Rom Rom Ras Peejiye #9

Do you think you have ever lived, even for a little while, with these questions? If these questions are in the mind, asked with full intensity, and we do not seek an answer from outside, what will happen? Have you ever asked—Who am I? Have you ever asked, filled with total thirst, with the yearning of your whole being: Who am I? Then ask! Become utterly quiet and silent in every way and ask: Who am I? And whatever answer appears, any answer that seems to be coming from outside, bid it farewell: I am no longer willing to take answers from outside. Now I will seek the answer within myself. Then keep asking, again and again: Who am I? Let the mind become quiet and empty, and keep asking: Who am I?

You will be astonished, astonished. When someone begins to dig the earth, at first pebbles and stones come to hand, soil comes up. The springs of water do not appear all at once. But if one keeps digging, keeps digging, then gradually the soil and stones are set aside and the water-springs, which were always present within, burst forth. In the same way, if one keeps asking within, Who am I? Who am I?—and whatever pebbles and stones come in between—others’ answers are like pebbles and stones, answers borrowed from books and scriptures are like pebbles and stones—keep removing them, keep putting them aside, and a moment will come when the inner springs will burst forth; within, the stream of answer, the stream of knowing, will become available.

But we have not dug the search of our lives like a well. We have made life into a cistern. There is water in both a cistern and a well. There is water in a cistern too. But there is a great difference in the water of the two, and the processes are quite opposite. To dig a well you must take out the soil and stones and throw them away; then water appears. The water comes from within the well. To make a cistern the opposite has to be done: first you pile up soil and stones to build walls, and then you bring water from outside and fill it. In one, soil and stones have to be removed—the well; in the other, soil and stones have to be joined to make walls—the cistern. In a well the water comes by itself; in a cistern the water has to be brought and poured in. The water of a cistern is stale. It has no life, no source. The water of a well has infinite sources; it is connected to the oceans hidden in the womb of the earth. And a cistern? It is cut off from the whole world, from all water-sources, walled in; and the water within it is imported from outside. That water then begins to rot, because it is not alive; it becomes dead. There is no current of life in it. Then it decays, decays, and spreads filth. But the water of the well is living, vibrant; it has relationship with the seas.

Those who stuff their minds with knowledge from the outside become like cisterns. The scholar’s mind is like a cistern. That is why the scholar’s mind gradually putrefies; it begins to stink. And this is precisely the reason that the scholars of the world have become accomplices in making humanity fight, in getting humanity butchered, in creating divisions, in raising walls. Their minds lack the freshness that comes from being connected to the seas. The current of their life is not joined from within; it is compiled from books outside.

But those who dig a well within themselves, and set aside all the rubbish, the soil and stones that centuries have piled upon us, they come to a current of the self, a stream of knowing that is infinite and that is connected far and wide to the ocean of wisdom whose name is the Divine.

So there are two kinds of knowledge: one that is filled from outside, like a cistern; and one that is discovered within, like a well. Then what will you do with my answers? Of what use are anyone else’s answers? They will only accumulate inside and block your own source.

So in the end, as you leave this camp, my first, first prayer is: whatever I have said, please leave it here; do not take it with you. Just leave it completely; there is no need at all to carry it along. I would not want it to become a burden on your mind. I would not want my answers to sit in your mind like a weight, to become your answers.

You may ask: then why did I give answers? Why did I say these things at all? I have not said them so they become a burden on your mind, but so that your mind may be made light and weightless. I have spoken to snatch away the burdens already inside you—not to add a little of my own and make that load heavier.

Therefore it is not at all necessary that I answer all your questions. Because even the answers I have given—I ask you to leave them here as well. There is no need to take them with you.

But if you have the courage to drop them, and also the courage to drop the great dust that has settled in the mind—dust of many centuries, thousands of years—then the mind will become like a clear mirror, an innocent mirror. And in that mirror truth is seen. In that mirror the self is realized. In that mirror there is a glimpse of all that is the essence, the quintessence of life. This is the very first thing I have said.

Certainly. Because we have been doing all these things, the moment we drop them we feel a vacuum, an emptiness—as if nothing will be left to do. Though these things have no real value, we have become so habituated to them that when they fall away we feel utterly empty, with nothing left to occupy us.

But I say to you: before anything meaningful can happen through you, becoming empty is essential. A person filled with the trivial—whatever he does—only increases the world’s turmoil, not peace. If your own mind is restless, afflicted, disturbed, whatever you do cannot be auspicious in its result; it will bring harmful consequences. So before anything right can arise from within you, your becoming empty is absolutely indispensable, very necessary—utterly essential.

It is as when one lays out a new garden on a plot of land: first the weeds are uprooted and thrown away, the reeds pulled out, the old entrenched roots removed. The ground is made clean—made empty. Why? So that new seeds may be sown, a new harvest gathered, new flowers brought to the soil.

So before new seeds are sown, the mind too must be freed of the old weeds—emptied. Only in that emptiness can new seeds sprout and reach to flowering.

There was a great musician, Wagner. A young man, after learning music for five years from another teacher, went to Wagner. He had learnt nearly all his teacher knew and was the most gifted of his master’s disciples. He thought, before I set out into life, Wagner’s name is becoming so renowned—let me stay a couple of months with him and learn his music too. He felt Wagner would be delighted to have so trained a student. He asked, How long will it take me to learn? What will your fee be?

What did Wagner say?

Wagner said, You will need at least ten years. And as for the fee—double what I take from ordinary students.

The youth was astonished. Ten years? I’ve already learnt for five!

Wagner said, It will take five years just to unlearn what you have learnt. What you call music is not music. For you, music is only an arrangement of sounds—finding a harmony among many notes. Your music does not go beyond sound. But the music I know is something else entirely: there the sounds end and the void begins. Where your music ends, ours begins, Wagner said. So first you will need five years simply to forget. And unlearning takes more effort than teaching—hence I shall charge you double.

Exactly the same is true of the music of life. These past three days, what work have I done with you? Not to teach, but to help you forget. We are sitting here with things learnt; if what we had learnt were right, our lives would be different. For thousands of years we have been carrying that learning, yet human life keeps sinking lower, the river of our vitality is drying up, fragrance is turning into stench. Still we cling to what we have learnt.

What is needed is someone to break all that, wipe it away, and clear the soil of the human mind so that new seeds can again be sown and new flowers awaited. For now the great work is cleansing. The great work is to burn off what’s accumulated on the mind. Without passing through a fire, a new human being cannot be born. In the direction of that new birth, much demolition is needed—so that new creation can happen. Whoever sets out to build must first demolish. There is no joy in demolition; it is a necessity. Without it, the new cannot be born and cannot grow.

So all that has piled up on the mind must be removed. But not simply because I say so. I have said my piece—consider it. Do not start removing things on my authority. If you do that, you may discard one burden only to place my words in its place. The load may change, but you won’t be free of burden.

Do not discard on my say-so. Who am I? What value have my words? None. Think it through. Let it become clear in your own seeing that yes, the mind must be unburdened; it has become heavy, stuffed with words and doctrines—doctrines that have no living relationship with life anymore, that do not move life but obstruct it. Our learned answers do not dissolve life’s problems; they create them. Life has enough problems of its own, and our learned answers add new ones, because no learned answer can ever match the living texture of a real problem. The answer is old; life changes daily. Life is new every day; problems are new. Answers—answers are old. Indeed, we are so mad that the older an answer is, the more right we think it must be. For many, antiquity itself is taken as proof of truth. That is why religious people strain in every way to prove their scripture the oldest—as if being old were necessary for being true.

But the fact is: life is new every day. It needs a mind that is new every day. Only then can life’s problems be resolved. If the mind is old and life is new, confusion is inevitable.

In a village in Kyoto, Japan, there were two temples—one to the south, one to the north—opposed to each other, as temples invariably are. The priests had not spoken for years; they never met, never exchanged words. Envy was rife. If one raised his spire higher, the other added a newer finial to surpass it. The whole village suffered from their quarrels. Temples grew bigger, houses smaller—after all, who would pay for enlarging the temples? As the temples expanded, homes shrank. Villagers grew poorer, priests grew rich. The poor had no bread, but the temple gods were cast in gold. The village split in two—half on one side, half on the other. Old quarrels, full of relish, with a certain secret enjoyment. Without that rivalry, exploitation would have been impossible. Their fight made exploiting the village easy.

Across the world so many temples and mosques stand; if they did not fight among themselves, they would not be able to exploit people at all. It is in the intoxication of their conflicts that all exploitation becomes possible. When the mosque grows larger, the temple priest says, Our temple must be larger; we are becoming small, inferior. See—the Muslims’ mosque is grand, the Hindu temple small; the Jains’ temple has grown, ours is diminished. Such frenzy arises, egos are inflamed, people rush to enlarge their own shrine. Temples fight so that priests may live. If temples did not fight, the priest could not survive. Hence as long as there are temples, there will be fights; if the fighting ends, the temples will fall of themselves—their life-breath will not remain.

Those two temples fought too. Their opposition was so deep that even their two young errand boys were forbidden to glance at the other temple or speak to the other boy.

But boys are boys. However much elders try to spoil them, even spoiling takes time; it cannot be done at once. The boys would sometimes meet on the path. One day they met. The boy from the north temple asked the boy from the south, Friend, where are you going?

The south-temple boy, who had been hearing metaphysical talk all day, had begun to talk metaphysics too. Children learn philosophy from the old.

The north boy asked, Friend, where are you going?

He said, Wherever the winds take me! What power has a man?

A lofty statement. He spoke of fate: Wherever the winds take me!

The north boy was nonplussed, had no reply, and went back to tell his priest. The priest said, This is bad! No one from our temple has ever been bested by that one. Go tomorrow to the same spot and ask again, Where are you going? When he says, Wherever the winds take me, you say, If the winds stop, then where will you go? He will be stumped. Do not come back defeated; it is a disgrace for our temple’s boy to lose to theirs.

Next day the boy went, ready with his answer. He asked, Friend, where are you going? He had prepared for, Wherever the winds take me. But the other boy had changed. He said, Wherever my feet take me.

Now there was trouble; the prepared answer was useless. Defeated again, he returned. Our priest’s boy complained, He is dishonest—yesterday he said one thing, today another. He seems the changing sort; he won’t even stand by his own word.

The priest was pleased. Those people have always been like that, he said—always untrustworthy. But go again tomorrow. Until you silence him, you are defeated. Ask again; when he says, Wherever my feet take me, you say, Suppose your feet are paralyzed—then where will you go?

On the third day, delighted, the boy went back and asked, Where are you going? The other replied, I’m going to the market to buy greens.

In truth, learned answers don’t work in life—because life changes every day. Life is very “unreliable.” Scriptures are very reliable: they never change. Scriptures are dead, so they don’t change. Life is alive, therefore it must change. That is not unreliability—that is the very sign of life: change.

So life changes daily, and our answers are from yesterday, the day before, a thousand years ago—they never change. We stand clutching them. Life poses questions that make our answers useless; yet we go on repeating the old answers, and we fall behind life. Anyone with learned answers will always lag behind. Life is so mysterious it never returns even for a day exactly as it came yesterday. The sun that rose yesterday is not the sun that rose today; the one that will rise tomorrow has never risen before. The birds that sang this morning in this garden will not sing here tomorrow; and even if they are the same birds, the songs will be different, the winds different, the listeners different, the trees different. Every moment everything is changing.

In this vast whirl of change, our answers are fixed. Because of the rigidity of these answers, we have become rigid, and our relationship with life is severed. What is needed is a mind as mobile, as dynamic as life itself—not dead, not inert, but alive. A mind like a mirror—fresh, young—able to look at whatever problem life presents, directly, anew.

We do not have such a mind. Hence so much sorrow, pain, entanglement. Not a single real issue has been solved in five thousand years—do you know? In five thousand years of human history, man has not solved even one problem. And whatever he has done in the name of solutions has produced ten more problems.

In five thousand years there have been fifteen thousand wars. What madness is this? What do fifteen thousand wars in five thousand years signify? Whenever a problem confounds us, we find no alternative but to fight. And is fighting a solution? One war gives birth to another, more dangerous than the first; from the second comes a third, even more perilous. We have waged war upon war; not a single problem has been resolved.

How many scriptures have been written! On this earth now, five thousand new books are printed every week; soon it will be a thousand a day. But what has been resolved in man’s life? So many propositions, and where is the solution? Man stands where he did ten thousand years ago. Clothes have changed, roads have changed, houses have changed—but man? Why has man not changed? What has happened to him? Why does he remain fixed while all else moves—the heavens and stars, the earth? Why is man inert?

The cause of man’s inertia is learned answers—learned knowledge. It strips the mind of freshness; it makes it stale. And a stale, borrowed mind is incapable of solving anything.

What is needed is a mind that does not interpose the past, that does not place borrowed notions in between, that sees life directly, understands life directly, and has the strength to move with the responses that arise from that direct seeing. We need such a person, such a mind.

What will my answers do? By the time they reach you they will already have gone stale—while I am speaking, as you are listening, they are turning old. Life will have changed by then. Of what use will my answers be? The question is not of answers—mine or anyone else’s. The question is the creation of such a mind.

So these three days my effort has not been to increase your knowledge; for thousands of years people have been increasing knowledge. I want to steal your knowledge. If you can stand without your knowledge, perhaps you will become fresh, young; the mind will be unburdened, able to see, to know, to recognize; the eyes will open, and when life brings questions, answers will arise from within. With an open mind, things begin to show themselves like an arrow’s flight.

But as we are, we see nothing. People die every day, and we do not see that we too will die. What blindness! What stupor! Strange! People hoard wealth, spend their lives in it, and we see no peace or joy in them—yet when we run, we too run after money. Strange! We see people climb from smaller to bigger chairs—higher posts—but in their lives there is no peace, no joy, no music; yet we throw ourselves into the same race. What is this? Do we not see anything? Does no accurate vision of life form in our minds?

Long ago, a young man returned from his guru’s school, very sad. One night he stayed with a friend in the capital, tossing and turning. The friend asked, What troubles you?

He said, I am troubled because I lived five years in the guru’s house. He fed me, clothed me, taught me—everything. I am very poor, an orphan. At farewell, all the students gave the guru a gift; I gave nothing. If only I had five gold coins, I would have offered them.

His friend said, Don’t worry. Go early in the morning. The king of this country has a rule: whoever comes first thing in the morning and asks for something, he grants it.

The youth went. He reached the palace around four. The king came out to stroll in the garden near five; the youth stopped him and said, I’ve heard that whoever is the first supplicant, whatever he asks, you give.

The king said, Certainly. But no one has ever come. It has always been my resolve to give to whoever comes—but people are so content no one ever came. You are the first beggar—not only today, in my whole life. Ask whatever you want, I will give.

Hearing “whatever,” the youth thought, Am I a fool to ask for five coins? Why not five hundred? Five thousand? Five hundred thousand? His arithmetic spread out; the thought of five vanished, even the thought of gifting the guru dissolved. The question now was: how much should I ask?

The king saw him anxious. Perhaps you haven’t decided, he said. Decide; I’ll walk in the garden. Whatever you ask, I will give. Don’t worry—ask.

The numbers grew larger. Five crores? Five billions? Five trillions? As far as his arithmetic went, he stretched. His heart began to pound—why did I not learn more mathematics! Now I see what it’s for! I used to think, what’s the use of all that math? Now I regret; I’ll ask so much there may be nothing left in the kingdom. He forgot the guru, forgot the five coins.

Anyone would. In his place, we too would forget—this is human. The original point vanished, another issue arose. By the time the king returned, the youth, heart thumping, thought, If I name a number I may blunder. Why not say: leave everything you have and step outside the gate; come out as I came in. The clothes you wear are enough; I won’t ask for more. Give me all you have—no room for error then; numbers won’t arise; I’ll get whatever there is; there will be no cause for regret.

The king came. The youth said, Please step outside the gate. The clothes you’re wearing are sufficient; and leave all that you have. I ask for the whole.

He had thought the king would panic. The opposite happened—the youth panicked. The king lifted his hands to the sky and said, O God, the man I was waiting for has come. How many days you pointed the way—at last he has arrived. Embracing the youth, he said, You go inside; I will go out. And these clothes too—I’ll leave them; I’ve worn them long and am tired of them. Now I would like to go naked.

The youth was alarmed. Wait! Wait a moment—let me think a little more. What is this? Why are you so eager to run? Why such impatience to leave your things?

The king said, Don’t ask, don’t think. Life is long—think slowly. After all, I too reached here thinking over a lifetime. How can I tell you so quickly, and how will you understand? You go in; I go out. Life is long; you are young; think. By the time you reach my age, perhaps you will understand.

But the youth said, No, I am not that blind. Please take one more turn in the garden; give me time to think. Be so kind.

The king said, Those who overthink get into trouble. You go in, manage everything; thinking—life is long. Why hurry?

But the more the king said, What’s the hurry? the more the youth’s hurry increased. Forgive me, he said, I take my words back. Take another round; let me think.

The king walked; when he returned the youth was gone. He had even left those five gold coins behind. He had fled. At home his friend asked, Did you get the five?

He said, No. My arithmetic went far beyond five. I had asked for everything. But the king put me in a bind—he opened my eyes. Now there is no question of asking for five, nor of asking at all. I see now that the mathematics I learnt was useless; the very act of asking is meaningless. For when someone is leaving everything so joyfully, only a blind man could accept it.

But in life we see nothing. We almost repeat what every man has repeated and, like the blind, go one round and are finished. Why do we not see? Because we never look at life with our own eyes. We see everything through what the previous generation has taught us. They pass on their illnesses, their diseases, their mistakes, their pre-fabricated answers—answers they themselves learned from the generation before. Thus a borrowed mind is handed down from age to age. We never look at life with our own freshness: we see through our father’s eyes; he through his father’s; and they through theirs. The eyes through which we look have become very old. No one looks through his own eyes.

If we could look at each problem of life with our own eyes, the problem would dissolve—because the solution would be our own. That solution could meet life’s challenge and resolve it; life could be different. Therefore my greatest opposition is to the borrowed mind. The borrowed mind is the most dangerous thing—the great epidemic, the greatest disease—and for thousands of years we have suffered from it. Hence there is no question of anyone’s answers, no importance to anyone’s solutions. Scriptures, fixed doctrines—none of it has meaning. What matters is a living mind, a fresh mind, a mind that is new. How to have a fresh mind—on that, these three days, I have said a little.

But I want to tell you: as man is today, animals are better than him. It hurts to know this; it hurts me too. But animals are far better than man—in a thousand ways. What has happened to man is astonishing. Animals do not seem so anxious, nor so miserable. Have you ever heard of an animal or a bird committing suicide? You haven’t. I don’t think such a thing has yet occurred. If it ever does, every newspaper in the world will carry it in big letters on the front page: A dog has committed suicide. So far it has not happened. Only man takes his own life. What does this mean? Man’s life has reached such a condition that man himself wants to end it. Has it become so bad that we ourselves finish it? So meaningless? So filled with sorrow and pain?

Yet this is what has happened. And we go on saying we must rise above the animal.
I would say: for now, even if we could become equal to the animal, that would be a lot. Rising above the animal is still a distant matter. Why has the situation become so strange? Because we have not accepted our nature. If we accept our nature, from that very acceptance nature can become culture. But we rejected nature; from that rejection, culture did not arise—distortion arose. Culture develops in the exploration of nature. What develops in opposition to nature is distortion, not culture. We have not become cultured; we are almost distorted.

Animals have sex; in man there is not only sex but sexuality—lustfulness—a new affliction. In animals there is only sex; in man there is lustfulness. In the animal’s life sex appears and departs—like food, like water, like everything else; it comes at its hour and dissolves. Man thinks of sex twenty-four hours a day. If man is not thinking of sex all the time, then why are his films, his stories, his books saturated with it? Why are Khajuraho and Konark filled with erotic couples? Why does the whole of life appear so drenched in sex? Animals do not seem troubled in this way, nor so tormented. Sex is certainly present in their life—it is natural—but not the distortion that it is in man’s life. How did this happen?
It happened through repression and suppression. We have not managed to transform nature; we have not evolved it, not transmuted it—we have suppressed it. Whoever suppresses nature falls even below nature. Because repression does not eliminate an energy; it only drives it deeper into the unconscious, where it begins to torment from within. Then its force, its undercurrents… Someone told me that beneath the ground here there are many water sources, undercurrents. From above nothing is seen, but they said that in a well you could go half a mile deep; beneath, the earth is filled with streams of water. From above, nothing is visible.

So too, whatever a person suppresses spreads as undercurrents in the unconscious below the ground. On the surface nothing is visible: on the surface he seems to be chanting Ram-Ram, reading the Gita, reading the Ramayana. What are the undercurrents within? Entirely different. What is above is one thing; within, another. Inside, everything has been pressed down, accumulated. It wants to come out; he keeps pushing it down—chanting mantras to push it, carefully holding it down.

But what we have kept suppressed will burst today or tomorrow. If not today, then tomorrow it will crack the ground and come out. And whatever we have suppressed must be kept suppressed every day, because the slightest weakness and it will break out. Any moment of weakness can bring it out. And even if it never comes out for a whole lifetime, it makes no difference: the life of such a person becomes an inner conflict. He will spend his life fighting with himself; he will not know any beauty of life. A repressive personality becomes utterly ugly. All beauty, all peace, all music are destroyed.

A small story comes to mind.
In Korea, two monks were crossing a mountain river. The elder monk was ahead, the younger behind. As the elder was about to step into the river, he saw a young woman standing on the bank who wanted to cross. It occurred to the old monk—he must have been seventy—to offer his hand and help her across. But the very thought of giving his hand, the very idea of a young woman’s hand in his, became an upsurge of the desire he had repressed for years. He had not yet touched her; out of compassion he had merely thought of offering his hand. The slumbering passion within… He was astonished: what he had pushed down for thirty years had not ended! With rosary upon rosary, sleepless nights, fasts upon fasts, he had thought, It is all quiet now, all quiet.

The undercurrents were present. The occasion appeared, and they rose again. His body had grown old; inside, the mind was young. Desire surged, and he felt that the touch of a hand would bring a pleasant taste. He was frightened, he trembled, his hair stood on end. The evening was cool, yet beads of sweat appeared on his forehead. He thought, Ah! Sin still lies hidden! I had thought it gone. Alarmed, he began to cross the river. He did not say to that young woman that he would help her across. He thought to himself, What a mistake, that I even thought this! I thought of a woman’s touch!

On one side this thought ran on; as he went a little further into the river, another thought arose: What harm would there have been if I had taken her hand and helped her across? Two currents stood in his mind. On one side was the religious mind of the seeker, suppressing: What a fault this is! From within, desire said: What harm would there be? If I had held her hand and helped her across, what harm? And a kind of sweetness began to be felt within. He fell into a great conflict.

He crossed the river. Then it occurred to him that his young companion would be coming behind; perhaps he too would fall into the same trouble that I did. He turned and was stunned: the young monk was carrying the girl on his shoulders across the river. Many fires flared up in the elder’s mind. One: I will set him right! He must be taught! He is going astray. I am old; he is young. If my desire has not gone, how will his go? Along with the urge to preach, jealousy also seized him: I missed, and this youth carries her on his shoulders. The more the jealousy, the sharper the relish for preaching.

Often when the old preach to the young, jealousy is mixed in—the jealousy of the life they have lost and the young still possess. The sermons become harsher, more condemning. The urge to consign them to hell grows deeper: send them all to hell.

He thought, Today I will go and tell the master. Today he must be corrected; he must be expelled from the monastery. This is the limit: a monk touching a woman—carrying her on his shoulders!

The young man came over; the elder did not speak. Their monastery was two or three miles away. When they arrived and began to climb the steps, the elder said, Friend, what you did is beyond endurance! I am compelled to tell the head of the monastery that a sin has been committed by a monk. Some punishment is necessary; otherwise the rules will break, discipline will collapse, the whole monastery will be corrupted. Why did you lift that girl onto your shoulders?

The young monk said, Venerable sir, I did lift her onto my shoulders—and I set her down on the bank as well. Quite some time has passed since that incident. But you are still carrying her on your shoulders. You are still carrying her.

Whoever represses things ends up carrying them on his shoulders all his life. Suppression or repression is not the path of growth. In life, nothing is to be repressed. Then what? Should we become animals, become unbridled, as my friend asked?

No, that is not what I am saying. Whatever tendencies, energies, desires, passions there are in life—one must awaken to them, see them, recognize them, understand them. The deeper our understanding about them, the more they are transformed in exact proportion to that understanding. Begin to watch any drive and that drive will begin to change. And the great secret is this: the very tendency you fear, and the very quality you wish to bring in—when you awaken rightly to that tendency, the transformation begins to move in the very direction you desire. See, experiment, meditate upon your tendencies. If you wish to transform any tendency, do not fight it—this is the first thing. Do not be its enemy; be its friend. Be awake toward it and watch.

Life is a simple acceptance. Accept life with your whole being; do not condemn it. Embrace life with your whole heart, with all doors open. And then, whatever is in life, understand it; try to know it, to recognize it. See the tendency in all its forms. And you will be amazed: the very moment you see, know, recognize, transformation begins—an unprecedented change starts. We have not seen, we have not recognized; therefore we repress. And repression does not culture man; it distorts him further.

So I am not in favor of repression; I am in favor of knowing the tendencies. I am not against life; I am in favor of the total acceptance of life. The religions that have prevailed on this earth until now, and the teachings that have been told to people, are life-negative; they negate life. Religions that negate life can never make man happy and blissful. What is needed is the acceptance of life—life-affirmation; the full acceptance of total life. When life is fully accepted, and we awaken to that life, and are filled with understanding, then transformation begins. Light a lamp and take it within. Light the lamp of meditation, take it within, and search there.

Buddha said something, and with that I will conclude my talk.
Buddha said: In a house where there is darkness, thieves come. In a house where there is no watchman, thieves come. But in a house where a lamp is burning, thieves are afraid to enter. And in a house where a guard sits at the door, thieves never come.

Buddha said: So it is with human consciousness. In a consciousness where the lamp of awareness is lit, the destructive tendencies do not enter. And where a guard of alertness, of awareness, sits at the door, no evil whatsoever is able to enter.

Make the mind such a temple that the lamp of meditation burns there, that the guard of awareness sits there. When the lamp of meditation and the watch of awareness are upon the mind, this very ordinary-looking life is transformed into immortal life. The divine is hidden within each person—but only if we awaken will we attain it.

In these three days, whatever I have said can be stated in one word: awareness—awareness, a total awareness toward life. One who awakens becomes available to life.

You have listened to my words very peacefully for three days—even to many things that may have given rise to unrest in the mind. You have listened with such love—even to many things that were difficult to hear with love. You have listened with such patience—even to many things that tried your patience. For all of that I am deeply obliged. And in the end I pray only this: Do not accept what I have said; do not reject it either. Think over it, try to understand, reflect upon it. Through thinking, reflection, understanding, perhaps something will become visible. And whatever becomes visible—that becomes yours; it is no longer mine.

May the divine grant that everyone may awaken in that light, that knowing, that nectar-like radiance which is everyone’s birthright—and which we are losing by our own hands. No one else is responsible. May each one attain what is his or her essential birthright.

Again and again, many, many thanks. And finally, I bow to the divine seated within all; please accept my salutations.