Jin Sutra #12

Resolve is done—surrender happens. Therefore you cannot even raise such a question as “surrender does not happen.” Surrender is not a matter of your strength. So the question is wrong at the root: “I do not have the power for surrender.”

Understand this clearly.

Surrender is not an act you can perform. Surrender is a state of consciousness in which you find that nothing happens through your doing. If even a trace of hope remains that something can be done by you, surrender will not happen; your ego is still intact. You think, “It may still be possible for me to do something.” But when your ego, worn out on every side, crumbles—like an old building collapsing; like an old tree whose root has broken and is uprooted—on the day your ego falls completely and you feel: “By my doing nothing will happen, for by my doing nothing has happened so far.” When your doing has been defeated again and again; when you have done and each time only failure has come; when by doing and doing you have gained only suffering, and created nothing but hell—when this pain becomes dense, when you appear utterly helpless, in that helpless moment surrender happens. It is not your act; it is the defeat of your doing. The defeated take refuge in the Name of Hari! When your defeat becomes so deep that no hope of victory remains; when your defeat becomes the dark night of the new moon and not a single ray of ego is left; when you no longer feel that you can do anything—in the completeness of defeat, surrender happens.
It is asked: “Neither does surrender happen to me, nor do I have the power of resolve.”
The second may be correct—that the power of resolve is lacking—but the first cannot be. And if the first is not correct, then the second too cannot be entirely correct. You say, “I don’t have the power of resolve”—even this you only say; you do not truly know it. You are not acknowledging it; you are merely asserting it. Somewhere inside, hope still remains. You are still holding on to some ray. You think: “It didn’t happen this time; next time it will. Not today; tomorrow. I lost today not because my strength was insufficient—the circumstances were unfavorable. I lost because fate didn’t support me. I lost because I didn’t make a full effort. If I had exerted fully, chosen the precise, auspicious moment, I would certainly have won.”

All the defeated rationalize their defeat. Who accepts defeat! The defeated convince themselves that people were against them. The defeated convince themselves that the effort couldn’t be completed.

An elephant was standing. At his feet, in the morning sun, there was warmth. The sun had just risen; it was a winter day. A mouse was sitting there too, basking. Generally elephants don’t even notice mice, but the elephant was idle, nothing to do, looking around in the morning sun—he noticed the mouse. He said, “Ah! Amazing! Such a tiny creature—never seen anything so small!” The mouse said, “Please don’t misunderstand! I’ve just been a little ill for a few days.”

Who is small! I’ve only been under the weather for a few days; that’s why I look small.

Haven’t you explained yourself like this thousands of times? Stop explaining! In that very explaining, in that very argument, your ego survives. The day you take your defeat as intrinsic—“What can be done by me?”—not that today I am weak and tomorrow I shall be strong; not that I don’t know the right method and tomorrow I will; not that today fate didn’t favor me and tomorrow it will. “No harm—if I lost once, it doesn’t mean I’ll always lose. Someday luck will shower! Someday fate will be with me! Someday even God will be gracious! Keep doing!” No. The ego is impotent by its very nature. Through it, nothing ever happens.

So I say to you: make your resolve; do all you can. Lose completely. In defeat lies victory. Out of the defeat of resolve, surrender arises. If you win, fine. If by resolve you win, fine—then there is no need of anything further. A few have won—rare ones. The path is very harsh, very arduous; but a few have won. So make your total effort. If you win—if by resolve you attain—then you have attained. If you do not win, even then, after having made your complete effort, the defeat will be total. Then lose utterly. Many have attained through losing. And the joy of attaining through defeat is greater than the joy of attaining through victory.

Such is love that here defeat is victory. So do not be afraid of losing. But once you must stake your entire strength; let no hidden feeling remain in the mind that you could have done it. If that feeling remains, surrender will not happen. It looks like this—

What a thing love is: it topples mountain ranges;
It drowns the swimmers, and makes the drowned float.

You have seen—sometimes when someone dies, he floats on the river! While alive he was drowning; dead, he floats! Does the corpse know some trick the living did not? If the living too became like a corpse, the river would carry him; the river would not drown him. If the living had also accepted—“All right, I consent; drown me”—the river would not drown him. Who drowns the one who is willing! The one who does not want to sink, who resists and struggles—the river drowns him. Do not fight!

But this non-fighting happens only when your tendency to fight is utterly defeated; not a shred of hope remains. Fall into profound despair. From there dawns the morning of surrender. Where resolve fails, there is surrender. If you win, you win; if you do not win, you still have not lost—because then from defeat a victory arises. Therefore, one who goes on the path of dharma never truly loses: if he wins, he wins; if he loses, he wins. One who moves toward the Divine reaches in every circumstance—because all paths lead to Him.
The friend who has asked has this difficulty: they did not carry resolve to completion, and now they want to make up that lack through surrender. If resolve is not complete, how will surrender be complete? Your ego must fall utterly into the dust.
This, then, is the end of the quest:
Battered by the idol-houses,
I’ve laid my disgraced forehead
to sleep upon the Sanctuary’s threshold.
Let any caravan that passes this way
give me a kick as it goes by—
“Jameel,” in the middle of the road
I’ve fallen asleep on just this trust.

“This, then, is the end of the quest”—this is the outcome of the search. “Battered by the idol-houses”—stumbling again and again in many shrines, temples, houses of images.

I have laid my disgraced forehead
to sleep upon the Sanctuary’s threshold—
I have set my much-maligned head upon the steps before Thy house and fallen asleep. I no longer even seek.

I have laid my disgraced forehead
to sleep upon the Sanctuary’s threshold.
Let any caravan that passes this way
give me a kick as it goes by—
“Jameel,” in the middle of the road
I’ve fallen asleep on just this trust.

Surrender happens in such a moment: when, utterly defeated, you collapse in the middle of the road and fall asleep—“All right now, if You want to raise me, raise me! If You want to give me life, give it; if You want to kill me, kill me! I have no search of my own now, no desire of my own. Let Your will alone be done!” That is when surrender arises.

Surrender is not something to do; it is a state that happens. So you cannot really ask, “I don’t even have the strength to surrender.” What has surrender to do with strength? The very language of strength is the opposite of surrender. Surrender arises out of helplessness, out of being bereft, defeated. You are still thinking in the language of power; therefore I say, cultivate a little resolve. Walk a little on Mahavira’s path. If you arrive, you will be a Mahavira; if you don’t, you will be a Meera. What is there to fear? Whoever truly walks, I say, does arrive.

Mahavira and Buddha both walked the same road. Their way was the way of resolve, and they were near contemporaries—only a few years apart. Mahavira strove for twelve years; striving, he attained. Buddha, after six years, became weary—defeated. The path was the same. So weary, so defeated, that one day he sat beneath a tree: “Enough. There is nothing in the world worth attaining, nor in the soul anything to be attained—if there is nothing to attain, what can I attain?” That evening he dropped everything—even the search. His five disciples, who had always been with him, seeing this said, “Gautama has become corrupt,” and left. “He has abandoned the path of practice.” But that very night the event happened. That very night Buddhahood flowered. That very night the lamp was lit.

Mahavira attained through resolve; Buddha through surrender. Yet both had set out on the road of resolve. Hence the long-standing, basic opposition between Jains and Buddhists. Jains feel that if Buddha is right, Mahavira’s rightness is threatened—for Buddha attained by giving up, by effortlessness; by dropping the search, he realized. He even made it a principle: you will not attain until your effort ends. That which is to be realized is already realized—drop effort and it is seen. In the bustle of striving, you miss what is present. You run, cry out, rush about—and so you miss what already is.

Mahavira attained by resolve. Therefore Buddhists do not warm to Mahavira: if Mahavira is right, how did Buddha attain?

I say to you: both are right. Truth is not miserly. And the Divine has not a single road. There are as many paths as there are people. Each must set out from where he is. You will go from where you are; another from where he is. Yet all roads reach That. Truth means precisely this: all doors open into it. Falsehood has a fixed track; Truth has none. Falsehood has limits; Truth has no boundary. If you want to reach something small, you cannot get there from every path. If you want to reach the Ganga, not every road will take you there. But if you go toward the great ocean, start anywhere—you will arrive. Go east, west, north, south—sooner or later you will meet the sea, for the sea girdles the earth. Some roads bring you near quickly; others, after a while. The names may differ—Indian Ocean, Pacific, Arabian Sea—but the taste of the sea is one.

Truth is like the ocean; untruth are little puddles. Stray even a little, and you miss.

So that surrender may happen, complete your resolve completely.

In both cases resolve is necessary. If you are to arrive through resolve, it is necessary; if you are to arrive through surrender, it is necessary. Resolve is essential in every case—and total. For whatever you have left undone, whatever remains incomplete, that very residue will haunt you; it will not let surrender happen.

Nor do I say that only by this path will you arrive. If you truly wish to arrive, there is no path that can prevent you. But there is one condition for arriving: whatever you do, do it with your whole being. Now, since surrender cannot be done, do resolve. That is why here I give you so many experiments in resolve, and yet I keep speaking of surrender.

People come and say, “You say surrender—do nothing—just float. Then why meditation? Why five meditations a day?” I know: do nothing, float. But as you are, you cannot float. You will start to swim. You will thrash about.

To abandon yourself to a river like a corpse requires a profound mastery of swimming. Only a great swimmer can truly let himself go into the stream. Because a great swimmer is free of fear. He knows: if need be, I can swim. If a difficulty arises, swimming is in my hands. The greater the swimmer, the more motionless he can leave himself; he does not even move hands and feet. “What is there to fear? My hands are with me, I am always here—if a moment comes, I will swim.” Such a moment does not haunt him.

Tell one who does not know how to swim, “Jump into the river—give yourself up,” and he may jump in a moment of inspiration, in some joyous surge, excitement, intoxication—my song may seize him—and he jumps. The instant he jumps, he forgets what I said. Instantly his arms and legs will flail. He cannot stop it, for to stop would feel like death. To him there is only one question: if you want to live, thrash—else you will die! The river will be forgotten; between life and death he will choose. Who cares in that moment about “floating”? One who does not know how to swim will thrash about. Only one well versed in swimming will consent: “All right—let me float and see.”

Fearless of heart, one can float. Fulfill your resolve. By it you will learn to swim. If by swimming you arrive—good, you have arrived. If not, there is nothing to fear. One way still remains—the way of being without any way; the way of being helpless.

That is the language of devotion, the language of the lover—the language of the Sufis, of Nanak, Kabir, Meera, Chaitanya: “Let go!” But before that, they had become great adepts at swimming. Without knowing how to swim, who has ever truly let go? From your unconscious such a surge of fear will arise that you will be swept by it—you will flail and cry out, “Save me!”

They say when a musician becomes utterly perfect, he breaks his veena; even the veena obstructs the subtlest music. It, too, creates a noise—sweet noise, but noise nonetheless. When one descends into a deeper music, where the sound of the void resounds, the unstruck melody—then he sets aside even the veena. Now the inner instrument has begun to play—who needs an outer prop?

So I say to you: one who wants to enter surrender must become skillful in resolve. I speak to you of these opposite paths so that no single path can seize you. And you use the opposites every day in ordinary life, but forget them when you turn toward the Divine. Be a little practical! When you walk, your two legs do not move together. One leg stands while the other lifts. They do opposite things: one stands—firm, gripping the ground; the other rises and goes forward. Then the other stands while the first lifts and goes ahead.

Notice: your movement is in this very alternation. If you lift both legs at once, you will fall—badly—break your limbs, and never again be able to walk. If you plant both legs and refuse to move, you also cannot walk. To walk, one leg must be surrender, one leg resolve. A bird flies with two wings—spread in opposite directions. With one wing, it will drown.

A Sufi fakir’s disciple once asked, “Can one not arrive by resolve alone—or by surrender alone?” The fakir stood by a river; they were preparing to cross. He said, “Come, I will answer on the way.” They sat in the boat. Usually the disciple rowed, but that day the master said, “I will row.” He began to row with one oar. A boat moves with two oars; with one, it just spins in circles. The disciple laughed: “Master, what joke is this? You don’t know how to row—let me. Has any boat ever moved with one oar? We’ll just go round and round like this.”

The master said, “One oar is named Surrender, the other Resolve. And whoever tries to go with only one will be in trouble.”

Understand this well—it will seem a great paradox: even to surrender, fundamentally you need resolve. How will the irresolute surrender? Is surrender a small happening? To leave yourself at someone’s feet—is that a small decision? Could there be a greater decision than that? To abandon yourself to the winds like a dry leaf—could there be a greater decision? Such fearlessness, such unshakable heart—so the first step of surrender, too, is resolve. And the ultimate fulfillment of resolve is surrender. For in doing, you will tire—there must come a moment of release from doing. That release we call moksha—liberation. Doing, doing, doing—for lifetimes we have entangled our lives in doing. Therefore we call the root of this entanglement karma—action, “what is done.” And we ask, How to be free of karma?

People ask me, “How to be free of karma?” But I feel they do not quite remember what karma means—how to be free of doing? How will the state of non-doership arise? When will the moment come when I can simply be, and no line of doing remains?

When there is nothing left to do and being is complete—that we call moksha. Moksha means: you are, in such harmony with the universe, such attunement, such musical accord, that you do nothing; the whole acts, and you flow with it.

The final result of resolve is surrender; and the beginning, the first step of surrender, is resolve. Therefore I say to you: for now, concern yourself with resolve.

Certainly this search is not one-sided. If it were, it would never be completed. If only you are searching for truth and truth is not searching for you, there is no possibility of meeting. If truth is not eager to meet you, truth will go on hiding itself. You will be exposed; it will keep itself concealed. Then it becomes like Draupadi’s sari—her drapery kept increasing. She was not willing to be uncovered, not willing to be made naked in that court. The desire to expose her belonged to the courtiers, to Duryodhana and his friends—but Draupadi would not cooperate. The sari kept growing. They tried to strip her, the sari kept growing, and Draupadi remained veiled.

This story is precious and deeply symbolic. Yet when Draupadi loved someone, then she would become naked before him; then in the innermost depths there would be the longing that someone unveil her, that before someone she could lay herself totally open, with nothing left hidden.

If the divine is intent on avoiding you, one thing is certain—you cannot win this race. He is trying to evade and you are searching. He will win. He has vast energy, immense power; what do you have? If the ultimate truth itself wants to avoid you, then you cannot win—your defeat is certain. And yet human beings have won: Mahavira won, Buddha won, Krishna and Christ won. Human beings have won. One thing is clear: he too is willing to be unveiled. He may sit with his face veiled, but he longs for you to lift the veil. Deep within there is a yearning that you come near, that you seek.

That is why I say: the water too thirsts to be drunk by you. Not only are you seeking water—water is also seeking you.

Gar na hotin qaide-rasm-o-rah ki majburiyan
Shama khud udkar pahunchti apne parwanon ke paas.
—If it were not for the compulsions of custom and the laws of the path, if there were not the bonds of order and law… Gar na hotin qaide-rasm-o-rah ki majburiyan! There are a thousand rules, a cosmic order. And at least the one who made the order must uphold it.

Gar na hotin qaide-rasm-o-rah ki majburiyan
Shama khud udkar pahunchti apne parwanon ke paas.
—God himself would come to you. Perhaps he does come, but you do not recognize him. For until you set out on the search, you will not recognize him. Only when this seeking burns from both sides can there be a result. If the devotee alone keeps crying, “God, God, God!” and God is deaf, or unwilling to listen, or wants to avoid—then your cries will be lost in the empty sky. But no, the call is heard. Prayer, sooner or later, reaches that heart. If it does not reach, the reason is not that he is unwilling to listen; the reasons are otherwise. Either you are crying in the wrong direction, or you are not calling with your whole being; or while calling you are also afraid inside—“What if he actually hears!”

I have heard: a man was returning, carrying firewood on his head. He was tired, seventy years old. A lifetime of cutting wood had become a burden. As people often say, he too said—an idiom, nothing serious: “O God! How long must I drag on this life? Why don’t you send death for me? It comes to the young; why am I being kept hanging? Send it now! I am ready to die—this life has been enough! Every morning cutting wood, all day gathering it, at dusk selling it somehow for bread, at night sleeping, then morning the same again! What’s the point? Send death now!”

It doesn’t usually happen that death arrives so quickly—but that day it did. Seeing Death before him, the woodcutter panicked. He had put down his bundle to rest under a tree. Death said, “I have come. Tell me, what do you want?”

He said, “Nothing much—no one else is around. Please just lift this bundle onto my head again. Do me that favor—put this load back on my head. Thank you very much! And even if I call you again, don’t trouble yourself to come!”

Even when you call, is your call complete? Is it heartfelt? Is every fiber of you included—or is there a layer that keeps saying no? One layer says, “These are not days for prayer—you’re still young! Such things are for old age.” Not even old age; people begin when they start dying. When the tongue falters, when one cannot even speak, then hired priests whisper God’s name in their ears! While alive, a person is tangled in a thousand desires; the desire for God has not yet been created.

When all desires dissolve into that one desire—as rivers lose themselves in the sea—when your yearnings flow unitedly toward the divine, when longing is born, then prayer is born. Then not a moment’s delay remains. And I tell you, even if the moth does not go to the flame, the flame will fly to the moth.

It is not only you who search; he too is searching.

There is an old saying in Egypt: had he not been searching, even the idea of seeking him would not arise in your mind. They say: the one who sets out to seek him is precisely the one whom God has already sought out. You become thirsty for him only when, in some deep sense, at some unfathomable depth, he has placed his hand upon your heart. Not everyone sets out to seek him. Now and then someone goes mad. Surely he has poured some wine from his own cup into you. Perhaps you don’t even know it, it was poured so deep—at the very center of your life-breath. You never go there; you move about on the surface. You never come home.

As I see it, the one who chooses God is announcing that God has chosen him.

In Tibet they have a proverb: it is not the disciple who chooses the master; it is the master who chooses the disciple. It seems as though the disciple chose, because the disciple’s ego still lives around the “I.” He says, “I am being initiated!” He says, “I chose this master!” But those who coined this proverb in Tibet knew better. The guru–disciple tradition there is very ancient, very pure. They knew and spoke rightly: the master chooses the disciple. He doesn’t say it, because if he said it, the disciple might slip away. Saying it might create resistance. It could hurt his ego, wound him, and the one who was drawing near might go far. The master doesn’t say anything. He even accepts that “you chose me.” But I tell you this: until the master has chosen you, the question of your choosing does not arise; the very courage, the very urge to choose will not be born.

So where is the obstacle? You search, and God searches—then why does meeting not happen?

First: you seem to be searching, but you are not. You put nothing at stake. You want God for free. For petty aims you stake your whole life. Majnun staked everything for Laila. Have you staked yourself like that in the search for God? No. You allot a little space to God in your life—five minutes of prayer in twenty-four hours. Even that you finish off in a hurry. Even that is a formality to be done; a clever calculation: who knows, God may indeed exist, so at least I’ll be able to say, “Look, I prayed five minutes daily, counted so many beads, read the Gita every day!” If after death it turns out that there is a God, you will have something to say, some bank balance, you won’t be empty-handed! And if there isn’t—nothing is lost. What harm in spending five or ten minutes?

You are clever! You ride two boats at once. Your prayer too is your arithmetic. And that is precisely where prayer dies—because prayer cannot be arithmetic. Prayer is ecstasy. Prayer is madness. Prayer is divine frenzy. It is an intoxication—not calculation, not bookkeeping.

When your prayer becomes mad, it is fulfilled. When God surrounds you from all sides—morning his, evening his, noon his—whether you rise or sit, you remain absorbed in him; even if you go to the marketplace, outwardly it is the market, but inwardly the remembrance is his; even sitting in your shop, outwardly you look at the customer, inwardly the vision is of him—when your life, day and night, within and without, like the breath going in and out, is dedicated to him—then the meeting happens.

So first: you talk of union, but you risk nothing. And this wager is such that only when you stake the whole do you truly stake; if you save even a grain, you miss. For in that saving, distrust has entered; in that saving there is cunning; innocence is lost. Prayer is an innocent state. One places one’s whole being on the altar, holding back nothing. One does not think, “What if the wager is lost for nothing? Better save a little.”

That is why I say: the gambler can pray, not the shopkeeper. The shopkeeper proceeds with calculation—“I’ll invest this much; how much will I get? If I lose, let it not be too much—only so much that I can make up for it.”

A gambler stakes everything; he holds back nothing. Such courage is needed. And gamblers stake things—goods, money; the devotee, the supplicant, stakes himself. For to gain God, you must stake the self. The price is yourself.

Second: your prayer is false, hollow. Your worship is a formality; social habit, not worship. And do you want God—or, in God’s name, do you want something else? People pray to God so that they may gain wealth, position, prestige; in truth they desire wealth, position, prestige, and want to use God as a means. They would make even God their servant. Their real goal lies elsewhere. If the devil gave them wealth, they would worship the devil. Whoever grants them wealth, they will worship. Whoever gives them rank, they will worship. Whoever provides position becomes their god. God is secondary; something else is valued more, something else is being sought.

You cannot make God a means; if you do, you will miss. God is the supreme end. Make yourself the means to him—then union will not delay.

Third: God is very near—nearer than the nearest. Even “near” is wrong, because “near” still suggests some distance. God pervades every fiber of you. He is so close that there is no space between you and him. And yet, this is precisely why you keep missing. Only when you are that still, that quiet—when the flame of your life becomes unwavering—will you see the one who is nearer than the near.

Mohammad said: the jugular vein—the life-vein in the neck, cutting which a man dies—that too is far; God is closer than that. But to know one so close, you too must come close to yourself. You have gone far away from yourself. Wherever your desires are, there you are. Your desires are stretched far into the future. You never come near. When desirelessness arises, prayer arises. You come close to yourself. As you draw near, his music begins to sound. As you come near, his fragrance begins to waft. As you come near, his gurgling stream, the unstruck sound, begins to be heard. Then you begin to dance. Then you no longer walk—dancing, you run toward home. Then bells are tied to your ankles and songs to your lips. Then you are drenched in ecstasy.

Come close to yourself. There is only one way to come close to God: come close to yourself. God is not other; he is your supreme being, your destiny. If you are the seed, God is the tree. If you are the bud, he is the flower—your own full blossoming. Come near. Come home. Become still within.

Main sun raha hoon tere dil ki dhadkanein paiham
Hai tera dil mutajassis kahin zaroor mera.
I hear the ceaseless beating of your heart;
surely, somewhere, your heart is mine.

I hear in my heart your very heartbeat—constantly, continually, unbroken. In this heartbeat too is his heartbeat. A listener is needed. Your ears are so full of noise that you cannot hear your own heart.

A great musician in the West wrote in his diary: he visited a laboratory in America—he had heard they had built a one-hundred-percent soundproof room. He wanted to know what absolute silence is like—being a musician, he wanted acquaintance with perfect stillness, for music leads in that direction. He went inside, and was astonished: there was absolute silence, yet two sounds were audible; he could hear them clearly. He said to the attendant, “You claim no sound can enter here, but I hear two.” The attendant laughed. “Those two are inside you,” he said. “They are not coming from outside. One is your heartbeat—pounding so loud you didn’t even think it could be your heart. The other is the movement of your blood—the gurgling stream in your veins. These are not coming from outside.”

When the outer sounds were utterly cut off, these became audible. They are sounding in you as well, twenty-four hours a day. But the outer clamor is so great that these subtle sounds are lost. Even your heartbeat and your blood’s flow are, in a sense, outside you. There is yet another sound which is heard when the heartbeat stops and the blood’s flow ceases—that we have called Omkar, the unstruck sound, Pranava.

Main sun raha hoon tere dil ki dhadkanein paiham
Hai tera dil mutajassis kahin zaroor mera.
—and from this it seems to me that not only am I seeking you; your heart is seeking me too—because I hear your voice within my own heart. He has taken form within you; he has colored your life. The one you are seeking is sitting in your house. You are pressed to the door, peering out, waiting for the guest—and the guest has never even been outside. You sit outside in the courtyard, watching the road: “When will the beloved come?” Every passerby’s footsteps give you a hint: “Perhaps he has come!” A flying leaf deceives you: “Perhaps he has come!” The wind rustles in the trees and you think, “Perhaps he has come!” You start at every sound. You are strung tight day and night—“Maybe now he will come. Who knows when?” And “Let it not be that he comes and the preparations are incomplete!” So you stand at the road watching. He is sitting in your house. Before you came to be, he was seated there. The guest has arrived before the host. Come home. You will find him within.

When Bodhidharma attained, it is said he burst into loud laughter. Other seekers around him asked, “What happened?” He said, “This is too much! Even jokes should have a limit. The one we were searching for, I found sitting at home. The one we went out to seek was hidden in the seeker himself. What a cosmic joke!” And Bodhidharma says he laughed all his life. Whenever anyone spoke of God, he would laugh. He would say, “Don’t bring up that topic—it’s too funny. It’s a deep irony.”

You do not miss because he is far—you miss because he is far, far too near, nearer than near. Return! First search in the house; then go outside. Outside there is vastness—how far will you search, to the moon and stars? First search home. If you do not find him there, then go out. But whoever has searched within has found—there has never been an exception.

I was once a guest at Mulla Nasruddin’s house. He was lecturing—scaring—his son, because the boy would come home having picked up filthy swear words from the neighborhood. So he had written on a slate and hung it in the boy’s room: If you use the word “badmash” (rascal)—five paise fine; if “gadha” (donkey)—ten paise fine; if “sala” (a common curse)—twenty paise fine; if “haramzada” (bastard)—forty paise fine. He gives the boy fifty paise a day as pocket money.

The boy began to laugh. He listened, watched, and then laughed. Nasruddin asked, “Why are you laughing? What’s the matter?”
The boy said, “I know abuses for which even a whole rupee won’t be enough.”

If abuses are what you know, then toward whomever you relate, they will start flowing that way. Whatever is in you is what will flow. If all you have learned in life is to swear, then even when you fall in love, your swearing will begin to flow in your love. After all, it is you who will be flowing in your love, isn’t it? So the stench you have accumulated all your life will fall even upon your beloved. If it is you who loves, where are your abuses to go?

Try to understand this. You perhaps think you only swear at your enemies—wrong. If swearing has become part of your habit, if the possibility to abuse exists within you, then to the enemy you will do it openly, to the friend you will do it covertly—but you will do it. What you have is what you will distribute. To a friend you may do it jokingly—but you will do it.

There are people for whom there is no friendship until there is the rough-and-tumble of abusive banter. As long as one must use words like “Please come,” “Be seated,” “How are you?”—that is not friendship, only acquaintance. When the trading of swear words begins, then they call it friendship.

Look at this a little. What kind of friendship is this?

But you are helpless. Whatever you carry will cast its shadow even upon your friendships.

There are two kinds of people. Some make one person into a friend and another into an enemy. They divide themselves. Whatever is bad they channel toward the enemy; whatever is good they channel toward the friend. But when you fall in love with me, you will fall in wholly. Then digging channels will not do. Then your abuse will also come to me, and your prayer will also come to me.

You will have to wake up! And you will have to be free of the abuses. Otherwise even your love will be polluted; your prayer will be polluted.

It is good that, by this pretext, you have begun to see your abuses; now, slowly, unfasten your bondage to them. Now, slowly, awaken. Because those abuses will not let you fly—they are heavy; they will hang around your neck like stones. They will remain lodged like stones between me and you. The flow will not be able to happen rightly. Whenever you swear, you will contract. Whenever you swear, guilt will arise within. Whenever you swear, there will be remorse.

It is good that you asked the question; at least you have been honest. Now gather a little more awareness. I am not saying, “Stop swearing” by force; because if you stop by force, you will simply start giving it to someone else. Then you will need another guru to whom you can hurl your abuses, and one guru whom you can praise. This is exactly what people are doing. If they praise Mahavira, they abuse Buddha. Where should the abuses go? A channel has to be dug. If they praise Rama, they abuse Krishna. If they praise Krishna, they abuse Rama.

But wake up a little!

I have heard: a great architect, a master craftsman, when a ship went down, swam to an unknown island. He was alone. No one was there. He was highly skilled, and he had nothing else to do. The trees were laden with fruit, so there was no shortage of food. There was wood in the forest. There were beautiful stones. Slowly, with nothing else to occupy him, he began to build. He built houses. He built shops. He built churches. Years later—some twenty years—when his whole town had come into being, a ship finally touched shore. The craftsman said to the passengers, to the captain, “Before we leave, before I board the ship, come—at least see what I have built!” He showed them around. Everything was fine, but people were very surprised: he had built two churches. They asked, “What will you do with two churches? One church is understandable.” He said, “One church is the one I go to, and the other is the one I don’t go to.”

Think about it a little. Alone, one church won’t do—the one you go to. You also need a church you don’t go to. A temple won’t do—you also need a mosque you don’t go to. A church alone won’t do—you also need a gurdwara you don’t go to. What fun is it if there is only the church you go to! Then where will you put what is wrong in you?

So people often choose two masters: one they are for, and one they are against. They choose two: one they call friend, one they call enemy.

Watch carefully: if your enemy dies, you will feel a great lack. You will feel very empty. Now what will you do? Even when the enemy dies—the one you always wished would die, for whom you prayed would die—even then, when he dies, you will weep inside. Because you will feel, now what will you do? What you were channeling toward the enemy—where will it go now? Then you will have to look for another enemy.

People cannot live without enemies, because a great enmity is hiding within them.

So there are two ways: either you find one more guru, build one more church which you don’t go to, whose word you don’t listen to, whom you are against, who is wrong, a hypocrite. Or the second way: understand these abuses that are arising within you, see them, recognize the impurity within you, understand and know the trash and rubbish within you.

The first way is not meaningful, because by it you will not change; you will remain as you are. In that case, it is even better that you keep on loving me and also keep on abusing me. Because that situation cannot last long; your love itself has begun to shrink within; your love itself has begun to suffer. Good—no worry. Go on living like this. Slowly you yourself will think, What am I doing! With one hand I build, with the other I demolish. How will the building be constructed then? With one hand I place the brick of trust, with the other I pour the poison of distrust. With one hand I sow the seed, with the other I rain fire. How will this building, this garden, ever be created?

Do not think you are doing me some harm. You are harming only yourself. You are putting filth into your own food. You will be the one to eat it. It will flow in your own blood. From it your own bones will be formed. When you hurl abuse, it is not the abused who is harmed—the harm is to the one who abuses. His tongue is spoiled. His heart becomes tarnished. His life-breath becomes petty.

This is a kind of madness. Wake up from it! And don’t relish it. Because from the questioner’s words it sounds as if he thinks he is doing something very precious. He has also written that when he hurls abuses like this, people call him “foolish,” and he laughs at them. It seems you are taking pleasure in it. No harm; if you cannot rise above it, even that is okay. At least while abusing you will remember me—but there are better ways to remember. You have chosen a very stupid way to remember.

I tell you, if you must babble nonsense, if you must abuse, then drop love—at least you will remain single, together in one piece. And if you want to love, then be free of abuse. Because it is not about me. What harm is there to me if you abuse me! But your abuse will go on breaking you. Slowly you will begin to separate from yourself, and it will become difficult to join these two ends again.

One night Mulla Nasruddin put his son to bed and went to his own room. More than an hour passed, yet the boy kept shouting, “Papa! I’m thirsty.”
“Keep quiet and go to sleep,” Mulla shouted back. “If you trouble me any more I’ll get up and give you a slap.”
“Papa, when you get up to slap me, bring a glass of water too,” the boy said.
Rightly said. At least do that much—since you’ll be getting up anyway.

So if there is no other way, and this is the only way you know to remember, no harm. Fine—go on abusing; at least the remembrance will continue. But if you go on with both, you are riding two horses, and you will land in great difficulty. Either let go of love—what kind of love is this, anyway?—or let go of abuse.
Become a single note; only then will you be able to be at peace. Otherwise there is no way to peace. Peace is nothing but the state of one who has become a single note. Restlessness is nothing but the derangement of a man split and shattered into two notes, into many notes.