Nahin Ram Bin Thaon #2

There is a great difference between learning and awakening. Learning is very simple; awakening is very difficult. Learning does not require awakening as a condition. One can learn even while asleep. In fact, whatever we ordinarily learn, we learn while asleep. Breaking sleep is not necessary.

Perhaps you know that Russian psychologists have been conducting a new experiment for the last ten years: educating children in their sleep. It is a valuable experiment. The child remains asleep all night and keeps learning; there is no need to go to school during the day. Then the child can play, feel free; the daylong imprisonment of school is gone. And the experiment is succeeding. The child sleeps with a device by the ear, and while he sleeps the device feeds him information on mathematics, language, geography. The child’s unconscious mind catches and stores it all.

It has been found that the obstacles to learning that exist while awake do not exist during sleep. Awake, the mind is distracted; other things attract. The child sits in class; birds are singing outside; his mind wavers. Someone passes by, a sound arises; his attention splits. The sleeping child’s mind is undivided. And we learn through the unconscious, not the conscious. What Freud called the unconscious—learning happens through that.

That is why learning requires repetition. If you are learning a language, you have to repeat the meaning of the same word many times. Through repetition, what is conscious sinks into the unconscious. The more you repeat, the deeper it goes. Repeat a song again and again and you know it by heart; sing it once and you forget. Once means the conscious mind read it; many times means it slips beneath the conscious layers and slowly becomes unconscious. We learn through the unconscious.

In sleep, the conscious sleeps; the unconscious wakes. In sleep, the inner mind remains awake while the upper mind goes to sleep. Sleep-learning is direct education of the unconscious.

I mention this experiment so that you can grasp that learning can happen without awakening—perhaps even better.

Learning and awakening are very different matters. Learning is a matter of memory; to learn, one need not know. Even if someone else knows, you can still learn. All education proceeds like this. It runs on borrowed knowledge; it has nothing to do with one’s own experience.

On love, for instance, libraries overflow with scriptures. You can read them all, conduct great research, even write a scripture yourself. To know about love, it is not necessary that you have loved. Learning can happen without experience.

For experience, awakening is necessary. And for the experience of the divine, complete awakening is necessary. It is an experience of total wakefulness. Only when you are utterly alert can it happen. The knowledge of the world can be acquired in sleep; the knowledge of truth cannot. Even if Russian scientists succeed in educating children during sleep, no system in the world will ever be able to make someone a saint in sleep. It may succeed in making a scholar.

Scholarship and sleep are not at odds; they have a deep connection. Wisdom and sleep are in deep opposition, because the ultimate meaning of wisdom is non-sleep, wakefulness, awareness, the end of stupor.

The way we live—walking, getting up, sitting, working—is all sleepy. We are not in awareness. Hunger comes, we eat. It is time for work, we go to the office. Evening comes, we return home. None of this requires awareness. It happens by habit. It is mechanical.

Perhaps you know of those who walk and do many things in their sleep—somnambulists. Many people; even here there may be some, because psychologists say at least five out of a hundred can walk and act while asleep. They get up at night, open their eyes; the eyes are open but everything within is asleep. They rise and walk in the dark. Awake, even walking in the dark might be hard, but they walk at night in sleep; they do not bump into things; if furniture blocks the way, they slip past gently. They go about the house in the dark and do many tasks.

Often, in the morning the family says the house is haunted. The “disturbance” was only that one member got up at night and made a mess. He himself has no awareness. Asked in the morning, he cannot say he got up. He has no idea—like a man walking drunkenly along the road. And if the drunk is practiced, you might not even detect he is drunk. So too at night, in sleep, people walk and act. Many times they have done things we could call miraculous. People have even committed murders and then gone back to bed—and in the morning they know nothing.

In New York, in 1940, an incident occurred. A man, in his sleep, would jump from the roof of his building to the roof of another. Fifty stories high, a chasm between the buildings as deep as fifty stories—and he would leap from one roof to the other. Word got out. Every night at one o’clock he would get up, jump to the other roof, then jump back and go to bed. Gradually crowds gathered to watch, because the gap was such that even awake it would have been extremely risky and daredevil.

One night the crowd was so large that when the man leapt and cleared the gap, they shouted with joy. The noise woke him. The moment his sleep broke he was terrified. He was standing safely on the other roof; the jump was done, no danger remained. But standing there, when he looked down and heard the cheers, he panicked, trembled, lost his balance, fell, and died.

He could not jump awake. The mere thought—“I have crossed such a huge gap, fifty stories high”—made him so frightened he trembled, fell, and died. Many times he had done it in sleep; awake, without doing anything, death happened.

Learning can happen in sleep. By sleep I mean a way of living in which we do not live attentively. Whatever you do, your attention is elsewhere. You are walking on the road; the body is on the road, but the mind may be at home talking to your wife, or it may have reached the office ahead of you and is arranging things there while you are still on the way.

The mind in one place, the body in another—this is the state of stupor. Where the body is, there the mind is—that is the state of awareness.

You are listening to me here. If, in these moments of listening, only the process of listening remains—if the mind goes nowhere, is only here, only now, and listening is the sole event; as if the whole world has vanished, as if nothing remains but me speaking here and you listening there; a bridge forms between the two, and your mind does no other work, becomes completely inactive—only listen, only listen, only listen—then in this moment you will experience awareness. For the first time you will find what meditation is.

Meditation means to be in this moment, not to go beyond it.
Someone asked Buddha, “How should one meditate?” Buddha said, “Whatever you do, do it mindfully—that is meditation.” If you walk, walk mindfully, as if walking is all there is. If you eat, eat mindfully, as if eating is all there is. Rise mindfully, sit mindfully. Let every action be suffused with mindfulness. Let the mind not wander outside the moment; let it stay within the boundary of the moment—halted, settled, still. That alone is meditation.
Meditation is not a separate, isolated practice. Meditation is the art of living life with awareness. It is not something you do by setting aside an hour out of twenty‑four. If twenty‑three hours are un-meditative and only one hour is meditative, the un-meditative will win; meditation cannot prevail. If twenty‑three hours are unconscious and for one hour you practice a little non‑unconsciousness, you will never attain Buddhahood. How will one hour defeat twenty‑three?

And reflect further: if for twenty‑three hours you are in stupor, how will you be awake for that one hour? If you are sick for twenty‑three hours, how will you be healthy for one? Health or illness is an undercurrent. If you are ill for twenty‑three hours, you are ill for twenty‑four. If you are healthy for twenty‑three, you are healthy for twenty‑four—because the undercurrent of life cannot be broken abruptly for one hour. The stream keeps flowing.

You may go to a temple, a mosque, a gurdwara—nothing will turn into meditation simply because of that. If you were unconscious in your shop, at home, in the marketplace, how will awareness suddenly settle in the temple? Without the undercurrent, nothing will bear fruit suddenly. So Buddha said: only when meditation is present for all twenty‑four hours does it truly happen.

Hence, meditation is not one act among the many activities of life. It is not one bead on the necklace of life’s actions. There are many beads; meditation is not one among them. Meditation is the thread that is strung through all the beads.

So meditation is not a deed; it is a way of living. Whatever we are doing, let it be done mindfully. Only when each bead hides within it the thread does a mala come into being. The thread is not even visible; it is hidden within the beads, covered. The meditator is not visible either; the thread of his awareness is woven through all his actions. The day a person lives mindfully, he is awake; if he lives unmindfully, he is asleep.

Someone asked Mahavira, “What is the definition of a monk?” No one has ever defined it as he did. Mahavira said, “The sleeper is not a monk; the awakened is the monk.” One who sleeps is unholy, unmonk-like; one who is awake is the muni, the true monk.

Who is awake? One whose every action is mindful. Religious experience, liberation, happens only in awakened consciousness. Everything else called “learning” belongs to a sleeping mind.

That is why I said there is a great difference between learning and awakening. And I am not attempting to teach you anything. For learning, the world is vast—great universities, great scholars, great scriptures, libraries. You can learn anywhere. There are countless means and methods for teaching; that can happen elsewhere. And learning flatters the ego, because learning makes you powerful. The more you know, the greater the expert you become, the more power you have. Knowledge is also wealth. Some hoard wealth in safes; others hoard it in memory.

And note this: the one who hoards in memory is, in a way, more clever. Safes can be robbed; an economy can change; there can be a communist revolution. A safe cannot be trusted—thieves can take it, the state can seize it. But memory is not so easy to steal. Although now even memory is being tampered with. A change of regime does not change memory, but efforts are afoot to change it.

In China and Korea, communists conducted major experiments to steal and alter people’s memories. Because ultimately, memory too is a kind of inner property, stored within. The brain is subtle and complex; our reach there is not very deep yet—but it has begun.

Old texts and ancient universities said: piling up wealth is unreal; it can be stolen. Accumulating knowledge is real, for knowledge cannot be stolen. Death can take your wealth; knowledge will go beyond death. You have heard the old saying: a scholar is honored everywhere; wherever he goes he is respected.

But those sayings have grown old. We have now found ways to break and reprogram the inner safe as well. Large-scale methods of brainwashing are underway—how to wipe and rewrite the brain.

In China they did dangerous experiments. In Korea, on American prisoners of war, they did many experiments—trying to wipe the minds of young Americans. And minds can be wiped, because memory is like a recorded trace. Just as a tape can be erased, so can memory—wiped clean, new memory recorded. A Muslim can be made a Hindu without his awareness; wipe away the Gita and inscribe the Quran—turn a Hindu into a Muslim.

So when American soldiers returned from Chinese camps, America was shocked to find many had become communists—an impossible thing, and not done consciously. When their minds were examined, it was found that something had been done to them, methods applied to break their memory.

Now America too conducts such experiments. A very prominent thinker, Skinner, says there is no need to persuade people anymore—we now have systems. If you want to make people “good,” just change their brains. No need to preach or teach ethics. The brain can be altered by chemicals, by surgery. Electrodes can be implanted, and people can be operated from outside.

An electrode can be inserted into every child’s brain at birth; the child won’t know, nor will the parents. And throughout life, whatever you wish can be made to happen through that electrode. The person will feel that he himself is doing it—no sense of receiving orders. He will think it is his own inner inspiration and that he acts freely.

What Skinner and his colleagues discovered could usher in a great, dark age of human bondage. You will feel you are acting, while you are being run from the capital—messages broadcast, radio waves capturing your brain. Skinner says: if a village is unruly, it can be calmed in a moment. If people are revolting, they can be made obedient. If soldiers are to be sent to war, they can be made fearless—just feed them the message that there is no death and there is no cause for fear. They will leap as if there were no death at all.

So now there are methods to steal, alter, destroy, and implant memory—because memory too is a kind of wealth. Only one thing cannot be destroyed: inner consciousness, inner awareness. That cannot be annihilated.

Buddha, Mahavira, Christ are not people with more memory than us; they are people with more awareness. Nothing can be taken away from them. We can kill their bodies, cut them into pieces, but we cannot fragment their awareness.

Awareness is not the product of any mechanism within us. Awareness is the nature of our innermost heart, our inner center, our soul—call it what you will; therefore it cannot be destroyed. Memory can be implanted and removed: it comes from outside and can go back outside. Awareness rises from within; it does not come from outside, so it cannot be snatched away.

Nothing except meditation crosses death. Not knowledge—only meditation can accompany you through death. Only meditation makes you free.

Hence Hindus have said again and again: there is no liberation except through meditation; all else is bondage. In countless ways we are bound. Our morality binds, our knowledge binds—everything binds. Only meditation liberates.

So when I say I am not here to teach but to awaken, I mean I have no desire to increase your store of memory. Even if it grows, little good will come of it. You may know a bit more, have a little more information—it will not help. But if your meditation grows, your consciousness deepens, you become more alert, a revolution can happen in your life.

The efforts to awaken are fundamentally different from those meant to teach. Teaching means to tell you in words what you do not know. Awakening means to get you to do, through methods, what you are not yet.

Sitting on a riverbank, I can tell you about swimming; your information will increase. If I give you a push into the river, swimming will be born. Those who teach swimming do nothing else—they push you in, you flail your arms and legs, and swimming begins.

The meditative experiments I keep asking you to do are attempts to learn to swim. My emphasis is less on information, more on method. And the only reason I offer information is to persuade you toward method.

Someone asks Buddha, “Does God exist?” Buddha remains silent. But if someone asks, “Is there a method to realize God?” he speaks at once. If asked to talk about liberation, he keeps silent; if asked how to attain liberation, he comes alive instantly—as if he had been waiting. In his last moments someone asked Buddha, “What essence did you wish to teach us?” Buddha said, “No essence did I wish to teach; I wished only to give you a method by which you can know the Ultimate.”

There is a difference between method and information. We can discuss food for hours—it will not satisfy anybody’s hunger. It might even increase it. But if we set about cooking, even if the first day we prepare nothing very delicious—since we are not yet skilled—whatever rough fare is made will assuage hunger.

The Divine is a hunger within us, a thirst. No doctrine can satisfy it. No scripture will quell that hunger. If a scripture can intensify that hunger, it is a great blessing.

No master can satisfy that hunger by teachings alone; if he can ignite it, that is supreme grace. That is why a true master does not quench your thirst, he arouses it. He does not give you contentment; he makes you discontent. He will not give you “peace,” for that peace would turn into death. He will make you more restless—toward a new, otherworldly dimension; he will shove you onto an unknown journey. He lights a fire in your being so that every pore becomes thirsty, every breath unfulfilled, your whole life a hunger. And until that hunger is satisfied, you must become like one possessed—restless and ardent.

With the true master you will receive restlessness; with the false you will receive information. The false master will turn you into a pundit; you will “know” many things without knowing. Scriptures will sit in your heart; there will be no contact with truth. Contact with truth happens only when thirst becomes dense—so dense that you no longer feel “I am thirsty,” rather “I am thirst.” So dense that every fibre of your being is a living flame.

In the very moment your every fibre turns to fire, the rain descends. That is the moment of revolution, of transformation. Truth is touched then.

From the master you will receive sorrow—the sorrow that we are hungry, thirsty, unfulfilled; the sorrow that what is needed is not with us. From the master you will not receive consolation. He will take away all consolations. A master is no consolation to pat you and say “All is well, all will be well.” A master is a revolution. He will break your consolations, snatch them away. He will shatter the sleep you have organized around you—the belief that “all is well”—and show you that nothing is well, that all is off‑track, that you are a chaos, that what you have gained is rubbish, and that toward what is worth gaining you have not even stretched out your hand. Your fists are full of pebbles and stones and you have taken them to be diamonds. He will take from you whatever you have; he will make you naked; he will make you a clean emptiness. From that emptiness and nakedness, your spiritual thirst will be born. He will strip you of everything so that you have no false ground to stand on. He will demolish your security, your whole dream‑arrangement.

The master is an iconoclast—but he does not go to break the idols installed in temples; doing that would be foolishness. He breaks the idol of yourself installed within you. What you have taken yourself to be—you are not that. The peace that shows on your face is false. Your smile is social etiquette. Your “All is well” is a lie; nothing is well. Each morning when someone asks, “How are you?” you say, “All right.” That is a word, nothing more. You have never paused to ask how far it is true. You do not dare to think, because it is frightening. Nothing is alright—but etiquette demands you say so. And repeating it to others, you have come to believe it yourself. You have forgotten that nothing is alright.

Hence going to a true master is dangerous, risky. He will break all your illusions—and apart from illusions, you are nothing. He will take your contentment and a discontent will be born that will not be appeased before the Divine is attained. A restlessness is born, a pang of separation that pricks like thorns on every side. A malady is born that persists until supreme health is found.

Therefore only the very courageous can go to a master—better to say, the daring. It is playing with fire: news of another world, a message from the unknown; a journey beyond the known, with no map and no briefing. It is not a business; it is pure gambling where you stake yourself without any certainty about the outcome.

Only those who can stake themselves thus do I call seekers, sannyasins. They risk what they know for what they do not know. The world’s cleverness says the opposite; that is why the world always thinks a sannyasin is mad. The world lives by the rule of trade: stake one rupee only if there is sure promise of one and a quarter. The world says, half a loaf in the hand is better than a whole loaf in a dream. What is in the hand is proper; to drop it for what may or may not come is madness.

Omar Khayyam’s famous quatrain says: do not let go what is in your hand; enjoy it, because what is not in your hand—who knows if it even exists? So enjoy this world; do not talk of the other. If it is there, we will see; but no one knows. So squeeze what you do have—the body, the senses, the world—to the last drop.

The worldly man’s argument: squeeze what you hold; do not think about what you do not. The sannyasin’s argument is the opposite: what you hold are pebbles and stones—no matter how you squeeze, nothing will come; there is no juice there. And the moment you drop them, doors open toward the unknown—there lies all the joy of life.

Only gamblers can enter this game. That is why I often say the businessman rarely becomes religious, because he lives by mathematics. I heard of a businessman who once bought two lottery tickets for two rupees—one rupee each. By chance he won the first prize—ten lakhs. Friends rushed to congratulate him. But he lay sad on his bed, both tickets in hand. They asked, “You and sad?” He said, “I am thinking what misfortune made me buy the second ticket. One ticket was fine—it brought ten lakhs; but this second ticket—one rupee wasted!”

Such is the businessman’s logic—therefore he rarely turns religious. You may be surprised to know that this land’s greatest religious figures were born in kshatriya families—not to Brahmins or traders. Mahavira, Buddha, Parshva, Nemi, Krishna, Rama—all from warrior lineages. A kshatriya can be a gambler; his arithmetic is different: not of interest but of stakes. To him, life‑and‑death is a leap.

Everywhere the religious person has the temperament of a gambler—daring enough to risk what is for what is not yet; to stake the real on the possibility. A poet may become religious; a shopkeeper rarely. And when shopkeepers become religious, they turn religion into a shop. Religion does not change them; they change religion. Their temples and mosques become markets; ledgers arrive at the altar.

When I say I have come not to teach but to awaken, I mean I want to take away your commerce. I want you to become daring gamblers. Look with open eyes at what you have—and see there is nothing—so that the search for what you do not have can begin.

The journey is arduous—and it is possible only when you are awake. If you are asleep you will go astray, and there is vast scope for wandering. To arrive there is a narrow path. The saints have said: as narrow as the edge of a sword. For wandering there is vastness, bigger than the earth. A vast world to get lost in.

That narrow path—the edge of the sword—is what we call meditation. The moment you try, you will understand why the saints call it razor‑thin: you miss so easily. For even a moment it does not remain; unawareness takes over at once.

Sit with a watch in hand and try a small experiment: keep attention on the sweeping second hand and see how many seconds you can sustain unbroken remembrance of it. Let nothing else arise in the mind—only the second hand. You will find even three seconds is hard. Before three pass, the mind has gone elsewhere—to another world, another desire. The watch is forgotten, the hand is forgotten. Suddenly you will startle and see how many seconds have gone—without any remembrance. Then you will know why saints say it is like the edge of the sword. In a moment you slip; the least movement and it is gone.

Awakening is difficult; but it is worth practicing. No matter how difficult, what is gained far exceeds the effort. Those who reach the goal are heard to say: what we did was nothing; what we received was everything. That is why saints say attainment is grace, not effort. As if there is no relation between our doing and the receiving—as if we did a penny’s worth and obtained a king’s treasure. As if we did nothing, and got everything. There is no cause‑effect proportion—hence they call it prasad, grace—received through His compassion, not our effort.

Yet while making the effort, it is very hard—because we have invested heavily in our stupor. We have staked so much on sleep, spun such great hopes and dreams. The moment we begin to break sleep, all the hopes and dreams begin breaking.

You tell your wife, “I love you.” If awareness fills you, you will see you have never really loved—this is a downright lie. You tell your children, “I live for you.” With awareness you will see the truth is the reverse: you are not living for your children; you keep them so that when you die, they will live for you. The children are your ambitions: what you could not accomplish, they will. You are trying to journey into the future on their shoulders. Through them you seek your immortality: you will die, but your son will remain—something of you will go on.

People are happy carving their name in stone—“Even if I am gone, no matter—this stone will remain.” If a stone gives so much happiness, how much more carving your name into a living person! To die without becoming a father or a mother feels painful—because you leave behind no living event; you die completely, your current ends. Hindus said the debt to the ancestors is not paid until you have children. Think about it: only when you become a father is your debt to your father paid. Why? Because the father lives through you; if your stream stops, he cannot go on. So leave a child behind—adopt if needed, even if not your own, we will accept as our own. Hindus became so enamored of this that if a son did not come, they would invite another man to sleep with the wife so a son might be born—then it was not called adultery, because the son was so necessary that this could be forgiven. No immorality—because the debt to the father had to be paid.

Man wants to escape death; he seeks many means—builds mansions, fortresses; signs his name on the flowing stream of life; wants to leave children; and every father tries to make his children his mirror image. He never asks: what is there in me that must be replicated, that would make the world more beautiful? I made it ugly enough—my presence was a burden—yet I want to leave my replica! And if the son strays a little from the father’s line, the father suffers—because then he will not be my representative. Parents say, “We live for you,” but with awareness you will see we keep children alive for ourselves.

Thus when children become rebellious and take revenge in old age, it is not surprising. No one wants to live for another; each wants to expand himself, not another. Hence every son harbors a deep hostility toward his father. Among Freud’s discoveries is this fundamental one: it is hard to find a son who is not, inwardly, his father’s enemy. Outwardly he respects, touches feet; inwardly a deep opposition. It is hard to find a daughter who is not her mother’s foe.

Gurdjieff used to say: if you ever meet someone who truly honors his parents, know that he is a saint—because it is very hard to love mother and father. If that happens, it can happen only when there is complete awareness; then compassion arises for them. You see they lived in stupor; it was not their fault. These are natural traits of stupor—that it dominates others, oppresses—and does so in a way that oppression appears moral.

When you beat your child, you think you do it for his improvement. A little awareness will show it has nothing to do with his betterment. You were angry; your ego was hurt. You beat him for that wound—but you say it is “for your good,” and pose as if you are doing him a favor. With awareness all this slips away.

You say, “I am entering politics to serve the people.” But no politician ever stands to serve the people—though every politician thinks and says so. I am not saying he is lying; he deceives himself too. He thinks, how can one serve without power? But every “servant” who gets power becomes a master. The politician begins by massaging your feet and ends by squeezing your neck. He thought he was serving—but when did it turn into strangling? Neither you nor he notices.

With awareness you will see: my politics is a deception—I am not doing it to serve anyone; it is the expansion of my ego. I want others to serve me. When you serve, you do it to be served. When you give, you do it to take. All your methods are exploitation—only the names are nice.

That is why I say: we have invested in stupor; we have staked much on it. To break stupor is hard. To break it is to see that the world I have built is false—a web of my desires, ambitions, violences, jealousies. Few have the strength to see their entire life till now as vain and not be shaken. We panic; we close our eyes and think, “As it is, let it be; don’t break it.”

Hence meditation is difficult. You are ready to learn; you are not ready to awaken. So I must speak a little to you—so that, under the lure of learning, you may come near. It is bait—like dough dangled to catch fish.

Buddha speaks, Jesus speaks—knowing well that speech in itself means little—yet you are such fish that without bait you will not come near. Teaching is the bait; awakening is the hook. It will prick. It will make life difficult. It will kill this life and give birth to a new one. It is a rebirth.

Every rebirth is preceded by a death. In awakening you must die; your continuity cannot remain. You will be erased. And who agrees easily to be erased? Learning preserves your continuity—you remain you, only polished, refined, cultured, educated. It is your improved edition. The more you learn, the more sophisticated, civilized you appear.

“Civil” is a nice word: fit to sit in the assembly. The more knowledge you have, the more fit you become to sit in the assembly. The more you know, the more refined your ego becomes—like a diamond cut and polished to sparkle. The uneducated man is like a rough diamond; the educated, a cut diamond. Only a jeweler recognizes the rough; the polished is obvious to all—even to the blind.

You are ready to learn, because your ego’s continuity remains and becomes more pleasant. You are not ready to awaken, because in awakening you disappear and the new is born.

So I begin by teaching, in order to awaken. But teaching is not my purpose. And whenever someone comes ready for direct awakening, I make no effort to teach.

In this context, understand surrender. For learning there is no need of surrender, only of will. One with will‑power can learn, because learning needs concentration. The narrower the stream of consciousness, the better things go straight in and become memory.

Hence all schools emphasize concentration. To learn you must concentrate. To make children concentrate, they devise twenty‑five methods—punishment and reward. Under fear, the mind concentrates. If someone stands over you with a knife, you will not ask how to concentrate—you will concentrate. Everything else will be forgotten, songs will break, ideas scatter—only the knife will be there. Fear concentrates.

Thus schools use very subtle forms of fear: if you fail, there will be disgrace. People will laugh; and fear for life: if you keep failing, what will become of you? Where will you stand? Where will you get bread, a roof? You will be nothing. This fear must be planted deep. As it settles, concentration happens. A student’s concentration is never as strong as during exams—because as they approach, fear thickens, and the frightened mind concentrates.

On the flip side is reward. Fear and reward differ little; reward is inverted fear. “Come first—get the gold medal, fame in the papers, prestige, a chance to stand tall. Ambitions will be easier. The ego will be honored.” Then you fear not getting the reward; and greed for it is born.

All education rests on fear and greed. To teach, you must frighten. Hence the invention of hell and the promise of heaven. In truth, there is neither a hell nor a heaven somewhere “out there.” And if there is, it is within you—never a geography. Dig under the earth—you won’t find hell; fly rockets to the stars—you won’t find heaven. Heaven and hell are inside: hell is fear; heaven is greed.

Religions also learned: to teach people, scare and lure them. A strange contradiction: religions keep saying “be free of greed, free of fear,” yet they go on talking of heaven and hell.

There was a Sufi woman saint, Rabia. One day people saw her running through the village, a torch in one hand and a vessel of water in the other. They thought her mad—as people always do with saints, except those saints who are shopkeepers like themselves. Only the one who is just like you will not look mad; a true saint must differ from you essentially.

Seeing her rush by, they asked, “Rabia, where are you going in such haste? And what are you carrying?” Rabia said, “This torch—to burn your heaven; and this water—to drown your hell! Until your heaven and hell are destroyed, there is no way for you to be religious. How can one be religious while driven by fear and greed?”

To teach, fear and greed are needed, because they focus the mind. To awaken, no concentration is needed; to awaken, fear and greed must die. In fact, concentration must end.

This will be hard, because we have assumed concentration to be meditation. It is not. Concentration is a tense state of mind; meditation is the mind at rest. Concentration is narrow; meditation is vast. Meditation means the mind is quiet—not fixed anywhere, not clinging—just quiet.

You sit under a tree. If you concentrate, you take a rosary and chant “Ram Ram” or some mantra, focusing the mind. That is still part of learning; it can generate power, because will generates power. But it cannot bring peace, because will has nothing to do with peace. It can produce a Durvasa within you—Durvasa is the ultimate refinement of concentration. If he says, “Die,” you will die—because his concentrated thought pierces your unconscious like an arrow, becomes a suggestion, plants a seed. If Durvasa commands, you cannot live—you must obey. His concentration is so strong that you bend and break before it. One must fear such a person.

That is why I cannot call Durvasa a rishi. One before whom I must fear—what kind of sage is that? The true sage is one near whom all fear dissolves.

But a concentrated man inspires fear. If he but looks at you, you tremble.

In Russia there was Rasputin—the Durvasa of this age: a man of tremendous concentration. If he raised his eyes toward you, panic arose. The prince who killed him, Yusupov, closed his eyes while firing—lest Rasputin’s gaze stop his hand from pulling the trigger. So potent were his eyes, sharpened by years of concentration.

Rasputin didn’t blink. If he began to look at you, he made you terribly uneasy—nothing else required. His unblinking eyes and long practice of concentration would shake you. He ensnared the Tsar through the Tsarevich—the little boy who bled profusely from minor injuries. Doctors were of no use; but if Rasputin looked in the boy’s eyes and said, “Stop,” the bleeding stopped. Once thought a miracle, hypnosis now shows it is possible; our blood can obey the mind deeply. If my hand lifts when I will it, why not the blood stop? The body obeys the mind; with concentration, it can obey very far.

Through the boy, Rasputin had the royal family in his grip. If he left town for a day, they were in trouble. He also declared, “The day I die, within a short time the Tsar’s power will end.” He said it to ensure protection—and the Tsar protected him as best he could. Within a year and a half of Rasputin’s murder, the three‑hundred‑year‑old empire collapsed. In the outer history of the 1917 revolution, Lenin is central; in the inner, psychological history, Rasputin is key. Because of him, a revolution could happen—though such inner causes don’t show on the surface.

If you cultivate concentration under a tree, power will arise. All forms of power feed the ego. Therefore concentrated renunciates are almost always very egoistic—their gait, their posture, their speech—all bear the shadow of ego. And for the ego‑filled, what relation can there be with the Divine? Impossible.

Meditation is the exact opposite of concentration. Meditation means: you are sitting under a tree and your consciousness is open on all sides—not running in one direction but resting, and open in every direction. A bird sings—you hear it. But you do not think, “Which bird is that—koel or papiha?” The moment thinking starts, meditation goes and concentration begins. The bird’s song resounds in your inner emptiness—and is gone. A plane roars across the sky—sound arises and passes. A train whistles—arises and passes. The wind shakes the leaves—arises and passes. Leaves fall—sound arises and passes. But you do not think; you simply are.

This “being without thinking” is meditation. Meditation is not a narrow stream of the mind; it is the ocean. Concentration is like a river—active, rushing in one direction. Meditation is like the sea—vast, present in all directions, running nowhere. Rivers flood; the ocean does not. Rivers are narrow, petty; a little water fills them or leaves them dry. In concentration there can be great storms of power—and in concentration there can be barrenness. Meditation neither dries up nor floods; it is always steady in itself.

Awareness is attained through meditation, and meditation is surrender. Concentration is attained through will; meditation through surrender.

Surrender means: let yourself fall into this vastness, be one with it. “Nahin Ram bin thau”—there is no shelter but Ram. This Ram—the Brahman—pervading everywhere: be one with That. Let your drop dissolve into it. Do not preserve yourself as separate; if you keep yourself separate, you cannot be open: doors must be shut, walls raised. Leave it open. Let the winds pass through you with no resistance; let sounds pass through you without meeting a wall. Become openness—a free sky. This happens through surrender.

Surrender and will are different inner states: will means struggle; surrender means no struggle.

One man swims in a river—he is the symbol of will. Another floats—he is the symbol of surrender. The swimmer can drown; the floater never drowns. Have you ever seen a dead body drown? The living always struggle a little; even while “floating,” they keep a little guard up—“lest the river drown me.” The corpse is very skillful—a supreme meditator. It does not care what happens; no river can drown it.

Doctors use this to test: if a body is found in a river and there is water in the lungs, he was alive when thrown in; if none, he was already dead. A corpse offers no struggle, and the river offers none to it; it lifts the dead like a flower.

A meditator is one who has “died” from the standpoint of ego. Surrender means dissolving the ego and saying, “You are; I am not.” This is the meaning of the sutra: “Nahin Ram bin thau”—not I, but Thou. I offer my “I” back to You. I cherished it, and got much sorrow; I hauled it, and my back broke; lives long I dragged it and gained nothing. I return it.

To hand the ego back is surrender. To live in the feeling “I am not” is surrender. Rising and sitting—let not the “I” rise and sit. Let me be only an instrument—let the Divine rise and sit in me. Let the Divine hunger and be satisfied; let the Divine thirst and drink; let me step aside.

Surrender is not merely putting your head at someone’s feet; it is a way of life in which you have stopped manufacturing the “I”; where the “I” is not built; where the Divine works unobstructed through you.

Krishna’s entire teaching to Arjuna in the Gita is just this: disappear and let the Divine be. If the Divine wills war, let it proceed; if the Divine wills to stop, let it stop. Become only an instrument, a mere medium. The sword may be in your hand, but let it be the Divine’s hand within yours—let no sense of “me” remain inside. Then action will happen, but the question of fruits will not arise; for the hankering for fruit is always the ego’s.

Action is simply the play of life energy; the craving for fruit is the ego’s craving—“What will I gain?”

That is why small children can play. As we grow older, play stops. The ego begins to ask, “What is the profit? What is the outcome?” The child spins himself round and round; we say, “Why this useless bother? With such effort you could earn money. Why run about for nothing? What’s the use?”

The ego always asks, “What is the benefit? What will I get?” People come and ask me, “What will I get from meditation?” I say, “You will get nothing. Whatever you have will also be taken away. Has anyone ever got anything from meditation? Everything goes—and when all that is ‘yours’ is gone, what remains is called God, is called liberation.”

Ram is all; and “I” is nothing. But do not mistake me to mean the bow‑bearing Ram standing in the temples. Those images are of little use. You may think you have placed your head at his feet—but you haven’t dropped anything. Whoever goes to a temple does not go to abandon; he goes to ask. If he bows, it is in exchange; he has come to bargain. He flatters: “You are great, O bow‑bearing Ram! Uplifter of the fallen!” He is buttering the Divine, praising with a deal in mind: “I want something; fulfill it.” The hint is clear: “If you don’t, this praise will stop; I will start to complain.” The Ram who is influenced by your praise is not Ram; the one who is swayed by your criticism is not Ram. The one who hears your demands and fulfills them is not Ram; he is a puppet woven of your desires, your toy, installed by you. That temple is part of your dream.

I am not speaking of that Ram. I speak of the Ram who shimmers in the trees, sings in the birds, murmurs in the streams, stretches in the open sky—who is everywhere. Not a person: the Supreme Energy. If you have eyes, you will see the spread of energy everywhere—one power manifesting, dissolving in countless forms. This vast play is Ram.

Hindus chose a beautiful word: for Ram’s drama we say “Ramlila”—play. Lila means play, a child’s play—energy so abundant that sitting idle, what to do? Play! Only Hindus have this notion of the Divine’s play. Christians say God “created” the world: creation sounds grave, purposeful, as if aiming for a result. Hindus say the world is the Divine’s lila—He is so full of energy that sitting idle, what to do? He plays.

You cannot keep a child sitting. Seat an old man and he sits gladly—movement pains him, energy wanes. A child brims with energy; seat him, he still swings—energy is overflowing.

The Divine is infinite energy; our existence is His overflow—His flood, which flows on and never empties. That inexhaustible power is Ram.

And the day this Ram becomes your final refuge, your last resting place; the day there remains no goal beyond That—on that day supreme blessedness dawns in your life. Before that, blessedness cannot be.

Enough for today.