Nahin Ram Bin Thaon #8

The story is older than Buddha, but the way Buddha used it is entirely his own. Both meanings are worth understanding.

The story, in its original form, is the essence of Hindu thought. But Buddha wrote over it with a bold, new ink—and the entire meaning changed. Buddha’s interpretation is unique.

First, let us understand the Hindu perspective. It has its own validity. Then we will also see how the same symbol can become a foundation for two different visions. Change the way of seeing, and what is seen also changes. The world is in our vision, not in things. As the seer is, so the world appears.

Hindu thought rests on the idea that the world is maya—illusion. The pleasures found in it are momentary, not true. Now they are, and in the next moment they are not. Death erases life—indeed, every moment it is erasing it. The white and the black mice are day and night, gnawing at the root of life. As long as we live, we are dying. Birth is the beginning of death. The child is born, and dying has begun. The black-and-white mice have set to work. The roots have not even taken hold, and their end has already started.

Here, birth is tied to death. Birth is one step; death is the other. The day we call a birthday is also a death-day. The distance—seventy years, a hundred years—is only the space between two steps. The nature of birth and death is exactly one.

Hindus say: whoever is born will die. And one who sees deeply can see death in birth itself. Therefore birth is no occasion for celebration. And if birth is an occasion for joy, then death is no occasion for tears. If you laughed at birth and cried at death, it only means you are blind.

Time is gnawing at your roots. With each passing moment, you are being spent, emptied out. And the Hindus say, there is no way to escape.

In the world there is simply no way to be safe, because the world is the very expanse of death. Wherever you run, wherever you hide, death will find you. The mind thinks it will find some means—build a house, find security, a mountain, a wall—and hide. So the mind builds walls of wealth, erects status and position. Science, knowledge, technology—and thinks there will be a way to survive death.

Hindus say: there is no way. Since the nature of the world is death, run where you will, death will pursue you. That tiger is after you. And sooner or later you will come to the place where there is no path ahead, where even running has to stop—an impasse. If you turn back, death; if you go forward, the abyss. And if you peer below, you find death waiting there too. Even if you jump, there is no escape. You may jump in hope that perhaps you will be saved—but there too another tiger is waiting for you.

Hindus say: life is surrounded by death on all sides. Every direction is covered by it. Therefore there is no escape. Running is futile. You will only tire and arrive at the place where you have to stop. Still, the mind keeps trying—death below, death above, a dreadful chasm, and if your hand slips, again death—yet the mind tries. Till the last moment the human mind tries. It will hang on to the root. The roots are not trustworthy—day and night gnaw at them—but hope finds support even in a straw, companionship even in a dream. Where nothing can be done, the mind imagines something can be.

The nature of mind is to go on hoping. Omar Khayyam has a rubai: he asked gurus, scholars, teachers—why does this life go on? Why does it not stop? No one seems happy; everyone is miserable. Yet life keeps going. What is the secret?

He found no answer. He writes: “The doorway I entered by, through the same I returned.” Great pundits, but no answer. Then I asked the sky, because the sky has always been. Everything changes—people come and go, births and deaths, civilizations rise and disappear—the sky has been witnessing. No greater witness exists. So I asked the sky: what is the secret of life? Why does it keep going? And a voice came from the sky: “On the support of hope.”

There is so much suffering, but hope is greater still. Life does not run on the support of happiness, because there is hardly any. If suffering alone were there, it would all break down; you would commit suicide right now. That is why anyone even a little reflective at some time considers suicide. Sometime he thinks: end it. What sense is there in getting up in the morning and sleeping at night? The same food, the same clothes, the same work. What is the purpose of going round and round on this wheel? And in the end one has to die anyway—what is wrong with dying today? After thirty or forty more years you will die. When the pit will swallow you in the end, what is the harm in offering yourself to it now? Why prolong the pain, this needless worry, turmoil, torment in between?

So the reflective mind does at some point think of suicide. Only the unthinking never do. The dull never think life is something to be finished. The reflective repeatedly reaches places where he thinks: let me erase myself! If I must vanish, let it be by my own hand!

So suffering is complete. Happiness has hardly a glimpse. Yet hope says: what did not happen today may happen tomorrow—so wait till tomorrow. Suicide is checked not by life, but by hope. And hope goes on: why be afraid? What has not happened till now may happen in the next moment. Who knows—the gate of heaven may open in the next instant; the treasure of life may fall into your hands. That “next moment” seduces. Therefore we live in tomorrow.

Mind is the name of the hope of tomorrow. Death above, death below—we are hanging. The roots can break any moment. Even if they don’t, the hands will tire soon. Still hope remains: something can happen. There is still time; so the waiting continues.

And at just such a moment of waiting, a fruit appears—a wild berry or some other fruit—and everything is forgotten. Neither the death ahead, nor the death behind, nor the chasm is seen. Nor that the hands are slipping from the roots. The sweet taste of that wild fruit—at that moment everything is forgotten.

Pleasure is momentary, yet it makes one forget all. It is a deep intoxication. The taste lasts only a moment, but its stupor is total. For one moment it is, but in that one moment it covers the entire cosmos. All sorrows, all the pain of the journey, all the torments that have been and those to come—everything is forgotten in that instant.

Hindus used this tale to say: do not get lost in such momentary tastes. Be alert. Do not forget death in the taste of a fruit; no taste can save you from death. Do not give any route for life to be bewitched—neither by taste, nor lust, nor greed. Do not allow any sense to cover your consciousness.

Taste is only one sense. It could just as well have been the eyes: the story could be that you saw a beautiful young woman, or a peacock began to dance, or the sun rose, or a rainbow spread across the sky—and in that moment you forgot everything. Or it could have been a fragrance: jasmine in bloom, a wave of scent filled the nostrils—and you forgot everything.

So the story is symbolic. Any sense can make you forget. All the senses are ready to sedate you. The juice of the senses is in stupefaction. When you are alert, the sense is dull. When the sense is awake, you are stupefied. Your stupefaction is the senses’ awakening; the senses’ stupefaction is your awakening. When a sense wakes and taste fills the mind, inside there is a swoon. And such a situation—extreme—when death stands before you!

Mahatma Gandhi has written a childhood memory—it became a wound for his whole life. Psychologists would call it a trauma—never erased, and around it a whole life’s pattern gets woven.

Gandhi’s father was dying. The doctors said this night is the last; he will not survive till morning. It was natural for the son to sit by the father—any moment the breath might stop. And it was not that the son lacked love or reverence; he had great feeling for his father. Gandhi sat massaging his feet. Twelve o’clock passed, then one. The father dozed. As he dozed, Gandhi’s mind began to think: doctors are not prophets; how can they be sure? It’s only an estimate.

The mind opened a door. “Since father is asleep, resting, I remember my wife. She is just across the wall. If I go for a moment and make love, what harm is there?” Leaving the father asleep, Gandhi went to his wife’s room. While they were in intercourse, there was a knock at the door: your father has passed away.

This became a lifelong wound. Gandhi’s celibacy (brahmacharya) sprang from this wound, which is why his celibacy was not like Mahavira’s—it had an illness in it, a guilt. There was no joy, no celebration in it; it was penance. It is important to understand, because celibacy is not the same for everyone; where does the stream arise from, and why?

Gandhi’s feeling for celibacy was an atonement tied to his father. Thereafter he could never sleep by his wife with the same innocence—his father’s death always stood in between. He felt criminal: “What is this, that while my father was dying I could not stay away from my wife even for one night!” His wife was pregnant and a few days later the child was born—stillborn. The wound deepened: perhaps our intercourse caused the child’s death. Intercourse with a woman late in pregnancy can sometimes be risky; the child’s life can be harmed.

Only ten or fifteen years ago doctors used to say it’s a superstition that late-term intercourse causes fetal death. But recent research suggests the old belief may have some truth. In female orgasm the heart rate increases, the body chemistry changes, oxygen levels fluctuate. The baby receives oxygen from the mother. The fetus is delicate; this turbulence can be fatal. If for even a moment oxygen does not reach, the child can die.

So Gandhi suffered: the child died, the father died, and even in that moment I remained filled with lust! My wife was pregnant and I could not restrain myself! My father was dying and I could not restrain myself! So a deep remorse, guilt, disgust toward lust entered his mind.

In that moment, when memory of the wife seized the mind, the whole world was forgotten—father dying, wife pregnant—everything.

When any passion seizes the mind, consciousness is stupefied. Or we can say: whenever consciousness is stupefied, a passion seizes the mind. The two are interconnected.

Taste is only a symbol. When the doorway of a sense opens, the doorway of awareness shuts.

Hindus told this tale so that you do not get lost in the moment and forget the eternal. The moment has the capacity to make you forget the eternal. This raises a profound puzzle. Thinkers have asked endlessly: how did maya, which is unreal, cover Brahman? How did darkness, which in itself is nothing, cover light? How did ignorance, which has no roots, no substance, delude the supreme knowledge, the supreme conscious Self? If maya is not real, how are we deluded?

It happens like this story shows. If we fall asleep even for a moment, the Brahman is lost—for us. Our sleep is its disappearance.

Think: the sun has risen, and I close my eyes. How powerful are the eyelids before the sun! So weak—yet I can close them. What strength do the little eyelids have? And yet they cover the sun. Eyes closed, the sun is lost. The Himalayas stand there; I close my small lids, and the Himalayas are gone. A grain of sand gets into the eye; the eye shuts. The grain is tiny, but Gaurishankar (Everest) is lost. Do not think that smallness cannot cover the great—if it can close the eye, it can cover anything.

Brahman is where it is. It is lost for us—when our eyes are closed. And the senses are devices for sleep. The juice of the senses is in sleep, in oblivion. Therefore there is such opposition to tamas—the tendency to sleep, to inertia, the somnolent mood. Whatever brings tamas increases worldliness.

In that moment, when the wild fruit was tasted, tamas surrounded you. The mind was veiled; you were lost in taste. Only taste remained; everything else was lost. Brahman, truth, that which surrounds you on all sides—nothing was seen.

Often, when life is painful, we seek stupor. All over the world alcohol exerts such attraction—and however much preachers lecture, man finds it hard to give it up—because there is so much suffering, and preaching does not remove suffering. If you cannot go beyond suffering—which happens for a Buddha or two—then you try to forget it, which alcohol can do; there are a thousand intoxicants that can do it.

All kinds of sensuality are intoxicating. When you see a beautiful woman or a handsome man, for a moment intoxication grips you. I don’t say this only symbolically; psychology and physiology testify: when you see a beautiful woman, your hormones shift; glands release intoxicants into the blood. At once you may forget the world and follow her; you may forget rules, order, society, law—and assault her. And if in court you say, “I didn’t do it,” that too has a truth: the intoxication grew so dense within that it happened through you—you did not do it. The decision was not yours; it was taken by the chemistry within.

Seeing wealth, you can go mad. You can forget what you are doing.

The Hindus used this story to say: even for a moment, the taste of a sense can hide the eternal. But Buddha used it very differently. There are fundamental differences between Hindu and Buddhist visions; then the shift of meaning is clear.

Hindus say: the moment is untrue; the eternal is true. That which always is, is truth. The moment is not; it is a dream. For what was not a moment ago and will not be a moment hence—its being now cannot be truth. If illusion surrounds it on both sides, the middle cannot be real. Reality is that which is eternal—always was, always will be—cannot be erased.

Buddhists define it differently. Buddha is momentary; Hindus are eternalist.

Buddha says: only the moment is true. The eternal does not exist; it is only an idea, a concept, a hypothesis of philosophers. Only the moment is real. What is here and now—just here and now—is the truth. There is no truth more than this moment.

In Buddhist thought, truth means what is present in the present. And Buddha says: what is now true, you call false; and what is never now, you call true? Beyond the moment there is no time, because only a moment is available to you. Eternity is a notion; the moment is reality.

The amazing thing is that from these opposite approaches, the ultimate fruit is the same.

Now let us understand the story according to Buddha.

Buddha says: you are running in the forest, a lion chases you; death is after you. You reach the chasm, and below another lion awaits. He does not intend to frighten you; he says this is the nature of life.

In the Hindu telling, there is a tone of fear—because if maya frightens you, you will seek Brahman.

Buddha says: there is no Brahman to seek. Call it maya or whatever; this is how life is. Death follows you. The fear arises from your mind; otherwise you would simply understand: this is the way of life. Death on this side, death on that. And we stand at the edge where there is no path ahead.

For Buddha, every moment you stand at that edge where there is no path. There cannot be a path if all you have is a single moment.

This is subtle.

If you have only one moment, there is no way to move. If there are two moments, there can be movement. If you only have ground enough to stand, where is the road? Walking requires space; the mind’s walking requires time. If this clock-tick is all there is, where will you go? Jump in place, jog in place—there is no going anywhere.

For Buddha there is no journey. You are jumping in place. Like someone exercising in the bathroom—he may create the illusion of miles traveled, but the space is only a few feet.

Buddha says: a single moment is all you have; your mind jumps inside it. Therefore, each moment you are where there is no way forward. The day you see this, you stop the futile hopping.

The world is the mind’s futile hopping, which yields no conclusion. You get exercise, and we have been doing it for lifetimes. We go nowhere, but we run a lot. We walk much, the destination never arrives. Yet we never sit and ask: we have walked so much and arrived nowhere; could it be we are jumping in place? Otherwise, after so much walking, we should have reached somewhere!

A man travels all his life, and at death finds himself where he was at birth. This travel seems dreamlike. Like at night you sleep, dream you are flying by airplane or have reached New York, immense journey, much suffering—and in the morning you open your eyes in your own bed. You say: it was a dream.

Why do you say that? If you opened your eyes in New York, would you say it was a dream? If you had arrived, you could not call it a dream. Dream means: much movement, no arrival. That is why we say in the morning: it was a dream. If someone were to play a trick—while you were dreaming of going to New York, your friends carried your cot to New York—and you opened your eyes there, you would be in trouble; for the first time you could not say it was a dream. It would seem real.

Buddha says: truth means movement that yields arrival. Untruth means much movement with no arriving. Long journey, nowhere reached. And when the eyes open, you find yourself where you were.

This is what Buddha means in calling the world a dream. He too calls it maya, but not in contrast to Brahman. He says: there is no Brahman; there is only maya. And his point deserves understanding.

He says: Brahman is your mind’s new hope. You never let go of hope. You give up hope in wealth, in the world, and install it in Brahman. You see the world is futile; then you say everything is in Brahman. First you wanted to attain the world; now you want to attain Brahman. But the mind does not leave the obsession with attainment. And Buddha says: as long as there is something to attain, the mind remains.

So Buddha says: forgive the Brahman; do not bring it in. You will turn Brahman too into a race of desire. Yesterday you went toward the market; today you will go toward the temple—but you will go. Yesterday you hoarded wealth and counted it daily; now you will hoard merit—but hoard you will. Wealth is capital; merit is also capital.

Remember, wealth is a social construct—and so is merit. That hundred-rupee note is worth a hundred because society accepts it so. If tomorrow the state declares the note invalid, it becomes worthless. What we call merit (punya) is also social.

In Hindu society, one marriage is meritorious; marry four and you will be in trouble. A Hindu marrying once is doing his duty—he must repay the debt to the ancestors; without children it cannot be repaid. If a Hindu marries four times, it is sin; if a Muslim marries four, it is virtue—no sin. The coin of four marriages is accepted in one society, not in another.

Sin and merit are coins minted by society. If you are alone in a forest, what sin and what merit? What use is a hundred-rupee note? In the forest it is paper. There, merit is paper, sin is paper. Whom will you serve? Whom will you harm? You are alone—sin and merit vanish. They are social currencies.

First a man hoards wealth, fills his strongbox, feeds his ego: “Look how much I have!” Then, having left that, Buddha says, he hoards merit and builds a new strongbox—more cunning, because wealth stays here, but the hope is that merit will go with you—that death cannot snatch it.

I visited a village where a Muslim sect believes that their priest writes a letter at death listing the man’s merits and donations, signs it, and they place the letter in the grave so the dead can show God the priest’s certificate.

Buddha says: do not fall into this folly. Your God is an extension of your shop, your business. Your ego is not dissolving; it is relocating—now attaching to Brahman. Now you must possess Brahman; you will not rest until Brahman is in your fist, until you can declare: I have conquered not only the world, but Brahman too.

Your “I” will not let you see anything but yourself. Your Brahman will be inside you; your wealth inside; your lust inside; your prayer inside.

I heard of a Jewish millionaire who went to a Hasidic mystic and said: I try to pray, but lust persists. I want to give, but greed stands behind it; the wish to gain stands behind it. I can renounce, but even that is a bargain—for greater gain. I close my eyes, but there is no vision of God; I am filled only with me. What is the cause of this trouble?

The Hasid said: come. He took him to a window. The glass was clear; outside were trees, birds, cranes flying, clouds, the sun. “Look outside.” “I can see everything,” said the rich man. Then he took him to a mirror. “Do you see any difference between this glass and that?” The man laughed: “Only my own face appears here.” “Both are glass,” said the mystic. “What is the difference?” The man said, “A silver backing! That glass has none; this one has a layer of silver behind it. Because of that, it is no longer transparent; it shows only me.” He said, “I understand. A layer of silver surrounds me; therefore wherever I look, there is no God, no Brahman—only me.”

Silver has many forms—worldly or spiritual. As long as any coating of desire remains—that is the silver—you are encased in yourself.

Buddha made a profound declaration—first on earth with such purity: your Brahman is the expansion of your ego. Therefore he said: there is no Brahman. Do not misunderstand him to mean there is no ultimate. When he said there is no God, do not mistake it—otherwise you will err—as if he were denying the divine.

When Buddha says there is no God, no Brahman, he means: your God, your Brahman, are you—your own play, new doorways for the ego, new colonies for it. You are going to settle yourself there too.

Therefore Buddha is extremely austere, because his compassion is immense. He says: no God, no soul (atman), no liberation—nothing. Only this moment is all.

If you grasp that this very moment is everything—no future, no past, no eternal, no everlasting—where will you go? Where can your craving run? All routes are taken away; all bridges collapsed. You will stand here.

Behind is death—let us understand this in Buddha’s way. He says: death before birth. If you had not died, how could you be born? As death follows birth, so death precedes birth. They are two sides of one coin. You died in the past birth, therefore you are born now; you are born now, therefore you will die again; and as you die, you are born again. If death is one step, the other step always exists. If birth is one step, the other always exists.

Thus Buddha says: behind is death, ahead is death—birth is in between. Between two deaths, one birth; between two births, one death. Wherever you stand, death on both sides, ahead and behind. This is the situation. You hang over the chasm, and you see a honeycomb—in Buddha’s version, not a fruit but a comb—and from it a single drop of honey is about to fall. Your eyes are fixed on it; you open your mouth; you wait. The drop falls, and Buddha says, “Ah! How sweet! What taste!”

If you can forget both deaths—this is the meaning—you can also forget that your hands are weakening, the roots will slip today or tomorrow. The taste of this moment can become so total that only taste remains. When you forget death, you forget yourself. When there is no death, no time, no awareness of situation, then this taste has become your samadhi; this is your meditation. In this very moment you are free. In this very moment you know what Brahman is.

For Buddha this story carries a much deeper meaning.

His meditation means living moment-to-moment, tasting each moment with such totality that even the taster is not inside. Otherwise totality is fragmented.

If, when the drop of honey falls into your mouth, you also remain there, the taste will not be complete.

Let only taste remain. Let the sweetness spread in you till your whole being becomes sweetness. Let nothing remain—no knower, no enjoyer, no doer, no one. Only sweetness spreading. In that moment is samadhi.

So Buddha says: every sense can become a door to samadhi. The senses are not the problem; the ego is. If the ego uses the senses, each sense becomes a bondage. If the ego is quiet within, each sense becomes liberation.

These are very contrary statements, yet the ultimate result is one.

Choose what resonates with you. I do not wish to confuse you, but both meanings of the story must be told. You can choose for yourself. If the first vision feels right, your path will be utterly different. Then your journey will be by what is called tapas—austere resolve. Struggle: cut each sense, awaken yourself against each sense. Absorption is not your path; your path is resolve and struggle—guarding and standing upright.

And in the end, the greatest difficulty will be this: after you have gone beyond the senses and none affects you, you will find a pure “I” remains—how to dissolve this into Brahman? Because by fighting each sense, the “I” becomes stronger and more refined.

Therefore, in the Hindu path the final question arises: how to dissolve the ascetic’s ego? The ascetic’s ego becomes very dense. Compared to it, the ordinary person has hardly any. The Hindu path is easy in the beginning—because fighting is easy. We are ever ready to fight—even with ourselves. Violence is accessible. Destroying, cutting, makes sense to us. Tapas appeals because it is a kind of self-violence, self-destruction.

But what is being destroyed outwardly is being built inwardly. The body may be weakened, the ego strengthened. The Hindu path is easy at first, very hard at last—because then the final leap has to be taken. The crystal you have refined with so much effort—how to throw it away? On the first day, the stone was rough; throwing it would have been easy. After so much polishing, it is a pure crystal—now to drop it is difficult. Hence, in the final phase the Hindu seeker struggles: how to surrender this crystal of the ego into the divine?

The Buddhist path is very difficult at the beginning, because turning sensory taste into meditation is extremely hard. The nature of the senses is to stupefy, while meditation is non-stupefaction. To relish the senses without becoming unconscious—to such completeness that the ego and enjoyer disappear—is very difficult. We go to the senses to sleep. Buddha says: be awake from the start. Do not control the senses through ego; remove the ego altogether. Hence he says: within there is no soul, no “I-ness”—within there is no one. You are merely a chariot; there is no charioteer. Move with this feeling.

So the beginning is extremely hard, but the end is very simple. Because moving with this feeling, there never comes a day when you must suddenly throw a grown ego into God. You gradually find that the ego is not there; its dissolution becomes easy. One day you suddenly find: I am not—only the ultimate is. Buddha called this nirvana.

Looked at as whole processes, the two ways balance. Whether difficulty is at the start or at the end, the total is the same. The scales balance.

Each seeker must decide for himself. Walk with Buddha—difficulty at the beginning. Walk with Shankara—difficulty at the end. It depends on you: your tendency, your destiny, your life and temperament. Understand this and proceed accordingly. You will reach the same place.

Buddha calls it nirvana; Shankara calls it Brahman. Shankara leads you there by mastering the eternal; Buddha by mastering the moment.

Buddha’s view could not take deep root in India because the Hindu tradition was long established, and it had opposed the moment so much that it was hard to accept that the moment could also lead to truth. Hindu thought had long restrained and opposed the senses—Patanjali defined yoga as “chitta-vritti-nirodha,” the cessation of the mind’s modifications—pitting mind against its waves. In this stream, Buddha’s words seemed contradictory, as if they would shatter the entire Hindu framework.

Therefore Hindus saw in Buddha an enemy as in no one else. They did not oppose Mahavira as much; thus the Jains survived in India. Mahavira’s practice is also of resolve, of mastery over the senses—its fundamental style is Hindu. So there is no basic gap between Jain and Hindu practice; the theoretical talk differs, the personality-structure is the same.

Thus the Jains survived, but to let Buddhism survive seemed impossible. Buddha had to be uprooted, because the vision of the journey is opposite. That drop of honey—be so immersed in its taste that the drop becomes Brahman. In the Hindu view, the honey-drop is the sense, maya; in Buddha’s view, the honey-drop becomes Brahman, the ultimate—this very.

Both are right. And when I say that, it creates difficulty—because it is easy to call one right and the other wrong. The mind wants to say only one of two opposites can be true. How can both be?

Life is far bigger than mind. Mind is narrow: in it only one can be true. In life both can be true. Intellect is small; it has no room for opposites. Existence is vast; the opposites are contained in it. The sharper your religious vision, the more you will find all opposites reconciled.

Then die! That is precisely the meaning of surrender. Do not try to save yourself. There is nothing wrong in dying; all the wrong lies in trying to be saved. And what is there to save for which we are so frantically busy—“Save me! save me! save me!”? What is there to save? If you look attentively even for a single moment, sit quietly and reflect, you will see there is nothing in your possession worth saving.

And once you see that there is nothing to save, the fear of death will vanish instantly. For who is going to die? If there is nothing to save, what is there to lose? This fear that something may be lost stands upon the illusion that I have something. And you never open the door of your house to see whether anything is there; perhaps you don’t look precisely out of the fear that it may be revealed that there is nothing at all. For then even the commotion you keep up about saving and being saved would no longer be possible, and you would feel very helpless. Even if there is no safe, we keep making a racket as if to prevent a theft; from that noise alone it seems as though there is something.

What is this fear of dying? What is so terrifying in it? What will be lost by your disappearance? This is the deepest question a seeker should ask within: If I am erased, what is the harm? What will happen if I am not? If I accept this state of not-being, why the uneasiness? Because in the state of being there is no happiness; as I said earlier, there is only the hope that perhaps someday happiness will be.

Whoever and however you are, you are tormented and troubled; however you are, you are in pain and turmoil. Yet you still say, “May this not be lost!”

No—die! Dying is the greatest art. And whoever learns how to die is the one to whom the full celebration of life becomes available.

The moment you drop yourself, in that very moment all the energies of life within you will be absorbed in an unparalleled dance. So long as you keep saving yourself, that very saving prevents the dance from being free. You are so frightened that you cannot laugh. You are so afraid that the flowers within you cannot blossom. You have gripped your own life with your own hands so tightly that your very hands have become the noose around your neck. And you keep pressing, lest you disappear. And this sense you have of dissolving is created by your own hands. A vicious circle is born.

A friend comes to me. He has a headache all day. To escape the headache, he drinks at night. Because of the alcohol, the headache starts the next morning. Now what should be done? In the evening when he meets me he says, “What can I do! I have to drink, because there is this headache.” In the morning when he meets me he complains, “How can I be rid of it? Because if I drink, I get a headache.”

This is precisely the human condition. On one side you create your suffering, and on the other you want to escape from it. And what is his wish now? I told him, “Your wish is that the drinking should continue and the headache should not happen.” He said, “You have grasped it exactly—that’s it.”

And that cannot be. Your wish too is that you should remain, and liberation should also happen. That cannot be. If you die, there is freedom. If you remain, there is bondage—because you are the bondage. Your not-being is moksha.

That’s all for today.