Grace is Being Herenow

The first question:

GRACE COMES OUT OF ETERNITY. GRACE is never a part of time. Time creates hurry, time creates tension, time creates anxiety. The more you are conscious of time, the more neurotic you will be. Time is a neurosis. When you are not conscious of time at all, when there is no past and no future, when time is irrelevant to you, when you are just herenow, grace arises.

Grace is part of the eternal. Grace is a quality of God - and God is not in time. In time is mind, in time is ego, in time is misery, hell. The way of the meditator is how to go beyond time, how to drop time, how to become oblivious of time. I don't mean the clock time, I mean the psychological time.

Clock time is perfectly okay, utilitarian. If you have to catch a train, you have to remember the clock time. But that is not a problem. That doesn't create anxiety, that doesn't destroy your grace. The clock is perfectly okay in its own way. But when you become entangled in psychological time, then you lose grace.

What is psychological time? To live in the past is psycho-logical time. And then out of it arises another problem: one starts living in the future. Past starts projecting itself into the future. You had some experience yesterday, you would like to have it again tomorrow. You had some experience yesterday that you did not like, and you don't want to have it again tomorrow. The tomorrow comes out of the modifications of yesterday. It is a refined version of yesterday, of all your yesterdays.

What are you hoping for in your life in the future? What are you going to do tomorrow, or the next year, or the next life? Sometime look into it - what are you going to do? And you will find your whole past clamouring to be repeated - in a better way, of course. Some depressing moments have to be dropped, some dark corners have to be made light, some ugly states are not to be repeated again, some faults not to be committed - AND some joys have to be strengthened, prolonged, made more joyful.

Your future has been chosen from the past, so in these two you are entangled. Either you are entangled in the past, thinking of that which is no more, or thinking of that which is not yet. And meanwhile you are missing the present. And the present is part of eternity. The present is not part of time at all.

Be herenow and grace comes of its own accord.

Whenever you are herenow, suddenly you will find tremendous grace, harmony, equilibrium, a melody in your being, a tranquility - and a tranquility that has not been forced from the outside, a tranquility that is not part of any discipline, a tranquility that is not quiescence, a tranquility that is not a kind of managed stillness. If it is still managed, then it is not yet herenow. If by effort you have been keeping it there, then it is already past. Or, if by great desire you are holding it there, then it is already in the future. Only when there is no effort to maintain it, no desire to support it, unsupported by you, un-maintained, unmanaged by you, uncontrolled by you... it is simply there. It surrounds you like spontaneity, silence, benediction... then there is grace.

Grace has nothing to do with any time in particular.

Drop time-consciousness. Live in time, chronological time, but drop psychological time. Don't hanker for the future. ALL that you need is available; nothing more is needed to be happy. Nothing more is needed to be in heaven. Heaven is just standing in front of you. Heaven is where you are. So don't think that something else has to happen, THEN you will be happy. That is a way of postponing.

Nothing is going to happen - all has already happened. God is already the case.

Start enjoying the God that is available to you. Drop psychological time and grace will enter in you.

There are no 'my times'. The time that is destroying your grace is the same - always the same, and the same for everybody. It has no East, no West; it has no past, no future. The time that is disturbing you is the same disease - the disease of not being herenow. What should be done?

In fact, to ask the question that way is to ask a wrong question. Whatsoever you do will come out of the psychological mind, because you will do it to create grace. There will be a motive. So try to understand. Nothing can I can be done about it. Only understanding, just understand! No need to do anything positively for grace. Only one thing is needed to understand why you are missing grace - WHY YOU ARE MISSING; not HOW TO ATTAIN.

The difference is tremendous. If you ask rightly, you ask, "Why am I miserable? Why am I missing it?" If you ask a wrong question, you ask, "How to attain it? How to become blissful?" You have moved wrongly. And they look almost the same. Linguistically they look almost the same - 'why"

and 'how' - they look as if they are two aspects of the same coin. They are not.

When you ask "How?" you are asking for the future. Then rather than looking into the situation in which you are, you are creating a desire, an ideal, a goal - and that's what psychological time is. You will be caught in the trap again. Now you will start looking "How to create grace?" And whatsoever you create will not be grace. At the most it can be just a pseudo-coin; at the most it can be just a face, a mask. It cannot be true; it cannot be authentic - because the authentic CANNOT be created by the mind. The authentic can only be ALLOWED by the mind, but it cannot be CREATED by the mind. The authentic comes on its own - you just give way, you don't stand in the way.

So ask WHY you are not graceful - and look into the causes, and you will find the basic cause is psychological time. The basic cause is: always being entangled with the non-existential, so the past and the future go on pulling you into two separate dimensions. Hence grace disappears, you are pulled apart. How can you be graceful?

Seeing it, looking into the fact, you start laughing - then don't be pulled! There is nobody ELSE really who is pulling you. You are allowing it. It is your own doing. When you see that "It is I who am allowing this-psychological mind to function, not only allowing but supporting it, pouring my energy into it" - seeing the fact that this is destroying your benediction, your blessing, your bliss, you pull your hands away, you don't support it any more. That's all. Without being supported by you it starts shattering, falling. Once it has disappeared there is grace.

Grace is absence of time: grace is presence of eternity.

The second question:

IT IS NOT ONLY THAT SOMETHING ESSENTIALLY IS missing in Western psychotherapies - THE ESSENTIAL is missing! The Western psychotherapies are still objective, from the outside.

They have not yet come to the point where meditation becomes the MOST important thing in psychotherapy. They are still looking from the outside - they are looking at the behaviour.

Behaviour is the outermost expression of your psychology, but it is not the source. It is the outcome, the by-product. The Western psychotherapies are still pruning the leaves of a tree. By pruning the leaves of a tree you cannot destroy the tree. They have not yet reached to the roots; those roots are hidden underground. They are looking aboveground. When you look at the tree you rend to forget the roots - they are not visible, they are not obvious. Roots are not so foolish as to be obvious; roots are not so foolish as to be there, very apparent. They are hiding themselves; they are the secret source of the tree. The secret source has to remain at the most secret place so nobody approaches it easily. Exactly the same is the case with man.

Western psychology still goes on thinking about the leaves and the branches and the foliage, and the OUTER expression of psychology. But from where it all arises - the source, the innermost core of it - is still not tapped, it remains untouched.

When a psychology starts entering into the subjectivity of humanity, it becomes a technique of meditation. Then it is no more concerned with the behaviour, it is no more concerned with the act, it is no more concerned with the symptoms. It is more concerned with the very source of it all.

And by changing the source, all is changed. Without changing the source, you can go on changing everything and nothing basically is ever changed.

Without changing the source, all is just patchwork. Somebody becomes ill - mentally ill - what does it show? It simply shows that some root in that man's being is rotten; somewhere in the source there is poison. You patch him up; you do something on the surface. You analyze his behaviour and his dreams, and you try to understand his problem objectively, from the outside. You watch and you try to patch up. Yes, it can be done. The illness can be stopped from one point, but sooner or later it will assert itself from another point, because the source poison has not been changed yet. Only the symptom has been treated, not the disease itself.

The same goes on in medicine too. You have a headache? They will give you aspro. Aspro is not a cure, it simply makes you unaware of the symptom. The aspro does not destroy the headache; it simply does not allow you to know about it. It confuses you The headache remains there but you are no more aware of it. It creates a kind of oblivion.

But why in the first place was the headache there? Ordinary medicine does not bother about it. If you go to a doctor he is not going to be bothered why in the first place you have the headache. You have the headache! - the problem is simple for him: "The symptom is there, take this medicine - some drug, some chemical - and that symptom will disappear." The headache may disappear and you may have a disturbed stomach the next day; another symptom has come up.

Man is one; man is a totality - an organic unity. you can push a problem from one side, it will assert itself from another side. It may take time to come to the other side, to travel to that point, but it is bound to come. And then pushed from that side it moves to another side... and man has many sides. It goes on being pushed from one corner to another.

Out of all this you become more and more ill rather than healthy. And sometimes it happens that a very small disease becomes a big disease. For example, if the headache is not allowed, and the stomachache is not allowed, and the backache is not allowed, and NO ache is ever allowed...

immediately the ache comes and you take something and you stop it. If for years together you go on with this repression - this is repression - then one day ALL that disease gathers together, asserts itself in a more organized way. It can become cancer. All that has gathered together and now it asserts itself almost like an explosion.

Why for cancer have we not yet been able to find a drug? Maybe cancer is an expression of all the repressed diseases of man. We know how to repress single diseases up to now; now this is not a single disease, this is a very collective attack. It is a total attack - ALL the diseases have gone together, joined hands together. They have made an army... and they attack you. That's why drugs are failing; there seems to be no possibility right now that any drug will be found.

Cancer is a new disease. It does not exist in primitive societies. Why? - it has to be asked why it does not exist in primitive societies. Because the primitive man does not repress, there is no need.

It is a REBELLION of your very system. If you don't repress, there is no need for any rebellion.

Small things happen and go.

The religious attitude is to look, not for the symptom but for the source. That's what I call 'The Psychology of the Buddhas'. If you have a headache, that is not your illness, that is not your disease. In fact, that is a signal from your body that something is going wrong in the source - run to the source! Find out what is going wrong. The head is simply giving you a signal, a danger signal, an alarm that "Listen to the body. Something is going wrong. You are doing something which is not right, which is destroying the harmony of the body. Don't do it any more! otherwise the headache will go on reminding you."

The headache is not the disease, and the headache is not your enemy - it is your friend. It is in your service. It is very, very essential for your existence that the body should make you alert when something goes wrong. Rather than changing that wrong, you simply put the alarm off - you take an aspro. This is absurd. And this is what is happening in medicine and this is what is happening in psychotherapies - symptomatic treatment.

That's why the essential is missing. The essential is: look into the source. Next time you have a headache try a small medita-tive technique, just experimentally, then you can go on to bigger diseases and bigger symptoms.

When you have a headache just try a small experiment. Sit silently and watch it, look into it - not as if you are looking at an enemy, no. If you are looking at it as your enemy, you will not be able to look rightly. You will avoid - nobody looks at the enemy directly; one avoids, one tends to avoid. Look at it as your friend. It is your friend; it is in your service. It is saying, "Something is wrong - look into it."

Just sit silently and look into the headache with no idea of stopping it, with no desire that it should disappear, no conflict, no fight, no antagonism. Just look into it, into what it is.

Watch, so if there is some inner message, the headache can give it to you. It has a coded message.

And if you look silently you will be surprised. If you look silently three things will happen. First: the more you look into it, the more severe it will become. And then you will be a little puzzled: "How is it going to help if it is becoming more severe?" It is becoming more severe because you have been avoiding it. It was there but you were avoiding it; you were already repressing - even without the aspro you were repressing it. When you look into it, repression disappears. The headache will come to its natural severity. Then you are hearing it with unplugged ears, no wool around your ears. It will be very severe.

First thing: it will become severe. If it is becoming severe, you can be satisfied that you are looking rightly. If it does not become severe, then you are not looking yet; you are still avoiding. Look into it - it becomes severe. That is the first indication that yes, it is in your vision.

The second thing will be that it will become more pin-pointed; it will not be spread over a bigger space. First you were thinking, "It is my whole head aching." Now you will see it is not the whole head, it is just a small spot. That is also an indication that now you are gazing more deeply into it.

The spread feeling of the ache is a trick - that is a way to avoid it. If it is in one point then it will be more severe. So you create an illusion that it is the whole head which is aching. Spread all over the head, then it is not so intense at any point. These are tricks that we go on playing.

Look into it and the second step will be that it comes to be smaller and smaller and smaller. And a moment comes when it is just the very point of a needle - very sharp, immensely sharp, very painful. You have never seen such pain in the head. But very much confined to a small spot. Go on looking into it.

And then the third and the most important thing happens. If you go on looking at this point when it is very severe and confined and concentrated at one point, you will see many times that it disappears.

When your gaze is perfect it will disappear. And when it disappears you will have the glimpse of where it is coming from - what the cause is. When the effect disappears you will see the cause. It will happen many times. Again it will be there. Your gaze is no more that alert, that concentrated, that attentive - it will come back. Whenever your gaze is REALLY there. it will disappear; and when it disappears, hidden behind it is the cause. And you will be surprised your mind is ready to reveal what the cause is.

A thousand and one causes there can be. There are different causes. The same alarm is given because the alarm system is simple. There are not many alarm systems in your body. For different causes the same alarm is given. You may have been angry lately and you have not expressed it.

Suddenly, like a revelation, it will be standing there. You will see all your anger that you have been carrying, carrying... like pus inside you. Now this is too much, and that anger wants to be released.

It needs a catharsis. Cathart! - and immediately you will see the headache has disappeared. And there was no need for the aspro, no need for any treatment.

And when the anger has disappeared, a totally different quality of well-being will arise in you that can never arise out of the aspro. Aspro represses - anger remains hidden inside you, violence goes on raging inside you. You only keep the alarm shut, that's all. Nothing changes, only the alarm is no more there.

This goes on and on, and it becomes more and more accumulated. It may give you ulcers, it may give you tuberculosis - one day it can give you cancer. When a great quantity gathers, there are qualitative changes. There is a certain limit for the body to tolerate anything, beyond that limit it starts feeling ill. So is the case with mind. And never think of body and mind as two separate things; they are not. Man is body-mind, psychosomatic.

Now there are two psychologies in the West: psychologies which don't bother much about the body, and psychologies which don't bother much about the mind - psychologies rooted in the body and psychologies tooted in the mind - the old Cartesian dichotomy continues. A real psychology will not be in any way leaning either towards the mind or towards the body; it will take the totality of man as one unity.

Man is psychosomatic; man is body-mind together. Body is nothing but mind expressed outwardly, and mind is nothing but body unexpressed in the deeper source of your being. Both are poles of one energy. The one energy vibrates, pulsates, affects both. So the psychology cannot be Pavlovian or Skinnerian. The psychology cannot be a behaviouristic psychology, and the psychology cannot be just Freudian or Jungian; they are half half. And the half-truth is sometimes far worse than the whole untruth. The whole untruth is at least whole. The half-truth is more dangerous - and Western psychotherapies are caught up in it. Half are caught up with the body, half are caught up with the mind.

Descartes goes on reigning yet; he still remains the father of Western philosophy. He should be dethroned, the sooner the better. Any dichotomy in man, any division, any split in man, is dangerous because man exists as one organic unit, man exists as one dance. And everything is interconnected, nothing is separate. And man should not be treated locally. When the head is ill, it is not only the head that is ill - it is the whole system that is ill. The head is simply giving the symptom. When the stomach is ill, it is not only the stomach that is ill; it is always the whole system that is ill. So the WHOLE system has to be treated, and the whole patient has to be taken care of. No local treatment, no local medication, no local psychotherapy, is going to help. The very idea is dangerous.

But this is how the Western scientific mind has been functioning for three hundred years. If you have something wrong, they are ready to remove it immediately. They don't bother that the question is never of the part - the question is of the whole. If something is wrong they are ready to remove it. If your teeth are wrong, they are ready to remove the teeth. If your tonsils are giving you trouble, they are ready to remove the tonsils. But tonsils don't exist in a vacuum. If something is wrong with the tonsils, something must be wrong somewhere else too. By removing the tonsils you will simply put the alarm off. Now the illness will have to find some other alarm somewhere else.

Don't treat man in parts. That is very disrespectful. Treat man as whole, respect man as whole. And that is true as far as medicine goes and as far as psychotherapies go.

But the MOST essential that is missing is meditation. Psychology has still not stumbled upon the interiority of man. The interiormost source, the inner emptiness of man, has not yet been penetrated.

It cannot be penetrated by scientific methods - that's the trouble.

And if you have decided beforehand that the only true methods ARE scientific methods, then there is no possibility to enter this inner emptiness. Then your very methodology prevents this; then you are in a prejudice - you are not open. You say, "We will only go as far as scientific methodology allows." But scientific methodology can only go as far as the OBJECT is concerned. The subject remains away from it; it cannot go there. By its very nature it cannot penetrate your innermost core; it can only go on touching the surface.

So if you think that this methodology cannot be changed and there is no other methodology - that this IS the only methodology and this is the only scientific methodology - then Western psychotherapy is fore-doomed.

For the object a different method is needed; for the subject a different method is needed. For the object, thinking is needed; for the subject, no-thinking is needed - just the opposite is needed. It is as if you are trying to smell with your eyes. You cannot smell with your eyes. Nothing is wrong with the eyes; eyes are perfect. But if you want to smell a roseflower you have to bring it close to your nostrils, not to your eyes or to your ears. If you want to listen to music you have to bring it to your ears, not to your nose. If somebody insists that "I will hear the music through the nose," then he will not hear the music. And naturally he will say, "There exists no music because I cannot hear it." His VERY approach, his very bias, prevents him from hearing it.

Thought is object-oriented. No-thought is subject-oriented. If you want to go outwards, if you want to think about others, you will have to think. If you want to go inwards you will have to drop thinking.

There is no other, so thinking is not needed. There only you ARE, SO only silence is needed, non- thinking is needed. Mind can be dropped, you can be there without the mind. Knowledge can be dropped, you need not carry it there; it is unnecessary luggage. It won't allow you to enter inside.

You will have to completely unburden yourself of all your knowledge.

And remember, I am not saying that the objective approach is wrong. I am saying the objective approach is not very essential. I'm not saying it is wrong - it is perfectly good as far as it goes. But it does not go far enough, and it cannot go to the innermost core.

That is what is missing - the most essential is missing!

The Western psychotherapies have still not stumbled upon meditation. Nothing like VIPASSANA has happened yet. Unless it happens the soul will be missing, and Western psychotherapy will remain just a dead body, a corpse. It will not breathe, it will not be alive.

The third question:

IT IS VERY MUCH POSSIBLE. Many times your ego will I deceive you. It will say, "You have arrived, you have attained." By saying that it will prevent you from attaining, because when you have attained there is no need to make any more effort. When you have already attained, then what is the point of going on troubling yourself? That is the last trap ego throws at you.

First it says, "It is foolish to try to attain Buddhahood. It does not happen in the very nature of things.

It is all nonsense, fiction. Don't be mystified by these words!" First the ego will say, "It is impossible.

It has never happened and it is not going to happen." But if you don't listen and you go on and on, the ego will try many other ways to distract you.

The last will be: one day, seeing that now you don't listen, the ego can say to you, "Now look! You have had it, it has happened. This is satori, this is samadhi. You have become a Buddha." This has to be encountered by every seeker.

The real enemy is not outside you, and the real distraction never comes from the outside - it comes from the inside. Buddha has said, "The enemy is within, and the friend is within - both are within you." If you listen to the enemy, the ego, it will go on befooling you, deluding you.

Naturally, there is nothing much more than Buddhahood. If the ego can feel that "I have attained"

then you are at the top of the world. Even an Alexander is nothing before you. The richest man is just poor before you; the most powerful man is nothing, helpless before you. You have become omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent - you have become a god. The ego can do that. And it will do!

Unless you are very, very alert.

And when it starts playing such tricks on you, you will tend to accept it because it is so sweet It is so beautiful to accept these ideas. Knowing well that nothing has happened - because how can you befool yourself? - knowing well that nothing has happened, still you will tend to become a victim.

Two old men meet on a corner.

First old man: "Where have you been for the past eight weeks?"

Second old man: "In jail."

First old man: "You in jail? How come?"

Second old man: "Well, about eight weeks ago I was standing on a corner, and this beautiful young girl rushes up with a policeman and says, 'He's the man, officer. He's the one who attacked me.' I tell you, I felt so flattered, I admitted it."

It is possible. A man of eighty, if a beautiful girl rushes up with a policeman and says, "This man has attacked me," can feel flattered. It is worth going to jail for a few weeks. He could not say no.

When the idea is thrown at you from your ego that you have attained, it is so charming, it is so hypnotizing, it is so attractive, it is incomparably attractive. And knowing well somewhere deep down - how can you not know? - knowing well, perfectly, that it has not happened! You are just the same, with the same anger, with the same jealousy, with the same possessiveness, with ALL the nonsense that has been there - it is still there. But still you would like to accept it.

Then you ask me: AND IF IT CAN HAPPEN LIKE THAT, THEN HOW TO AVOID IT?

The only way to know, the only way to judge whether it has really happened or is just an ego trap, is that when it really happens you don't have the feeling of attainment at all. When it REALLY happens you don't feel that you have attained. You don't feel that you have arrived, that you have achieved. There is no trace of achievement at all - because WHO can achieve it? In the very process of achieving it you have disappeared, so who call claim it? Who can say, "I have come, I have attained"? The 'I' is no more!

This is the only criterion: when you really attain, there is no feeling of attainment at all. There is NOBODY to attain it and nobody to claim it. There is immense silence. All that garbage of attainment - of attaining this and attaining that - has all disappeared. The whole crowd has gone. You are left utterly in silence. Not even for a single moment does the idea arise: "Now I have attained!"

And you know it has happened, but there is no feeling of attainment. Let me repeat: You know it has happened. But remember, it is a happening - because you don't find yourself at all! You are not there! It HAS happened! You are empty, you are absent; you look in all directions and you don't find yourself at all. You are nowhere to be found. That old guy has disappeared without leaving a trace.

You KNOW it! It has happened, but there is no feeling of attainment.

Attainment is an ego feeling; achievement is the desire of the ego. So remember the difference between a happening and an achieving. Ego is the achiever. So if any trace of achievement lingers in you, and any feeling of attainment comes to you, and you start feeling strong, worthy, great - then you can be certain you have missed again.

When it really happens, there is no claimant left. One simply is it. Not that you become Buddha - suddenly you understand you are not, only Buddha is. It brings great humbleness. There is no assertion.

The fourth question:

THE FIRST THING: Righteous conduct has nothing to do with enlightenment. Of course, enlightenment has much to do with righteous conduct.

You don't go to enlightenment through righteous conduct; you come to righteous conduct through enlightenment. Righteous conduct first and then enlightenment is putting things upside down. It is putting the cart before the bullocks. The inner must happen first! then the outer follows it like a shadow. Consciousness must happen first, then conscience arises out of it naturally.

If you do it the other way round, you will miss. You will become a righteous person but you will not be a right person. You will become very very righteous, moralistic, puritanical, this and that - but ALL this will be nothing but decorations for your ego, new medals for the ego, new certificates for the ego.

You can become a saint by righteous conduct, but you cannot become a Buddha. You can become a saint, but you cannot become a Christ - and the difference is tremendous. Try to understand it.

Character is imposed from the outside; it is a conditioning. It is a kind of enforced slavery. You are not really free in it. You have to do certain things because if you do them you are paid well. It brings a good payoff. If you don't do those things, you suffer, you lose respect, you lose respectability. You become a criminal.

A cunning person, a clever person, would not like to lose respect in the society; so all those who are clever and cunning, they will become righteous. Naturally, they will have double-binds in their minds; they will not be one piece. on the surface they will show that they are righteous, and from the backdoor they will go on doing all that they always wanted to. They will have two faces, at least. One face, the public face, to show to others; another, the private face, to live with. They will be hypocrites.

Imposed character brings hypocrisy in the world. Imposed character brings a split in people; they become schizophrenic. They do something and they say something else, and they pretend something else still. Their life loses grace because they are not one; their life loses harmony. There is no accord, there is constant discord.

So your so-called religions, which have insisted too much on the moral code, have not been able to make a better world. They have been able only to create a hypocritical world, a very ugly world.

You can see it, there is no need to say it. You can see it all around - a very ugly world, very false, pseudo, pretentious.

And the man who pretends... and he cannot do anything else - unless he has attained to inner consciousness, he can only pretend; he cannot do anything else. All that he is trying to do he will have to follow - Moses' commandments he will follow, Jesus' commandments he will follow, or Buddha's commandments. But they are not his own experience. He has not experienced that way himself. All his morality is borrowed from others. He is an imitator, it is not authentic.

That which has not arisen in your own consciousness is never going to make you free; you will be imprisoned. And you will ht so much entangled in all that split that it will be difficult ever to feel happy.

Now see what happens. Your morality says one thing. For example, the morality says: "Stick to your woman. If you are married, stick to your woman, love her, be responsible." Perfectly okay. If you LOVE her, there is no need to say 'stick to her' - you will stick anyway. But if you don't love her, then the problem arises. If the love has disappeared... and love disappears; in this life nothing is permanent. I'm not saying that in the first place there was no love - there may have been but now it has disappeared. As it has entered one day, it has gone one day. Now what to do?

If you stick to your righteousness, to all the codes and the rules that have been given to you, you will be untrue to yourself, untrue to the woman. You will go on making gestures to her as if you love her.

And deep down you will be very very angry, raging. Deep down you would like to kill this woman.

You feel at least that if she dies it will be good, it will be a blessing. Something... you will be waiting for some disaster to happen.

But you are righteous and you believe in a certain way of life, and you have to love her. How can you love anybody if the love has disappeared? You can pretend. And when you pretend, you are killing your own love energy and you are destroying the other's possibilities. She will never be satisfied by your pretensions; you will never be satisfied by your pretensions. Then one day or other you are going to fall in love with some other woman.

Now more misery will enter - you will have to keep it a hidden fact. Now a secrecy. Now you have two lives, and you have to hide from your wife about this woman, and you have to hide about your wife from this woman. You will have to start living in two worlds, and you will become more and more untrue. And one untruth leads to many other untruths - you will become a mess! And sooner or later you will be caught. It is impossible not to be caught, one is bound to be caught.

Deep down you will feel miserable because you are doing something wrong. If you don't do the wrong you feel miserable, because you don't love this woman. If you do the right you feel miserable.

if you do the wrong you feel miserable - you are trapped either way. This kind of righteousness is a trap it keeps people miserable.

My own approach is totally radical. My approach is: I don't give you any commandments. I trust in you more than in any commandments that can be given to you. I would like to give you consciousness, not commandments - not conscience but consciousness! I would like you to become more and more aware about your life, and I would like you to become more and more authentic about this awareness - so that you remain one piece whatsoever happens. And whatsoever you want to do, you have to do it responsibly. And remember, my word 'responsibility' does not mean responsibility towards somebody else, no. When I say you have to do it responsibly, I mean you have to be responsible to your consciousness, that's all.

Nobody is responsible for anybody else here. How can I be responsible for you? How can you be responsible for me? I am responsible for whatsoever I am doing - and I have to do it, and I have to do it with all my heart and all my being. So whatsoever it is, I accept it and I go with it, and I don't go on playing false games. This is honesty.

I don't call that honesty which says "Honesty is the best policy." How can honesty be a policy? A policy is in the very nature of dishonesty. Honesty is not a policy! - honesty is a rebellious way of life. It has no politics and no policy in it.

This is what I call a really righteous person, a right person. He moves according to his inner consciousness, and wherever it leads he is ready to accept the consequences. He does not hide, he does not try to pretend. He lives a life of unity. He's not many persons, he is one; he is not a crowd. He really has a unity inside him; he is not poly-psychic. Otherwise, the righteous is the most dangerous and the most false man in the world. Even criminals are sometimes more innocent than your so-called righteous people.

That's what Jesus means when he says that "The righteousness of the righteous is not enough" - a tremendously important saying: The righteousness of the righteous is not enough. It is lacking, something is missing in it - the soul is missing.

A monk said to Master Seppo, "I have shaved my head, put on black clothes, received the vows - why am I not to be considered a Buddha?"

Seppo said, "There is nothing better than an absence of goodness."

Meditate over it. Seppo says, "There is nothing better than an absence of goodness." What does he mean? He is not against goodness but this IDEA that "I have done this, I have done that, now what is missing? Why am I not a Buddha? Why should I not be considered a Buddha?"

When the first Zen Master entered China, the emperor had come to see him. And the emperor had done many righteous acts. He had made many Buddhist temples, thousands of Buddha statues he had spread all over the country. He was converting the whole country to Buddhism. Millions of monks he was feeding; he had been maintaining many monasteries. Thousands of scholars were translating works from Buddhist scriptures into Chinese. He had put all his treasures at the service of Buddhism. Naturally, he was feeling very good, obviously - he was on a great ego trip.

And when Bodhidharma came, he received Bodhidharma and said, "Sir, I have done this and I have done that, and I have done this, and I am doing this - what will be my merit?"

And that Bodhidharma looked ferociously into his eyes and said, "Nothing, sir, no merit at all. You will fall into the seventh hell."

The emperor could not believe it, because ALL other monks and Buddhists... many had come before. This was the first Zen Master. Many had come before. China was already converted, the country had almost become a Buddhist country. Many had come and everybody had praised him like anything; and everybody had said that "This Emperor Wu is the greatest man in the world." He was almost respected just next to Buddha. He had done so much, and people were praising him like anything. Books were written in praise of him, poetry was written in praise of him, songs were sung in praise of him. Buddhists monks, Buddhist scholars, pundits - they were all bowing down to this emperor.

And here comes this Bodhidharma and he says, "No merit, sir - not only that: you will fall into the seventh hell. Drop this idea that you have done anything, otherwise you are in danger!"

Why? Because to feel that you are doing something good simply means that doing is coming out of the ego - and ego is the door to hell. The righteous person is the egoistic person, one of the most egoistic persons. And he has much to be egoistic about. He has a reason to be egoistic. He can show the good acts that he has done.

Then the Emperor Wu asked, "Then what is virtue? Then what is merit? What is PUNYA?"

And again, like a bolt, Bodhidharma said, "Emptiness... just emptiness."

Wu again tried to understand and he said, "So you say emptiness is holy?" Again from the backdoor he brings his idea, "So emptiness is holy?"

And Bodhidharma shouted, "You stop this nonsense! There is nothing holy in it! Emptiness is simply empty! What holiness? There is nothing holy in it! Emptiness is simply empty."

Now this was too much, shouting at the emperor. And the emperor said, "Now this man is not for me." And Bodhidharma turned, went back to the mountains. But the emperor meditated over it. How can you forget such a man? The man continued to haunt him, he became like a nightmare.

"Why has he shattered my beliefs?" This man was living in a dream palace, that he was going to the seventh heaven and even Buddha may be ready to receive him at the door. This man had shattered all his dreams. And this man looked very authentic. The emperor knew all kinds of flatterers, they were all around him, the whole court was full of them; and he had known all those so-called mahatmas who had come before this man. And now he could see the difference - this man had a fire, an authenticity. This man was REALLY of a totally different quality, belonged to some other dimension.

He thought again and again, and the more and more he thought, the more and more he felt that this Bodhidharma seemed to be right. But he could not gather courage to invite him again. Then when he was dying - after seven years - on his deathbed, he could not postpone it any longer. He told the people around him, "Rush immediately and find out where Bodhidharma is, because that seems to be the only man I have come across, the only real man. A man of so much virtue that he says there is no virtue in it. A man so righteous that he does not believe in righteousness. A man so enlightened that even virtue is a fetter. You go! I am dying and I feel he may be right, that I will go to the seventh hell. It was all an ego trip."

But it was too late. When the people reached Bodhidharma, the emperor was already dead. Before his death he told his people, "On my grave write something from Bodhidharma. I could not write it in my heart, but at least let it be engraved on my grave." On his grave still this whole dialogue is written:

Wu asks, "What will my merit be?"

And Bodhidharma says, "Nothing. There is no merit in it, and you will fall into the seventh hell."

"Then what is virtue?"

And Bodhidharma says, "Emptiness."

"And what is holy in emptiness?"

And Bodhidharma says, "There is nothing holy. Emptiness is simply emptiness."

My own feeling is that if even for a single moment before death this man Wu understood it, that was enough. One moment of real understanding is enough... more than enough, more than thousands of lives of righteous living. That's what Jesus means when he says, "Righteousness is not enough, something more is needed." Conscience is just the outer shell: consciousness is needed.

SO, I DON'T THINK MUCH OF ETHICS. Not that I am against it. I don't think much of it because it has not made man ethical at all. And I don't think much of righteous acts, because they are not basically righteous - they are pretensions. First and foremost is meditation, everything else follows.

First you should go to your innermost core. Forget about all else - the relationship, the social world and all that. First you should go to your innermost core, get rooted there and let your life arise from there. And I know you will be moral, and without being moralistic.

Now these are two different things. To be moral is one thing, to be moralistic is another. The moralistic person is an ugly person; the moralistic is not moral, just bragging about it.

I have heard:

A country convert, full of zeal, offered himself for service in his first prayer meeting remarks.

"I'm ready to do anything the Lord asks me," said he, "so long as it's honourable."

Now this is a moralistic person. Even with God he will have to choose. He says, "I am ready to do anything the Lord asks me, so long as it is honourable." Even with God he will choose what is honourable and what is not honourable. A moralistic person keeps an eye to judge everybody - even God. A moralistic person is on a trip to condemn everybody. And a moralistic person is not moral because he loves: he is moral because he is afraid. His morality is out of fear, the hell, the punishment. Or maybe out of greed - the reward in heaven and paradise.

Gil Hodges turned down a steak dinner on a plane because it was Friday. A teammate, also a Catholic, advised him to have the steak, saying, "There's an automatic dispensation when you're on a plane and they're serving only that."

Hodges hedged, "That might be, but we're a little too close to headquarters up here," he said.

Just the fear... just fear keeps people moral. But fear is immoral, so how on an immoral attitude - the attitude of fear and greed - can morality have its structure raised? It is making a house on sands.

A moral person is unafraid and ungreedy. If you ask me my definition of morality, I will say: a man who has no fear and no greed. Now if you think of this definition, then your so-called righteous people will not be righteous at all, because they are ONLY greedy and afraid. If somebody comes and declares to the world and convinces everybody that there is no hell, out of your one hundred moralistic people, ninety-nine will immediately rush into sin. Fear has disappeared. And if somebody comes and says, "There is no paradise either. and you are not going to be rewarded; sinners and saints - all are alike once they have died," then the remaining one percent will also fall into sin.

There is a story about Jesus. It is not related in the Bible but in Sufi sources.

Jesus comes to a town and he sees a few people sitting on a veranda, very sad - crying, weeping, beating their chests. He asks, "What has happened to you? What wrong has happened to you?

Who has created this state? Who has made you so miserable?"

And they say, "Nobody. We are afraid of hell. We are religious people, and we are afraid of all the sins that we have committed. We are asking for forgiveness."

Jesus moves ahead. He comes across another group, sitting in a garden, very sad - not weeping, not crying, but very sad, very dull, almost stagnant life energies. He asks, "What has happened to you? Why do you look so stupefied?"

And they say, "We are worried whether we are going to make it or not - the paradise, Firdaus - whether we will be able to make it or not! The very anxiety paralyzes us. If we miss, then...? We don't do anything wrong! we keep away from anything that can have any connection with wrong, but still the mind goes on being worried whether we are going to make it, whether we will be able to enter paradise. That very greed is making us very sad, anxious, paralyzed."

These are the two kinds of religious people in the world.

Another parable:

A Sufi mystic woman, Rabiya, was found one day running in the marketplace, shouting like a lunatic.

In one hand she had a torch, a burning torch. In another hand she had a pot full of water.

So somebody inquired, "Rabiya, what has happened to you? What are you doing? Where are you going? And why this torch and the pot with water?"

She said, "I am going to drown hell with this water, and I am going to burn paradise with this torch.

Only then can the world be religious, never before it."

The moral person is the one who has no fear and no greed. But fear and greed disappear only when the mind disappears. They are the two wheels of the mind. The mind-cart moves on these two wheels; hence, those who know, they say morality is a by-product - the real thing is meditation.

And then when you do one thing wrong, you have to find a thousand and one explanations why you had to do it. You rationalize, you try to protect yourself against the fear. You da a small thing and you make it look very big. You just give some help to some beggar and you make it look very big, as if you have done something very great. Or you do something wrong, and then you make it look very small. And you try to find reasons why you had to do it. It was not really that you wanted to do it, but the circumstances were like that. The situation was such that you had to do it.

This constant rationalizing in the mind makes you more and more foggy, dim and dull. And, by and by, you lose all proportion; you don't see things as they are. Magnifying one thing, making it look very big, and on the other hand trying to make things look very small, you lose all perspective. Then you can't see things as they are in their real size and shape. Your world becomes a very very illusory world.

The husband wired home that he had been able to wind up his business trip a day early and would be home on Wednesday. When he walked into his apartment, however, he found his wife in bed with another man. Furious, he picked up his bag and stormed out; he met his mother-in-law on the street, told her what had happened and announced that he was filing suit for divorce in the morning.

"Give my daughter a chance to explain before you do anything," the older woman pleaded.

Reluctantly, he agreed.

An hour later, his mother-in-law phoned the husband at his club. "I knew my daughter would have an explanation," she said, a note of triumph in her voice, "She didn't receive your telegram!"

That's how things go on. We go on finding some foolish kind of explanations why we did this and why we didn't do that. These foolish explanations are keeping your mind clouded. Don't start by being moral; start by being meditative. And you will be surprised that morality comes without any effort on your part to bring it. And when it comes without any effort, it has a beauty of its own. It is so natural.

Then you don't brag, then you don't hanker for any paradise. You did the right thing because that's how you enjoyed doing it. There is no more profit in it, there is no more motive in it - it is unmotivated.

You do the right thing because that is the way you enjoy doing it. You don't do the wrong thing, because that is the way you don't enjoy doing it. It is simple! You don't become righteous. You become more and more joyful that's all. You become more and more celebrating, and you don't feel that you are obliging everybody in the world. And you don't feel that others are not so righteous as you are, and you don't need any God to give you any more rewards for it. The right act is its own reward. To ask for any other reward simply means you have not known yet what the right act is.

When you love, the very rightness of it gives you joy. When you share, the very rightness of it gives you great peace, silence, delight. When you steal, the very wrongness of it makes you feel hellish.

When you cheat, the very wrongness of it brings your energies low, you feel depressed. There is no need for any heaven and hell in the future; each act brings its own hell, and each act brings its own heaven. And you go on moving between these two - a thousand and one times in one day.

You do something good and you are happy, and you do something bad and you are unhappy. And I am not saying that there is any outer criterion to judge it by. If you understand me rightly, there is only one inner criterion: whatsoever you feel good doing, whatsoever you feel joyful doing, is right; and whatsoever you feel miserable doing, is not right. If you can see that point, then your life will have morality and no moralism. You will not be a puritan.

Enter into your own being and others disappear. Then your morality is not a consideration for others, it is just an outpouring of your inner being. You are moral because you are happy that way.

The morality is your poetry, your song. It is your fragrance.

One time, the old Zen Master, D. T. Suzuki, gave a talk on Zen in Tokyo. He spoke of the silence, the emptiness, the nothingness, and all the rest, together with the deep wisdom that comes from satori.

When he had finished, one of his audience rose to his feet and, not without a touch of irritation exclaimed, "But Dr. Suzuki, what about society? What about other people? What about the other?"

Suzuki looked at the man with a smile and remarked, "But there is no other."

There is no other, and there is no self. That is the illumination that comes through meditation. You disappear and the other disappears immediately, because the other exists only as a counterpart to 'I'. 'I' creates 'thou'; the self creates the other. When the self disappears in meditation, the other disappears also. Then there is a natural flow. In that natural flow everything is right of its own accord - not that you have to put it right again and again, not that you have to be very very careful and considerate and concerned. It creates no anxiety, it follows you like your shadow wherever you go.

That morality is religion.

So, let me repeat:

Nothing at all, but enlightenment has much to do with righteous conduct.

Very moralistic, but not very good. Shows your miserliness, shows your money-mindedness, shows your very very hard heart. Good, at a very low level.

If you are thinking only of the other, it looks good: why should he eat if he does not work? But you are not thinking about yourself at all. Can't you be generous enough to share with somebody who is not working? Why should you be so miserly? Why should work be a condition?

I know it has been a condition in the past, because the past has been very poor. It has nothing to do with morality; it is just because of the poverty of the past that such mottoes became important. They were necessary evils, they have nothing important about them. It was just a necessity. People were poor in the world, and somebody not working was a heavy burden. All people working, then too there was not enough food, not enough clothes, not enough shelter. Life has been very miserable.

Out of that misery these mottoes were created. They have nothing to do with morality; they are just part of the past economics of poverty. They have nothing to do with religion either.

But in the future, when more and more technology will make it possible for more and more people to be free of work, then...? Will this motto work: "If you don't work you don't eat"? In fact, we will have to reverse the motto completely. We may even have to say: "If you work you don't eat!" You can't have both. If you want to work you can work, but then you don't eat - because more work will not be possible. Once technology takes over, the lazy person will become the ideal hero; the one who does not work at all will be appreciated, because he will not ask and he will not demand from the society, "I need work!" He will say, "I am happy without work."

But there are going to be millions of people who will not be able to relax and they will demand work.

They will say, "Work is a must. We cannot sit. What should we do?" You know - what do you do on holiday? You become so tired of not doing anything at all, you become so bored, that you start hankering for Monday to come. You start thinking about what you are going to do tomorrow in the office.

When you are not doing anything, when you are unoccu-pied, you feel it very very difficult to tackle that emptiness, because you are not meditative. Only a meditative person can relax into unoccupiedness. The future belongs to meditators not to workers. In the future, sooner or later - after this century - it is going to happen that this motto will become one of the ugliest mottoes. And anybody demanding work will be thought of as an anti-social element - because from where to bring the work? To give him work means to create trouble that machine can do better work more cheaply, more easily, more fast, more efficiently - and the man demands work! From where to find the work?

Then there is a possibility we may have to make a motto that if you demand work, if you are too much attached to work, you can have work, but then you cannot eat.

People who will be lazy, people who will be just lousy, people who will be just resting, meditating or playing guitar - they will be the respected citizens of the world. Then what will happen to your motto?

It has nothing to do with morality, it is just a necessity - in the past it has been so. But don't try to confuse economics with religion, otherwise all that is beautiful will disappear.

Then how to define work? Buddha, is he a man who works? It will be difficult to define... whether he works or not, whether he is entitled to eat or not? Whether I am entitled to eat or not? It depends on you. If you love me you will say, "Yes, your work is great! It is creativity, this and that." If you don't love me you will say, "This is useless. What is the work in that? You better do some pottery or carpentry. Be creative, do something useful! Teaching people meditation is a useless thing. You are not doing anything and you are teaching other people not to do anything."

What is work? Is Christ entitled to eat or not? Michelangelo? Wagner? Kalidas? Shakespeare? Are they entitled to eat or not? It will depend on how you define work.

If Bodhidharma enters China now, he will be put in jail. He did well - he entered many many hundreds of years ago. Now if he enters Maoist China, he will be put in jail. There are many Buddhist monks and Lao Tzuan monks in jail - for being lazy, for not doing anything that THEY call creative or useful. This is happening! This has happened in China, this has happened in Russia.

Monasteries have been deserted, people have been forced to work.

In the East we have supported the sannyasin for centuries. Why? Because we know that his work is tremendously creative. It is not creative on the surface, but what Buddha is doing just by being here is tremendously significant. But that depends on your interpretation. Otherwise Buddha is just lousy. His work is not visible; it is not there like an object that can be seen and looked at and judged.

It is very mysterious. It is there for those who are ready to fall en rapport with him. They know that what he has done nobody has ever done.

Work in itself is not a value. And remember, the active people have been the most dangerous in the world. The inactive people have been the least harmful, because even to be harmful one has to be very active. The inactive people have not harmed anybody. If Adolf Hitler had been inactive, a little lazy and lousy, the world would have been better. But he was not. He was a great worker. If Mussolini and Stalin had been a little less active people, the world would have been far better.

Just think - Tamerlaine and Genghis Khan and Nadir Shah and Alexander and Napoleon - these are the really active people. They have created the whole history. It is not history - it is hysteria.

They have created this whole neurosis that we call history.

Why do you go on praising work? And remember, I am not saying that one should not work. No, I am not saying that, not at all. But these things should not be raised to moral mottoes. They are economic things; they should belong to their realm. They should not become commandments. They change with circumstances.

It is good to work - but, again, my emphasis is that you should work from your innermost core. If you feel like doing something, you should do it. You should not be manipulated by others. For example, you should not continue to be a doctor if you want to be a carpenter. By being a doctor you earn more, by being a carpenter you will not earn more, you will remain a beggar. But my insistence is that if that feels good for you, then that is right. Drop it, don't be a doctor - be a carpenter! Or if you would like to be fisherman on the lake somewhere, you will be even more poor, but if that is what feels more in tune with your being, then that is what has to be done. No other consideration is important.

There are a few people who will not feel like working at all. In a better human world they have to be allowed their lousiness, their laziness. We should be at least that much human. If somebody does not feel like working, then can't we be human and generous enough that he should be allowed? He is not asking for much - just bread, a shelter.

'In a religious world we will appreciate him, we will not condemn him. There is a possibility - a few people ARE that way, made that way. Don't impose. Rarely are there such people, and if you accept them without any condemnation and you don't make them feel guilty, you are religious, you are righteous, you are really a moral person. There is no need to make them feel guilty. What wrong is there? What is going to happen by all the work that you are doing? Everything disappears into death. And if somebody does not have that feel....

I know one man. I have watched him. He was a student with me... very lazy. Then he became a professor with me, and we lived together. He is very lazy, but I loved that man. He has tremendous qualities. His laziness is not just laziness - he has a certain grace, a certain beauty. That beauty in itself is so valuable that I would not like to destroy that beauty by putting him into work. Just his being there - plain lazy - creates such a pool of energy that whosoever comes close to him feels happy; as if you have passed through a garden where there was much freshness and cool fresh air and the fragrance of flowers.

He is plain lazy. He has never done anything, and he is not going to do anything. What should we do? Should we make him feel guilty? That's what everybody has been doing to him.

When he met me and I allowed him to stay with me, for three months he watched - whether I would condemn him or not. When I didn't condemn him and when I didn't say anything... because he's so plain lazy that if he is thirsty he will just go on Lying down on the bed. He will wait for me to ask, "Are you thirsty or something?"

When for three months I didn't say a single word to him, and I did everything that I felt was needed to be done for him, after three months he started crying. And he said, "You are the first man who has accepted me. You are the first man who has given me my soul. Nobody has loved me, and everybody has made me feel guilty." And naturally, when the whole world makes you feel guilty, you start feeling guilty. You start feeling a great hate arising in you against yourself.

He flowered in those three months, he bloomed. And out of that blooming, something started happening. He started singing, he started writing poems. Then one day he started playing the guitar. But it came out of the acceptance, that at least one human being accepted him totally. If he got up at ten o'clock in the morning, I was not going to say to get up at nine-thirty. Ten is perfectly okay! If you feel like that, it is okay. A person should be allowed to be himself.

So I understand what you mean when you say: I THINK "IF YOU DON'T WORK YOU DON'T EAT" IS A VERY GOOD MOTTO. It has been good in a way because the society has been poor, starving. But it is not good for you! You should be able to accept the other's reality as it is without any judgement.

And you should be able to give the freedom to the other to be himself without any hindrance. That is real morality. That is to be really religious.

Yes, a few people will remain lazy, but nothing to be worried about. There are lazy men's guides to enlightenment too! Lao Tzu is the highest priest for the lazy man.

Active people do something in the world which is important. Lazy people also do something beautiful in the world which is needed. They create a balance, harmony, equilibrium.