Nahin Ram Bin Thaon #12

Whether it is anger, sex, or any other impulse, another person is not indispensable. And whatever surge you discharge by getting bound to another creates a chain. Anger comes, you express it on someone; the other responds with anger; more anger arises—where does it end?

Whenever we connect to another through a feeling, we enter an endless disturbance.

Sannyas means: from now on I will not link my feelings and impulses to others. From now on my feelings and impulses will manifest and be dissolved in aloneness. The infinite sky will receive them; I will not dump them on persons.

To give them to persons is to create relationships, to forge a chain. The other is human, weak like me; reactions will arise in them. The other is not the sky that will absorb you without answering back. In the other there will be a rebound; then in you a counter-rebound; and the sequence continues.

Lifetime after lifetime you have done this. Who knows how many nets you have erected around yourself—how many you have angered, how many you have coveted, how many you have bound by attachment and sex. You carry the burden of all that.

There is only one way for this burden to leave: stop tying your impulses to others. Let them manifest in solitude.

This must be understood, because it is difficult. You might grasp that anger can be released in solitude—but how will you express sex in solitude?

Even anger is difficult to discharge alone in the beginning, because anger too demands the other. That is why I gave you a pillow. It is only a prop; soon you must drop it too, because that also becomes “the other.” But initially it is useful.

If you can truly be angry at a pillow, why can’t you truly love a pillow? If you can be mad at a pillow, why not embrace it?

And when you relate with a person in anger or love, the whole play is of the mind anyway. What is the other doing? When you embrace someone, what comes into your hands is bone-flesh-marrow. It is not more valuable than a pillow. How is bone, flesh or skin more valuable than a pillow? It is only your notion that “another” is present; that notion lets you expand your love.

When you strike someone’s head with a stick, how is that different from striking a pillow with a stick? It appears different because you believe “the other” is there and a pillow is “no one.” It appears different because the other will respond and a pillow will not. That is all.

The other will answer. If you embrace someone with love, they will embrace you back. That makes it easier for you, because the reply arouses and excites you, and a chain forms.

The difficulty with a pillow is that you are alone; it will not answer. You must create everything yourself.

This initial difficulty will be there with every impulse—sex, anger, anything. But within a few moments, a few days, you will become capable. Then you will laugh that all the people you embraced till now were no more than pillows—mere occasions.

To make love your solitary meditation has many obstacles—obstacles of conditioning. From childhood certain ideas are taught; they become hurdles.

For example, a man expressing sexuality with a pillow might have ejaculation. Fear arises. From childhood he has been told, “Even a drop of semen lost and you fall into a great abyss; immense life-energy is destroyed.” Hindus say one drop of semen takes forty days of food to produce. Sheer untruth—no grain of fact. It was invented to frighten children. Children get frightened; worse, old men remain frightened.

An average man can easily have intercourse four thousand times in seventy years. In each ejaculation he discharges from ten million to a billion sperm. Within one body there are so many sperm that if each became a fetus, the present world population could be born from a single couple—four billion people from one man and one woman.

And semen is not some fixed treasure stored within you, such that if some goes out, the stock diminishes. It is being produced every moment: as the body breathes, eats, exercises, semen is produced. Modern medical research is quite different, even opposite: the more a man uses semen, the longer his virility lasts. The one who, out of fear, stops sexual use early loses semen production early, because when you use semen, the whole body engages again in producing it. When you do not use it, the body need not engage; slowly the capacity to produce declines. This may look paradoxical: those who have more sex can remain capable longer; those who have less, empty out sooner.

Thus in the West doctors advise that if intercourse can continue even into seventy, eighty, ninety, the chance of living longer increases—the body remains fresh. Old semen becomes stale and inert; with the inertia of semen, inertia spreads through the body.

We are surprised to hear in the West that a ninety-year-old marries. We wonder, “What’s the point now?” But in the West even a ninety-year-old can have intercourse, because notions about semen have changed; the scientific view is closer to truth.

In every faculty of life the same holds: use it, and it stays capable. Keep walking into old age, your legs remain strong; stop walking, they weaken. Use your brain till the last moment, it remains fresh; stop using it, it becomes dull. All the senses live by use and activity. What you use stays fresh longer. Semen too is no exception; it is part of the body. The body’s rule is: the more you use, the more alive it stays. If you get frightened and stop using, the body withers sooner.

And this becomes a vicious circle: fear reduces use; reduced use weakens the body; weakness increases fear; fear causes more repression; repression weakens further.

Fear restrains; restraint kills. Live fearlessly—Rosa Luxemburg, a German woman, said, “Burn like a torch from both ends.”

Do not panic that you will burn out; life is vast. There is plenty of oil in your lamp. But if you never light the wick, if you shrink in fear, you will sink.

All old cultures frightened people about semen. There were reasons: once a person is frightened about sexuality, it is easy to enslave them. You have caught the root. Sex is the root. Fill someone with guilt about sex, and they will neither be rebellious nor powerful; guilt will always suppress them. The guilty are easy to control.

So the state wants you to feel guilty; society wants it. All in power want every person born to remain afraid. The fearful can be owned; the fearless break all chains and live free, become rebellious.

Thus from childhood we tell boys, “Do not spill semen; conserve it.” We teach miserliness and call it brahmacharya. This is not brahmacharya. Stinginess is not brahmacharya. Nor is forced retention of semen any part of brahmacharya. Brahmacharya is an event of such bliss that your communion with existence has begun; thus need for intercourse with a person disappears.

This is hard to understand; if I state it plainly, it may agitate you. A saint is one whose intercourse with existence has begun. The cuckoo calls and his whole body experiences the bliss of intercourse. Flowers bloom on a tree and his entire body thrills and dances as one thrills in sexual union. At sunrise or moonlit night, at every moment samadhi-like intercourse is available to him. Your genitals alone are capable of intercourse; in him every pore is capable.

Understand one thing never even considered: we created the image of Shiva as the Shivalinga—as if Shiva is wholly a linga. It means Shiva has neither eyes nor hands nor feet—only linga, only the generative organ. This symbolizes the final state of saintliness: the entire body has become a generative organ. He is in union with the whole universe with his entire body. This is no longer local intercourse between genitals; it is the meeting of existence with existence.

By creating the Shivalinga we have given the world a concept whose measure is hard to compute.

But even Hindus avoid this meaning. The meaning is crystal clear; we are blind because we are so afraid. We try to hide it.

Carl Gustav Jung, the great Western psychologist, came to India and visited Puri, Konark, Khajuraho. At Konark, the priest guiding him was restless, guilty—everywhere were sculptures of naked coupling. Jung was deeply impressed, for he was one of the few in this century who penetrated the human psyche deeply. The deeper one goes within, the more meaningful sex becomes; nothing goes deeper within you than sex. In the moment of sex you are in a depth you rarely otherwise reach; only when samadhi happens do you go beyond it.

Jung was delighted; the priest was distressed, worried what report this Westerner would carry. Not only that priest—Gandhiji himself thought Konark and Khajuraho should be buried under mounds of earth so we are not defamed!

There were people in this land who built Khajuraho and Konark—under the guidance of saints, for they are temples. Later came “mahatmas” who wanted them destroyed or buried.

I can never see Gandhi as Hindu; he is Christian at heart. His education and grip are Christian. The Christian is terribly afraid of such things; he cannot imagine sexual imagery in a church, or a Shivalinga there.

As they were leaving the temple, the priest whispered to Jung, “Forgive this perversion; it is the reflection of some diseased minds in our past, not our national symbol. Do not think this is our religion or philosophy.” Jung wrote in his memoirs: I was astonished that such profound imagery existed—and this is the modern Hindu’s view! The Hindu has become weak.

Shivalinga means a state in which your whole body can experience intercourse through every hair pore. Only then will you be free of genital sex and brahmacharya will dawn.

Thus brahmacharya is not freedom from enjoyment; it is the taste of supreme enjoyment. It becomes so supreme you no longer need to do anything special to get it. A gust of wind brings the same thrill a lover gets from his beloved’s touch.

But we have frightened children so much that even proper sexual fulfillment never happens; the fear remains, the miserliness remains—the dread of losing power lingers, even after having a dozen children.

An atheist might fear losing energy; a theist should not. A theist believes we are connected to an infinite source. If an atheist becomes stingy about semen, it’s understandable; a theist becoming stingy is not.

Because of this fear, loving in solitude seems difficult.

Yet I say: drop the fear. As you have expressed anger on a pillow, express love on a pillow. Do not worry quickly about results. In initial stages you may get so aroused that ejaculation happens. Take that ejaculation as an offering at God’s feet. From whom the energy came, to Him it returned. Do not be afraid.

Soon the moment will come when, in this meditation of love, ejaculation will not occur. As the meditation deepens and ejaculation ceases, you will taste something new: bliss without losing energy. When energy surges within with great intensity, you become a storm, a tide rises—but you do not throw it out; it becomes a dance and is absorbed back into you.

Understand the difference.

The ordinary way—what we call indulgence—is: a tide rises in you, but it is like a storm in a teacup, localized in the genitals. The body’s waves all concentrate on the genitals and in a moment it is over. A breeze blows, you are stirred, the genitals gather the energy and expel it. Like air from a punctured balloon, you collapse and sleep. This brief rising and losing—you have called it enjoyment. It is not even A-B-C of enjoyment.

Tantra’s description of enjoyment is: your whole body fills with the tide, every hair vibrates, you forget yourself in that state, even “I am” is not remembered; the dance remains, the dancer is gone; the song remains, the singer is gone. Your whole being becomes ecstatic, in samadhi; you climb a height, and daily that height grows.

Note: the sense of rising height is felt by your whole body, as if the whole body is pulsating and aware. Now you feel pulsation and awareness only in the genitals. Then the whole body becomes a Shivalinga and you will experience that your body’s outline has dissolved.

Shivalinga is not poetry; it is an experience. When the whole of life fills with the tide and your whole body is thrilled, you see around you a halo like the shape of a Shivalinga—a luminous oval. The contours of your body vanish; only the linga-like oval remains—eyes, nose, ears, hands disappear; just an egg-shaped light remains.

That oval of light is your soul’s form. When you entered your mother’s womb, a point of light in the exact shape of a Shivalinga entered. The body was acquired in the womb. When you leave the body at death—as you have before—your body’s shape will lie here; the luminous linga will rise from you and go on its next journey.

When, in the supreme state of intercourse, the whole body thrills, the same kind of event happens as at birth and death. But at birth you were unconscious; at death you will go unconscious again. In this moment of inner intercourse—which has nothing to do with another, but with your consciousness becoming a Shivalinga by breaking all bodily dams—for the first time you will experience your own form. And the bliss your form experiences with existence is what tantra calls intercourse.

This can happen in solitude, or with someone. But I say: care for solitude, because with another, disturbances are bound to arise. If it happens in solitude, you are free. Later, even with another, you will know it has nothing to do with the other. It is an independent happening. Light streams from every pore; a tide rises within you.

And when there is a full tide within, there is no ejaculation. How could there be? The oval itself prevents it; there is no hole for discharge. The energy begins to circulate in a circuit; it does not spill. An inner circle forms; energy revolves and slowly dissolves back into you; it does not go out. It rises in you, subsides in you. Like the ocean’s tide that comes and merges back—nothing is lost.

When for the first time you feel that the supreme capacity of enjoyment touches the peak and then is reabsorbed in you, your enjoyment becomes steady. You are blissful every moment, the way a sexual person is for a moment.

This is the bliss of saintliness. Saints did not leave sex because they controlled semen; they left it because they discovered the art of supreme intercourse. They received a vast kingdom; they lost interest in your petty commotion. When the great is attained, the small drops away by itself.

Those who try to drop the small without finding the great get into trouble: the great never comes, and in giving up the small they become miserable. Hence your so-called saints are sad, dull, tormented, defeated; somehow dragging along. From their eyes and being you do not hear the resonance of the Ultimate, you do not hear the strings of the heart sing. Sitting with them you may feel depressed or guilty, take vows and rules, but you do not fill with wonder. You may catch their disease, not supreme health.

I call that moment supreme health when you can make a circle of your peak energy. This will happen only in solitude.

What I am saying is dangerous. All significant things are dangerous. Things that can do no harm can bring no good; where harm is possible, good is possible. The doors of harm and benefit open together.

So what I am saying is dangerous precisely because the door of supreme bliss is hidden in it. It is possible your solitary love becomes mere masturbation. Then you are in danger. This is the very danger society used to frighten you with, until it robbed love and sex of their fragrance. I warn of that danger. It exists only if you do not enter this experiment consciously and begin to deceive yourself.

If you do not deceive yourself, this inner self-enjoyment—raising love completely within—can become the supreme attainment.

There will be stages. First stage has risk: ejaculation may occur. For women, initial stages may resemble masturbation. Do not fear. Do not give it much attention. Give attention to the inner happening. Focus on ensuring your whole body is aroused—not localized arousal—let the whole body be moved. Let every part tremble, thrill; let no part be deprived of the tide.

So dance, leap, rejoice. Give every pore the chance to participate. If you let the whole body join, the genital-centeredness will dissolve.

Psychologists call this state polymorphous: the whole body. They say the child is born capable of erotic taste through the whole body. But we gradually localize it. The whole body is erotic; that is why a small child sucking his thumb looks so delighted—as if absorbed in intercourse. Watch closely—though we blind ourselves to such things—his whole body ripples with glee. But you cannot bear to see it; you pull the thumb out of his mouth, thinking you are teaching him something. You are teaching him only this: his whole body must not remain erotic. The child’s whole body is sexual; the genital is not yet separate; the whole body is his sex organ. He draws juice from any corner of the body. He squirms and takes delight; his whole body still knows pleasure.

Soon we will canalize that river, so it will not flow through the whole body. It will flow only into the genitals. Then whatever pleasures he knows will be limited to a small organ for a fleeting moment. The energy of the whole body is expelled through that organ, and the body becomes light.

The “pleasure” of sex is small; it is mostly relief—the lightness after the burden of tension created by energy’s presence. Hence many use sex as a sleeping pill. When the body is full of energy, sleep does not come; restlessness is felt. Once energy is expelled, you feel light and sleep. Otherwise sex does not give you some great joy.

Thus when saints tell you there is no pleasure in sex, you agree—because you really get none; they are voicing your experience. Or when they say, “Why cling to such a petty pleasure?” you agree; it seems petty. It has become a habit.

Habits have a peculiarity: if you indulge, you get nothing; if you abstain, you feel you are losing something. Sex too has become a habit—you keep doing it. So when saints say, “There is nothing to it,” you agree—your experience says the same.

But I say: if sex spreads through the whole body and you become a Shivalinga… It would be good to keep a small Shivalinga where you meditate. No image on earth is more significant. It contains the entire shape of your soul, and the secret that your energy can revolve in a circuit. The day your energy revolves within and merges in you, you neither lose power nor miss bliss. The more power accumulates, the more bliss grows. Soon a moment comes when you gain joy without losing, without giving, without staking anything.

When causeless bliss begins—that state is called sat-chit-ananda. Communion with existence begins. Your very being, even your breath, becomes a form of intercourse. Breath goes in—bliss; breath goes out—bliss. Then no special arrangements are needed; whatever is, is bliss. Sitting in the sun, the rays touch your face and there is bliss—bliss like intercourse.

All bliss has the flavor of intercourse.

We have made Shiva’s image Ardhanarishvara—half male, half female—unique. Anyone who wants to enter the ultimate mystery of life must understand Shiva rightly. All gods we call deva; Shiva we call Mahadeva—none placed higher. There are reasons: in his conception we have hidden the essence and the keys of life.

Ardhanarishvara means: when supreme intercourse begins, half of your being becomes your wife, half your husband. Half your energy is feminine, half masculine. It is already so. The nectar and absorption of these two within ends all waste of energy.

Ask a biologist today—he agrees: each person is bisexual, half male, half female. You are born of a man and a woman; half of each is in you. If only your mother had produced you, you would be female; only father, male. But you are fifty-fifty. You can be neither purely male nor purely female—Ardhanarishvara.

Biology found this only in the last fifty years; we established it in the image of Ardhanarishvara at least fifty thousand years ago—not from biology but from yogic experience. When the yogi goes within, he finds: I am both—prakriti and purusha. In me both meet; my purusha merges into my prakriti; my prakriti unites with my purusha; their embrace runs uninterrupted; the circle is complete.

Psychologists too say you are half male, half female. Your conscious is male, your unconscious female—or vice versa. A union goes on between them.

The world is built of duality; therefore you must be two. You search outside for “woman” because you do not know the woman within; you search outside for “man” because you do not know the man within.

Hence, no man will satisfy, no woman will satisfy, because the inner image is far more beautiful than any outside. Everyone carries a blueprint from birth. However beautiful a partner you find, soon restlessness begins; something is missing. All lovers fail because fulfillment is nearly impossible. Only if you could find outside the exact image you carry within would you be satisfied—but you will not, for everyone carries their parents’ reflections. You carry your inner reflection.

When love happens at first sight, it simply means: something in the other echoes your inner image—your longing, your inner man or woman. You glimpse outside the form you carry within, and there is love.

China tells an old tale: in the beginning God created man and woman as one, joined—true “twins,” fused, Ardhanarishvara. But it was awkward: both had to go everywhere together, carrying two bodies. They prayed, “Separate us for convenience.” God did. Separated, on this vast earth, across countless births, they got lost. Love is the search for that lost twin; when found, fulfillment comes. With four billion people, the chance of meeting your exact counterpart is almost impossible. The tale is charming and meaningful. My sense is: you will never meet unless your eyes turn within. Your inner woman is there. The art of uniting your inner man and woman is yoga. The day this union happens, you do not lose energy; brahmacharya arises.

Therefore my notion of brahmacharya is not negation or renunciation—it is supreme enjoyment. What I say is easily misunderstood; it is easy to see “indulgence” in it, hard to see yoga. So I am abused daily that I teach people indulgence. In one sense the abuse is right: I teach enjoyment—but supreme enjoyment. All yoga, all tantra, all true religion teach that. I call God the Supreme Enjoyment—the experience of supreme intercourse. Your inner duality dissolves; the two become one—advaita. Embrace is advaita—where two vanish and one remains.

Such advaita will never be achieved with an outer woman; two will remain. Even if for a moment you forget the other, the next moment you remember. In intercourse you are you, wife is wife. You touch, you brush, but do not truly merge. Hence a bitter aftertaste follows every intercourse—as if something failed. Almost there… then lost. Hence the urge again—yet no intercourse satisfies, because none can become samadhi; it tantalizes.

The day the inner man-woman union happens, the matter ends. Then no outer search remains. No other remains; duality ends; nondual arises—the supreme embrace. One whose inner circle completes like a Shivalinga, whose self-enjoyment begins, whose self-intercourse starts—such a person loses no energy.

Know that sharp points are needed to lose energy. Body electricity can escape through fingers, not through the head; anything round does not let energy leak. The genitals can lose energy; they are specially designed for discharge. Understand: the body has two ends. One end takes in energy—the head. Hence the head is round: there is no losing there; it is for intake. You take food through mouth, breath through nose, rays through eyes, sound through ears—receiving organs. Doors through which things enter but do not return.

Excretion is at the other end—down below. The genitals are there too—the place of losing. Hence knower sages have said semen is no more than excreta; it is a form of waste. From below, the body discards what it gathered; it releases. It is excretion.

The head is round to collect; the genitals are pointed to discharge. Thus nature has arranged that when you are full of lust the genitals become erect and pointed; the more pointed, the faster the discharge.

The circular Shivalinga has nowhere for energy to exit. It can revolve on the circumference but cannot go out.

We built domes on temples so that the mantras and prayers uttered within would reverberate and fall back, not escape—keep raining back upon the devotee, forming a circle. In this sense, the temple has a quality neither mosque nor church has. The temple is constructed like the head; energy rains down; beneath it one becomes energized, gathers power.

Your head becomes like a temple when the inner union happens.

If you study the temple’s architecture, it is modeled on the human body. Your body is square; the temple is square. Above is the dome like the head. A yogi in lotus posture—the same silhouette is the temple’s blueprint. The temple is a symbol of the inner posture.

In the moment of inner union you become a temple.

So do not fear solitude. At first, ejaculation may occur. Do not be frightened; do not be guilty. “It is God’s; God has taken it.” Do not be stingy; do not interrupt; do not panic. What of it? Today or tomorrow, this body will be gone; with it, its semen too. Where will you take it?

It is amusing that so-called ascetics preach, “Do not hoard wealth; it will be left here,” yet say, “Hoard semen!” Where will you take semen? It too will be left here. It is part of the body; you can neither haul it nor take it along.

So even if ejaculation happens, do not be afraid; do not be filled with guilt—guilt will halt meditation. Say, “What came from God has gone to God,” give thanks, and absorb yourself again.

Very soon ejaculation will cease—because it happens only when you forcefully suppress. When you do not suppress, it stops. Soon the moment comes when your lover, your beloved, is found within.

So whether it is sex, anger, or any impulse, the meditator must not link it to another. That is the meaning of “world”: for my feelings and impulses, the other is necessary. Sannyas means: for my feelings and impulses, I alone am enough.

This aloneness is called sannyas. If you still need another for your impulses, how will you enter sannyas?

Neither leaving the house for the forest, nor running away from your wife is required. Drop the dependence of your impulses on others. Become your own master. Be yourself; the other is not necessary for your being.

This does not mean you will not love your wife. You will, but it will be the gift of an independent being—of a different dignity. Right now you love out of compulsion. You feel dependent, enslaved. So husband and wife are always angry at each other.

I know hundreds of couples, but I have not seen one without anger toward the other. Naturally so. We are angry at all upon whom we depend. Whoever we depend upon feels like a master; we have become slaves. Both feel this, for both depend. No one is master; both are slaves. Slaves exploit each other through dependence.

Often in a household quarrel the wife wins—right or wrong—because the husband depends on her for sex. He fears that if he stirs trouble she will refuse; if he fights, love will be withheld. To get love he must bargain; so he loses. The wife knows this, so she creates a scene at two moments—when the husband sits to eat, and when he prepares to make love. On these two he depends. So as soon as he sits at the plate, the complaints begin. He is afraid and hums assent to finish eating.

Food and sex are connected. Food is necessary for your individual existence; sex is necessary for the society’s existence—sex is society’s food. On both counts the husband depends.

Thus the greatest hero—Napoleon—becomes meek at home. He trembles before Josephine like any man before his wife. The battlefield bravado disappears because here he depends. He needs something from Josephine that she can refuse.

Do not think only prostitutes sell their bodies; wives do as well. The bargain is: agree to these conditions and the body is available; otherwise not. If you want the body, agree to the terms.

Therefore the husband’s anger toward the wife remains; the wife’s toward the husband remains—because each depends. Where there is dependence, there is anger; love cannot be.

You will be able to love only the day you are not dependent—when you become self-reliant in the dimension of love. You can be alone and your joy is unchanged. Only then can you truly love; only then will your wife stop tormenting you, because she knows there is no point—no way to bend you—dependence is over.

Home is a great quarrel because we depend on one another. A continuous tug-of-war.

Sannyas does not mean you will not love. It means your love will be a gift, not a dependence. You will give, share—but as the offering of a free person. You will not demand anything in return. You will give because giving is your joy.

When two people give love like this—when giving itself is joy, with no dependence and no bargain—only then does the true phenomenon of husband-wife happen in this world. Otherwise all are formal institutions. Only then can some Ram-Sita, Radha-Krishna, Gauri-Shankar-like union be. That is why we do not remember them separately; it is not right to do so. They did not live separately; there was no quarrel—separation is impossible. Even a hyphen between Sita-Ram is too much—there is not that much quarrel. Radha-Krishna, Gauri-Shankar become almost one name. To call them two is not right; such unity was born within.

If you do not let fear eat you, and in solitude you succeed with love, anger, sex—you will become a free person. All the joys of life are for the free. Life pours its treasures on the free. It is in your hands to become its master.

You may feel you cannot ask, that asking seems difficult—but the mind you have can hold nothing except questions. This is your catharsis. I say to you: ask, so that your catharsis can happen. The mind anyway goes on asking. You may not gather the courage to voice a question; you may hesitate, feel afraid—but the mind goes on asking continually. In the mind, only questions stick; answers never do. The mind is a process that produces questions.

The mind raises questions about everything. So it may happen that out of modesty or etiquette you do not ask me, or out of fear of what people will say: that the question is too small, not worth asking; that it is absurd, irrelevant, unbecoming; that asking it will make you look so ignorant that even this has not been resolved in you. Because of such fears, you don’t ask. But you will sit with your questions suppressed. Those suppressed questions will keep agitating your consciousness.

And I am against repression in every situation. Your questions, too, should not be repressed. A suppressed question will go on haunting you, will pursue you for lifetimes. Whatever is repressed remains present.

So ask, so that there can be a catharsis. Do not think that the answer I give will satisfy you. That is not going to happen. Nor will my answer bring your question to an end. My answer will create a thousand more questions within you.

That is why, after answering, I look back at you—because it will have created more questions. In the time I was answering, you will have prepared a thousand new ones. So my answer is never going to become your answer. From my answers, more questions will arise.

Then why do I answer? To make you aware of certain things. Each answer will create more questions, and slowly you will become aware. Some things will come into your own experience. First, you will see that answers are not obtained through answers. You will have to search elsewhere. No answer given by another can give you the Answer; you will have to find it yourself. Even if a question is settled on the intellectual plane, there is still no real resolution. This race of question-and-answer—the race of the intellect—leads nowhere. You will have to set out on the path of the heart.

You will ask, I will answer, and in the end you will find that your confusion, your bewilderment, has increased rather than decreased. The questions have multiplied instead of diminishing. Only then, perhaps, will you awaken and realize that the answer to questions is not in answers. The answer to questions is in meditation. Answers can be given from the outside; meditation has to be born from within.

The answers to your questions are not in the scriptures. Because the mind’s nature is to create questions, reading the scriptures will only create more. The answer lies in freedom from the mind. Until the mind falls away, questions will continue.

You have a mind; therefore I say to you, ask. Nothing will be solved directly by this. But an indirect solution is possible. Slowly you will become aware that this asking and answering is a game; nothing will come of it. How long will you go on moving these make-believe elephants and horses on the chessboard? One day you will get up and throw away the whole chessboard.

There is a tradition in Japan: when someone comes to a Zen master, he brings his mat with him. He spreads the mat, sits, and asks his question. He has to leave the mat there. Then he comes again, whenever he has questions, sits on his mat and asks. Sometimes this goes on for years.

Then, the day he becomes tired of asking and receiving answers, and the day it becomes clear to him that all this is futile, he rolls up his mat, tucks it under his arm, and leaves.

The day he rolls up his mat, the master says, “Blessings! So—you’ve rolled up the mat?”

Rolling up the mat is a symbol: now, after all this asking and all this listening, he is tired. It means, “I now stop this asking and listening.”

From that day, meditation begins.

So the day you roll up your mat—when you start to run off with it and I try to stop you, saying, “Ask,” and you say, “No”—that day, my blessings!

You want to ask but cannot muster the courage; hence I say, ask. I answer so that you will ask more. I have to tire you—thoroughly tire you—tire you so much that you simply collapse and say, “Enough: no questions, no answers.”

In that moment the first ray of your meditation will descend. In that moment you will be weary of the mind. In that moment you will be able to put the mind aside and say, “Now I want experience, not answers; now I want resolution, not replies.”

The true resolution is in samadhi.

Enough for today.