Koplen Phir Phoot Aayeen #6

What comes through study, thinking, and contemplation is not even the intellect’s understanding; it is only the illusion of understanding. Just as if we tried to explain light to a blind man—he listens; and there is a system by which the blind can read, so he studies; and on what he has heard and read he also reflects and contemplates within—do you think he will gain any understanding of light? Yes, one thing can be gained: the illusion that “I understand light.” And that illusion is more dangerous than blindness itself. Because if a blind man understands that he does not understand, he might search for the remedy by which eyes can be found. But if the blind man concludes that he understands, then even that door is closed.

Your question has two parts. You are calling study, listening, and contemplation the intellect’s understanding. The intellect has never truly understood anything, nor will it ever be able to. But you are fortunate that you remember this “understanding” is not helping. There is dense darkness within you, unconscious drives, and you are aware of them as well. You have not forgotten their presence, their mischief, in the din of the intellect.

So one thing you said is wrong: that an intellectual understanding is attained. But the second thing is precious. And you are blessed that, even taking it to be understanding, you have not become smugly “wise.” You have not taken that false cleverness as your punditry. Many unfortunate ones waste their lives in that very punditry.

It is true you are much more than the intellect, far beyond it. The intellect is useful for knowing things that are other than you; to know what is not you. Therefore the intellect is not your enemy. From the intellect all of science is born. But you can turn the intellect into your enemy if you think that by it you will also know yourself.

Understand it this way: someone tries to hear music with the eyes, or someone tries to see light with the ears. It is neither the fault of the eyes nor of the ears. Eyes are made to see light, not to hear music. Ears are made to hear music, not to see light. The intellect is used to know objects, to know what is different from you. But its use is not to know the knower. The one who sits within you as the knower is not an object.

And hence the great predicament of science. Science knows so much about so many stars, so much about atoms and molecules, yet the scientist misses just one thing: knowing himself. He knows everything and forgets the one who is knowing it all.

And it seems quite natural to assume that with that by which we have known everything else, we will also know the knower. You can see the whole world with your eyes, but not your eyes themselves. It is another matter if you stand before a mirror; but what you will see is not your eyes, it is their shadow, their reflection. What a strange limitation! The eye sees everything and is incapable of seeing itself! Exactly the same is the situation.

A small task will be needed. A very small task.
For twenty-four hours you are busy looking at the other—by day and by night. At least spend some time in forgetting the other. The day you forget the other completely, the very utility of the intellect is finished.
The wise have called this meditation. Meditation means: a state in which nothing remains to be known—only the knower remains. There is no way to get rid of that. Run to the mountains or the deserts, to the moon and the stars if you like, but your knower will go with you. Because that is you, your inner being; you cannot escape it. It is not a shadow. It is your very existence. Every day, for an hour—morning, or evening, or noon—begin to give yourself this unique dimension. Just sit with your eyes closed.
But your habits are bad. And there are professionals who exploit your bad habits. They will say: Close your eyes and see Lord Krishna playing the flute! See Jesus hanging on the cross! Close your eyes and see this pair, Rama and Sita!
But even with your eyes closed you remain entangled in the other. The eyes have closed, but you have not been freed of the other.
Gautam Buddha has a unique saying: On the path of meditation, if you meet me, pick up your sword and cut off my head. If you are my disciple and have understood me, do not hesitate even for a moment. Because on the path of meditation, if even the master stands there, he too is the other.
Perhaps that battle is the final battle. Leaving your wife is not very difficult. And those who left their wives and went to the forests, took sannyas, became sadhus and mahatmas—you may think they did something very hard. You are greatly mistaken. The hard work is what you are doing—staying with your wife. Those who ran away are escapees. But from such flight, such escapism, there will be no solution.
Run away from wealth and still nothing will change. The craving for wealth will pursue you. There is no sin in wealth; the sin is in the craving for wealth. Where will you leave the craving? If there were sin in wealth itself, thieves should be rewarded, not punished. Poor fellows—how hard they work to free people from their sins! And if running away from wives were a virtue, then the one who ran off with your wife would be assured of heaven.
I have heard: a man, out of breath and sweating, ran into a post office. The postmaster seated him and asked what the trouble was.
He said: Write down my report! My wife has run away with someone.
The postmaster said: You have my full sympathy; I understand that in your rush you forgot this isn’t a police station, it’s a post office. The police station is right across the street.
The man said: I know that too. You write the report.
The postmaster said: You are a strange man. This is not the post office’s work. You have to file this report at the police station.
He said: I already filed it once. But those scoundrels found her the very next day and brought her back. I’m not going to make that mistake again.
The postmaster was astonished. He asked: Tell me at least—when did your wife run away?
He said: It must be about seven days.
Seven days later you’ve come to file the report?
He said: I want to give her a chance to get as far away as possible.... Blessed is that man. His heaven is assured. And he has made us into mahatmas without any difficulty.
Neither by leaving wealth, nor wife or husband, nor by leaving the marketplace—because... understand a small principle of psychology. Whatever you run away from—close your eyes—and you will find it standing before you. The one who runs is weak, runs because he is seized with fear. But in this way there will be no freedom from the other.
And then, even if you leave your wife and run away, what difference does it make? The lust for woman is still within you. It was there even when there was no wife. It is for that very reason you went looking for a wife. That same lust will again compel you to search for a wife. It makes no difference what the faces are. Faces can change—some other woman, some other man.
You can leave a palace and live in a hut. But that was never the real question. That palace was “mine,” and now this hut is “mine.” You would have given your life for that palace; now you will give your life for this hut. The real issue is the “mine-ness”; in that, nothing has changed.
So when I say sit with closed eyes for half an hour or an hour, I am saying: for that time, forget others. You have twenty-four hours. Give twenty-three hours to the whole world—give to the marketplace, to the shop, to the house—give to whomever you want. But are you not capable enough to save one hour for yourself? Perhaps saving twenty-four hours is very difficult. Saving one hour may be easy. And I do not say that to save this hour you must go to some cave in the Himalayas. Your home is sufficient, and the easiest place—because there you are familiar with whatever is there. And for one hour, forgetting all that is not difficult.
If not today then tomorrow, if not tomorrow then the day after, soon that moment comes when you simply sit silently. Images will come—don’t take any interest in them—neither for nor against. Let them come and let them go. There is a road, the road of the mind; traffic moves along it. You sit at the roadside and keep watching. And you will be amazed—amazed by the greatest mystery of life—that if you remain in witnessing—just witnessing, as if you have nothing to do with who is going or who is coming—mute, silent, sitting by the side of the road—soon the moment comes when the crowd on that road begins to thin out. Because there is a reason for this crowd to be on the road: you have invited it. You have welcomed it till now. It is not uninvited. And when it sees that you are so full of indifference that you do not even look back—who came, who went, whether it was good or bad, beautiful or ugly, mine or another’s—this crowd will slowly begin to depart.
The process of meditation is very simple. Only a little capacity for patience is needed. And what is there to lose? Even if nothing comes of it, at least you will have an hour’s rest. But I know from my experience, and from the experience of thousands whom I have guided through this process: one day that moment arrives—the great moment—when the road of the mind is empty, not even dust rises, nothing remains to be known. And when nothing remains to be known, only the knower remains. And that knower then has no way to know anyone else except itself; knowing is its nature. If you hand it some toy, a little rattle, it keeps knowing only that. Today there is nothing. Today it knows only itself. And once anyone has tasted oneself, one has tasted nectar. Then there is no darkness, no unconsciousness.
And that one hour will slowly spread over your whole twenty-four hours. You will still live in the marketplace, you will still live in the home. The same wife, the same children. But you will not be the same. A revolution will have happened in your life. All your perspectives of seeing, your very eyes, will have changed. A peace—and such a peace whose depth no one has ever measured. And a light—and such a light in which there is neither oil nor wick—without wick, without oil. Therefore the question of it running out does not arise.
Without this experience, the whole of life is futile. And to attain this experience is to attain that supreme wealth which never exhausts. Then you can pour it out with both hands, yet you cannot empty it. This state of wealth is what we have called God. Ishwar is derived from the word aishwarya—so the word we have for God is not found in any other language of the world.
Let me repeat so you remember. First: what you take to be the cleverness of the intellect is not understanding at all. Second: what you think is very difficult is in fact very simple, very natural. You have simply never made the attempt.
All your schooling, your society, your conditioning teach you to run after the other—teach ambition: for money, for position, for prestige, for fame. It is our misfortune that till now we have not been able to create a society that teaches you the royal secret of how you will recognize yourself. And there is no prestige greater than that. And there is no longing greater than that.
It is a very strange world. Here people filled with sovereignty wander about as beggars. Those who were meant to be emperors roam with a beggar’s bowl in hand. Just a little effort... but your society and your conditioning frighten you. They tell you: To know oneself? That happens over many lifetimes! It happens rarely. It happens in the life of some incarnate one, some tirthankara. Some messiah, some prophet, some son of God... You are just an ordinary person. Don’t get into this hassle, don’t take up this difficulty. It is not within your capacity.
I tell you it is your birthright; and for it you need not be a tirthankara. Yes—if this event happens, you will become a tirthankara. You need not be a messiah. Yes—if this event happens, you will become a messiah. Being a messiah is not the first requirement; it is the final result.
I ask you only for one hour. And in twenty-four hours, can you not give one hour? No one is so poor. And I do not say go to the temple, I do not say worry about the mosque. In my view temples, mosques, churches, and gurudwaras have proved harmful. They created the idea that God is not in your home. I tell you: wherever you are, there is God. Therefore, wherever you sit becomes a place of pilgrimage. Just sit a little silent, a little quiet. If it takes a little time, do not panic.
People are so full of impatience... For a simple education that at most will leave them a clerk in some office, they are ready to spend one-third of their life; and after twenty-five years of circling schools, colleges, universities, they will then circle offices—and even then they do not think that I am asking you for only one hour. And in that hour of experience you will arrive—into that nectar-experience, that eternal, for whose attainment this world is a school.

It is true that there are two paths to realize the ultimate truth: love and meditation. But this does not mean that a meditator must be devoid of love, nor does it mean that a lover need never concern himself with meditation.

This may sound a little difficult. It is only a matter of primary emphasis. If you choose love as your path, meditation will come along like a shadow—because if love does not bring meditation in its wake, it is not love, it is lust. What is the difference between love and lust? Only this: lust has no shadow of awareness behind it, while love does. And if you choose the path of meditation, it does not mean you will become a loveless, wooden dummy. Meditation will be your discipline, but flowers of love will begin to blossom in your life.

Love and meditation are simply matters of your inclination. Otherwise, they are like the two wings of a bird—cut off even one and flying becomes difficult. They are like your two legs. They are like the two oars with which a boat is rowed. Drop one oar, and the boat will only keep circling in one place.

This is where you went wrong: you have not understood the meaning of love. You have understood the kind of “love” that can be understood in Bombay—you go to Chowpatty and think you’ve understood love.

Love is a goodwill toward the whole of existence. Love is a compassion without any address. Love is a joy—like a flower blooming and its fragrance spreading to the four directions, not searching for specific nostrils.

I have heard of a Buddhist nun in China. She believed she had great love for Buddha. She sold all her property and had a golden statue of Buddha made. Every day she worshipped that golden Buddha. There was only one difficulty. She would light incense—now who can trust smoke? Sometimes it would travel toward Buddha, and sometimes it would go the other way. She would light incense sticks—but who can trust the smoke? And what does smoke care? It goes where the winds take it. She was very troubled. And her trouble grew, because she was staying in a vast temple—perhaps the largest surviving temple in the world. Who knows how many centuries it took to make it? A whole mountain was carved out to create it. It has a thousand statues of Buddha—it is called the Temple of One Thousand Buddhas. Each statue is more beautiful than the other.

The nun’s problem was this: she would offer incense to her Buddha, light the sticks, place flowers—and the other Buddhas, those rogues, would enjoy the fun. It was unbearable. She took this to be love. She thought and thought: what to do? Then she made a bamboo funnel. When she lit the incense, she would guide the smoke with the bamboo funnel right up to her Buddha’s nose. Now the poor golden Buddha couldn’t say, “What are you doing, you madwoman?” Buddha’s nose, his eyes, his mouth—all turned black. Then she was very alarmed. She went to the temple priest and said, “What should I do? I am in great difficulty. If I don’t use the bamboo funnel, my incense doesn’t reach my Buddha, my fragrance doesn’t reach my Buddha. And there is such a crowd of rogue Buddhas—one thousand Buddhas all around—that I cannot tell who will snatch away the fragrance. So I, a poor woman, made this funnel. Now a new nuisance has arisen: my Buddha’s face has turned black.”

The priest said, “What you have done is exactly what is happening in the world. Every lover blackens the face of the one they love. And this people call love. Lest my fragrance, my love, reach someone else, everyone has made their own bamboo funnels.”

A Hindu will marry a Hindu; a Muslim will marry a Muslim. And even after marriage, nothing is certain—the world is big and thousands of Buddhas, all kinds of rogues, are roaming about—so they keep all doors and windows shut. Even if the one they love is suffocated, even if together they themselves are suffocated, so be it. And in household after household the breath is choking. I have been a guest in thousands of homes, and I have seen breaths choking everywhere. The wife is crying because she married the man she loved.

It’s astonishing! It seems people should love their enemies. At least they should marry their enemies. Love whomever you like, but marry your worst enemy—because given how you are going to behave later…

Your idea of love is wrong. And for a woman to feel that there is no love within—this is impossible. Just as there is water under every stretch of land—only, in some places it may be fifty feet down, in others sixty—so love is within every human being. Man is a little hard; you have to dig the well a little deeper. Woman is more fluid; she is not so hard. A little digging and the water appears. But sometimes what we see around us in the name of love makes us hard; it frightens us; it makes us fearful—so that we pray, “If this is love, God save us from love.”

You too must have built a wall around yourself. Bring that wall down. There is no need to marry and have children in order to bring that wall down. It is enough that there be no wall between you and this vast human society, between you and the birds and the trees. We are all connected; we are all together. However far apart we may be, we are still very near—after all, we are parts of the same existence. From there we are born, and into that we one day dissolve.

So my first suggestion is this: drop your false notion that you have no love, or that love is not your path. Without love you will become dry and arid—like someone thirsty in a desert. Break this wall.

I am not telling you to walk the path of love. I am only saying: remove your mistaken idea about love. Walk the path of meditation—it feels dear to you, it interests you. The moment you drop your wrong notion about love, you will find that your meditation—your very idea of meditation, your path of meditation—has become simple on its own. It has become flowing on its own. The difficulties that seemed to be there till yesterday will no longer seem to be there.

It will go on until you correct the first mistake. That little taste of bliss you get for a moment doesn’t become vast because you have dammed up love. If the dam of love also breaks, and this small moment of bliss is there, then the Ganga will begin to flow within you too. Then long intervals will begin to appear. For long stretches there will be no trace of thoughts. And there will be a new sense that as meditation deepens here, behind it the fragrance of love spreads. The day meditation and love are not two for you, know that the goal has arrived. The day meditation is love and love is meditation, know that the temple is here. There is nowhere else to go; this is where you were to arrive.

So in the beginning a choice has to be made, but in the end there is no choice. In the end love and meditation become one. Meditation unites you with yourself, and love unites you with all.

If you unite only with yourself, the whole of existence will remain separate from you. That attainment will be incomplete. And if you merge with all but do not meet yourself, is that any meeting? The day you meet yourself and simultaneously meet all, the attainment is complete.

Let me repeat, so you don’t forget.
- Your notion about love is wrong; drop it.
- Love does not mean lust. Love means goodwill toward all.

It is mentioned in the life of Gautam Buddha that he would tell every monk: when you meditate and when you are filled with bliss, do not forget one thing. When you are filled with bliss, share your bliss with the whole world. Only then rise from meditation. Don’t let meditation become miserliness. Don’t start locking it in a strongbox. Whatever you receive, lavish it. Tomorrow more will come—lavish that too. The more you pour out, the more will come.

A man stood up and said: Everything else is fine; your command I accept upon my head, but I want to ask for one exception.
Buddha said: What exception?
He said: I meditate; I will meditate. And as you say, after meditation, when the experience of bliss happens, I will pray, “O universe, receive this experience.” But in this I want a small exception: I want to leave my neighbor out of it. Because I cannot bear that that scoundrel should benefit from my meditation. Just this one concession—one neighbor. I am willing to share with the whole world; however far, even if someone lives on distant stars, I have no concern. But this good-for-nothing...!
Buddha said: Then there is great difficulty. Then you have not understood at all. The question was not whether to give it to this one or that one. The question was not to give to your own and not to the other. The question was not to give a little more to the friend and a little less to the enemy. The question was: you will give, you will give unconditionally; and you will not ask who the recipient is. And you have got stuck right there. Your meditation will not be able to advance. The moon and the stars hold no meaning for you; therefore you are ready to give them love, meditation, bliss. But that neighbor...
So Buddha said: I tell you, forget about everyone—the moon, the stars. Each day after meditation, pray only this much: May all my bliss go to my neighbor. That alone is enough for you. For others, even the whole world is too small; for you, your neighbor seems bigger than the whole world.

Such is the meaning of love: that my bliss, the joy of my life, the fragrance of my life, reach all, unconditionally and without cause.

So first, remember that your old notion of love is wrong. And second, that moment which comes in meditation—don’t get frightened and drop it. Because that very moment... Just as the Ganga at Gangotri is very small. So small that the Hindus have made there a cow’s mouth—Gomukh. From a stone cow’s mouth the Gangotri issues forth. And that same Gangotri, traveling thousands of miles, becomes so vast that when it meets the ocean it is called Ganga Sagar. It becomes difficult to see from one bank to the other.
That small moment is, for now, Gangotri. If you correct your understanding regarding love, it will not take long for that Gangotri to become Ganga Sagar. Its becoming Ganga Sagar is certain. The laws of existence do not change; they are ever the same. If ever any error occurs, the error is ours. The laws of the world show no favoritism.

The very first gate of man is thought. A human being first learns to think. The capacity to think, to reason, is what we call intellect. All our systems of education train only this intellect. That is why the world has so many thoughts, but not much love. And a world with an overabundance of thought and no love will soon become a hell. Because thought has nothing to do with what is right and what is wrong. Thought is a prostitute.

In Greece, before Socrates, there was a great philosophical tradition. Its name was the Sophists. Their one job was to teach people how to think. Rich youths, princes, or anyone willing to pay their fees—they would teach them the processes of thought and of argument. They had no doctrine of their own. They only taught thinking and the techniques of logic. Then you could use it as you wished—for good or for evil.

A sword can cut someone’s neck, and a sword can also prevent a neck from being cut. Poison can kill, and in skilled hands the same poison can save a life.

The Sophists’ work was simply this: “We will teach you how to wield the sword. Why you wield it, what your goal is—that is your concern. We have nothing to do with that.”

Zeno, a very thoughtful young man, enrolled in the school of a great Sophist. The Sophists had a rule: you paid half the fee in advance, and the remaining half when you won your first public debate. They had that much confidence in their science—you were bound to win. Zeno paid half the fee. The training was completed. Moons rose and set; suns rose and set; days passed, months passed. The master kept pressing him about the remaining fee. But Zeno said, “Let the condition be fulfilled. When I win a debate, then. I have decided I will never enter any debate at all. If someone tells me at noon that it is night, I will say, ‘Yes, it is indeed night.’ If I never argue, what is there to win? And until I win a debate, I will not pay the other half. And you know I am your disciple—I learned your very art.”

The master thought, “This is too much. The fellow has turned mischievous. Something must be done.” He had to prove his mastery. He sued Zeno in court for the unpaid fee. His logic was: he would recover the remaining fee either way. If he won, the court would order Zeno to pay. If he lost, outside the court he would grab Zeno by the collar: “Son, the other half?”

But Zeno was his disciple. They had the same style of thinking, the same sword, the same logic. Zeno said, “Fine. If I lose in court, I will ask the court to decree that my teacher should stop asking me for the fee—I have lost my first case. And if I win in court—which is quite likely, since all arguments favor me: I have not debated at all, so why fees, and that was the condition—then outside I will bow to my master and say, ‘Greetings! I cannot act against the court. I am a law-abiding man.’”

Thought is a prostitute. Thought has no vision of life of its own. Thought is blind. Yet we train people precisely in this blindness. Deeper than thought is our heart. But all societies, up to now, have tried to keep human beings away from the heart. Because the heart is dangerous. The heart does not know logic; it knows love. Thought can be used—you can be made into a soldier, into a clerk. But what will society do with love? Love has no utility for society. In fact, love is a danger to society. Today you love one person; tomorrow you may love someone else; the day after, someone else. How is society to manage all this?

To cut love down, society invented marriage, backed it with a thousand laws, and declared: true love is that which never changes. But in this world, whatever is true changes every day; whatever is false alone does not change. Paper flowers do not change; a real rose changes every day.

There is also danger with love. It is difficult to make a man into a soldier; to make him a soldier you must kill his love completely. Otherwise, when he takes a gun in hand to kill an enemy, his heart will say: “He too has a mother, just as you do. He too has a wife. As your wife wept bitterly when she bid you farewell, his wife must also have wept. He too has small children, and you are about to make them orphans. He too has an old father who has no other staff to lean on in his old age. What are you doing? And why? This man has done nothing to you. For a job paying a mere hundred rupees you will kill a man; and he too, for a pittance, has a gun pressed to your chest!”

If even a ray of love arises in the two, both will drop their guns and embrace—because they share the same problem. And the guns should be aimed at those sitting in the capitals.

You will be surprised to know that in the last World War, the older American soldiers behaved exactly as soldiers are trained to behave—the business of killing. But among the young, thirty percent did not kill anyone. They went to the battlefield with guns and returned in the evening with guns. When psychologists studied this, a panic spread across America. If this were to spread like wildfire among the youth—thirty percent is no small figure—and if American youth were to say, “Why should we kill people who have done nothing to us?” then America’s swagger, that it is the world’s greatest power, would be worth two pennies. Those who enjoy that swagger are in Washington. Those who have to kill and die have neither name nor address.

No society wants your heart, your love, to be allowed to develop. It is blocked in every way. The greatest obstacle is this: at the surface is the head; deeper than the head is the heart; deeper than the heart is your soul. Since your heart is not allowed to develop, the possibility of reaching your soul is closed; the doors are shut. So if in today’s world there is a stark shortage of people who know the soul, it is no wonder. It should not have been so—people have been seeking the soul for thousands of years; the number of the self-knowing should have increased. Instead, their number has been decreasing day by day. And whoever speaks of opening the doors of your heart and of how the flower of your soul can bloom—all the powers in the world that are against love and self-realization will become his enemies.

I have harmed no one in any way. Yet America has persuaded all the non-communist countries of the world not to give me even a place to set foot. And the communist nations were already irritated with me. Such a vast earth has become suddenly small for me. What is their panic?

Their panic is very basic. They fear that I am giving their youth the message of love. They fear that I am inspiring their youth toward meditation. They fear that, for the first time, millions of people all over the earth—without bothering whether they are Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Parsi, or Jew—are ready to enter a process of meditation and to dive into the unique ocean of love. That is their panic.

Without any crime, today I am enemy number one in America’s eyes. In their courts they could not prove what my crime is. How could they? No law in the world says that love is a sin. No law says that to know the soul is a crime. No law says that meditation or samadhi leads man to hell. What, then, could they prove in court?

Just four days ago, America’s top law officer, the Attorney General, in reply to a question at a press conference—someone had asked why I was not sentenced, why I was not jailed—gave a reasoning worth pondering. He said, “Our curiosity—our priority—was to destroy the commune Bhagwan had established here. That was our first task.”

And what was that commune? A small community of five thousand people, meditating in a desert where no American had any need to come, and no invitation was extended. The nearest American settlement, a small town, was at least twenty miles away. A slightly bigger town was thirty miles away. How were we troubling them?

But to destroy the commune, one thing was clear to them: first they had to get me out of America. Because those five thousand sannyasins had declared that if an attempt were made to arrest me, I could not be arrested without first killing five thousand sannyasins. For two years they wanted to arrest me; for two years news kept coming daily—today, now—the arrest warrant is about to arrive. And in the town twenty miles from the commune they had stationed troops so that, if needed, even the killing of five thousand sannyasins could be carried out—and that too they would do.

And those five thousand sannyasins had harmed them in no way. Their only “offense” was that they turned a desert into an oasis and gave America, for the first time, a slight taste of the nectar of meditation. For the first time in America, a place came into being that did not exist anywhere else there—a place you could call a place of pilgrimage. Every year thousands of sannyasins from all over the world were coming to the commune. They should have been happy that we gave their land a touch of sacredness, that we offered a gift of religion to their irreligious society. But for them, that was a threat.

Think with the intellect—but remember, think in such a way that it leads you toward the heart, not against it. Then you are truly intelligent. Love—but let your love not wander into the filthy sewers of lust; let it point toward the soul. And meditate, so that one day you light within yourself that lamp which never goes out. Whoever lights it attains the fulfillment of life. Whoever dies without lighting it has lived in vain and died in vain.

And I want to repeat, finally: this is your birthright.