Main Kaun Hun #10

A few things are worth understanding. First: whoever tries to live life according to some fixed way will be deprived of life. Whoever imposes a theory upon life becomes a killer of life. No method, no pattern, no framework allows the plant of life to grow rightly. The first understanding about living comes from accepting life with as much naturalness as possible. The more effortlessly you accept it, the more life becomes a benediction. A doctrinaire can never be natural; and the more uneasy a person is, the more artificial, false, and hypocritical he becomes.

The first sutra of the art of living is this: a natural, effortless acceptance of life. As life comes, embrace it in a spirit of ahobhava—total acceptability. Not only complete acceptance, but acceptance with grace, with gratitude—acceptance with gratitude.

Plants live, birds live, the sky lives, the earth lives, the ocean lives—without any principles. Only man tries to live by imposing principles upon life.

I am not saying there should be no principles in life; I am saying there can be no principles over life. If there are principles, they should be derived from life; they should follow life. Life cannot be produced out of principles. It is essential to understand the distinction. Life cannot be extracted from principles in the same way oil cannot be extracted from sand. Principles can flow from life.

Much can be seen through the art of living; a path may be revealed. But that path will be like a river flowing towards the ocean, carving its own course. There is no ready-made road on which a river runs. Trains also run, but on iron rails pre-laid. They don’t have to search for a path—the path is pre-fabricated; the carriages simply race along.

The life of a doctrinaire is like those running, dead carriages. The principles are fixed; the rails have been laid by tradition over thousands of years; the iron tracks are ready. All a doctrinaire has to do is place his wheels upon them and keep moving.

Life does not accept ready-made routes. Only one who is afraid of being alive prefers iron roads. A thousand trains can run on the same track; two rivers cannot flow along the same course. Nor can two lives ever walk the same path.

Every person has his own private life. To understand life is to understand that each life is one’s own. There is no single thing called “life” that belongs to all of us collectively. I live in one way; you live in another. The moment we decide on one way, we deny the other’s freedom, naturalness, privacy, individuality. Our world appears so dull, faded, and without sparkle because the source of sparkle, of joy, of delight—the individual—we have imprisoned. We have made pre-fabricated roads and commanded everyone to walk them. Whoever complies is accepted by society; whoever steps down from the road becomes rejected and neglected.

Life means infinite life. There are as many lives as there are people. And each person’s life is, in a very special sense, his own. Such a life has never happened before and will never happen again. In fact, the cosmic arrangement that produced you will never be repeated. The hour you were born will never return in history. Neither the same moon and stars, nor the same conditions on earth will be present again as they were in that moment. You are unique. Everyone is unique. Each person is such that there is no repetition of him; he has no counterpart in past or future, no comparison.

But ready-made, prepared roads—the roads of principles—do not count the individual; they are based on the group. They contain the fundamental error all statistics contain.

If we measure the height of every person in Baroda and divide by the number of people, we will discover the average height of the citizens. But it is quite possible there is not a single person in Baroda exactly that height. Go out to find a man of “average height,” and you may not find even one. The average man does not exist. The average man is a mathematical trick. Every person has his own height.

The game of averages is filled with such folly. I have heard: an emperor sent his vizier to find a bride of sixteen for his young son. The vizier searched, but could not find a beautiful girl of sixteen; so he brought two girls of eight each. He was a mathematician. He thought, if one sixteen-year-old isn’t available, then two of eight will do: eight plus eight equals sixteen. He arrived and stood the two little girls before the emperor. The emperor shouted, “Madman! Why have you brought these children?” He replied, “They are not children, Majesty—just do the addition. Eight and eight make sixteen. You required a woman of sixteen; here she stands. Your arithmetic seems weak.”

Many kinds of mathematics have been done with man. Mahavira has his life; Buddha his; Krishna his. Every person’s life differs. When we fix principles for how to live, inevitably they are borrowed, derived by looking at someone else’s life.

Mahavira stood naked. Seeing Mahavira, if someone fixes his life’s principles, he will lay iron rails of nudity and declare nudity necessary for himself. Nudity was never “necessary” for Mahavira. Mahavira’s nudity arose as a natural incident out of his innocent heart. Clothes must have become a difficulty to him; one day he threw them off. He never accepted nudity as a doctrine and then removed his garments. The clothes fell away; then he noticed he stood naked. That nakedness was a spontaneous occurrence in the flow of his life.

But one who constructs his life by looking at Mahavira will place the principle first—nudity—and the event will come later. Then the event becomes false. His nakedness cannot be beautiful; it becomes ugly. In that nakedness there will be no renunciation; at most, a circus. He has stripped by effort. Mahavira needed no effort to stand naked; perhaps effort would have been needed to wear clothing. If we adopt the principle first, that principle will belong to someone else.

Mahavira’s father is not your father; his mother not your mother; his time not your time; his mind not your mind; his soul’s long experiences not yours; what has his life to do with you? Yet you will stand naked. In your life that nakedness will be a kind of adultery. In Mahavira’s life it was a right conduct, a spontaneous fruit; in your life it will be an accident, a mishap. Anyone can stand naked—there is no difficulty. But the principle will have come first, life trailing behind. And whenever principle comes first and life after, life dies and only principles remain.

A “-ist” is a dead man. So all “-ists” are dead—Mahavirists, Buddhists, Marxists, Gandhians—no difference. The “-ist” is dead because he brings a principle from someone else and pours his life into that mold; in the molding, life is killed.

If one rose plant makes another rose its principle, it will surely die. The number of branches, leaves, the nature of flowers—none are identical. If your rose bears white flowers and makes the red-flowering plant its principle, it will be filled with self-condemnation: “I am bound for hell; the red is the principle and I am white—now I am finished.” Even with self-condemnation, the white rose cannot produce red flowers. One trick is possible: if the plant were as “intelligent” as man, it could varnish its white petals red. But varnished flowers are no longer alive; the varnish kills.

White should be white; red should be red; big flowers big; small flowers small. Small has its own beauty; big has its own. Red has its own; white has its own. Life accepts all. Only we reject ourselves and fall into misery.

So when someone asks me how to live, I say: don’t ask me; ask your own life. Let your life flow. Walk. Live. And in that living, whatever is blissful—let that become your principle. Whatever is sorrowful—do not turn it into a principle. There can be one touchstone: that which gives you joy becomes your sutra; that which gives you pain becomes your opposition. Don’t ask me, don’t ask anyone. If you go to anyone to ask how to live, the mistake has begun—because I can only speak about my own life.

People come to me and ask, “What time do you get up?” I ask, “What use is my getting up to you?” They say, “We will also start getting up at that time.” You may not know: even waking time is one’s own—except in the military, where there are no “men,” only machines. All military training is to make a man into a machine. That’s why for years they repeat foolish drills: left turn, right turn—again and again. Slowly the man turns left-right like a machine. Then when the command comes, he doesn’t have to think; he just turns. Later, tell him to aim and shoot; he does so without seeing whom, why, for what. There is no question anymore. A machine-gun in the hands of a machine. Life need not be made into a military.

Much research on sleep has brought surprising facts. Those who are accustomed to rising at brahma-muhurta and waking others too should understand them. A twenty-four-hour temperature study shows that for twenty-two hours the body remains around a certain temperature, and for two hours it drops. This usually occurs between 2 a.m. and 7 a.m. The two hours during which your body temperature dips are your deepest sleep. If you rise during that dip, you will feel restless the whole day; your sleep will have been incomplete. If you rise after those two hours, you will feel fresh, and you won’t worry about sleep all day.

Someone’s dip is from two to four. Suppose Vinoba Bhave’s dip is two to four—he rises at two or three. The imitation-Vinobas around him also rise at three. But if one imitator’s dip is from three to five, he will suffer all day; then he thinks he is tamasic: “See, Vinoba feels no sleep, and I feel sleepy all day—must be bad past-life karma.” It is not about past lives, sin, or tamas; it is a straightforward scientific matter. His body’s dip occurs two hours later.

Women’s temperature often dips later than men’s. Naturally, husbands arise earlier, make tea, and the wife rises a bit later. No need for wives to feel bothered or sad. A woman’s dip may be between three and seven; some between seven and nine. If one whose dip is seven to nine rises before nine, her day will be spoiled.

Discover from your life. If you must find a rule even for waking, experiment ten days to see at what hour you feel most fresh all day. That will be your rule. Don’t ask anyone else, because his rule cannot be yours. But the formulas we make are for everyone. We declare: whoever doesn’t rise at brahma-muhurta is not a good person.

Everyone’s brahma-muhurta is different. No one has the franchise that his brahma-muhurta must be mine. So I don’t say “rise at brahma-muhurta”; I say: find your brahma-muhurta precisely—your moment of awakening. Moments of sleep differ; moments of waking differ. Food habits too are individual.

It is surprising: even when two people suffer the same disease, their illnesses have individuality—the disease has a personality. If both you and I have tuberculosis, it will not be the same TB. Therefore, the same medicine that works for you may not work for me. The reasons are there: the whole organization of my personality is different. The event within that organization will be different than within yours.

One-size-fits-all medicine is our compulsion. Medical science is slowly realizing that when fully developed, we will treat the patient, not the disease. Now we are forced to treat disease when in truth we should treat the diseased person—because patients differ. But we build a hospital, admit a thousand TB patients, and can’t manage individualized treatment, so we treat all the same. That approach isn’t right or scientific—just a helpless compromise.

When our capacity grows, every patient should be treated differently. Not the disease but the patient must be treated. Each sick person is unique. There is no common platform of disease. Each is a person; therefore there is a soul.

If one car’s petrol tank breaks and another’s does too, there is no personality there; the same treatment fits both. But two men are persons. That is why I say men have souls; machines do not. If you acknowledge an inner personality, privacy, soul—then never, even by mistake, go to another to ask how to live. And if someone tells you, consider him an enemy, not a friend. At most he can say, “I live like this, and I found joy—or suffering—this way.” It is not necessary that you will find the same.

Live your own life and discover its sutras by living. One touchstone: that which increases your peace, joy, flowering, light, depth, and height—know that is the right path for you. Mind you, for you. Don’t grab your son by the neck and declare, “This is also your path, because it gave me joy.”

Neither ask others, nor impose on others. We are eager to ask so someone will tell us; and if something happens in our life, we are eager to impose it on others. Both are harmful. There is no alternative: you will have to know how to live by living.

It is like someone asking, “How should I swim?” I would say, “Jump into the river.” Not too deep—lest the swimmer be lost; but not so shallow that standing removes the need to swim. Jump deep enough that the hands must flail. He says, “Until I learn to swim, I cannot enter the water.” His logic is correct; there is no flaw in the argument. But logic and life differ greatly.

He is right: “Until I learn to swim, how can I enter water? The first condition for entering is that I must first learn to swim.” And I will say: until you enter water, how will you learn to swim? The first condition for learning is to enter water. Flailing arms on a mattress in a room won’t teach you. In fact, the possibility of drowning is an essential condition for learning to swim. The one who risks that much—swimming arises in him. It is precisely in that danger that the hands flail and swimming begins. Enter the river; then you can enter deeper rivers; then oceans. That is the way.

Enter life; don’t sit on the bank thinking, “How should I live?” Don’t go to the Gita, Quran, Bible, and thousands of gurus to ask how to live. Enter. Remember: where there is danger, there is education. There is danger—of drowning, of going astray, of error. That is why the very clever, the “wise,” remain sitting on the bank; they say, “Let no mistake be made. First lay iron rails; then we will walk.” Such clever people sit forever; they never enter.

You will have to take risks. Mistakes can happen—should happen. Whoever lives will make many mistakes. Don’t fear mistakes. Only this much intelligence is enough: do not repeat the same mistake. Let there be new mistakes daily—that is essential. It is not intelligence to sit on the shore for fear of error.

Enter life—stay awake and experiment; try waking and observe; try sleeping and observe; try eating; try lying and truth-telling; try anger and forgiveness; try love and enmity—taste all. In all of it, wherever depth increases, where peace increases, where joy increases, where a glimpse of the divine comes—recognize that as the rule forming for your life. And do not make even that rule so rigid that there is no possibility of change tomorrow. No one knows what life will bring tomorrow. The straight path may suddenly need a turn. What was pleasurable may become painful. Keep an opening for tomorrow.

Hence the second thing: discover life’s rules from within. And also: do not consider your discovered rule absolute. Do not regard it as perfect. It must have the flexibility to change tomorrow. Life flowers fully only in one who can change each moment. But we are “consistent” people. We insist: what we did yesterday, we will do today—else what will people say? What we believed yesterday, we will believe today—else people will say we have changed.

I have heard of a man whom people called intelligent—though a greater fool is hard to find. As a schoolboy he read a slogan on the wall: “Time is money.” He believed it. Later he began to earn. Being a very consistent man, he threw away two-thirds of all he earned and used only one-third. If he earned three rupees, two rupees went into the trash and he ran the household on one. Misery increased. Friends and family protested. He smiled as the so-called wise smile at the “ignorant.” Finally, pressed by friends, he explained: “I am a consistent man. Since I waste two-thirds of my time, how can I use all my money? Time is money; as I behave with time, I must behave with money.” No one could prove the slogan wrong; still, a mistake was happening. Often our mistake is that we clutch what we once grasped in the past and carry it blindly for life.

Buddha used to say: eight people once crossed a river by boat—as is proper. After reaching the far shore they hoisted the boat on their heads and marched into the marketplace. People were shocked. They had seen people riding boats, but not boats riding people. A crowd gathered. “What is this secret?” they asked. The men replied, “Fools! We are consistent people. The boat supported us in trouble; now we will support the boat. How can we put down the boat that carried us across? We are principled!” It is proper to cross by boat—but then leave the boat at the bank and go your way. In life, all principles are for crossing and dropping. No principle needs to be carried on the head. But the doctrinaire does just that—he piles up so many that walking itself becomes difficult. In our country this has happened. Thousands of years of traditional principles weigh upon us. Carrying them, we sit; to move a step is difficult; to set them down is harder.

I am utterly non-doctrinaire; I believe in no principle. Why? Because I believe in life. I believe in the courage to go where life leads. Man has intelligence and thought: discover where life leads. If it is worth going, go again—go a thousand times. If not worth going, then don’t go again—never go.

What is right today may not be right tomorrow; what was not right till yesterday may become right today. So life needs flexibility, liquidity. Live like water: in a glass, take the glass’s shape; in a pot, the pot’s; flow as a river; merge as an ocean.

But we are not like water; we are like stone-ice—hard, solid. Put a lump of stone-ice in a glass and the struggle begins; the glass and stone-ice fight. The ice refuses to take the shape of the glass; it has no flexibility. Water has flexibility.

As a person grows older, flexibility decreases. The child is fluid; the young begin to lose it; the old lose it all. One who remains fluid up to the moment of death has not lost youth. The body may be old, but he is not. If someone can keep the capacity to learn till his last breath, he never truly grows old. The body, nerves, bones age—but the soul need not. Blessed are those who prevent their soul from becoming old. I call them religious—not doctrinaires. Doctrinaires grow old before youth; they become rigid, armored; movement becomes frightening. Like wooden posts, they stand stiff, merely waiting for death. And truly, death need not kill them; they die long before it arrives. Few’s dying and burial occur on the same day; most die at twenty and are buried around seventy—there is a gap of fifty years. If dying and burial are the same moment, that man was alive and young.

The third sutra: be eternally young—meaning, remain fluid. Search anew daily; live anew daily. Do not decide today that tomorrow you will live the same way. Let life come. Why so much fear of the unknown? Whatever tomorrow brings, we will see; we will understand; and we will live accordingly.

Note: one who decides today for tomorrow weakens his discernment. His intelligence atrophies—because he won’t need it tomorrow. Whatever is not needed gradually withers. One who lives constantly in insecurity—who knows not what the next hour will bring—has to keep his intelligence ever alert. Perhaps we become awake only in danger; ordinarily we remain asleep. Put a knife on your chest and in a single instant you will awaken as never before. In that moment, thoughts stop—scriptures vanish—principles disappear. In that moment you are not a Hindu or a Muslim; there is no Quran or Gita inside. There is only awareness. In such a crisis there are no pre-laid iron tracks; no readymade answers learned at school. Nothing is fixed. Because nothing is fixed, intelligence must awaken to see what to do now. When confronted with the question “What now?” and there is no ready answer, intelligence appears in its full brilliance, full wakefulness, full sharpness.

One who lives twenty-four hours in such danger and insecurity acquires a certain gleam in the soul—a luminosity we hardly know. He lives with the sense, “I don’t know what the next moment will bring. How can I decide in advance? I will respond to what comes; I will enter into a dialogue with it; whatever can happen, let it happen.” Such a person lives awake. Discernment arises in him.

Discernment never arises in the doctrinaire, for he has ready-made answers to every situation. He never needs to think. His discernment dies.

Remember this sutra: if you want to awaken discernment, live in insecurity, live in danger.

Nietzsche had two small but precious words written on his table: Live dangerously! What does it mean? Drink poison? Build houses atop trees? Sleep on the road? Stand still before roaring buses? No. It means: do not live in security. Do not arrange safety. Stay away from bound principles. Live! Do not plan life in advance; don’t make five-year plans for living. Make no rigid structure in which you must live. Live straightforwardly and freshly. Wherever life is, accept the struggle and live. Proceed with what emerges from that struggle.

One consequence is that discernment awakens. Where discernment awakens fully, the experience of the soul begins; and as it reaches fullness, the glimpse of the divine arises.

The more your security, the less any sign of soul. The security-seeker is body-centered. The doctrinaire is body-centered; he never experiences the soul.

As an inner sharpness appears—just as a knife acquires an edge when rubbed on stone—so the one who meets new situations daily sharpens his discernment. That edge and shine—this is genius, this is the aura, the radiance that seems to encircle a person. Without this shine, no one can find God.

These dead people cannot find God—those who live tied in bundles of principles, perfectly safe, who even know heaven and hell beforehand, who calculate what act leads to hell or heaven, who give a coin to a beggar and record it in their ledger to claim it later from God. For such dead people there is no liberation, no God.

Where there is calculation and mathematics, there is no life. Life’s paths are free of mathematics, free of argument. Life is beyond logic. Its arithmetic is different; it does not follow our accounts. The one who calculates how much to wear, how much to eat, what to speak and not to speak, how to sit and stand so as not to go to hell—if such a poor fellow gets a place even in hell, it is much. He belongs nowhere. He is not living.

I have heard of a man near death. A priest came for the last confession. “Repent,” he said, “ask God’s forgiveness for your sins.” The man opened his eyes and said, “I can repent only one thing—that I did not live. I wasted life arranging to live. I will not ask your God for forgiveness either, lest I miss living even death. Let me now die—knowingly, awake, unafraid. Let me look death face to face. I could not see life; life stood before me while I kept ledgers of how to live. Life passed; I went on calculating.”

Accounts never work, because in life no account works. Life scrambles all your figures. I would say the same to you.

And a second point in this context: one whose discernment has awakened never needs to repent, because he lives as he can live—totally. Repentance for what? If yesterday I was angry at you knowingly, fully aware, and felt anger was appropriate, if I acted with full acceptance—I will not repent today. I know that what could happen through me, happened. But if before anger I believed forgiveness is virtue and anger is sin—and then I got angry—and afterwards thought, “How bad; I sinned”—then repentance catches me.

A religious man does not repent, because whatever he does, he does in totality. Even if he does something “bad,” he does it in totality. And by acting in totality, he goes beyond the bad. He does not repent; he steps out. If my anger gave me pain, I will go beyond it—but I will not repent. I will thank that anger: had it not happened, perhaps I would never have gone beyond it. It gave me a chance to transcend. Nor will I come to ask your forgiveness for my anger; I will come to thank you for providing the occasion. Without you, perhaps I would never have been free of this anger.

A religious man does not repent; he turns even the moment of potential repentance into a moment of attainment—because he lives wholly. Whatever is lived becomes part of his experience; and whatever becomes part of experience needs no principle; it begins to work silently within. It pervades every fiber of the mind and being.

When your hand burns in fire, you don’t need to make a principle that “I shall never again put my hand in fire.” If someone says so, know that his hand never burned; hence he needs a principle. Where there is experience, principles are unnecessary.

Therefore, live. Do not ask, “How to live?” Live—fearlessly, dropping all fear. Do not fear sin, do not crave virtue. Live totally. And you will find your boat drifting toward the shore of virtue and away from sin. If you live out of fear of sin, remember: what we fear magnetizes us. The shore of sin will call: “Come sometimes—after sunset, when darkness falls—come now and then.” Virtue seems dry. One who lives fearing sin will be beckoned by its dark paths. His fascination for sin will never disappear. We are frightened precisely of what attracts us. Monks and sannyasins have always feared women, because they are attracted. Where there is attraction, there is fear—fear of being attacked, of being overwhelmed.

I have heard: in China, an old woman served a monk for thirty years—from his youth to old age. Near death, she wanted to know. She called a courtesan: “Tonight after midnight go to his hut outside the village. Embrace him. Watch what he says and does; then tell me.” The courtesan went. It was a dark, lonely night. The monk opened his eyes: the village courtesan stood bedecked before him. He screamed, “Woman—the gate of hell! How dare you enter? Get out!” She approached; he panicked, ran to a corner; there was only one door and she stood in it. He folded hands, “What are you doing? I regard you as mother.” These are all words of fear—the “I see you as mother, sister, daughter” vocabulary. She embraced him; his whole body burned with fever; his hands and feet trembled. The courtesan reported back. The old woman said, “My thirty years of service were in vain. Even now he has not gone beyond sex.”

What we fear is what attracts us. Have you seen a novice learning to ride a bicycle? Even on a sixty-foot-wide empty road, he sees only the milestone at the edge: “I must not hit that!” He doesn’t see the wide road. Even aiming on purpose he might fail to hit it, but fear fixes his eyes on the stone; the road disappears. His handlebar turns toward it; he panics more; turns more—and collides. Do not think milestones are enemies of novice cyclists. They are not hell’s gates. The milestone has nothing to do with your learning. You are responsible. Fear hypnotizes; we become drawn toward what we fear.

Monks say woman is the gate of hell. Even if she were—who asks you to go through that gate? And if woman is hell’s gate, then how will a woman ever enter hell—where is her gate? Doors do not go anywhere. Then surely no woman has reached hell; only men—and especially monks—have. The door becomes their milestone. The more loudly they chant Rama’s name, the more their inner mind teases them with woman.

And if woman is hell’s gate, then what is man? For women, men become the gate of hell. Women ascetics have written few books. Perhaps a woman’s mind is closer to life; overflowing with the wish to live, she has never wholeheartedly agreed to renunciation. Perhaps woman is so joyous toward life that it does not seem something to abandon; and if God will come, he will come through life’s juice. So women did not write such books.

Where they did, see this curious thing: I know a woman ascetic and a male ascetic—Ma Anandamayi and Swami Akhandananda. He calls her “Mother,” she calls him “Father.” What conversations they must have! He says, “Mother”; she replies, “Father.”

What fear haunts a man? In truth, calling a woman “Mother” erects a barrier: “Now we can talk without so much fear; now there is no woman-man between us.” The woman says, “You are my father,” and her fear reduces. But why so much fear?

A woman is a woman, a man is a man. The purest relation possible between them is friendship. But we don’t allow a friendship between man and woman. She must be wife, or mother, or daughter. In any case, she must be within some sexual relationship. In spiritual cultures they say: make her your mother, sister, daughter—or wife; never a friend. Friendship is dangerous. All these roles are sexual: mother means my father’s wife; father means my mother’s husband; sister means two emerging from the same womb; daughter means born of my wife. Mother, sister, daughter, wife—relationships born of sex. The fearful declare: decide something fixed.

There is only one asexual relationship—friendship. But try it in a “spiritual” country. Walk with a woman; a friend will ask, “Who is she?” He must ask! If you say, “Wife”—the wonder is that no thought of sex arises. The matter ends. If you say, “Friend,” restlessness begins; immediately, suspicion of a “wrong” relationship. Friendship itself becomes wrong. Even between husband and wife, no thought of sex arises though “husband-wife” means a socially sanctioned sexual relationship—licensed. But we accept whatever happens under license. Friendship—possibly non-sexual—is viewed with suspicion.

This world made by the fearful, its principles and practices, lead nowhere—only into deeper fear—leaving man trembling, afraid.

Other than a fearful man, there is no hell.

So I say to you: apart from the frightened man, there is no hell anywhere. Apart from the fearless man, there is no heaven anywhere. The one established in complete fearlessness is in heaven. The one established in complete fear is in hell.
And the so-called religious people have found easy methods to make you afraid. They have made you afraid of everything. Do not taste when you eat, they say. If you eat and you taste, you will go to hell. You must practice non-taste. Among Gandhi-ji’s vows there is one: aswad, non-taste—eat, but do not taste.
It is rather amusing. Only animals eat without tasting. An essential part of human evolution is that a human being can also taste. No animal tastes; it only grazes, only eats. And those who practice non-taste lower themselves to the level of animals.
No, non-taste cannot be practiced. Non-taste comes as the fruit of total taste. If a person can take the full taste of something, he becomes fulfilled. That very fulfillment becomes non-taste. Then the longing for taste does not remain. Then there is no running after taste, no craving after taste, no lusting after taste. That which we know, that which we fully experience, we become free of.
So I would say to you: take total taste. If you must take a vow, take the vow of total taste—that if I taste, I will only taste, and I will taste fully. And when I am tasting, I will forget everything—the world, the shop, the market, knowledge, the Gita, the Koran—forget it all. When I taste, I will come onto my tongue; I will bring my whole consciousness there. If the whole soul can taste, you go beyond taste.
If a woman attracts you, do not run away; if a man attracts you, do not turn your back. In fact, we give no respect to those who run away from wars, but we give great respect to those who run away from the battle of life.
A friend came and told me there is a mahatma—now he should be called Ranachhod-dasji. A friend came and said to me, “Do you know a sannyasin, Ranachhod-dasji?”
I said: All the sannyasins I know are Ranachhod-dasji. Do you understand the meaning of “Ranachhod-das”?...
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