Geeta Darshan #4

Doubt your doubt; only then is doubt complete. Your journey of doubt is not yet complete. One doubt remains to be doubted—that is, doubt itself. It is surprising that people who doubt everything never doubt their doubt. Darkness remains under the lamp. The day you can doubt doubt itself, that very day the seed of trust will sprout.

Suppressing doubt does not bring trust; completing doubt does. Trust is not the opposite of doubt; it is beyond and above doubt. Fulfill the journey of doubt; don’t leave it unfinished. If you avoid it, leave it half-done, something will remain inside and it will keep returning to fragment and shatter trust.

Any experience left incomplete returns in many forms. There is no way but to complete it. Don’t be afraid.

I am not like those believers who tell you, “Don’t doubt.” I say to you, doubt totally. My trust is not broken or destroyed by doubt. Trust is vast; it has no fear of your doubt. Go through it to the end. You will find that as doubt is completed, a living light of trust begins to arise within you.

Doubt is not something great. Doubt exists because you are afraid. It is a symptom of fear. How to trust? The other might deceive you, trick you; perhaps there is a conspiracy all around; perhaps someone is out to cheat you, drown you, erase you.

Doubt means a frightened person’s security system. The more cowardly a person is, the more he doubts. So doubt is not a sign of strength; it is a sign of weakness.

But go ahead and doubt—and by doubting see clearly that doubt offers no safety. You may save yourself from the other, but doubt itself will devour you. By doubting another, perhaps the other won’t be able to harm you. But what real harm could the other do? He might pick your pocket—take ten where five were due. You might have ended up a beggar on the street had you trusted people—and now you sit in a palace. But you are forgetting that doubt is stealing from you something infinitely more precious. The protector is becoming the predator. It is robbing you of your soul, of your possibility of the divine. You save a few pennies and lose everything.

When you complete doubt, you will see this too. You will become alert to doubt itself—that doubt also snatches and erases.

Whatever is valuable in life, doubt destroys it. You cannot love with doubt. You cannot be a friend with doubt. Does a doubter have any friend? How could he? Can a doubter love anyone? How? The wall of doubt will always stand in between.

A doubter lives frightened, trembling. Doubt is hell. In it you will remain afraid; you will never be able to stand fearless. The fragrance of friendship will not come into your life, nor the light of love. Your life will be like that of an insect—hidden by doubt inside your shell, afraid, shaking; you cannot come out, cannot expand.

Have you seen a tortoise? When it is frightened, it pulls in its limbs and hides within. You too have contracted into your body like that. And one who has hidden in the body—how will he know the divine? How will he know himself?

For the frightened, there is no knowing. Try as he may, he will not know. The wise have taken fearlessness as the first step of knowing. In the life of the one who attains fearlessness, dawn begins; otherwise night surrounds. Night belongs to doubt; dawn to trust.

Go beyond the night; don’t sit covering the darkness of night. Many are doing just this: doubt is present and on top they have put on trust. Thus they fall into great dilemma. Outwardly there is trust; inside, doubt. They stand in the temple with folded hands; those hands are falsely folded, because doubt slithers in the heart. They pray with faces lifted to the sky; only the face is raised, not the soul—because within there is doubt. They are not certain that God is.

People say so—father says, mother says, ancestors say, scriptures say, the guru says; when so many say, he must be. But you have no inner certainty, no personal trust. And since so many say, better to perform worship—why take a risk? Maybe he exists; later it might turn out that he does.

So you are being clever. You are doing arithmetic even with God. Your love is bookkeeping; your prayer is entered in the ledger. What are you doing? You are arranging so that if after death it turns out that God is, at least you can say: I had faith; I went to temple, mosque, gurudwara; I worshipped and prayed.

But God is not pleased by your worship and prayers, nor by your going to temples and mosques. The day the temple of trust rises within you, the day the pitcher of trust is raised within, only that day is God pleased. Before that you were doing something else. You neither loved, nor desired God, nor called out to him.

Your faith is false if you have painted it over your doubt like a cosmetic. Whom are you hiding from? Whom are you protecting against? If there is doubt, I say, consider it like pus—let it drain. When it drains, you will be healthy.

Do not become a false theist. A true atheist is better than a false theist. At least he is true; at least he says, “I have no trust—how can I pray?” There is that much authenticity. He says, “I have known no God—how can I fold my hands? For whom should I fold them? I see nothing but empty sky. When I go to the temple, I see stone statues.”

An atheist cannot perform a false bowing. And I tell you, only atheists ever become theists in the true sense. False theists remain false. It is difficult for them to ever become theists—they have not even become atheists yet!

Atheism means doubt; theism means trust. The theist is not the opposite of the atheist, just as trust is not the opposite of doubt. The theist is beyond the atheist, as trust is beyond doubt. Where doubt ends, trust begins. Where atheism ends, theism begins. But one must pass through atheism.

There is so much irreligion in the world because there are false religious people. There are not even true atheists here. Here prayer is hypocrisy; love is empty babble; worship a sham; the whole conduct hypocrisy—hoax and pretense.

And you know it well. You know that when your hands were folded, your soul was not. When you bowed your head, you did not bow. When you said, “Yes, I trust,” your intellect said it; your heart remained unmelted, unbent, not even slightly softened. On the surface you wore trust like clothing; within, your soul was full of doubt.

I do not tell you to become theists—how could you? That is the upper step. At least become atheists. Take the first step. The upper step comes on its own. The day the lower step is complete, suddenly the door opens and the upper step appears.

Doubt—doubt with your whole being. Doubt is a path. But don’t stop halfway; complete it. The day you complete doubt, a new art opens: doubt your doubt. And doubt-your-doubt cuts doubt, as a thorn removes a thorn. Doubt itself cuts doubt. And when both thorns are pulled out, suddenly you find a flood of trust has come.

And when the flood of trust comes, it does not mean that you trust in God; it means that you trust. It does not mean you trust the idol in the temple; it means trust has arisen. Now there is trust in the mosque and in the temple; in the Koran and in the Vedas; in the thief as well as in the sage.

Trust is a vast revolution—the greatest. You trust. Now you know: we tried doubting—got nothing, saved nothing; only lost. We collected cowries and lost diamonds. Now you are totally transformed. Now you say: let those who want the pennies take them; we will not lose diamonds to clutch pennies. Now you say: we will save the diamond of trust.

What Meera or Kabir sing—“I have found the treasure of Ram”—that is trust, the Ram-ratan-dhan. Now all delusion is broken, all doubt gone; the treasure found. The Kohinoor has been found—who will go on gathering pebbles!

And when your theism is a transcendence of atheism, when your trust comes from having lived doubt to completion, no one will be able to break your trust. The possibilities of breaking you you have already crossed. Your atheism cannot return. You have lived it, paid it, carried it to the cremation ground, burnt it on the pyre. It is gone—ash. Now no one can shake your theism. If a thousand atheists gather and offer thousands of arguments, not a hair of the theist will tremble.

But right now you are afraid. And the religions in which you were raised are themselves afraid. They instruct you: “Do not listen to the atheist; close your ears.”

You must have heard the story of a man, Ghantakarna, who hung bells from his ears. He was a devotee of Ram, and the village boys were mischievous; gradually the whole village began to tease him. People would come close and utter Krishna’s name in his ear.

It is an old story; otherwise they might have used Mohammed’s name. He panicked even at Krishna’s name. Because he was a devotee of Ram, and the name of Krishna entering his ear—a wrong name! His trust must have been very weak, so tiny that it ends with Ram and cannot even reach Krishna.

With such a tiny trust will you ever cross? Do you want to cross the ocean of becoming with such a small dinghy? A great vessel is needed. Trust must be such that all temples and mosques are contained in it. Ram, Krishna, Buddha—let them all fall into it and become small, and let the sky of trust be vast, open for all. Let thousands of Rams arise and millions of Krishnas—still, the sky of trust does not shrink.

Trust is not your courtyard with four walls; it is open sky, blue sky, without limit.

Ghantakarna panicked: every day the village makes fun; for them it’s a joke, for me a crisis. Hearing the enemy’s name again and again, I will be corrupted. At the sound of Krishna his faith wobbled: who knows, perhaps Krishna is right.

Ram and Krishna are very opposite symbols. In truth both are included in the Real, for in truth all contradictions are reconciled. But if you think of them simply, they are very opposite.

Where is Ram—propriety, restraint! And where is Krishna—could you find anyone more unrestrained? Ram, vowed to a single wife; Krishna, with innumerable gopis—even “stealing” others’ wives. Ram, whose word you can rely on; Krishna, whose word you cannot. He says one thing, does another. He said he would not participate in the war, then entered the battlefield—broke his word. Where is Ram!

Can you imagine Ram stealing women’s clothes and sitting atop a tree? Impossible—even to think. But Krishna has no difficulty. He has no hindrance, no limitation, no rule. Krishna is pure anarchy; Ram is disciplined—Maryada Purushottam. If you were to give Krishna a title, it would be Amaryada Purushottam—the supreme beyond bounds. He follows no rule, no vow, no restraint. He is like a flood. Ram is like a canal—confined within banks, moving by line. Krishna is like the Ganga in flood, breaking all shores.

So naturally Ghantakarna would be frightened by the name of Krishna. It is a fearsome name. All the religious should fear this name. It is dangerous—anarchic. Has there ever been a greater anarchist? A greater opponent of society, system, order, state?

There is no matching the two. Yet in the open sky they are together. Those who have seen the open sky say they are both incarnations of the same One. Ram—partial, bounded; Krishna—total, beyond bounds. That which manifests within limits as Ram manifests beyond limits as Krishna. The water that flows as a canal is the same that comes as flood. Naturally floodwater is dangerous—not for all. It will ravage fields and houses. Work is done by the canal—it irrigates fields, quenches thirst. Ram has utility. With Krishna there is danger—a call to adventure. Few will go with Krishna; most will have to go with Ram.

So Ghantakarna must have panicked: these anarchic fellows shout the name; for them it’s a game, for me life-and-death. They shake my faith. So he tied bells to his ears. The bells kept ringing, and whatever people shouted—“Krishna!”—did not reach within.

As I see it, whether anyone ever did this or not, I see bells hanging in the ears of ninety-nine out of a hundred theists. They are Ghantakarnas—frightened. Fear within, fear without. Afflicted by doubt. They fear the atheist; the atheist makes them tremble and panic because doubt is within. The atheist stirs it up—like someone who stirs the ashes and the ember flares. The atheist provokes them. They are afraid; they don’t read others’ scriptures; they don’t listen to others’ books; they don’t hear others’ words. They listen only to their own guru—bells hanging in their ears.

A Jain does not go to listen to a Hindu; a Hindu does not go to listen to a Jain; a Muslim does not read the Gita; a Hindu does not read the Koran. Such fear! What kind of theism is this? It is a eunuch’s theism.

A theist is vast; he can hear everything; no one can shake him. But this will happen only when you have gone beyond atheism. If atheism remains within, fear will remain.

Understand it like this: a small child is attached to toys. His body has grown, but his mind remains childish. Now he moves carefully lest toys appear before him—for if he sees them he will not be able to resist; then people will laugh: a grown man carrying a doll! So he hides dolls at home. If other children pass around him with dolls, he panics—because his taste is still for dolls. He still wants to arrange the doll’s marriage, still wants to play. Inside he remains a child; the inner child has not ended. He has not matured; only the body looks mature on the outside. Inside—the mind of a child.

Inside you are atheists, full of doubt; on the surface you are theists. Your maturity is not real. You are afraid someone may say, “There is no God,” because you suspect it yourself. Someone may say, “What are you worshipping these stone statues? There is nothing here.” You are already scared.

There is an incident in Dayanand’s life; it has not been understood this way. He was sitting to worship. In front of the idol to which he had offered sweets, a mouse carried one away. A mouse! Perhaps it was Ganeshji’s image—the mouse is his vehicle—or Shankarji’s, Ganesh’s father, distant kin to the mouse. The mouse ran off with the sweet. A doubt arose in Dayanand’s mind: if the God who cannot protect himself from a mouse—how will he protect me? He threw away the idol. From that very day he became an iconoclast. The mouse carrying off the sweet is the birth of the Arya Samaj; that very day the Arya Samaj was born.

But it is worth pondering: did Dayanand have any trust in the idol? If he had, could a mouse break it? Then the mouse seems a greater sage than Dayanand! A mouse broke Dayanand’s faith. Was there faith? If there had been, who could break it? There was no faith in the first place—only false worship going on. But Dayanand did not see, “My faith is false.” He saw, “The idol is useless.” This needs reflection.

If Dayanand had truly been a seeker of the self, he would have seen: a mouse has broken my faith. I have no trust. Perhaps it was Ganesha’s own mischief: “Mouse, take the sweet and break this false faith.” But from that day he became anti-image. When was he ever a lover of images? His opposition to images is understandable; but when was he their lover? That I cannot understand. Does a lover leave love so quickly? Is love such a weak, brittle thread? A glass bangle that a mouse can drop and break?

Had there been a true theist in Dayanand’s place, he would have seen God in Ganesha and in the mouse as well. The sky of trust is vast. He would have said, “Ah, God in the form of a mouse! So you are taking the sweet. The one to whom it was offered has received it. We thought the idol was dead; it is not. Through the mouse the idol stretched out a hand and took the sweet.”

If there were trust, it would appear like this. Then this country would have been spared the misfortune of the Arya Samaj. But it did not happen. The mouse gave birth to the Arya Samaj. Doubt was inside.

Dayanand is rationalist, not theist—and he never became a theist. Only reasoning remained; trust never happened. It was a web of logic. Till his dying breath, trust did not arise. He missed the first step.

That day he needed to decide: my atheism has not yet died; my doubt has not died; I am not yet worthy of worship. He concluded that Shankarji or Ganesha are unworthy of worship. What should have been known is: I am not yet qualified to worship; I am not yet worthy to enter this temple; I must first discover trust.

Had his vision been right, the mouse would have revealed: your faith is superficial, pasted on like thin paper; within, doubt sits enthroned in your temple. Can a mouse produce anything that is not already within you?

All your doubts gnaw at you like mice because your faith is like clothing; it is not your soul. Therefore you fear that someone may say something which will shake your faith.

I was once a guest at the palace of the Maharani of Gwalior. She had never heard me before. Somehow, by some miscalculation, I had been invited. After hearing me, she panicked, became very uneasy—a commonplace devotee whose faith has no strength, no foundation. Out of courtesy, she did not have the courage to avoid me; I was her guest. The next day she came and said, “I no longer dared come to you. What I heard frightened me. You will destroy our faith!”

I said, “What value do you place on a faith that my words can destroy? A faith that dissolves in words must be as weak as bubbles in water. Words are bubbles in air. I said something and your faith broke? Is that faith, or have you made a joke of it?”

She said, “Whatever it is, now please say no more. My son wanted to come to meet you too, but I stopped him. He is still young. Perhaps you will completely unsteady him.”

This mother cannot see that her faith is worth two pennies; nor can she see what value there is in trying to protect her son with such a two-penny faith. Will you make a boat out of it? Will you cross the ocean of becoming with it?

Gold does not fear passing through fire; trash does—trash will burn.

I tell you: that which survives passing through doubt is trust. That which dies in doubt—know it as trash; it was never gold. Good that it died. Thank doubt—because doubt saved you from preserving trash, from guarding it; otherwise you would have kept trash locked in your safe.

In this existence nothing is useless; trust is meaningful, doubt is meaningful. One who knows accepts doubt too. But he does not get stuck in doubt; he goes beyond. Doubt is important, but not all. There is another limb of life—trust.

As a bird flies with two wings, as you walk with two legs, as you see with two eyes—so too, doubt and trust are the two eyes; with both one sees. And when, through the eye of doubt, you have seen everything—and by everything I mean, when you have seen doubt too—then the second eye opens. Now you are worthy of trust, a fit vessel.

Doubt refines you; it burns and purifies you. Doubt is a collaborator, a friend.

For me, atheism is not the enemy of the theist; atheism is the preparation for the theist—the university where the theist is forged. And when a religion starts fearing doubt, know that that religion is dead.

When Mahavira is alive, he does not make his disciples afraid of doubt. He says, “Bring your doubts; ask, raise questions; whatever is hidden within, bring it out—for I am present; I will burn it.”

When Buddha is alive, he does not stitch anyone’s lips closed. He says, “Ask, inquire, doubt! How else will you move ahead? I am present; I will take you beyond your doubt.”

I say the same to you. Bring all your doubts.

None of your doubts is an enemy of trust—nor can it be. How can something like doubt be the enemy of trust? Doubt is like darkness.

Have you seen? However dense the darkness, it cannot blow out even a small lamp. What strength has darkness? Have you ever thought that darkness might collapse like a mountain and extinguish a little lamp? Impossible. The whole earth may be filled with darkness; if a small lamp burns in your home, darkness cannot put it out. What power has darkness?

But if a false lamp is “burning”—not really burning—and with closed eyes you think it is lit, then it can be “blown out.” That which was never lit will go out—it was always out; with closed eyes you were dreaming.

On the day the mouse made Dayanand wobble—what kind of Dayanand could he have been! That day he was imagining a lamp in darkness; the mouse blew and put it out.

Then such faith in the mouse arose in him that it never left. He never again doubted the mouse, nor himself. All his life he lived in that same certainty, that “revelation” of that day—as if it were Buddhahood. And the Arya Samajis think a great event of knowledge happened that day.

Dayanand was a pundit—remained a pundit. And for the doubt that the mouse exposed, he never did anything to dissolve it. He remained logic-bound. Whatever study he did of the Vedas and Upanishads, the basis remained logic.

Therefore you will find Arya Samajis great sophists. Argue with them and you will be in trouble—they are blatherers. The whole movement is of blatherers; it has nothing to do with religion.

Religion has nothing to do with logic; religion has to do with trust. And if you are full of doubt, then even your relationship with religion will be through logic. You will prove by argument that the Vedas are true; you will conjure arguments. But “the Vedas are true” will not be the flowering of trust in your heart; it will be logic. And by logic you will go on persuading yourself.

The very meaning of logic is that doubt is present within, which you are trying to refute by logic. Trust has no logic. Trust is self-evident—such is its nature. It needs no proof; it is self-proved; it asks for no witness.

Therefore you cannot refute a theist—because the manner in which you could refute him is not the manner in which he claims to be right. His claim is of another order.

He does not say, “By proofs I have known that God is.” He says, “I have seen. I have become. I have tasted.” You may say a thousand times that there is no God—how can I agree? My thirst is quenched and you say there is no water. I see you writhing in thirst and you say there is no water. My thirst has been quenched—how can I agree there is no God! I see you in suffering, in argument, in doubt. My suffering has ended; bliss has showered within me. How can I agree there is no bliss!

You can unnerve someone else, in whom bliss has not showered; you can plant doubt in him. In me you cannot plant doubt; there is no way. There is only one way: somehow, if you could snatch away my bliss, then perhaps doubt could arise. But can anyone snatch anyone’s bliss? You can take my body from me—but not my soul. You can kill me—but within there is a place where weapons do not pierce, where fire does not go—you will not even touch it. Cutting my body will prove nothing; rather, you will prove what I was saying—that I still am. By cutting my body, you will only prove my trust.

There is no way to demolish trust, because it is an experience. Therefore I say: complete doubt—so completely that doubt turns upon doubt. Then doubt staggers and falls of its own accord. When it falls, only then, for the first time, does the sprouting of trust happen; a wave arises within you.

Trust is an experience, not an intellectual assent. Trust is not a belief or a dogma; it is an experience—as love is.

Your son falls in love with a girl. You explain endlessly: “Fool, first look carefully—her father lacks character.” The boy says, “What has that to do with it?” You say, “There is no money in that house.” He says, “I am not in love with money.” You say, “Consider her lineage.” He says, “I am not going to marry the lineage.” The father says, “She is dark, thin, sickly”—he finds a thousand arguments. But the boy says, “Try to see through my eye. To me, none is more beautiful.”

Love cannot be refuted by any argument. And if it can be, know that it was not love. If the boy agrees—“You are right, there is no money; what dowry will we get?”—then he was never in love. In fact he is not even a boy—he became a father before being a boy. He will miss life; he is already old.

Only an old man thinks of money. If a young man thinks of money, his youth is suspect. A young man should have trust—not in dowry, but in himself—that he will earn, he will create. But if even a young man thinks, “How much dowry?” he is no longer young. He has fallen into arithmetic, into accounting, into the world of logic; he has no inkling of love.

And trust is the great love—love with existence; a great madness. Can you make the mad understand by logic?

People like Dayanand were never mad. They never danced in ecstasy. They just sat piling arguments, writing commentaries on the Vedas, proving that the Vedas are God.

But there is no way to prove God, nor to prove the Vedas. Proving belongs to the world of doubt. God is; with the arising of trust he is seen—the moment the eye opens, his sun is found already risen. It is a matter of opening the eye.

You do not need to give a blind man arguments that there is light; you only need to pray to him to open his eyes. And he says, “How can I open my eyes now? Inside I am seeing many dreams; a very enjoyable dream is going on.” Then we say to him, “See it well. As much as you can, see the dream—see it so intently that you yourself see it is a dream. Do not look dimly—look with full intensity, with your eyes fixed. Because when your inner dream breaks and you open your eyes, only then can you experience the light of the sun.”

If you look toward yourself, the dawn will appear distant—inevitably. The reason, however, is not that you looked at yourself, but that you don’t yet know how to look within. What you are calling “looking at myself” is looking at the ego; that is not looking at yourself. And the ego is darkness.

If you truly look at yourself, the dawn happens right there. But what you take to be your “self” is your delusion: “I am someone’s son, someone’s father, someone’s husband or wife; I am poor, I am rich; I am beautiful, I am ugly; I am sick, I am healthy; I am young, I am old.” These are all definitions of the ego. They are not you.

You are the one who passes through all of these. Sometimes a child, sometimes young, sometimes old. You are neither childhood nor youth nor old age. You are that which passes through all three. Sometimes poor, sometimes rich; sometimes happy, sometimes unhappy; sometimes humble, sometimes charitable; sometimes beggar, sometimes emperor—you are that which goes between the two. Sometimes you are born, sometimes you die. But that which is never born and never dies—though it appears in birth as if being born and in death as if dying—yet is neither born nor dies: that is you.

But you are not looking that way. You are looking at the ego, at your identifications, at what others tell you you are. Someone says you are very beautiful and you believe it. Someone says you are not, and you are hurt. You are collecting other people’s opinions about yourself. You have never looked directly at yourself.

Drop all opinions. Others see you from the outside. Only you can see yourself from within. Why collect their seeing?

It’s as absurd as sitting inside your house and going to the neighbors to ask about your house. One says, “Your house is beautiful”—they’ve only seen the exterior, the paint. Another dislikes the outer walls and says the whitewash is peeling, it’s getting shabby—no one has seen the inner rooms. Only I can see that.

No one but you can enter your within. “Within” means where only you can go and no one else can. Wherever another can go, that is the boundary of the “outside.” Outside simply means the realm where others can enter. Inside means where only you can enter. Not even your beloved can enter there. Not even your closest friend, for whom you would die, can enter. Only you can.

And look carefully: even your body cannot go there, because it too is outside. Your thoughts cannot go there; they are on the surface. Only you, in your purity, can enter there. The day you see that thought-free purity, that open sky without a single cloud of thought—that day you have looked toward yourself.

Then all the masters will seem right to you. For now, they seem wrong. Hearing them, it feels as if morning is near; God is already here—just one step is needed. A tiny thing: a speck in the eye—remove it. Nothing big. Listening to masters, you feel: almost there, at the very shore; just a small turn, a small reach of the hand.

But when you look “toward yourself,” a terrible darkness seems to engulf you, a dense night, a new-moon night with no end in sight. How will morning come? Trust does not settle.

You have looked at your wrongness, not your nature. You looked at your heap of acquisitions, your memories; you did not look at awareness, at the witness. You kept looking at the seen; the collection of the seen is called ego. Naturally it will be so. Then what to do?

First, begin to discern who you are—and cut away whatever you are not. Eliminate the irrelevant. The Upanishads call this process neti-neti—the method of elimination. Whatever seems secondary, without which you can still be, discard it; that is not you.

You have wealth, so you strut; drop the strut. Without wealth you can remain; wealth is not essential. Tomorrow the government may change—or this government’s mind may change—if communists come, the wealth may go, and you will remain. Whatever you can remain without is not you. Otherwise how would you survive?

Beauty, form—today it is, tomorrow it may not be. Smallpox may scar you; illness may ravage the body; leprosy may spread. Then that “beauty” is not you, for you remain even then. When the body withers, when pockmarks cover the face, when no one looks at you—or if they do, it’s with pity; when no one praises your beauty—still, you remain you. Drop it. Do not include anything you can be without in your accounting of being.

I am not saying go and contract smallpox. I am not saying go fall ill in a hospital. I am not saying donate your wealth to the government. I am only saying: whatever you can be without, do not count as your being; it is not your essence. It is outside you. If it is there—fine; if not—fine. Do not depend on it. It is not your foundation.

Slowly eliminate—neti-neti—“not this, not that.” Keep putting aside. A moment of consciousness comes when you see: now there is nothing more to drop. This I am. Because if this too goes, I myself am not. Peel the onion of identification, layer by layer. The day only that remains...

What will remain in the end? That which we have called atman, consciousness, awareness, knowing, Buddhahood—there are a thousand names.

What will remain within when all the onion’s skins are peeled away by neti-neti? You will find one thing remains: consciousness, awareness, wakefulness. You cannot cut that off; cut that and you cannot remain. Leave that and you cannot remain—you are gone.

That without which you would not be—that is your being. Seek that. This is the process of meditation. Keep seeking it; keep breaking away from the false, the futile, the inessential—whatever is not your nature but an acquired attribute. As the alien drops, the native nature emerges; as ties to the alien loosen, nature spreads its wings. Freedom begins to blossom.

In the end what remains is sat-chit-ananda: you are supreme consciousness; you are supreme truth; you are supreme bliss. That is your nature.

The whole religious process is contained in neti-neti. Nothing more than these two words is needed: not this, not that—keep cutting. Chase yourself with the scissors.

If you search with courage, your gaze will gradually turn the right way. Until now you were looking elsewhere and thought you were looking at yourself.

Understand exactly: how will you look at “yourself”? Whatever you can look at will be the other. How will you look at yourself? Who will look? At what? There the seer and the seen become one. That is why whatever you look at now—“I am male, wealthy, young, learned, knowledgeable, these degrees...” whatever you are looking at—that is not you. Keep cutting.

One day, suddenly, you find a moment arrives that yogis call the confluence—sangam. A moment arrives where the seen, the seeing, and the seer are one. You cannot divide them. You cannot say, “I am seeing.” You can only say, “I myself am the seeing, I myself am the seer, I myself am what is seen.” The triad collapses; the three gunas—sattva, rajas, tamas—become balanced. And you go beyond them—gunatita. The sun of life rises. Morning is near.

When I look at you, I tell you: morning is near. I do not say it only by looking at myself; looking at you I also say: morning is near. But when I look closely at you, I see you are not looking toward yourself. You’re looking elsewhere—there it is night, an endless new-moon night without beginning or end. There you will keep wandering in darkness.

Turn the eye back upon itself. That’s all—a small thing. It looks big only because you have lived in darkness. Your trust in darkness has become so fixed that you cannot believe morning is possible.

People come to me. Only last night someone said, “I’m feeling great bliss—could this be imagination?”

You have lived so long in sorrow that when even a faint ray of meditation breaks through and a subtle music of joy sounds, you cannot trust it. You suspect it.

I asked that gentleman, “When you were in suffering, did it ever occur to you that perhaps it was imagination?” He said, “That thought never occurred.”

In suffering, it was “reality.” Not even a doubt arose that perhaps the suffering was imagined. But now that a little movement in meditation has begun, the boat has loosened from the shore, the oars have lifted, doubt arises: “Could this joy be imaginary?”

Mind says, “Come back to the shore. Where are you going? This ocean is all fantasy. Your old spot is fine; your old identification is fine. What are you out to find? Self and God—mere imagination. Come back! Suffering is real, hell is real; heaven is imagination; the devil is real, God is imagination.”

Doubt means misplaced faith—faith in the wrong. And when you have faith in the wrong, how will doubt be dissolved? Doubt does not want to let you slip out of the wrong, because there doubt can survive. If the right dawns, doubt dies. Hence the mind wonders, “Isn’t this imagination?”

I tell you, sat-chit-ananda is the touchstone. Test everything on it. If anything brings bliss, it is closer to the divine, that is why it brings bliss. If anything carries the feel of truth, an inner dignity of reality—a certainty so deep that doubting it becomes difficult—know that it is close to the divine. And whatever increases consciousness, whatever brightens the inner light—know that it is near the divine.

Sat-chit-ananda is the assay. Keep testing by it. Whatever runs contrary, know it is that much farther. If you travel with this touchstone, one day you will arrive.

And again I say: the goal is not far—it is a single step away. So I say, there is no need to “walk”; you can leap. What is a single step? A leap will do.

Therefore, in this world a unique phenomenon happens—there are leaps. Some attain the divine in a jump. For those who truly see, whose doubt has died, who have found trust—a leap, a gesture, a single call—and you are out. The night of thousands of births shatters.

Morning is near. Looking toward myself I say it; looking toward you I say it. But I also see that you are not looking toward yourself.

All the meditations are arranged only for this: to make you capable of looking within. You can become capable. However difficult it seems, it is not impossible. And the day it happens, you will laugh and say: it wasn’t even difficult. You will both laugh and weep—weep that you wandered so long when it was so near; laugh that it was but a matter of stretching out your hand.

“Dil ke aaine mein hai tasveer-e-yaar—
jab zara gardan jhukai, dekh li.”
In the mirror of the heart is the Beloved’s image—
when I just bent my neck a little, I saw it.

Only that much. But the neck has grown stiff, paralyzed. It hasn’t bowed for thousands of years; you have forgotten how. Give it a little massage. Meditation is that massage—call it samayik, worship, prayer—a little massage to the neck. Let it bend a little, become supple—and you will see, the Beloved’s image has always been within.

Your lover is within you. Your quest is within you. The goal hides in the seeker. Had God been outside, it would have been difficult; He is within you.

Pause a little, sit, and cut false identifications by neti-neti. Suddenly you will find the sun has risen. In fact it had risen; it never set; night never was. You had only kept your eyes shut.