the difference between remembering and re-living, and can understand that hypnosis directly is not definitive, because you have not cut all the rubbish of thinking, imagination, hallucination. They will arise, and if you insist that in hypnosis you have reached to past lives, the person is helpless; he will believe in his own mind projections. Even these projections will be helpful - more helpful than psychoanalysis - but these cannot bring a transformation in the person.

You will be only dealing with patients. Do you understand that healthy people also need tremendous help? You may be healthy mentally, physically, but that does not make you a perfect man. Unless you know the beyond, the mysterious, you know nothing. You can live a healthy life, and you can have a healthy heart attack.

It is a well-known fact that sick people rarely have heart attacks. One needs some energy to have a heart attack. Have you observed the fact that after eighty years of age, very few people die?

After ninety, even less and after a hundred, you will very rarely find somebody dying, because dying needs some energy. After a hundred years of living, you will be so exhausted... you cannot die!

It will be good for him to have a deep contact with the East, because he will not get any support in the West. He will be suppressed, subdued, contradicted, and alone he will not be able to fight the vested interests of Christianity, Judaism, Mohammedanism, communism. Now almost three-fourths of the world believes that man is only a material phenomenon, there is no spirit; nobody can move from one body to another body.

This country still remains the only stronghold for the theory and practice of reincarnation. That's why I have invited him. Here he may flower, finding the right soil and the right atmosphere. It is not possible right now in the West.

I am trying my best to send my people around the globe, spreading something that they have experienced, something for which they are authoritative. The meditations will make you capable to have the courage to fight rotten conditions, rotten traditions, rotten scriptures.

We already have two million people around the world. We can create a worldwide fire so that this night, a long night, ends into a dawn, and a new man comes out of the fire of meditation - a new man with a soul, with a deep connection with the cosmos.

In the past, two kinds of fallacies have been perpetrated. One is from Christianity, Mohammedanism, Judaism, communism, and that is, accepting only the material part of man and rejecting anything inner. The second fallacy has been perpetrated by the East, by Buddha, by Mahavira, by Shankara:

rejecting everything that is material, calling it illusory, and just confining themselves to the inner.

Both are halfhearted.

I teach you the whole man, and I want you to be the whole man: Zorba The Buddha.

THE CONCEPT OF REINCARNATION, HITHERTO DISMISSED AS BEING WITHOUT SCIENTIFIC BASIS, IS BEING INCREASINGLY USED BY PSYCHIATRISTS TO CURE PHOBIAS AND OTHER MENTAL ILLNESSES - but they don't say it publicly.

IN HIS BOOK, Many Lives, Many Masters, BRIAN WEISS SAID IT TOOK HIM FOUR YEARS TO "GARNER THE COURAGE" TO WRITE ABOUT HIS EXPERIENCES WITH PATIENTS REGRESSING INTO PAST LIVES UNDER HYPNOSIS.

HE SAID HE HAD BEEN AFRAID FOR HIS FLOURISHING CAREER IN A CONSERVATIVE PROFESSION. BUT THE RESPONSE HAS ASTONISHED HIM. HE HAS NOT BEEN RIDICULED.

Just wait a little more, Dr. Brian Weiss. You have not hit hard against the tradition; you are simply proposing a process of helping the psychologically sick. But the idea of reincarnation goes further.

You will be again astonished - and ridiculed by your own people, because it puts their whole theology in the wrong.

Perhaps they have not understood it and its implications yet. Just wait a little. I am saying it on my own experience.

In the beginning I was traveling all over the country, and people were very much happy with me.

Fifty thousand, sometimes one hundred thousand people would gather to listen to me, but they could not understand the implications. They simply rejoiced that a man from this country is capable of rediscovering the forgotten language of spiritual revelation.

But as they became more and more acquainted with me, they started dispersing. They saw that I was not supporting their traditions - although I was commenting on Indian scriptures, so they were very happy. But as they became aware - it took some time for them - that although I was mentioning their scriptures, what I was interpreting was my own, immediately all the traditions of India, Hindu, Jaina, Buddhist, all became enemies to me. But it took almost fifteen years for their thick skulls to comprehend my meaning.

So you just wait. It will be good, before they start ridiculing you, if you come to the East to have some support and more material which has been gathered through ten thousand years of experimentation. You can become more sophisticated and more scientific, but you don't know anything about meditation yet.

Once you know meditation, then hypnosis can be of tremendous value. And once you start growing in the right soil, in the right atmosphere, you will have enough courage to go to the West, and you will not have to wait for four years to "garner courage" just to express a simple thing which has been accepted, recognized for thousands of years.

Perhaps he is not aware of the Eastern discoveries in the inner world....

He seems to be the right person to be welcomed here. We can help him to refine his theorization. It is absolutely a need that the West understands that there is not only one life; you have lived many more lives, and you will live many lives until you become a buddha. Once you become a buddha, wholeheartedly - inwards, outwards, in a synchronicity - you will disappear into the ultimate cosmos.

You don't need an individual body; the whole existence becomes your body. But unless you become a buddha, you will have to go on from one body to another body.

It is a torture. It is imprisonment.

To attain ultimate freedom you have to be pure consciousness which can move into the blue skies and disappear. This disappearance is not annihilation; this disappearance into the blue skies is becoming one with the whole.

Just by the way... one yoga teacher, Iyengar, in Poona, has given an interview to some journalists, and they asked him about me because we are both in Poona. He used to come to listen to my lectures in those old days when they did not exactly understand my meaning.

He used to come to my meditation camps - there are here witnesses for it - and he wanted me to do some yoga exercises, because I was traveling continually, and that would have an adverse effect on my body.

I said, "I would rather have that adverse effect than learn some stupid distortions of the body. And moreover, I remember perfectly how you exploit people."

He was teaching J. Krishnamurti a few yoga postures to help him overcome his forty years' migraines. Now, a yoga teacher is a professional; all that he teaches you is certain exercises of the body. But when he wrote his book on yoga, on the flap paper he wrote, "I am the guru of J.

Krishnamurti."

I told him, "I don't want such exploitation. 'Guru of J. Krishnamurti' - just because you have taught him a few exercises? Then any idiot who can teach a few exercises, then any doctor who treats you with medicine, then any psychiatrist, any psychoanalyst, can claim to be your guru.

"I don't want to be included in your disciples. I am nobody's disciple. Hence, I have to refuse your offer for teaching me some exercises. I don't need them."

Instead of talking about me - he was asked to talk about me - he said, "Everybody is a part of God, but nobody can claim to be God himself." In his mind he thinks that I think myself God.

Just look around the world: if I were God there would not be such a mess. This mess is enough to prove that I am not God. But his statement is so stupid, that everybody is a part of God - which part?

You are dissecting God into parts, and if the whole of God is dissected nothing remains behind, no God, because everybody has got a part and run away.

Such illogical, irrational statements people go on making, and nobody even objects. I am simply ashamed of the retarded minds that surround us.

You will be surprised to know that the University of Oregon has made a survey: how much intelligence the average Oregonian has, and how much intelligence my people in the commune had. And they were surprised, they were utterly disappointed. The average Oregonian has only seven percent of intelligence functioning - that is far below the retarded. And it is not my survey, it is the survey of Oregon's own university.

Unfortunately they surveyed the commune when we had invited the street people. Still, the average commune member was found to have fourteen percent functioning - double the amount of any Oregonian. My own understanding is that if we had not invited those street people, the average intelligence of the commune people must have been somewhere around twenty or twenty-five, not less than that.

This man Iyengar makes a laughingstock of himself when he talks about "We are all parts of God."

I was wondering who is which part? and whether anything is left behind or everything has been divided?

I want to tell you, you are not parts of God; there is no God. You are a whole cosmos in yourself.

The moment you reach to your peak, to your ultimate attainment of buddhahood, you ARE God, because you become part of the cosmos. Not part of God... you are the whole God. Only one man, P. D. Ouspensky, has gone to immense trouble to prove that.

In ordinary mathematics - he was a great mathematician of this century - a part is always smaller than the whole, obviously. But he was the chief disciple of George Gurdjieff. He wrote, "In the inner world of consciousness there is a higher mathematics where the part is equal to the whole, not smaller than the whole." He is the only man in the whole history who has asserted an absolute truth.

In the inner world you are not part of God, you are the whole. In the inner world the part is equal to the whole.

When Ouspensky showed his manuscript to his master, George Gurdjieff, Gurdjieff said to him, "You will have to make one more statement: that there are moments in the inner world when sometimes the part is bigger than the whole."

Ouspensky, being a mathematician, had already gone beyond mathematics, but this was too much - that the part can be bigger than the whole.

But I absolutely agree with George Gurdjieff.

Reluctantly Ouspensky noted it down, but made a statement in his introduction: "That piece - that the part can be bigger than the whole - is incomprehensible to me, but my master says so, so I have put it. But I cannot support it by any reasoning."

Reasoning is not at all the question.

The whole is unconscious: the trees, the mountains, the rivers, the oceans, are all unconscious.

When a buddha comes to his fulfillment, he is not only equal to the whole, he is certainly bigger than the whole, because the whole is almost unconscious. In his consciousness, in the explosion of his consciousness, the part can become bigger than the whole.

But people like Iyengar simply repeat like parrots, because it is written in the Hindu scriptures that everybody is a part of God. It is not based in experience.

I say unto you: Everybody is equal to the whole, and there are moments of conscious explosion when the part is far bigger, far more expansive than the whole existence. The consciousness surrounds the whole existence like a tremendous mystery.

But to just go on repeating the scriptures, parrotlike, has been the way of all retarded people.

Intelligence requires research; it requires research in the outer world, and insearch in the inner world.

Another famous clinical psychologist, who directs a number of programs at St. Francis Hospital, Arlene Huysman, says of Dr. Brian Weiss, "If anyone else had written the book I would not have believed it."

But this is not belief, this is just trusting the man, who may be just roaming, through hypnosis, in the imaginations, in the dreams of his patients. He has yet no validity, no evidence to say that it is not imagination but a re-living of a past life.

Re-living of a past life is a vast phenomenon. You can use it as a clinical process, but that is not its purpose. Its purpose is to bring a reorientation to your being, a re-evaluation of your inner world.

And seeing the fact that thousands of times you have been born again and again, and you have been doing the same thing... it is disgusting: the same desires, the same jealousies, the same greed, the same violence you have done so many times. If you can re-live all those lives again, the very re-living is going to change you totally. You will not desire anything anymore, you have desired enough. Everything that you attained in your past life has proved only a soap bubble. Now there is no point in again running after soap bubbles.

It is time to stop all desiring, it is time to stop all greed, it is time to stop all jealousy. It is time to look inwards, and to see your original face.

In the East, we have called this cycle of birth and death... You just go on moving like a wheel, the same route again and again, the same spokes again and again. Sometimes it comes up, sometimes it goes down, but it is the same wheel. How to get rid of this wheel of birth and death has been the only focus of the whole Eastern consciousness. And certainly that helped so many people in India, in China, in Tibet, in Japan, to become enlightened, to become buddhas.

The whole earth has the same intrinsic birthright.

The sutra.

Maneesha has asked:

The reason for Koyo Seijo not becoming a buddha, although he practiced sitting meditation, zazen, for thousands of lives... Obviously, the question has meaning: what prevented him? Nobody has meditated so long. The reason is simple, because to become a buddha also is a desire - very subtle.

You cannot become a buddha even in one hundred kalpas, because you are a buddha right now. It is not a question of becoming, it is a question of entering into your being.

Remember the difference between 'being' and 'becoming'. Becoming is somewhere faraway in the future: you have to reach. Being is just now, here. You have only to close your eyes and see the buddha. You have always been a buddha.

This poor fellow Koyo Seijo was striving hard to become a buddha; that was what prevented him - because he was running, thinking that there, faraway, he would become a buddha, and all the time when he was seeking the buddha, he was the buddha. Just if he could have relaxed for a moment, dropped the desire to become a buddha... he would have laughed and asked for a cup of tea.

SEIJO SAID, "YOUR QUESTION IS QUITE SELF-EXPLANATORY."

Seijo is saying, "This means that nobody can become a buddha, because everybody is a buddha."

THE MONK ASKED, "HE MEDITATED SO LONG; WHY COULD HE NOT ATTAIN BUDDHAHOOD?"

He could not understand yet, he was still worried about the thing. "He meditated so long, and he did not attain buddhahood? Why?"

SEIJO SAID, "BECAUSE HE DID NOT BECOME A BUDDHA."

A strange answer. But Zen is full of strange answers, tremendously significant, but if you look only at the words you will miss the point.

Seijo said, "Because he was a buddha, and he was unnecessarily running after being a buddha.

How he can attain it?"

A roseflower, if he tries to become a roseflower, do you think he will ever attain it? He is not looking at himself, he is already the roseflower; he is looking in all ten directions - where to go, where to find the secret of becoming a roseflower - and he is not looking at himself.

This is one of the most significant points to remember: that when you experience the buddha in you, remember you are not becoming a buddha. You have always been a buddha; just you were keeping your back towards him. Now you have taken a complete one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn, and you are facing yourself.

How does one face oneself?

You do it every day. When you look in the mirror, whom do you encounter? Yourself - but yourself is not in the mirror, remember. Yourself is the one who is witnessing the mirror reflection. So when you go inside, I remind you continuously, "Remember only one quality: of witnessing." When your whole inner being becomes a mirror and you can see yourself reflected in all directions, but you remember that you are not the reflection, you are the witness. To find the witness is to find the ultimate secret of life and existence.

AT ANOTHER TIME, A MONK ASKED ROSO, "WHAT IS MEANT BY 'IN FRONT OF YOUR NOSE'?"

That is also a Zen expression. Whenever a disciple asks a master where to look for the buddha, the master will say, "Just in front of your nose."

What does it mean, "in front of your nose"?

It means, find your inner mirror and look in front of your nose. The buddha is not in the mirror.

Remember to remain a witness. You are the buddha; the mirror has only helped you to see your face.

I have told you the story of Mulla Nasruddin.

In his old age he found a mirror by the side of the road. He looked into it - he had never looked into a mirror - and he said, "My God! This seems to be the photograph of my father. I never knew that the old fellow, who is dead now, was such a fashionable person as to have a photograph."

He came home, hiding the mirror in his clothes. He did not want to reveal the secret to his wife.

He was afraid she would immediately freak out and say, "This is your photograph! You are wasting money and we are starving." So he simply went upstairs and tried to hide it in a suitcase full of clothes.

The wife had come just behind him without making any noise of footsteps. She was watching, she knew where it had been kept. She went away, and Mulla Nasruddin was not aware of her.

When he went out she immediately opened the suitcase. She looked in the mirror and she said "My God, in his old age he is running after this rotten woman, and he is keeping it a secret from me!"

For the first time when you encounter yourself in front of your nose, in your inner being as a mirror, there is a possibility to think that you are the fellow in the mirror. Hence, I repeat continuously, "Remain a witness. Whatsoever happens, you are only a witness, nothing else."

When everything drops away and only the witness remains in its uttermost purity, you have become a buddha, you have become one with the whole.

And perhaps - if you are not a half-buddha like Gautam Buddha, but a complete buddha with both the wings intact - perhaps you will understand George Gurdjieff's statement, that the part sometimes is bigger than the whole, because the whole is unconscious.

Unconsciousness, howsoever vast, is not even bigger than a dewdrop of consciousness. Darkness, however vast and ancient, is not bigger than a small flame of a candle. A small flame of a candle is far bigger than all the darkness of the world.

George Gurdjieff, howsoever irrational, is absolutely right.

WHEN THE MONK ASKED ROSO "WHAT IS MEANT BY 'IN FRONT OF YOUR NOSE'?" ROSO RESPONDED, "SLENDER BAMBOOS CANNOT BE USED AS MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS; A GOURD CANNOT RETURN TO THE TRELLIS IT GREW ON."

He is saying, in a very metaphorical way - "SLENDER BAMBOOS CANNOT BE USED AS MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS, AND A GOURD CANNOT RETURN TO THE TRELLIS IT GREW ON" - he is saying that you have to move inwards, just watching that you are going directly and straightforward in front of your nose. Don't go zigzag. The inner world is vast; don't go here and there, you will be lost.

Hence, I have been telling you, "Go like an arrow, direct." Hit the source, and everything else becomes so clear that one who has hit his center never asks a question again. All questions are dead, all answers are dead; you have found the golden master key.

SAIGUN ONCE ENTERED A TEMPLE AND NOTICED A SPARROW MAKING DROPPINGS ON THE HEAD OF AN IMAGE OF BUDDHA.

This is the right place for the Republican Party of India, and the Dalit organization - that immediate action should be taken against the sparrows, because they are making droppings on the head of Gautam the Buddha!

SAIGUN SAID TO NYOE, A DISCIPLE OF MA TZU, "HAS THE SPARROW THE BUDDHA-NATURE OR NOT?"

Why are you worried that the sparrow is dropping shit over the head of Gautam Buddha? Why are you worried?

"HAS THE SPARROW THE BUDDHA-NATURE OR NOT?"

NYOE ANSWERED, "YES! The sparrow has also the buddha-nature."

SAIGUN SAID, "THEN WHY DOES IT MAKE DROPPINGS ON THE HEAD OF BUDDHA?"

NYOE REPLIED, "DOES IT MAKE DROPPINGS ON THE HEAD OF A HAWK?"

Buddha is sitting so silently; it is possible for the sparrow to shit on the Buddha. It is his silence, it is his utter immobility....

One of the great masters of the Jainas is Bahubali. His statue in South India is the biggest statue in the world, fifty-two yards high. The whole mountain has been cut into a statue. The smallest toe on his foot is as long as your whole body. To see the whole statue, you have to go along a ladder that goes from one end, covering the whole statue, and ends at the other. It is almost like climbing a mountain. The head is so big, you can have a good gathering there.

Bahubali... The name itself means: a very strong man. 'Bahu' means arms - a man who has arms of steel. He meditated standing near that mountain, and he was so deep in his meditations that birds made their nests in his ears, and he was so long standing there that creepers started moving up his body.

It is a beautiful statue, perhaps the most beautiful in the world. Thousands of artists worked together in tremendous harmony to create that big a statue.

Although Bahubali is not one of the tirthankaras of the Jainas - he is not counted in the twenty-four - he is respected almost like a tirthankara. He was a great master, a great meditator, so deep in his meditation; these are just symbols that birds have made nests in his ears, that creepers have grown around his legs, thighs, and are reaching to his chest, flowering. The man is completely covered with flowers and foliage. But he has forgotten everything of the outside; he has gone so deep, miles deep.

It is possible for a sparrow to mount on the head of a buddha, but it is not possible to make droppings on the head of a hawk. The hawk moves the fastest of all the birds.

I have heard about Paddy and Seamus, walking outside, and a hawk shit over Paddy. His whole face was covered. Seamus said, "Wait, it will take a little time; I will have to go back to find some tissue paper."

Paddy said, "You idiot! By the time you come here, the hawk will be gone miles away!"

A haiku:

A FALLEN LEAF RETURNING TO THE BRANCH?

BUTTERFLY.

The Zen poet is saying, "What is this butterfly? It must be a fallen leaf which is returning to the source."

In these word-paintings, Zen poets have said so much.

A FALLEN LEAF RETURNING TO THE BRANCH? BUTTERFLY.

A fallen leaf becomes a butterfly and returns again to the branch.

Everything returns to the source: that is the meaning of the haiku. You may take your time, but one has to return to the source. At the source you are the buddha. At the source you are one with the cosmos, and perhaps bigger than the cosmos.

Question 1:

Maneesha has asked a question:

Yes, Maneesha. Laughter is therapy. And if you are allowed from the very beginning to enjoy a belly laughter without restraint, without inhibition, to find out your buddha will be the easiest job, because you will be free of all seriousness. You will be free of all tensions, inhibitions, suppressions, and in this freedom only one finds the buddha.

Hence, before your meditation I have kept a special time for Sardar Gurudayal Singh. I want you to laugh as deeply as possible, so you are unburdened. Then meditation is very easy, nothing inhibits you.

My contribution to the world is: making sense of humor a part of spiritual growth. A man who cannot laugh is sick, sick unto death.

Bernie Baloney comes racing into the emergency room of the Hamchop Hospital. "Excuse me, miss," he pants, as he reaches the receptionist, "but can you tell me which ward Miss Fitz is in?"

"Miss Fitz? You mean Miss Fannie Fitz?" asks the receptionist. "The woman who got run over by a steamroller this morning?"

"Right!" says Bernie. "Which ward is she in?"

"Well," explains the receptionist, "you will find her in wards eight, nine, and ten!"

This is what Iyengar is trying to do with God - chop him into pieces. These butcher-type people!

Cherrie Chubbs is concerned about her husband Buster's impotence, but she also realizes that he will never admit it as a problem. So one day she goes to see her family physician, Doctor Hardong, who prescribes some medicine to raise Buster's spirits.

Cherrie takes the prescription to the drugstore but unfortunately the pharmacist misreads Doctor Hardong's handwriting. Instead of typing "FOUR TEASPOONS" on the label, he types "FORTY TEASPOONS."

Early the next morning, Cherrie Chubbs races into Doctor Hardong's office.

"What is the matter?" asks the doctor, looking up at the frantic Cherrie. "Did not the medicine work?"

"It certainly did," smiles Cherrie, "but now I need the antidote so that they can close his coffin!"

Fritz Frankfurter, the German tourist, runs into his old friend, Helmut Hamburger - both of them vacationing on Miami Beach. They go to the outdoor beach-bar for a gossip and a few beers.

Suddenly, Fritz chokes on his beer. "My God!" he splutters. "Look at that fat, frumpy woman in the green bikini - the one jumping up and down in the sand and waving. That must be the most disgusting sight on the whole beach. Do you think that with all that jumping up and down and waving and leering towards me, she is trying to proposition me?"

"I don't know," says Helmut, drinking his beer. "But if you like, I will go down there and ask her - she is my wife!"

Nivedano...

(drumbeat) (gibberish) Nivedano...

(drumbeat) Be silent. Close your eyes and feel your body to be completely frozen.

This is the right moment to look inwards with your total life force, with your whole consciousness and with an urgency as if this is the last moment of your life.

Go directly like a spear, piercing into the very center of your being - deeper and deeper. The deeper you go, the closer you are to yourself. The deeper you go, the more you are a buddha.

This moment remember only one thing, because that is the very spirit of the awakened one. Be a witness. Just watch and don't get identified with anything. You are not the body, you are not the mind, you are not any spiritual experiences either. You are just a witness. Witnessing is the greatest science for inward revolution.

To make it more clear, Nivedano...

(drumbeat) Relax, let go, but remain a witness, watching whatever happens.

A great silence descends over you, a deep peace arises in your being. Your separation from the universe disappears; you start melting and merging. Gautam the Buddha Auditorium starts looking like a lake of consciousness without any ripples.

The evening was beautiful on its own, but the presence of ten thousand buddhas has made it a splendor. Everything around you, the bamboos, the stars, all are rejoicing and dancing. Even a single buddha and the whole universe goes on a festival - and when ten thousand people are centered the whole universe becomes a celebration.

Collect as much joy, peace, silence, blissfulness, ecstasy, to bring with you, and persuade the buddha to come along. It is your very nature.

He has to express into your actions, into your gestures, into your words, into your silences.

He has to become your whole being, your poetry, your song, your dance.

Nivedano...

Come back, but remember, you are coming back as buddhas - with the same grace, with the same beauty, with the same splendor. Sit down for a few moments just to recollect, to remember the golden path that you have traveled, the tremendous peace in the innermost shrine of your being - the grace that is your nature, the awareness that is your birthright.

Now, sitting like a buddha, you are the most fortunate, the most blessed beings on the earth at this moment.

You have to spread this ecstasy around the world.

This benediction you have to share with all and sundry, with friends and strangers.

We have to make this whole earth aflame with a new passion - the passion of your innermost being - with a new fire which only burns the false and brings out the pure gold.

Mankind has forgotten the language of being a buddha. We have to spread the message to the furthest corners of the earth.

Okay, Maneesha?

Yes, Beloved Master.