Sabai Sayane Ek Mat #2

If prayer is truly prayer, it is more than enough. But the real question is whether your prayer is really prayer. If it is not borrowed but heartfelt; not taught and learned, but rising from your innermost core—then it is not only enough, it is more than enough.

If prayer becomes utterly pure, even God is not necessary—prayer is enough. God does not transform you; prayer transforms you. God is the concentrated experience of love. It is not that prayer is the means and God is the end. When prayer becomes dense and total, God appears. God is the condensed essence of prayer.

But what you have called prayer—and God is very far off—is not even prayer.

Once, on a trip to Calcutta, a thoroughly miserly friend kept insisting I come to his new rented house. I knew well the house would not be worth seeing. It would be a wasted visit—he was a miser, a grand miser! Still, he pressed, so I went.

It turned out the visit wasn’t wasted; I got a precious insight. He began showing me around. There was nothing worth seeing. Old calendars from previous years were hanging. The furniture looked like it had come from the flea market—torn, worn, historical relics. But the last room he showed me proved very revealing. He said, “This is our music room.”

I looked around: no veena, no tabla. Not even a radio. I asked, “No instruments at all? Just a few rickety old chairs?”

He said, “Instruments? No need for instruments. We sit here and enjoy the melodies from the neighbors’ radios.”

That was his music room—melodies from the neighbors’ radios! Even the radio is borrowed—and that too, the neighbor’s. And the melody is stale, because it’s a recorded track on the radio; no living pulse is vibrating there.

Your prayer is not yours. Someone taught it to you—perhaps your parents, perhaps society. An inherited chain of conditioning coming down through centuries. Whether the first in the chain even sang it from the heart is doubtful. You take part in this stale game and hope thereby to find the ever-fresh God.

That is why Dadu says: Give ever-new love, give ever-new Name.

You must make it new. We make everything old. Our way of being itself is decrepit and stale. Even our minds are borrowed. Words repeated endless times on the lips—those stale words you go on repeating. No ripple in the heart, no tremor, no dance of the sleeping life within—and you think prayer will do everything? You are mistaken.

First, prayer cannot be borrowed; love cannot be borrowed. No matter how much your forefathers loved, that won’t make you a lover. No matter how many saints your land has produced, that won’t make you a devotee. It has nothing to do with someone else. You will have to find your own innermostness. Only if the voice rises from your own innermost heart will it be meaningful. That will transform you.

Never, even by mistake, learn prayer from anyone. Every learned prayer becomes false. Go to a temple, mosque, gurudwara—no harm. But let the prayer be your own. No harm if words don’t come—what has God to do with words? Let tears flow; sit in silence; or start dancing like an ecstatic madman; or laugh out loud; or let a torrent of unaccounted speech pour forth—what in India came to be called sadhukkadi, the babble of a saint, who keeps no account.

There is a story of the great Sufi Bayazid. When he spoke, nothing was clear; grammar never concerned him. He didn’t speak from the head, but from the heart. One night he was passing by a deep well when a voice cried out, “Help! I’m dying!”

He went closer; it was a dark night. He asked, “Who are you, brother? Why the racket? What are you doing down there?”

The man said, “Help, I’m dying. I’m the village pundit, the maulvi.”

Bayazid said, “Wait. I’ll go bring a rope and bucket—whatever is needed—I’ll pull you out. Don’t panic. Be patient.”

But he said this in his own way—without grammar or form. He was just about to go when the voice rose from the well: “Listen! Whoever you are, at least speak properly. Don’t make grammatical mistakes.”

Bayazid said, “Then you’ll have to stay down a while longer. I’ll go study grammar.”

They say Bayazid studied grammar for a year, and when he returned the grammarian was already dead.

The language of the heart is needed; grammar is not. Because someone else was drowning; but if you don’t catch the language of the heart, you are the one who is drowning. Even language is not necessary. For the One to whom you speak—prayer means a dialogue with God, a whispering into the ears of the divine—He does not care for your words; your feeling is enough.

Dadu says: Feeling is the very basis of devotion. Give feeling—that is the essence.

Feeling is a great thing. Does feeling have a grammar? Does feeling have words? Feeling is a wave rising in the wordless. It is the heart’s song echoing in emptiness. It is poetry, not mathematics. Let it arise from your heart. Don’t prepare it in advance. Prayer cannot be a rehearsal. It has no prior training. It is not a performance.

The whole world is your performance; then why go to a temple? You perform quite skillfully here already. To go to the temple means: you are bored with all performance, you have played the roles enough; now a thirst has arisen to know life’s reality. The play no longer tastes sweet. Childhood is gone; you have ripened; maturity has dawned.

So don’t go from home with a prepared prayer. If you prepare a prayer from the scriptures, you are like a child going to an exam having memorized everything by rote. But the exam will not test your rote learning; it will test what you have made your own, your heart’s truth.

If you have memorized all the arrangements of prayer, you will go and recite it; but then you are a gramophone record, not a living man. Prayer should arise from your reality. It cannot have prior preparation. All preparations lead you into error.

I was reading a story just yesterday. An inspector was to visit a school. The teacher had coached all the students—because he knew what the inspector always asks. He drilled the brightest boy, Bantu, again and again: “When he asks, ‘Children, who sent you into this world?’ you must jump up and say, ‘Sir, God did!’ He’s a very devout man—big on worship and prayer. He always asks this. So remember. No mistake. Repeat it many times.”

Next day the inspector came. As predicted, he asked, “Children, who sent you into this world?”

A moment of silence. The teacher got nervous: had they forgotten? He scanned the class. A thin, frail boy stood up and said, “Sir, the boy whom God sent is absent today—he’s got a fever.”

Your memorized answers will not match the living questions of life. The more prepared you are, the more you will fail. Has anyone ever gone to declare love with a prepared script?

Mulla Nasruddin was in love with a woman. He wrote her long letters, gave her jewelry and saris. Then a quarrel broke out; before the wedding everything fell apart. He went to take back all he had given.

She was angry and threw the clothes and ornaments at him. Still he stood there. She said, “Now what’s left?”

Nasruddin said, “The letters I wrote!”

She said, “What nonsense! Take the ring, fine; take the jewelry, fine; take the sari—but what will you do with the letters?”

Nasruddin said, “Has life ended? I’ll have to write to another woman. I’ll use these. The writing’s the same; why do the work twice? I’ll just change the name on top.”

Your prayers are just as false. You have not written letters to God. You are merely changing the name. The same letters your father wrote, and his father before him—you only change the addressee and sign your name. Such prayers are false.

Prayer is the inner feeling of the heart—going and letting go before the divine. Then even the temple is not particularly necessary, because the temple too can become part of ritual. Then you can sit under a tree; sit by a flowing river; look at the towering peaks of the Himalayas; gaze at the stars in the sky—there is the temple. Everywhere the pillars of His temple stand. Everywhere His temple’s moonlight spreads. Everything is His. Wherever you are, you stand on holy ground. There let the heart make its offering—an offering that even surprises you, something you yourself did not know would arise from your depths.

Someone asked Goethe about the meaning and purpose of his great work, Faust. Goethe shrugged and said, “You ask as though I knew.”

He wrote it—so the questioner couldn’t believe him. “What are you saying? You wrote it!” Goethe said, “I wrote it, He made me write it. And when I wrote, I was more astonished than you upon reading it—Where does this come from within me? From where did these lines descend? Who sang this song? I was only a flute. If you were to ask a flute about the song, it would say, ‘You speak as if I had sung it. The lips that sang were someone else’s.’”

You do not pray—God prays through you, and God receives through you. You become a flute, a hollow reed of bamboo. You only give way—that is enough. Do not obstruct—that is sufficient. Let your hollows be open—that is all. God sings His song, and God listens. He is the idol and the worshipper. He is the singer and the listener.

When such a moment arrives within you—when you see: I am the singer and I am the listener; I am the supplicant and I am the worshipped—when in prayer all dualities drown, and a single wave of wonder, an expanding ah, spreads toward the vast sky—then prayer is not only enough, it is more than enough. In that moment prayer itself is God.

Borrowedness has killed you. Borrowedness has ruined everything. Even the words of love have become stale; the words of prayer taught by pundits! Drop them. I tell you, drop these false prayers so the true prayer can be born. I tell you, step away from these temples when they have become merely ceremonial. The true temple of prayer can only be unceremonial.

People have told you, “Go to the temple to pray.” I tell you, wherever you pray, there is a temple. The real question is prayer; the temple is not the question. People have told you, “Pray to God.” I tell you, without prayer how will you know God? Before whom will you place your offering? At whose feet will you bow? If those feet were already available, what is there to bow to, to seek, to find?

No—I tell you, pray. Bow down. Don’t worry about the feet. Wherever you bow, His feet will be there. Wherever you pray, there you will find Him. Prayer is greater than God. It will be hard to think that prayer is greater than God—but it must be so.

Kabir says: Guru and Govind both stand before me—which feet should I touch? The dilemma must have arisen.

Kabir touched the guru’s feet, for he said: I am blessed by the guru, who showed me Govind. Without the guru how would I have known Govind? So the guru is greater than Govind—through him He is known.

Therefore I say to you: prayer is greater than God. Without prayer how would you even know there is God? You were taught the lesson backwards, hence the world is irreligious.

People say, “First prove that God exists, then we will pray.” Their argument seems mathematical, neat: “When God is not, how can we pray?” But this does not hold in the mathematics of life. It may be right for the intellect—but what depth does intellect’s mathematics have? It is superficial.

The deeper mathematics of life says: when there is prayer, God manifests. Prayer is the eye with which God is seen, the feeling by which God is known, the worthiness by which God is received. Wherever prayer happens, God appears.

If you say, “First let God be found, then we will pray,” it sounds clever—but it is great stupidity. You will never find God; prayer will never happen. You will go on wandering.

That is why the earth is largely atheistic—not because people have conclusively found that God does not exist, but because religious teachers taught that prayer is possible only if there is already God. They taught a falsehood.

In life you fall in love. Have you ever thought: does love come first, or the beloved? Your mathematics says: “This woman came into my life, she is so lovely—therefore love arose.” Wrong. If there were no love already in your heart, this woman would never have appeared. Love is first. Love was within; this woman became the excuse for it to manifest. Other women did not provide such an opening; this one did. But the love was already there. She facilitated its flow, but she did not create it. The stream was present. She provided the door for its outpouring. Love is first—otherwise how could a lover be born?

Prayer is first. And if prayer is there, doors will open anywhere. In a tree you will find it, in a rock you will see it. Love is needed. Love is the proof of God—there is no other proof.

So don’t ask, “Is prayer enough?” I tell you, even God is not necessary. Prayer alone is utterly sufficient—more than sufficient. Attain prayer, and you have attained God.

Do not get entangled in the reverse search—that way man becomes an atheist. What I am saying is the way man becomes a theist. There is no other way for man to become a believer.

Don’t ask me. Don’t ask anyone. Because if anyone gives it a form, your prayer will be borrowed. Let it arise. What are you so afraid of? Why such panic? Wait, sit silently, and let the prayer arise. And you will find a very unique event begins to happen.

But you are addicted to rehearsal. You say—first let me know for certain what prayer I should do. But if you come to know beforehand what prayer is to be done, you will be deprived of prayer forever. Do not find out. Leave it in his unknown hands. Is it dark? Then leave it to the dark. Is there no trace of light? Even if I tell you something, you will still not know. You will memorize the words spoken about light, and you will keep repeating them in the darkness.

Does darkness disappear through words? However much you repeat: light, light, light... will the darkness vanish? You need a lamp! I can give you words; who will give you the lamp? You yourself will have to light the lamp—because it is the lamp of the life of your life. The word “light” I can give you. What will you do with the word? Is there anything more lifeless in the world than a word?

Tolstoy has a very famous story—I am very fond of it. The chief priest of Russia came to know that across a lake, hidden behind the mountains, three saints had appeared, and people were rushing to them. Among the poor villagers they had great prestige. Simple folk were worshiping those saints like God. The chief priest could not tolerate this.

A priest can never tolerate a saint. Because the very presence of a saint breaks the priest’s business. The saint is against all kinds of formalism. A saint means a rebellion, an uprising. A saint can never be non-rebellious—except Vinoba Bhave; he is a government saint—if any such thing can be. A saint will be a rebel. Government and society and the establishment will always be at odds with him.

The priest got anxious. And he said, this does not make sense: how can there be any saints without my approval?

Christianity took foolishness to the extreme—they issue certificates of sainthood from the Church. In fact, in English the word saint, “saint,” is taken from a Greek word whose meaning is sanctus: one who has received sanction. One who has received approval from the authorities, a certificate—he is a saint. The English word “saint” is a joke. The Hindi word “sant” does not come from the English “saint,” nor does “saint” come from the Hindi “sant”—remember this. They look alike. The English “saint” comes from sanctus; it means one who has received approval from the authorities, by the state, by the Church, by the establishment. The Hindi “sant” comes from sat—truth. One who has known the truth, who has become one with sat, is a sant. For that there can be no approval, no certificate.

The priest was angry: without my permission? Because in Christianity edicts are issued every year—how many saints have been made! Names are in the edicts. These men’s names had not even appeared. But daily reports kept coming; the crowds increased. People started going from the cities; attendance at churches decreased. The saints had created a frenzy. At last the priest too had to go: I must see!

He went, seated in his motorboat. They were simple people; seeing him, they stood up. His robe, his glittering golden stars, the decorations on his chest given by emperors—his whole manner was imposing.

Those who are empty within, create an imposing manner. Those whose inner being is like ash, not like flame, collect Padma Bhushans, Bharat Bhushans, Bharat Ratnas and who knows what titles; by means of them they get a little feeling of soul—borrowed! Even that soul is given by others—name, rank, prestige conferred by others.

Seeing him, the three saints stood up. All three bowed to him.

A saint is always ready to bow. He has known the delight of bowing, the joy, the ecstasy of bowing. He has caught the secret of bowing.

At first the priest was afraid in his mind: who knows whether these rebellious saints will bow or not, agree or not. But they were straightforward village farmers. To take hold of them would not be difficult. In a stern, cracking voice he said: What uproar have you created here? Why are such crowds coming?

The three said: We have done nothing. We have not called anyone. In truth, people’s coming creates great obstacles in our prayer. It will be a great kindness if you will stop them. For years we were in great bliss—no one knew us. There was this lake, these mountains, and we. It was great fun. Now with these crowds we are very troubled. You will be very kind. And we are not any saints or anything. But no matter how much we say it, people will not believe. The more we say we are not, the more the crowds grow.

The chief priest relaxed. He said, nothing to worry about. They are very ordinary people. He asked them: There was obstruction in your prayer? What prayer did you do?

The three were a little embarrassed. They said: Please don’t ask that. We are uneducated; we do not know how to pray. And we have not learned prayer from anyone. We are absolute rustics—be sure of that. So we made up our own prayer.

At that the priest became even angrier: have you ever heard of such a thing, that anybody and everybody makes up a prayer? The Church’s prayer is fixed. Are you Christians?

They said: Certainly.

Then how did you make a prayer without permission? Tell me the form of your prayer.

They were very shy. Of course, can anyone tell another his prayer? Prayer is heartfelt, personal, intimate. To tell one’s prayer to someone would be like standing in the middle of the marketplace and making love—it would be vulgar, unbecoming. Love wants privacy; prayer wants even more privacy. Not a whisper of it should reach anyone. Because as soon as another hears, its intimacy will be lost.

That is why a mantra is whispered into the ear, so that no one else hears it. And the guru says: do not tell your mantra to anyone. You may be surprised—there is nothing special in the mantra. He whispers in your ear: chant Ram-Ram, Ram-Ram. Now, is this something not to be told? Everyone knows it.

No, that is not the point of its being known or not. The mantra is so private and solitary—do not say it to anyone. Because in saying it, a little display will creep in. And where there is display, things become false. Jesus has said: let your left hand worship and your right hand not know. Let your left hand give alms and the right not get wind of it. Give so silently that even your own hands do not know—no slightest sound.

So they began to say: Please do not ask this. If you ask, we will have to tell. But we do not know anything; we have made up a homely kind of prayer. And you will laugh and make great fun of us. God tolerates it—because he knows we are foolish, ignorant, sinners. But the people of this world will laugh a lot.

The priest stiffened even more. He said: You will have to tell. If it is wrong, I will correct it. If it is completely wrong, I will give you the proper prayer—sanctioned by the Church. Speak!

When he would not relent, they spoke. They had made a small prayer. Christianity believes that God has three forms—as Hindus believe in the Trimurti, Christianity believes in the Trinity. So the three said: We have made a little prayer—that you are three and we are three; have mercy on us. Now is that any kind of prayer! That’s a joke. You are three, and we are three—they too were three—what more to say? You are three and we are three—the matter is settled. Now have mercy on us. And there is not much more to say than this.

The priest too burst out laughing. The seriousness broke. He said: Utterly foolish you are! Never do this again. Is this any prayer!

He then recited to them the long prayer that was sanctioned by the Church. They listened very devoutly, but said: It is very long; we will forget it. Please say it once more. He recited it again. Still they said: We will be much obliged if you repeat it once more—so that we can remember it. If we forget any word, or a mistake happens, we will be in trouble. What has been wrong so far is one thing; let there be no mistake hereafter. So the priest recited it three times. He thought: these are absolute idiots—one has to repeat the prayer three times! He arranged everything properly and, very pleased with himself that he had brought three lost ones onto the path...

Only fools take on the idea of bringing the lost onto the path. Only fools think that people are astray and must be brought to the path. The wise one shares what he has found, but not with the intention of bringing anyone onto the path. Who can bring whom onto the path? People wander by their own freedom; they come to the path by their own freedom. Who can bring whom?

But the priest, puffed up and joyful that the journey had not been in vain, that his visit had borne fruit, thought: Now this nuisance will stop. I will go back and tell people, Are these any saints? They are village yokels.

This is just what that priest would have said to Dadu, to Kabir: these are all rustics. Is there any proper method in their prayer? The scholars of Kashi kept thinking of Kabir as an unlettered lout. Are these any ways to pray?

But when the priest was in mid-lake and was returning very pleased, having done a great deed—having taught those three saints the prayer that he himself did not know how to do, which he had never done, only repeated words, memorized—if only prayer were a matter of words! How simple it would be. In the middle of the lake he became alarmed: behind him something like a storm was approaching. He could not understand; the boatman could not understand either. Never had they seen such a thing on this lake. What was happening? When the storm came a little closer, he saw that the three saints—the rustics—were running over the lake towards him. They did not sink into the water. They were walking on the water as if it were a road.

All three came up close and folded their hands: Please stop! We have forgotten that prayer. Kindly tell it to us once more!

At that, the priest’s eyes opened too. Sometimes even the blind open their eyes. Seeing this majestic happening, it became clear to him who the fool was. Are these rustics fools, or am I the fool! This time he bowed at their feet. He said: Forgive me. Your old prayer is just fine. There is no need of our approval; it seems you have already received his. Who are we? We are middlemen, shopkeepers. You have a direct relationship with him; forget us. And pray for us too! And when you now say, You are three and we are three, then say, You are three and we are four—add me too—have mercy on us.

No, prayer cannot be given by anyone to anyone. Your prayer will be like you; my prayer will be like me. Your neighbor’s prayer will be like him. Prayer will arise from the uniqueness of your heart. Let it arise. Become like small children. Even before God, why go prepared? What is hidden from him? What form are you going to show him? What is there to perform—what language and grammar, what rhythm and meter? Nothing at all. There, your direct feeling will be understood. If tears come, cry—that will be your prayer. If laughter comes, laugh—that will be your prayer.

The Zen fakirs, in the morning, their prayer is only to laugh. A Zen monk gets up in the morning, stands from his bed, looks toward the sun, places both hands on his hips, bows toward the sun, and begins to laugh. It is madness. Sometimes they roll on the ground for hours.

An American traveler was a guest of a Zen monk in Japan. When he saw this scene in the morning, he said: What kind of madman have I come to! He began to arrange his things, to pack his bags. People asked: You came only last night—where are you going?

He said: I had thought I was going to a wise man. This fellow seems mad. In the morning I saw him looking toward the sun, and he began to laugh and titter. There was no one there, no joke had been told; there was no question of laughter. And then he rolled on the ground. For an hour he was drenched in sweat. And so joyous—I have never seen such a madman who is so joyous. Those who are not mad remain very serious. Only madmen ever laugh.

But they said: Stay; ask him before you leave. You do not know—this is the prayer of Zen monks. This is one way of prayer.

When they asked the monk, he again started laughing, rolling on the ground. He said: You have started the same thing again! Last night we could barely sleep. We laughed in the morning, and now you have started the same thing again. And he rolled and laughed. And he said: Laughter is our prayer. Before God we offer ourselves in laughter. And the morning must begin with laughter. Why set out in the morning with a sobbing face! And in the morning itself we make a bond with him through laughter—then he keeps us laughing the whole day; from place to place he makes us laugh.

Laugh—and that too will become prayer. Cry—and that too will become prayer.

Remember, tears have no necessary connection with sorrow. It is a false association mankind has made. It has been implanted in everyone’s mind that tears are related to suffering. Someone dies—and you weep. Some loss happens—you cry. You go bankrupt, your house burns down—you cry. You have altogether forgotten that tears have no real connection with sorrow.

Sometimes laugh properly—and you will find tears flowing from your eyes. Sometimes dance in complete joy—and you will find currents of tears flowing. Tears have nothing to do with sorrow. Tears are connected with excess. Whenever any mood becomes excessive, it turns into tears. Sorrow in excess becomes tears; joy in excess becomes tears.

But humanity has been deprived—some false notions have been planted: Do not cry! Crying shows sorrow.

Have you ever seen someone laughing and weeping together? There will be great movement in his prayer. He will laugh for God and weep for himself. Or his laughter will become so extreme that his laughter will begin to flow through tears—overflowing! Tears mean: overflowing from the brim. So much feeling has thickened within that there is no way to hold it inside. It overflows the vessel. Tears are divine. And if you weep for God—whether you weep out of sorrow or out of joy, out of bliss or out of pain—crying will become prayer. Laughter will become prayer.

But Buddha neither laughed nor cried. His prayer is silence. That is his prayer. For you, it may fit—or it may not. Meera danced. Would you tell Mahavira to dance? It would not fit. That personality is not one to dance. When prayer struck Meera, she danced; her instrument was ready to dance. The hands of God touched; the notes were struck; the strings vibrated. Chaitanya Mahaprabhu danced; he kept dancing. Buddha sat, Mahavira stood. For them, that was prayer.

Each person’s prayer will be like your thumbprint—different. It cannot have a collective form. That is why I continuously say: there cannot be prayer in a group. Prayer is a private petition, utterly personal. Your entire personality will cast its shadow on it.

If you tell Meera: Sit silently and pray as Buddha sits!—you will put Meera in trouble. Her prayer will not happen. Because she will have to keep constantly alert that her body does not begin to dance. For as soon as she comes into a state of feeling, the body will dance. For her, dancing is like breath. If you say: Do not dance; keep the body straight, keep the spine erect, sit just like a stone corpse—and in that posture pray! Then Meera’s prayer will not be able to happen at all. You will drown Meera. Because whenever prayer comes, she will begin to dance.

If you tell Buddha to dance, tell Mahavira to dance, tell Patanjali to dance, saying only then will prayer happen—look at Meera, look at Chaitanya!—they will all shake their heads. They will say: That will not be for us. And if you make us dance, our serenity will be lost.

When God plucked their strings, there arose the music of emptiness. When he plucked their strings, all movement became still—as if not a single ripple remained on the lake.

Remember, I am not saying Meera is right; I am not saying Buddha is right. Do not keep accounts of who is right or wrong. Keep only this account: what is right for you. Then your path will not be lost.

For each, religion will be unique. It must be. You are not willing to wear someone else’s clothes; you will not put your feet into someone else’s used shoes; you will not eat from someone else’s plate. Why do you borrow someone else’s religion? On the body you do not like to wear another’s clothes; they proclaim poverty. Why do you want to drape the soul in another’s garments of prayer? They will proclaim great poverty. There you will have to go exactly as you are. God never repeats.

Once it happened, I was sitting on a platform and a swami was giving a lecture. He was an angry man, as swamis often are. For those who have repressed many desires, those desires turn into anger. Only one outlet remains—anger. He had said something, expounded the doctrine of rebirth. A man kept standing up and asking twisted questions. He seemed a scholar too—quoting the Vedas, reciting the Upanishadic aphorisms. And he put the swami in a fix. His whole intent was to harass him. The swami began to get angry. At last the man asked: Swamiji, can it be that in my next birth I take the form of a donkey, as you are explaining in the doctrine of rebirth? The swami got his chance. He said: No, God never gives you the same form again. You are a donkey already. Now again...

The swami said it in anger, but I liked the point. It is true. God does not make two people alike. Nor will God make you the same again. God is ever-new. His inventiveness has no limit. His creativity has no limit. Every day he fills new colors, every day he gives birth to new songs, every day he breathes new life. He does not repeat. He is not tired; he has not run out. God is bottomless. His creativity is infinite. No one like you has ever been made, and no one like you will ever be made again. Therefore no fixed formula can be your religion. There is no arrangement in any religion for you. You will have to discover your own religion.

Krishna has said something very sweet to Arjuna: swadharme nidhanam shreyah, paradharmo bhayavahah. It does not mean: Die in the religion of the family you were born into and never accept another’s religion. It is not about Hindu, Muslim, Christian. Swadharme nidhanam shreyah! Krishna is saying: In the religion of your own self-nature, even if you get lost, even if you die, it is blessed—because in that way you will find yourself. Even in disappearing, you will find yourself.

Krishna is giving you the deepest formula of life: as you are, there is no one like you; there can be no comparison. You will not fit any line drawn beforehand. Do not become a line-fakir—because no line has been drawn for you. You have to draw it. There is no royal road on which you can set out with the crowd. You will have to make your own footpath. And not even such a path as is found ready-made, made by someone before. No. This field of life is like the sky. Birds fly, but footprints do not remain; no footpath is formed. In the sky of consciousness too, no footpath is made. Buddha walks, Mahavira walks, Meera dances and moves—but no footpath is formed. A royal road is out of the question—where the whole crowd can walk and political parties can hold their rallies. There are no royal roads in religion; even a footpath is not found ready-made.

Then how is a way made? The wise have said: by walking and walking the path is made. You yourself walk and open up a little way. As when you are lost in a jungle and there is no path—what will you do? You will walk, you will search, you will cut the bushes, you will make a way.

Your way is not going to be of use to anyone else. Because no path is prepared beforehand; it is prepared just as you walk. And remember another thing: as much as you have walked becomes void, lost in the sky—it does not remain behind. Therefore there is no convenience of walking behind someone else.

Religion is the art of being oneself.

And therefore your so-called religions are not religion; they are politics. Hindu politics, Muslim politics, Christian politics—all politics. They have nothing to do with religion. Religion belongs to the individual; politics to the crowd. The crowd has no soul—only noise, slogans, and uproar. The individual has a soul.

On this earth, the sins the crowd has committed, no individual has ever committed. Be a little cautious of crowds. Wherever there is a crowd, escape from there.

There is a certain pleasure in going with the crowd, because all responsibility disappears. There is a certain intoxication in drowning yourself in the crowd—like alcohol. So watch: when a crowd of Hindus goes to set fire to a mosque—look, what ecstasy there is! When Muslims go to demolish a temple—look, what pace there is in their feet, what enthusiasm! As if they were going to participate in the great festival of life, as if they had received an invitation from God. Look at the gleam in their eyes—excited for war, ready to be violent, ready to burn, to loot. But look a little around them—what waves of excitement are moving! They are going to do a great deed! If you join that crowd, your individuality will be lost. You will have accepted another’s religion.

Krishna says: Paradharmo bhayavahah. That which is another’s—be afraid of it, be wary.

And the great irony is that everyone has accepted someone else’s religion. Jains accept Mahavira’s religion. It was absolutely perfect for Mahavira—otherwise how would Mahavira have arrived? But those who follow him do not seem to be arriving anywhere; they only seem to be harassing themselves. Another’s religion is dreadful.

Millions have accepted Buddha’s religion—crores. They do not seem to be arriving anywhere. Otherwise the earth would be full of Buddhas. Becoming a Buddhist is not becoming a Buddha; becoming a Jain is not becoming a Jina. It is a deception. You have trusted counterfeit coins.

Your Jinahood, your Buddhahood, your Islam, your religion will arise from within you. Your Veda is waiting to be written—you will write it, only then will it be written. Your Upanishads are waiting to be born—they are hidden in your womb. They will take birth only if you give birth. Your Gita has not yet been sung. Only if you sing it will it be sung. And your Gita no one else but you can sing.

So do not ask me. For I have not come to give you a Gita. I have no desire to hand you any Upanishad. I am singing my song. Let it only give you the idea of singing—that is enough. But sing your own song. I am doing my prayer; let it only give you the taste of prayer. But make your own prayer. Who am I to give? And any prayer given by me will go stale. You will repeat it, but what happened to me will not happen to you—because I did not repeat anyone’s prayer. I did not walk on anyone’s royal road.

Therefore I tell you: be alert! Not Buddha, not Mahavira, not Krishna—no one’s royal road, no one’s made footpath is for you. Not even mine. Otherwise you will go astray.

Do not ask for a prayer at all. When a small child feels hungry, what does he do—does he ask? Whom would he ask? And even if someone told him, he would not understand the language. A child is born from the mother’s womb—does he ask the doctor, Now what shall I do? I am hungry. He cries. He has never cried before. In the mother’s womb there was never a chance to feel hunger.

It is inherent—when hunger comes, you will cry. When the thirst for God arises, you will pray. If even a little longing for truth appears, tears will begin to flow; you will begin to dance, to laugh—something will happen. Your prayer is lying inside you, just as the possibility of crying lies in the unborn child. You have brought your prayer with you. It is hidden in your blood, bones, flesh and marrow. Just give it a chance to manifest. Prayers taught by others are suppressing it; its neck is being throttled. You are killing it.

Remove the rubbish of others that lies upon you—so that your pure privacy can manifest in its complete purity and nakedness. A small child cries; when hunger comes, he cries. The mother comes running. You cry, and God will come running. Become like a small child.

I am not saying: if you do not know how to cry, then cry. You will miss. Laugh! If you can dance, dance. If you can sit silently, sit silently. If you feel like lifting your eyes to the sky and talking, then talk; speak. Whatever seems right to you—what feels natural, spontaneous—let that become your prayer. You have brought your prayer with you. I do not teach you prayer. I only remind you of this much: let it not happen that you die and your prayer does not get born.

My words will seem difficult to you. Because you have become accustomed to cheap things. You want me to give you a prayer, and the hassle is over. You go home, repeat it every day, and go to sleep. You do not want to search for anything. You do not want to take even a single step toward God. This very attitude is opposed to prayer. My words seem difficult because you will have to search. People have been feeding you religion with spoons. You have even forgotten your own hands, that with them you can lift food. Others have chewed it and put it in your mouth. It was spit-out, but it required no effort.

No—I am not ready to do such a thing for you. I have no fixed prayer for you, only pointers toward prayer. If you understand those pointers, you will find within yourself that diamond which has always been there, waiting for you. I do not give you a path to walk; I give you only understanding, so that you can make your own path.

If the acceptance of sin truly happens, self-abasement can never be born. Self-abasement arises because you do not want to accept, and yet you are forced to accept. Understand the difference between these two.

What you want is to be supremely wise. You want the world to know you as a great knower. Within yourself you already believe you are; only others have not recognized it yet. In time they will; people are ignorant, foolish—that’s why they don’t see your great wisdom. Otherwise, of course, you are supremely wise.

There is an Arab saying: at the final moment of sending each creature into the world, God calls them close and makes one last joke, whispering in their ear, “I have never made anyone greater than you.” And each person carries this within all life long. If he tells anyone, people laugh—because God has played the same joke on them too. They, too, have been told, “I have never made anyone greater than you.” So how can they accept that you might be the one, when they already are? And greatness can’t be twofold! You’re also afraid to say it to others because you know no one will accept it. And when others say it to you, you don’t accept it either. The tussle continues.

Ego does not want to admit there is sin; ego does not want to admit there is theft; ego does not want to admit there is darkness, wrongdoing. If, in this refusal, you are compelled to admit, then self-abasement is born; self-reproach is born. The meaning of self-reproach is that you never wanted to admit; you still do not want to; but life’s compulsions have wrung an admission out of you.

Or it may be this: listening to someone like Dadu saying again and again, “A thief in every tiny measure, an offender of yours each moment,” a greed may arise in the mind: “If saying such things brings union with God, then fine—let’s admit it.” That is just you being clever. “If by admitting I can get God, then I’ll admit.” But you have not actually admitted; out of the greed to get God you say, “Alright!” This will not be your inner confession. So you will say, “I am a thief,” while inwardly knowing it is not really true.

Tolstoy writes that one morning he went to church. The wealthiest man of the village had arrived even earlier. It was dark inside. Some special holy day had brought him there. Hands folded, kneeling, he was praying, “I am a sinner, I am a thief, I am dishonest. What sin is there that I have not committed! You are forgiving; forgive me.”

He did not know someone else was listening. In the dark, Tolstoy had heard him. When a little light began to seep in and the man rose, he saw someone standing there—recognized it was Tolstoy. Tolstoy was from the nobility, famous, a world-renowned writer. The man thought, “This is trouble. A writer—now this is... hard to escape. He’ll tell thousands. A writer means someone who trusts in gossip. He’ll write it. This is a mess.” He came close and said, “Remember, if you heard what I said to God, you heard it wrong—because that was a conversation between my God and me. You had no business being in the middle. Even if you heard, forget it. If you remember it or it goes anywhere, I will file a defamation suit. You will be in trouble.”

Tolstoy said, “I don’t understand. You were just saying—‘I am a great sinner, a great thief, ignorant, a wrongdoer; please forgive!’ So you were wrong?”

He replied, “Don’t worry about right or wrong. I wasn’t talking to you; keep that in mind. And in the marketplace no one should come to know this. Otherwise, you will be in trouble.”

What was this man doing? Was he truly confessing? No. Now he was frightened—he had been cheating even with God. He was being crafty with God too. He was saying to Him, “We have heard the saints say that if one confesses like this, You are attained; alright, let me try saying it.” If the village came to know, it would hurt him deeply. His ego would be badly bruised.

And remember, until you are ready for everyone to know, there is no meaning to saying it to God. Until you recognize the truth—“This is my reality: I am a thief”—your words are empty. Whenever I claimed, I became a thief. Whenever I called anything “mine,” I transgressed the boundary line of God. All belong to God, all is God’s; nothing is mine. Whenever, knowingly or unknowingly, I drew a circle of “I, me, mine,” I drew a false line. Every line I have drawn is a wound upon the chest of God. The day this is seen, that day you will no longer be seized by “sin.” On that day, by accepting your reality, a supreme peace arises—because the inner struggle stops. You won’t make a guilt of it; you won’t hide because of it. In truth, we hide after doing wrong because we don’t want to appear wrong in people’s eyes. Guilt arises. The one who says, “I did wrong—what else could I have done? I was unconscious, in a swoon—what is there to hide?”—the one who bares himself naked before all, all his guilt is washed away. He attains supreme peace.

Only in that peace is the possibility of God’s descent. Worthiness is born. Acceptance of sin gives birth to worthiness. And if it seems to you that acceptance of sin will breed self-abasement, the meaning is clear: you are not accepting sin. You are accepting in order to accept. But you have not seen the truth—that an unconscious person, what else can he do? Whatever happened through me was all that could happen.

The feeling of being “a culprit” is also an experience of ego. When you feel, “I am guilty,” what are you really saying? “I did what I should not have done. It was unworthy of me.” You are saying, “My image is pure, bright—and I have done something that left a black line.” Because something happened contrary to the ego-image you cherish, guilt is born. Guilt is the shadow of ego.

If you say, “What else could I have done? It was dark; I was blind; I was unconscious. What happened had to happen; otherwise what could have happened?”—when you feel so helpless that there was no other way, then acceptance dawns. There is a deep peace in acceptance.

You are in a dark room, you grope and bump into a chair. What could you do? Can you truly say, “If I had wanted, I wouldn’t have hit the chair”? Did you bump into it on purpose? No one in the world collides on purpose.

This is a deep matter; try to understand it carefully; much depends on it. Whenever you think about the past, “If I had wanted, I could have acted otherwise,” you are thinking wrongly; ego has entered.

Yesterday you were angry. Today you think, “If I had wanted, I wouldn’t have gotten angry.” That is false. Nothing other than what happened could have happened—because what happened happened through you. Given what you were, only that could happen. There was no other way. Now today, after the fact, you have become very wise. You say, “If I had wanted, I would not have been angry.” Now guilt is arising. Ego says, “How could someone like me—a great man, ever tranquil—how could I become angry!” Ego says, “If I had kept just a little awareness, controlled myself, it would not have happened.” Ego says, “Now let’s take a vow for tomorrow, swear in the temple that we will not be angry.”

But you will get angry. Tomorrow too, and the day after too. Because the ego that gives rise to anger—you are still preserving it. In truth, yesterday’s anger had made two things possible. One, which Dadu points to: had you done it, a revolution would have happened. You would have said, “What else can I do! I am a sinner from birth upon birth; I am a thief, I am asleep, full of negligence. What else could I have done? I cannot even say today that, had I wanted, I would have acted otherwise. How can I say that? Yesterday, when I did it, I was completely unconscious. And even now there is no guarantee—if someone insults me, who knows that I will not again become unconscious? All this clever talk arises when the state of anger is absent.”

After anger, everyone becomes wise. After sliding into lust, everyone starts thinking of celibacy. After greed, thoughts of merit arise. After sin, repentance follows as naturally as a shadow follows a man. But no sin stops because of it. Repentance is not the opposite of sin. Repentance is preparation to sin again.

You got angry and fell in your own eyes—because until then you thought you were non-angry, forgiving. By repenting you reinstall your image upon the throne: “See, I repented! Micchhami Dukkadam!” You went and asked forgiveness: “See what a humble man I am. A mistake happened; I corrected it.” Now the image within you, which had wobbled, has been steadied. The pride that had begun to hurt—“I became angry”—has been pacified. The image returns to the same pedestal it occupied before the anger. Repentance is the companion of anger.

Dadu says: do not fall into repentance, because by repeatedly repenting you recreate the capacity for anger, for sin. Rather, see and feel: “From me nothing else can happen.” Let Him do something; that is different. “From my doing, nothing will happen. I have done enough: I have been angry and I have repented; I have done bad and I have done good—but from beginning to end, to this day, merit has not happened.” I have tried everything. It is not that I haven’t tried to do good; I have. But even when I do good, it turns out to be wrong-doing; it is not merit. I have recognized my condition. My sense of being the doer has fallen. “Now, only if You do, can anything be. I leave it entirely to You.”

Acceptance means: “I open my entire ledger before You. I have kept no second set of books. I open everything—now You see. I have done it all; I have lost on all fronts; I have researched every which way. Whatever I did—when bad, it turned bad; when good, even then it turned bad—because the doer was the same.”

This is a very deep truth. You think you can do good or bad because goodness and badness, you believe, belong to actions.

They do not belong to action; they belong to the doer. It is like a neem tree saying, “Granted, I have produced many bitter leaves; if I want, I can produce one sweet leaf.”

Your actions surround your life like leaves. You are the root. If the root itself is poisonous, how will you produce a sweet leaf? Yes, you can paste a sweet label on a bitter leaf. That is possible—no obstacle there. Inside, the bitterness will remain. Perhaps you can coat it with sugar. Inside, the poison will remain. Whom will you deceive? At best, yourself. But this deception will not work before God.

Dadu says: I have tried everything—good and bad. But since I am wrong, since I am asleep, unconscious, since I am a neem tree, the poison in my roots reaches every leaf. Now only Your grace, Your forgiveness—there is no other way.

There is no self-abasement in this; there is only acceptance of truth. This is authenticity. Dadu understood the secret: “I was doing, but I never noticed that I, the doer, am wrong; so whatever I do will carry the shadow of my wrongness.”

Ordinarily, even a sinner thinks, “If I want, I can do virtue.” A thief thinks, “I will donate.” Somewhere there will be a flood, somewhere an earthquake—certainly; then I will give charity. If nothing else, elections will come; I’ll donate to political parties. Later I’ll get the license—another matter! For whoever gives, gives to get. Even when he donates, he keeps accounts—how many times over will God return this? Priests tell people, “Give one coin; you’ll get a crore times back.”

Keep some account! Such interest is not available anywhere. Give one and get one crore? Keep it within limits at least! But the greedy are blind. In the hope of getting a crore, he gives one. But he gives only for the crore. Therefore, he is not really giving. It is charity only when it is given without expectation, without longing for fruits—given for the joy of giving, with nothing to get. It is not that such a person does not receive; such a person receives a crore-fold. But that is secondary; it is not his concern.

So the scriptures are not wrong when they say, “Give one; receive a crore times.” The mistake happens when we start giving the one in order to receive the crore. The one who gives one does receive a crore-fold—but that is an outcome, not your craving for fruits. It happens. As your capacity to give grows, your capacity to receive grows. The more you distribute, the more God showers upon you—because you have become skillful in distributing. The more you hoard, the more you shrink. God’s doors also close.

Understand it like this: draw water from a well, and a thousand springs seep in and refill it. Do not draw water, the springs do not work; they remain shut. Gradually silt collects, filth gathers, the well stinks and becomes a cesspit. A full well that is never emptied rots.

A miser is such a stinking well. The well that keeps giving, new springs keep coming; it never rots; it remains ever fresh. Give, and you will remain fresh; clutch, and you will die—become stale. And for the fresh one, the doors of life open in a thousand ways.

Scripture is right; you understand it wrongly. You are wrong—what else can you do? Even if you read the Gita, you will understand only what you want to understand.

Dadu says: see clearly that the question is of the doer, not of the deed.

Our common belief is that sometimes a bad man also does good deeds. And because of this, we also believe that sometimes a good man also does bad deeds. This belief is fundamentally wrong.

If a man is good, he simply does not do bad deeds. His deed may look bad to you—that is your interpretation. From a good man, a bad deed simply does not happen. It would be like a mango tree bearing neem fruit; it does not happen. That is not the law.

And from a bad man, good deeds do not happen; they cannot. There is no guilt in this. For the neem to recognize, “I am neem,” carries no guilt. It will only stop the useless attempt to sugar-coat itself. Then it will surrender at God’s feet—as it is. God is ready to accept even your poison.

There is a story of Shiva: he is Neelkanth—the blue-throated. It is a story about the Divine.

The gods and the demons churned the ocean. They did it to obtain nectar. Word had spread that nectar was hidden in the depths. So they churned the ocean—a very difficult act. But the first emergence was poison.

Whoever goes in search of nectar will first meet poison—because poison is what you have been hiding; unless you pass through it, nectar cannot be found. Whoever sets out to be religious will first see his own irreligiosity—poison. Whoever sets out to be virtuous will first see his sin.

That’s what Dadu is saying: “A thief in every tiny measure. I am your offender.”

Before the arising of saintliness, before the arising of nectar—poison. Because poison is what we have kept hidden till now. The nectar was within, we did not know. Whatever poison we wished to hide so that no one would know, we hid it within. Had we hidden it outside, someone would have found it; so we hid it inside. Now layers of poison have accumulated.

It’s a very sweet parable: poison first appeared. The gods and demons both panicked, for neither was ready to drink it. Both had been after nectar—that’s the fun of it. Here the difference between good and bad men is not much. The god looks good on the surface, the demon looks bad on the surface—but the intense longing of both is the same. Both are asleep.

No one was willing to drink the poison. They were frightened: what to do now? And the ocean would be offended if the poison was not drunk. If it has been brought forth, drink it! Terrified, they prayed to Shiva to find a way. Shiva drank the poison. Hence his name Neelkanth—the poison turned his throat blue.

So even today we worship Neelkanth. The worship is foolish; the poor blue-throated one has neither done anything nor has any hand in our troubles. But the symbol is precious. Shiva drank the poison. The poison did no harm; rather, he became more beautiful—Neelkanth.

God will drink your poison. Do not indulge in guilt. Just open up; lay it in the open. Do not hide; confess. The more you hide, the more you will wander.

Dadu is not trying to create a sense of guilt. The wrongdoing is already there. But you have always believed wrongdoing lies in acts. Dadu says: wrongdoing lies in the doer. Once this recognition dawns, no emotion of guilt arises. The disposition toward wrongdoing does not arise either. Nor does self-abasement.

If you believe wrongdoing lies in acts, then the self-abasement of guilt is born—“I am not really a wrongdoer, but I did this wrong act, that wrong act. I am a good man who committed bad deeds.” The good man’s image and the bad deed do not match; from this mismatch arises a huge sense of guilt—“How could I do this!”

Mahatma Gandhi has written in his autobiography—and that event influenced his whole life; Dadu would not have approved. His father was ill; Gandhi was pressing his legs. Near midnight he grew tired and went to his room. Gandhi’s uncle came and began pressing the father’s legs. An hour later Gandhi’s father died. Then Gandhi was in bed with his wife. Someone knocked: “Your father has passed away.” A sense of guilt took root in him: “My father was on his deathbed and even then I could not stay away from sexual desire.”

But this is meaningless. It was not decided that his father would die that very night. Every day Gandhi would press for a while and then leave; that night he did the same. And from a father’s illness, why should a person stop loving his wife? If it becomes so—that because a father is ill people stop loving their wives, and because a father dies, love ends—then there will be neither sons nor fathers in the world.

But Gandhi could not forget it. A deep, poor, guilty feeling arose. So Gandhi spent his life trying to practice celibacy, also imposing it on others in his ashrams—because his own guilt pained him. Whenever he went to his wife, his father’s death would come to mind. The two things got linked by coincidence.

Why did Gandhi’s guilt arise? Because Gandhi believed: “If I had wanted, I would have kept pressing his feet. If I had wanted, I would not have gone to my wife that night.”

But I say, it could not have been otherwise. What happened was all that could have happened. This is hindsight—wisdom that even the most foolish possess after the fact. Gandhi thought, “I did wrong.” From an unconscious man, only wrong can happen. Right happens only in non-unconsciousness. In unconsciousness, only wrong happens. Then that wound formed; all his life he tried to get free of it—it never left, even to his dying breath.

If self-reproach is born, it causes great pain, and that wound never heals—because self-reproach has a trait: it keeps trying to look at the wound again and again. By repeatedly picking at it, it reassures the ego: “Granted I did a wrong act—but I am a high man. I am a great soul; only one deed went wrong.”

I have heard: a Sufi fakir did a small thing. A beggar came. He had one dinar in his pocket, a single coin; but he said, “No, I have nothing; go on.” Later he remembered, “That was a sin.” It is said for forty years—until he died—every morning he scourged himself with whips because he had told one lie. His fame spread far; people came from distant places. He became a great saint—“Never seen such a man! Such a tiny matter, not worth so much noise; the sin wasn’t that heavy.” People say “go on, there’s nothing here” to beggars without even thinking.

A Marwari was saying to a beggar, “Go on, brother, there’s nothing here.” The beggar said, “If not money, then give a piece of bread.” He said, “No bread either; go on.” The beggar said, “If nothing else, give an old cloth.” He replied, “There’s no one here, and there’s nothing here; you go on.” The beggar said, “Then what are you doing sitting inside? You come along with me—whatever I get by evening, we’ll share.”

People just say such things; they don’t think. The mind is unconscious; it is merely fobbing off—“there’s nothing.” It has no real meaning.

But that fakir tormented himself for forty years—fasts, prayers, worship, austerities, pilgrimage to the Hajj, whipping himself—tormented himself thus.

One night, the day before his death, he dreamt that he had died and was being taken to hell. He said, “This is the limit! For such a small matter—and a matter not even big—I have to go to hell? And I tormented myself so much—beat myself.”

He said to the angels, “First let me petition before God, then take me to hell—because this feels a bit excessive. People would even say to me, ‘If for such a small sin you torment yourself so, what will become of us? Have some consideration for us too!’ Others had pity on me; and God has none?”

He was presented before God. He filed a huge complaint—as saints always do, because they always keep accounts of what they have done. He said, “Listen! For forty years I have whipped myself so many lashes daily; I kept so many fasts of Ramzan; I ate one day, the next day not, for the full year—forty years. I did not sleep at night; I cried, I prayed. Crawling on the ground, I went on Hajj; my knees were flayed, my body crippled. And my sin wasn’t so very big: I had merely said to that beggar... What bad luck he showed up; he ruined my life. And now I am going to hell!”

God said, “We are not concerned with what you said to the beggar. That could be forgiven. But there is no way to forgive what you did for forty years. Who does not make mistakes? A mistake can be forgiven. But you did not want to ask forgiveness, so you did all this.”

Understand this. Shocked, he awoke. He could not believe what the dream had revealed—the whole life was made clear.

Your sins will not drown you; your attempt to be virtuous will drown you. In truth, trying to do virtue as the opposite of sin is an attempt to avoid asking forgiveness. “We did wrong; we will set it right ourselves. But we will remain in charge. If we did bad, we did; if we did good, we did. We ask nothing of You. We make no prayer to You.”

You are trying to escape prayer. Then there is difficulty.

Open your books and lay them out. Say to Him: “Given the way I was, this is what could happen. Now, wherever You send me, I agree. Hell is hell; I have no complaint. If I receive, it is purely Your grace; I did not deserve, and You gave.”

That is why Dadu insists: “I do not ask of You because of my worthiness; I ask because of Your capacity to forgive.”

This is the difference between a seeker and a devotee. The seeker says, “I have done wrong; I will settle it myself.” The devotee says, “Wrong has happened through me; I am wrong. Whatever I do to settle it will only make it worse. So I place everything before You. You settle it.”

A devotee has no search. Where the search of the inquirer and the practitioner ends, drops, there devotion appears. A devotee does not seek; he loses himself. He does not go to find God; he goes to erase himself.

The inquirer asks, What is truth? He only asks. He thinks: What is truth? What is God? This is a question to which some wise man somewhere must have given some answer. He thinks God is a question that an answer will resolve. He relies on intellect. If an inquirer continues on that path, he becomes a philosopher. Slowly, circling around some question, searching and searching, he settles for some answer—not because the answer has been found, but because one gets tired. Even searching has a limit; a person gets exhausted. Tired, he accepts any answer.

I have heard of a philosopher who had the habit of talking to himself. A friend asked, “This I don’t understand. You don’t talk to others; you stay silent. But whenever you are alone, you talk to yourself. Is this just a habit, or is there a reason?”

The philosopher said, “There are two reasons. First, I like to talk only to an intelligent person; and I like to listen only to an intelligent person. So there’s only one solution: I talk to myself. I like to listen only to an intelligent person, and I like to speak only with an intelligent person. There’s no other way but to talk to myself.”

So, little by little, the philosopher becomes satisfied with his own words, thinking he has become wise. After asking for a long time, he gets tired of questions, because questions create restlessness; then he settles on some answer—not because he has found it; nobody has ever found an answer through intellect. No journey is more unsuccessful than philosophy. Nothing is more futile in this world than philosophy. But how long can one go on being troubled? He keeps asking and asking, then he settles.

If you look closely at any system of philosophy, you will find that the final question stands exactly where it was. It never gets resolved. But whoever has accepted that philosophy becomes blind to that one spot. He leaves aside a single fundamental question; the rest he thinks are answered.

If you ask Jain philosophers why the soul is suffering, they have an answer: it committed sins. How will it be liberated? They have an answer: by accumulating merit it will be freed. You can ask them all sorts of questions—ask but one not at all. That one is their blind spot.

Every philosophy has one blind question. They themselves want to avoid it, because if it is brought up, they will have to start thinking all over again. The question is: How did the soul come into the world? Never ask the Jains that. Because… why is it here now? Because it sinned in past lives; fine. Someday it will be liberated because sinning will stop and merit will accrue. But the question is: how did it come into the world in the first place? It must have come sometime. Billions of births ago perhaps, but there must have been a first birth. How did that first birth happen without sin? Or can sin occur without coming into the world? Without entering the world, how would sin be possible? Circumstances are needed for sin. So how did the first soul descend? Don’t ask a Jain that; otherwise he gets uneasy. He says, “You are an atheist.” Then he starts abusing you; he won’t answer.

Ask Shankaracharya, ask the Hindus. They say, all is maya, all a dream; there is no substance in it. All this is false. Only God, only Brahman, is truth. Don’t ask them where maya came from if Brahman alone is truth. From truth, only truth can emerge. Don’t ask where maya came from. Then they’ll be annoyed: “Now you are being obstinate, argumentative.” They have no answer. They are blind to this.

It is told in the Vedas, the Upanishads: King Janaka convened a great debate. He had a thousand cows lined up. Their horns were gilded and studded with diamonds: whoever won the debate would take them.

Great pundits gathered. No knower would have come, because a knower has no faith in disputation. Scriptural debate is the procedure of the dull, a children’s game. But great scholars arrived. Then, later, Yajnavalkya came. He was a super-scholar. So great that when he arrived at noon, people had been waiting for him to start the proceedings. He came with his disciples. The cows were sweating. He said to his disciples, “Look, drive these cows to our ashram; I will settle the debate. Whoever wins will get them; victory is certain. Don’t worry.”

He had the cows driven off. Janaka stood there too, at a loss for words. What could he say? It was also true that Yajnavalkya would win the debate. And he had almost won—until a woman ruined his case.

And that it was a woman who undid him is also worth pondering. With a man, if you debate, you more or less know which path the argument will take. Both are men; you understand each other’s minds. Debating a woman is difficult. Every man who has ever argued with a woman knows it. Her logic is unfathomable. She can leap from here to anywhere. You say something, and she hears something else. You point out one thing; she understands another. No man wins against a woman; he just bangs his head, buries himself in his newspaper, and thinks, “This can go no further. There’s no substance in this.”

So the story goes that a woman named Gargi stood up at the end. At first Yajnavalkya thought, as men tend to think, “A woman—what is there to worry about? We shall settle this.” He had vanquished great men. But right there the mistake happens.

It’s the same mistake Morarji and Jayaprakash made. The matter wasn’t big; it was simple. Just one mistake: a woman’s logic moves in a different way, unrelated to a man’s. Had Morarji and Jayaprakash fought, one would have won; there would have been no quarrel. Both would have understood clearly. In a chess game between two men, each can foresee the other’s move; both minds adhere to the same logic. With a woman, there’s trouble. She may refuse to make any move at all and flip the board. That’s what happened: the very game was ended. Now all the players are sitting in jail.

Yajnavalkya fell into just such difficulty that day. When Gargi stood up, he thought, “What’s there? I’ve seen many Gargis.” But if he had had even a little sense, he should have remembered. He had two wives; had he learned anything from them, he would never have made this mistake. But people forget what they learn.

Gargi questioned him. The questions seemed simple. She asked, “On what is the earth supported?”

Yajnavalkya laughed. “Is this a great question? The scriptures say the earth is supported by elephants.”

“And where do the elephants stand?” she asked.

Here Yajnavalkya started. “The elephants? God supports them.”

“And who supports God?” asked Gargi.

Yajnavalkya said, “Gargi, be silent! Otherwise your head will fall off. You have gone into an over-question.”

That is anger. It is not an answer. When does an over-question happen? When you touch a philosopher’s wound, the very thing he himself hasn’t been able to resolve. So long as you do not ask up to that point, he can explain the rest at length—how many elephants are holding things up, how big they are, how God supports them—he’ll tell you everything. Just don’t ask the last question. Over-question means: a question toward which the philosopher has made himself blind for his own convenience, to escape restlessness. He does not look at it.

That is why it is such a delicious phenomenon that every philosopher immediately sees the other’s mistake, and no philosopher sees his own. All philosophies can refute others, and cannot defend themselves. In refutation, their skill has no end. In defense, they are utterly unarmed—because the other at once pulls the issue to that very spot.

As soon as you see the other person getting angry, know that you are nearing the place where he has closed his eyes.

An inquirer never arrives if he remains in inquiry. He becomes a philosopher; he can even win great debates, but he misses the real question. Its answer is not found by inquiry.

If the inquirer is defeated in inquiry and understands that this search never completes, that the question keeps remaining—however far you push it back, in the end it still stands as it is—when the inquirer sees this, then the practitioner is born. Then he says, Thinking will not do; practice will. Then he meditates, undertakes austerities, fasts, uses all kinds of methods to “master” it. The kundalini should awaken, the chakras should open, lights should be seen. All this begins to happen.

If the practitioner remains a practitioner, tangled forever in these toys of inner experience—powers arise, siddhis come. The practitioner’s final end is at siddhi. He can even perform miracles. But all those miracles only feed the ego. Up to the last moment the practitioner remains filled with pure ego; it does not dissolve. If he remains a practitioner, he becomes the purest egoist. But he does not attain God. All siddhis come; only the state of the perfect remains unavailable.

If someone tires even of that—has seen all the multicolored inner lights; seen the cosmic play within; seen energy rise; seen all the inner scenes and dramas—they too are dreams. However sweet, however pleasing, they are only dreams. One who tires even of that becomes a devotee.

Devotion means: now he says, Nothing will happen by my doing. Two avenues were possible: by the mind, inquiry; by the body, austerity. Both have been tried. Both show that an end does not arrive; You have no limit. Now I enter a third direction: erasing myself, surrender. Now I drop myself. Now I do not want to do anything. I only want this: that whatever You want to do, do.

One who bids farewell to the doer—that one is a devotee. Devotion is not an act; devotion is the complete defeat of the doer. Devotion means: nothing will happen by doing. Now I let myself go in Your current. Wherever You take me, I will take that to be the shore. I have no destination now, no goal.

And only in such a moment does the devotee become God. In this moment all obstacles break. The doer is no more, the ego is no more. When the ego goes, descent happens. That alone was the obstacle, that alone the veil. Becoming a devotee, the devotee becomes God. Without becoming a devotee, if you chase God with a stick, the faster you run, the more He evades you.

God is not to be sought; one is to be lost in God.

That’s all for today.