Sakshi Ki Sadhana #5

It seems right, but it appears impractical.
It is necessary to understand this clearly: in human history, whatever has appeared impractical to us has proved to be auspicious, and what we have called practical has, astonishingly, thrust us into sorrow, violence, and suffering. Certainly, what you are doing must look practical to you. But what is its result in your life? You are doing what you take to be practical—but what is the outcome? Nothing except misery and anxiety. Inevitably, anything different from that will at once seem impractical—not because it truly is, but because what you have long called practical is different from it, opposed to it, unfamiliar. And before entering any unknown direction in life, one has to leave the familiar ground. Only by leaving the known, the familiar, does one step into the unknown. Surely, at some point one must be willing to be a little impractical.
For example: it appears perfectly practical that if someone abuses me, I should abuse him back, twice as heavily. It seems practical that if someone throws a brick at me, I should answer with a stone. When Christ told people, “If someone strikes your right cheek, offer him the left as well,” the statement must have sounded utterly impractical.
But it is this practical idea of answering a brick with a stone that has produced four and a half thousand wars in three thousand years. In three millennia of human history, four and a half thousand wars have been waged on the very practical maxim: repay a brick with a stone, and if someone blinds one of your eyes, blind both of his. Think a little: if, in three thousand years, humankind goes mad four and a half thousand times, there must be some fundamental error in this practicality. And this is no small madness. In the last two world wars we murdered a hundred million people—yet we continue to say that what we think is practical. Now we are nearing a time when the whole of humankind may be destroyed; still we will insist that our thinking is practical. The entire life has become a hell, but we console ourselves that we stand on practical foundations in that hell. And anything that seeks to take us out of this hell seems impractical. Of course it will, it must. If it did not appear impractical to you, you would have done it long ago, and life would already have changed.
So, please, have a little doubt about your practicality. Your practicality is lethal—for your life, and for the life of the whole race. Question it a little, reflect on where this practicality has brought us.
No doubt Christ’s words sound utterly impractical. Christ said: forgive those who hurt you. It is indeed an impractical statement. On the day he was crucified, when he was raised upon the cross, those who had nailed him said, “If you have some last words, speak them.” And he said: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
That is not what should have been said. One should have prayed to God to burn them to ashes, consign them to the seventh hell, throw them into fire, boil them in cauldrons, and torment these wicked ones. But he spoke a most impractical sentence: forgive them, for they know not what they do. They do not even know what they are doing; they are without awareness. Certainly such a statement seems impractical. But a thing does not become wrong, nor unfit to be lived, merely because it is impractical.
So my request is this: if something seems right to you but appears impractical, then it is more reasonable to understand that what we have been calling practical has been our misunderstanding. As for new experiments—when we begin them in life they will be unfamiliar, but if one undertakes them, they gradually become familiar. And then the reverse begins to happen.
Let me tell a small incident.
Gandhi was in Champaran. The owner of an English tea estate—Gandhi had started some agitation there—told a thug: “We will give you five thousand rupees; kill Gandhi. Do not be afraid of a court case; they are our courts—we will save you there as well.”
This news reached Gandhi’s friends. They came to Gandhi and said, “This is the situation. You rise at four every morning and walk in the dark; it is not good. From tomorrow, do not go so early. Go after sunrise. Anything could happen.”
Gandhi used to rise at four every day; that day he got up at three. His friends were asleep, counting on four o’clock, that when he rose, they too would get up. Gandhi rose at three and went straight to the house of the man about whom it was said that, for five thousand rupees, he wanted to have Gandhi killed. At three in the night, seeing Gandhi, the man could not believe his eyes. He must have blinked several times, rubbed his eyes to clear them—was this a dream in the dark of night? How could Gandhi be standing before him! Gandhi said to him, “You are most kind, because no one would be willing to pay five thousand rupees for this body once it is dead. A man’s body is worth very little.”
Perhaps you do not know: compared with any animal, a human body is worth less. An animal’s body can be sold and will fetch some money. In a human body there is nothing of value. If you calculate, you will get hardly four and a half or five rupees’ worth of materials; not more than that. Now the times are a little more expensive—perhaps seven and a half or eight rupees—but not more than that.
Gandhi then said to him, “Five thousand is a lot. No one will agree to pay so much for me. And I need that sum for the Harijan Fund, so give me these five thousand rupees, and then shoot me. And there is no one present here; no question will be raised, no complication will arise, no trouble will be created.”
The man was terrified. It is impossible to believe such impractical words. He was utterly shaken—what to do, what not to do? He could think of nothing except to touch Gandhi’s feet. He touched Gandhi’s feet and said, “Until today I had thought the whole story of Jesus Christ purely fictional. By appearing at my door today, you have made it clear that Christ must have been— and that, hanging on the cross, he must have said, ‘Forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ You have made me a Christian.”
Gandhi returned, but that man was transformed; he became a different man. Surely, no “practical” man would agree to act in such a way. But the world moves forward because of those who are willing to be a little impractical. And the world falls into pits every day because of those whom we call practical. You will be doing a great kindness—to yourself and to others—if you move a little away from your practicality and dare to be a little impractical. Remember: a small effort to be impractical can bring revolution to life.
So what I am saying concerns the fundamental sutras of life; there is nothing impractical in it. Whoever lives them will discover—nothing could be more truly pragmatic. But we are very clever people. To avoid changing what we are doing, we invent a thousand excuses, and the greatest excuse is to say, “What you say is exactly right—but it is impractical.”
Can right things ever be impractical? It is astonishing! If right things are impractical, then wrong things must be practical. In that case, it would be better to choose the right and the impractical rather than the wrong and the practical—because the choice is always between right and wrong. One should have the courage to choose what appears right to one. There will be a little discomfort in choosing the right, a little inconvenience. But if one is not willing to accept even a little inconvenience and discomfort for truth in life, if one will not pay at least that much price, then life cannot be truthful; it will remain untrue.
Therefore, if anything I say appears impractical to you, reflect upon it, contemplate it, experiment a little. You will not find it impractical. For what is the point of saying impractical things? What purpose, what meaning would there be? From my side, I am not telling you anything impractical. If from your side it appears impractical, then think it over a bit, try it, see. The moment you experiment, you will realize that what we were doing—that was the impractical thing.
Other questions have also been asked. Usually, taking one question deeply becomes long; then it would not be possible to answer them all.
Yesterday, or this morning, I said: those who have said that woman is the gate of hell—have said wrongly. Someone asks: Osho, our experience is that once we get entangled with a woman, the doors of hell open, and then the cycle of birth and death begins. On what basis do you say that woman is not the gate of hell?
He has asked plainly and directly. But he should also think: the woman who got entangled with you—did you not open the gate of her hell? You are entangled with a woman—this is a very weak argument; the woman too has become entangled with you.
But why do you call this “entanglement” at all? Perhaps you call it entanglement—and that is why the gate of hell opens.
We do not take life simply. Our consciousness has become very complex; we take life with great difficulty, with great complication. We have suppressed all the naturalness of life, its spontaneity, beneath false doctrines and false beliefs, so deeply that we have descended into an astonishingly foolish way of thinking and spoiled the whole of life.
I was a guest in a house. The lady of the house said to me, “I respect my husband very much, and yet we quarrel every day. I honor him—as I have been taught, to see the husband as God, I try to see him so. But still the conflict goes on, twenty-four hours a day. It has become very difficult; life is hell.”
I said to her, “Perhaps you do not know: those very people who talk so much about heaven and hell are responsible for this hellishness.”
She said, “How?”
I told her, “We teach even very small children to feel disgust toward sex—we teach condemnation. We tell them sex is sin. A girl becomes twenty, and then she marries; or a boy becomes twenty or twenty-two, and then he marries. For twenty years, the girl has considered the sexual urge sinful and vile. When, after marriage, her husband comes near, it is no surprise that this man appears sinful to her, and that feelings of disrespect and disgust arise toward him. In a country where there is condemnation toward sex, a wife cannot truly respect her husband, nor can a husband respect his wife. In both minds there is disgust—intense disgust. And toward what?
“The power of sex is the root of all creation; all life unfolds from that very center. Plants, animals, birds, flowers, human beings—all are born from it. If any power of Paramatma is at work in the creation of the world, it is the power of sex, sex energy. Whatever creation is happening, whatever creativity is, is through that. When we look upon that primal power with condemnation, it is no wonder that frustration arises, that sorrow is born. And when we regard it with condemnation, with fear, with unease, then we also fight it; and while that urge is working at the very center of our life, we are simultaneously drawn to it and fleeing from it—we go near it, and we want to go far. In this tug-of-war, in this conflict, if life becomes a hell, neither the woman is at fault, nor the man.”
We have stopped taking life as it naturally is—as nature. And it is most surprising: if we could take it naturally—if the husband could give love to the wife, and the wife to the husband, unimpeded, unconditional—not because of some compulsion or condition, but freely and simply—then the most important thing would happen: the deeper and denser the love, the more the sexual relation dissolves. The entire power of sex can be transformed into love. It transforms into nothing else. Those who begin a war against sex make their lives excessively sexual; they become filled with mental debauchery. In the mind they are adulterous, while outwardly they are afraid, anxious, fighting. Then if a perpetual hell is created, what is surprising in that?
Neither the wife creates hell, nor the children, nor the husband. No one creates hell. When our way of seeing life is fundamentally wrong, hell is created. Hell is created by our way of seeing. And the way we become habituated to seeing life, life becomes accordingly. And when we see life wrongly, and it keeps going wrong—panic increases, restlessness increases—everyone begins to blame the other, never oneself. The husband blames the wife; the wife blames the husband. This tendency to lay the blame on the other is so vile, so criminal, that there is no measure for it. Then an exchange of condemnation goes on in which no resolution is possible.
You abuse women; if women write scriptures, they too will abuse you. They have not yet written; they still read and accept your scriptures, so they agree with what you say. But the day is not far when women will write scriptures, and they will write that because of men the whole world has been destroyed, the cycle of coming and going continues, and that men are the very gate of hell. And when man and woman conceive of each other as the gate of hell, what else will the world become but a hell? What else can it become?
Life becomes as we begin to take it. Life becomes as we begin to see it.
My vision is: one who truly wishes to be simple and serene will accept, with great blessedness, the nature of life—the nissarg—with profound gratitude. Where is the wrong? Where is anything wrong? Nothing is wrong. Flowers are born from seeds. Have you ever gone and said to a seed, “You are infernal—flowers are born from you”? No, you have never said this. And you do not know that seeds are born from flowers in the same way that human beings are. Sex is at work there too, in the flowers.
But we are strange people! We will say to the flower, “How beautiful!” Butterflies are flying, carrying the pollen from one flower to another. Those are the embryos of birth. The flowers release their pollen into the winds; it travels to other flowers. All of that is sex activity. Yet we are delighted by flowers; we write songs for butterflies and for blossoms. But when a child is born in human life—through the same wondrous arrangement—we condemn that very process.
Know this: whenever a man and a woman meet in love, in that moment both disappear, and the creative force of Paramatma begins to work in them, and a child is born—a new life appears. There is no greater mystery than this. And yet this greatest mystery—from which life sprouts and spreads—has been crippled and vilified by who knows which fools; they have filled our minds with condemnation toward it. When there is condemnation within, naturally distorted children will be born.
Understand this well! The decline of humankind is happening because when both mother and father harbor disgust in their hearts toward sex, toward maithun, the children born to them cannot be conceived in purity. They cannot be born in sanctity.
I say: if our understanding of life becomes deep, we will hold toward sex the same reverence we hold for prayer in a temple—indeed, even more. Even more, because in a temple there may be only a stone idol; perhaps Paramatma is not there. But in the intimacy of sex, in maithun, the power of Paramatma is palpably at work—life is taking birth. A husband should approach his wife as one should approach a temple. A wife should approach her husband with a heart overflowing with prayer. If the relationship between husband and wife is suffused with prayer, purity, and meditation, the children born of them will be of an altogether different quality. From that purity, purity will be born; from that love and prayer, souls of a different order will evolve.
From a relationship soaked in disgust nothing noble can arise. Humankind has declined for this reason. The race is sinking day by day. The cause of this decline is not materialism, not Western scientists, not those who build airplanes, automobiles, or fine clothes. These are not the causes, nor are films to blame, nor any such thing. Behind the decline is our condemnation of sex. It is destroying humankind from the very seeds—from the very beginning, where birth begins, it is being deformed and made ugly. The emotions of both parents mold the new child. If both are so crippled within—seeing each other as hell, as conflict—and meet under compulsion and force, then naturally what is born cannot be noble, cannot be beautiful, cannot be true and auspicious.
Regarding sex, my feeling is of utmost reverence and purity; nothing is more sacred than this. We honor the mother, but we do not know; we honor the father, but we do not know—deeper than mother and father, what is the very source of creation? And how will you honor the mother if you condemn sex? How will you honor the father? And more deeply still—when you condemn creation itself, how will you honor the Creator? I cannot understand what logic this is, what mathematics: you say you will honor the Creator, the source of creation—and then you dishonor the primal act of creation.
In my vision, the primordial source of creation is not to be dishonored; it is worthy of the highest reverence. A wholly different kind of married life must be evolved. This marital life is diseased and wrong. And in making it wrong, the teachings of so-called religious sadhus and saints have played a part. A dangerous conspiracy has been afoot for two or three thousand years, grotesquely perverting humankind. And it is being carried on by those from whom we have expected the elevation of life. Their words—their dangerous and fatal words—are dragging life downward.
Does this mean that I am telling you to drown yourselves in sex in every way?
No, I am not saying that. I am saying: do not hold disrespect or condemnation toward the central source of creation. Then what will happen? When you begin to look upon that center, that urge, with deep love and purity, you yourself will be amazed. If a husband begins to look at his wife with profound reverence and love, not as the gate of hell—and likewise the wife—and if they accept, with love and honor, the very relationship by which they have become each other’s hell, then you will be astonished: as love deepens, as purity deepens, as prayer deepens, the creative power of sex will rise to higher planes and begin to manifest in new forms of creation. Perhaps then no children will be born of you; instead a song may be born, a poem, a statue, a service to others, the birth of truth, the birth of beauty. On new planes, creation will begin through you. Your life will become creative.
When someone finds higher paths of creation in life, the same creative force begins to express itself through new doors, and the door we call the birth of children begins to fall into abeyance. A transformation happens—an utterly new transformation. Therefore, in the lives of those in whom new doors of creation open—of love, of prayer, of purity—Brahmacharya enters of its own accord. Brahmacharya does not have to be hammered in. When it is forced, it is false; it has no meaning. In that case, a healthy, natural sexual life is far more appropriate.
You will listen to these things, you will understand. I do not insist that you accept them, because what I am saying is so different from what has been said for thousands of years—so contrary—that I cannot expect it to enter your understanding at once. But today or tomorrow, humankind will have to understand, because some mistake has been made; some fundamental sickness has gripped us.
Let me tell you: no one attains Brahmacharya by rejecting sex. Yes—one who discovers higher doors of creation attains Brahmacharya effortlessly.
I am speaking of how such a state of consciousness can be cultivated. The way is meditation. Today I have given three sutras; yesterday I said a few; tomorrow I will say some more. If, through these sutras, the mind becomes quieter and simpler, sex will dissolve from your life in a wondrous way.
This does not mean that all creation will disappear from your life. No; new doors of creativity will open. New paths, new dimensions will open. Much creation will become possible through you; many things can be born of you. But it will not happen in the way we have been thinking.

These notions handed to us as education are, quite astonishingly, upside down. If the radiance of life—ojas—awakens, semen is preserved on its own. But by preserving semen, ojas does not arise. From semen-retention, derangement can come, not ojas; madness can come, not ojas. But if ojas flowers in life, semen protects itself naturally.

So wherever the emphasis is, “Preserve semen,” that teaching is disastrous. Its net result is that ojas never arises, while life becomes terribly frustrated, ugly, and repressed. The communities that have thought in these inverted ways… To me, it looks like this: it is as if I say to you, “There is great darkness in this house. Throw the darkness out, then the lamp will light by itself.” If someone said that, we would say he is talking complete nonsense. Darkness cannot be thrown out. If we start throwing darkness out, we will break down and darkness will remain. The lamp does not light by chasing out darkness; yes, if the lamp is lit, darkness leaves by itself. The lamp does not light because darkness is expelled; when the lamp is lit, darkness simply is not found.

So I say to you: kindle ojas, awaken ojas—semen will be preserved by itself.

But we worry about preserving semen. And what will you do in semen-retention? If a person has not awakened ojas in life, if no inner flame of peace and light has been kindled within him, what will he do? He will suppress whatever sexual feelings arise in him, fight them, forcibly restrain them. In this restraining and suppressing, his mind will become distorted and fragmented. This suppression breeds anxiety and fear. There will be a constant dread that the dam might burst, that restraint might slacken a little and then trouble will arise—a blowout, a shattering. And it will blow out. And in trying to prevent that explosion, whatever measures he takes, his life will be wasted—and nothing else will happen.

I read once—an incident. A woman checked into a hotel. She was a brahmacharini, around fifty years old. In the name of religion she had kept her life tightly controlled. She took a room on the seventh floor. A little while later she phoned down to the manager: “A man has come here and is behaving very indecently with me. He is standing right in front of me, almost naked.”

The manager panicked—who had reached her room, what had happened? He did not think it wise to go alone. He dashed upstairs with two policemen. The woman was alone. He asked, “Where is the other man?”

She said, “Don’t you see? Right there in front!”

But in front there was only a window, and for half a mile there wasn’t even another building. The manager said, “We can’t see anyone. Where is he?”

She said, “Look at the building across.”

Half a mile away there was a house; nothing could be seen there. The manager said, “We can’t see anything.”

She laughed, picked up binoculars from the table and said, “Look through the binoculars. That man is standing on the roof absolutely naked.”

The manager was stunned: what a crazy woman! She had reported, “A man is behaving indecently with me!”

This is what happens when sex feelings are continuously suppressed in the mind: now she peers through binoculars again and again to see who is misbehaving with her, who is trying to break her restraint, who is laboring to drag her to hell. On a distant rooftop some man was simply exercising—bare-bodied, moving his limbs. Seeing this through her binoculars, she believed he was targeting her.

These are repressed minds, not minds that have attained brahmacharya. Such repressed minds are dangerous. And these very repressed minds spread denunciations about sex, which the common people pick up and repeat. They keep shouting, “This is hell, that is hell; this is bad, that is bad.” They are consumed with anxiety—astonishingly so! They, of all people, should have no anxiety.

Just now in Delhi many big sadhus gathered and declared: obscene posters must not be displayed; obscene posters should not be on walls; obscene films should not exist; obscene novels should not be published. I asked them, “How do you read these? How do you see these posters? Being sadhus, what business do you have with them? How do they even come into your view? And why are you so concerned?”

Certainly these things must be more visible to them than to you. When a sadhu walks down the street, the film poster that you perhaps did not even notice, he definitely does—he looks through binoculars. Looking is quite natural. The very tendencies he has suppressed in his mind keep springing up before him.

You have heard the stories: when monks and renunciates perform great austerities, heavenly apsaras come to seduce them.

You have gone mad! Have the apsaras opened some shopfront for seducing them? What madness is this? No apsaras come. The suppressed desires in their minds—when the mind slackens and grows weak—those very desires stand up as apsaras. There is no one there. If you go, you will not see any apsaras. But they are terrified to death, blinking and cowering: apsaras dancing all around them. These apsaras are imaginations born of a sick mind; they come from no heaven at all. Otherwise, who in heaven would be running a business of this sort? And who needs to ruin these fellows? Who is troubled by their austerities? But the tales say Indra’s throne starts to wobble from their tapas, and so he sends apsaras to spoil and destroy them. These are shapes born from deranged minds; nowhere do they exist. What they have suppressed rises before them with form; in extreme repression, things start to take shape.

This has gone on for thousands of years. We have never paused to ask what it means. Someone who is filled with peace, love, and joy—whose sexual urge has transmuted into the expression of love—will neither be visited by apsaras, nor dream of women, nor, if she is a woman, feel any need to look through binoculars at distant roofs to see which man is misbehaving. As the mind quiets, these distortions dissolve.

One thing: as love deepens, sex dissolves. The deeper love settles in the heart, the more sex dissolves. And the deeper the love in the heart, the more life fills with ojas. Other than love there is no ojas, other than love there is no radiance, other than love there is no beauty, other than love there is nothing that belongs to the divine.

But these so-called celibates, these guardians of semen, all these types—they are deeply afraid of love, terrified of it. And where there is fear, how will ojas be? Where there is fear, how can there be radiance? Ojas is where there is fearlessness, where there is abhay—no fear. Their state is very weak—very weak. And the very things they fight and suppress have become their life’s struggle; they are sucking away their life-breath.

I know hundreds of sadhus: when they meet me in public they ask about soul and God—“Is there a soul or not? Is there God or not? Did God create the world or not?” But when they meet me alone, in private, they ask about nothing but sex. In public they ask about soul and God; alone, they ask, “What should we do about sex? It is devouring our very life. It torments us constantly.”

This is natural—nothing surprising. It is absolutely predictable. Life unfolds through simplicity, not through repression. Whatever we suppress gathers within like a virulent germ. Today or tomorrow it will erupt and the mind will be in trouble.

Let me tell you a small story I often tell; then I’ll take the next question.

Two monks—in a Korean tale—were crossing a mountain stream. A young woman stood on the bank; she too had to cross. Alone, unfamiliar with the mountain torrent, she lacked the courage to wade across unaided. The elder monk reached first. It occurred to him: I could lend her a hand and help her across. He had not touched a woman in thirty years; he had built walls around himself, always kept his distance. The very thought—“I will give her my hand”—and in imagination the touch of hand to hand, and the thirty-years-suppressed desire sprang awake, the one pressed down with mantras and japa. It cannot vanish anywhere; it stirred. He felt a certain sweetness. Then he was frightened, remembering his restraint and renunciation: “What am I doing! Thirty years of austerity—ruined by the mere touch of a hand!”

And what is the worth of such austerity that is ruined by touching a woman’s hand? Will such austerity ever lead to liberation? What a mad mind!

But he thought, this will be a complete mess. He closed his eyes and started across the stream. The poor girl had no idea that this monk had fallen from heaven to hell in a flash; that his liberation was being snatched, the cycle of rebirth reopened. She stood there unaware; all his ledger-keeping was inside his own head. Eyes closed, he waded across.

But what happens by closing one’s eyes? With eyes closed, the woman becomes even more beautiful. With eyes open, what beauty is there in woman—or in man? And if the eyes were still deeper, what would remain but bone and flesh? And if the eyes were x-ray-like, there would be much panic indeed. But if the eyes are closed, then everything becomes very beautiful—everything. Closed eyes turn things into dreams. A woman who is not all that beautiful becomes, with eyes shut, a most unearthly enchantress—an apsara—manifest. An ordinary woman becomes an apsara the moment the eyes close.

So I say: open your eyes and look rightly at the woman—you can be free. Close your eyes, and then escape from woman is difficult—or if you are a woman, escape from man.

With eyes closed, he moved on. The woman appeared even more beautiful. She was just an ordinary village girl. His mind wavered again and again: should I go back? Why not offer a hand? What harm will it do? There’s no one watching! No one to inform the guru either. It’s no big deal. But then a second thought: thirty years of austerity—am I to ruin it over a trifle? Ah, this world is insubstantial; don’t get entangled. This is the very gateway to hell—he must have thought—the loop that will ensnare me.

Somehow he got across. On the far bank he was exhausted—because a mind in such conflict, such inner war, is bound to be tired. Then he remembered that his younger companion, another monk, was following at a little distance. He is inexperienced, naive—what if he too falls into the tangle of compassion to which I almost succumbed? What if he feels pity and tries to ferry the girl? He turned to look—and was shocked! The young monk was striding down with the girl on his shoulder! Fire flared in the elder’s chest. There were many reasons. First, he himself had been deprived of the chance to carry her—this was the fundamental one. Second, he had been deprived of the chance to sermonize. Third, great anger arose: “In my presence, without seeking my permission, what is this youngster doing?”

All old men feel this. They won’t let the young do anything without permission. And a certain jealousy starts in all elders toward youth, because much of what the young do, the old could not, and are no longer in any state to do.

It became very difficult for him. There was no remedy now. He thought, “I’ll tell the master today and have him expelled from the monastery. This is the very limit of sin!” He forgot that for so long he himself had been brooding on the same “sin.” “This is beyond tolerance!” Furious, he strode ahead; the younger monk followed. At the gate they met. The old man said, “Listen, this is intolerable. It cannot be hidden. I must tell the Master. The rule has been violated; the rule of mendicant life shattered. Why did you lift that girl on your shoulder?”

The young monk said, “I am very surprised. I set that girl down two miles back. You are still carrying her! I set her down; you’re still carrying her.” And only the one can truly set a thing down from the shoulder who never picked it up at all. Remember this well: only the one can set it down who never took it up. And let no one remain in the illusion that just because we did not pick it up outwardly, it is not on the shoulder.

The more the mind represses, the more things climb onto the head. Take things simply, know them simply, be utterly natural and aware toward them. Then there is no reason why life should not slowly be freed from all bonds and the consciousness attain supreme liberation. But those who have repressed can never be free. Their repression itself becomes their bondage.

So I say to you—my plea—take life very simply; accept its nature very naturally. And look at life with eyes open. With eyes closed, no one can ever truly see. Open your eyes wide and see. And whatever you find attractive—examine it that much more closely. You will find the attraction dissolves. If women appear attractive to men, do not run from women. If men appear attractive to women, do not run from men. Running makes attraction permanent. Attraction settles inside like a boil.

I see that when we know things in their full nakedness and truth, we are freed of them. So if you truly want to be free of a bondage, see and know that bondage in its full truth and simplicity—without doubt, hatred, or inner conflict. Surely, through life’s experience, observation, awareness—by looking and understanding without swoon—a time will come when the bonds and distances between man and woman will break and vanish, and there will be the vision of the self which is neither woman nor man. The gaze can lift beyond the body. But the more you repress, the more your gaze is shackled to the body. The more you restrain, the more you are bound; the more you run, the more you are afraid; the more afraid you are, the more shadows pursue you—shadows that, if you stop, stop pursuing as well. With eyes open you see: they are shadows—no life-substance in them. There is no cause for fear, no cause for flight. The one who flees gets bound; the one who transforms the mind becomes free.

Reflect on this. Otherwise, what is happening in the lives of countless people—their suffering—will happen in yours too. The hell they create with their wrong visions, you will create as well. Hell is nowhere else; each person manufactures his own.

There was a fakir. One of his disciples pestered him again and again: “You speak so much of heaven and hell—show me, sometime!”

The fakir kept putting him off. When the boy would not relent, he said, “Come today. It is the night of new moon. I will show you.”

The boy came. The fakir shut him in a small room. “Close your eyes. I will sit outside. When I say, ‘Go—you are in hell,’ you will reach hell; look carefully at what you see. Then I will call you back: ‘Return.’ Then I will command: ‘Go to heaven,’ and you will reach heaven; see that as well.” The boy sat down and closed his eyes in the dark. “Go—arrive in hell,” the fakir said. Then, “Return.” Then, “Go—arrive in heaven.” After a little while he said, “Return. Open your eyes. Tell me what you saw.”

He said, “I was in great difficulty. I saw nothing in hell and nothing in heaven. And you have said that in hell flames of fire blaze, and in heaven wish-fulfilling trees stand under which all desires are fulfilled—none of that did I see.”

The fakir laughed. “You will see only what you carry with you. If you take hell with you, you will see hell. If you take heaven with you, you will see heaven. Right now you are a blank page. You have neither hell nor heaven—what would there be to see? You must take along what you wish to see there. If you want to see the cauldrons of hell and the burning fires, you must carry them with you; and if you want to see the flowers and fragrances of heaven, that too you must carry.”

Heaven and hell are states of mind; we manufacture them. We do not go to them; we make them. They are with us, not far away. There is no geographical heaven or hell. If heaven exists anywhere, it is psychological—of the mind, the inner being. So if you see heaven and hell in this world, understand that you are creating them. This very earth, these very people, this very moon and stars—when a person learns to see rightly, heaven becomes available here; the divine is seen here; one is liberated here. And one who becomes enslaved by wrong seeing—these same flowers, this same earth, these same moon and stars, these same people—become hell, and here he is bound deeply.

There are many more questions; I will speak of them later—tomorrow. For now, we must sit for the night’s meditation.

I have deliberately troubled you from that side and brought you here—for certain reasons.

First, where we were sitting, there was no sound of nature around us. Here there are many sounds; many small voices are resonating. For meditation there were very few sounds there. When the mind begins to quiet, then even there many subtle sounds can be heard. But until that happens, here there is a vast music all around. This music will take you very deep.

Second, there we sat under a pandal—a canopy hammered and stretched by men. Men have stretched all sorts of pandals—of scriptures, of religions—and we have been sitting beneath them. That too made me uneasy. Here we will sit under God’s canopy. Here, nothing is man-made overhead. Above are trees, above is the sky, above is the moon, and the great world—the vast pavilion—is around us. When we are enclosed by little walls, the mind shrinks and becomes small. The more spacious the expanse around us, the more the mind dilates and travels. If a person looks at the sky with open eyes for a little while each day, his soul begins to grow. But we look at people’s little roofs and live beneath them.

A survey was done in London. They asked the children there, and it emerged that fifteen lakh (1.5 million) children had never seen a field; ten lakh (a million) had never seen a cow. What will happen in the lives of these children? They will become distorted. Never having seen a cow or a field—only houses, streets, speeding cars and smoke, trains—if that is all they have seen, their minds cannot rise above the man-made world.

So I wanted us to come here. Above are trees, moonlight, and a most wondrous world. And all around a resonant hum of life. Here, meditation will happen very simply, very wondrously. We become like that which we stay near. If you remain near flowers, their fragrance will enter you. If you stay near trees, your mind will begin to be as silent as they are. If you sit by the ocean, waves of that same vastness will touch your heart. If you sit by waterfalls, the waterfalls will pour into you. Whatever we dwell near continually begins to enter us.

But we constantly dwell near people, and we hear what people think, we know the thoughts people think. And what do people think? They read the morning paper; they talk of elections; of strikes; of fasts; of where riots have broken out; of where Hinduism is in danger, where Islam is in danger; they play cards, drink liquor, gamble, argue—these sorts of things. The more we stay among people, the smaller we become. We don’t notice our smallness, because we are surrounded by others just as small, and we feel content that “everyone else is like this too.”

This vast universe spread around us, apart from human beings—this vastness has not yet severed its relation with God. These plants are still closer to God than we are; these moon and stars are still closer; the chirr of these tiny insects is closer still; the silence of these hills is nearer to the divine than we are. Man has enclosed himself in the noise of his own making. Remove man from the earth, and still there is silence, an astonishing hush, an astonishing music. So I wanted us to be here and sit a little while in this peace and stillness.

As for meditation—very simple. Now let us all sit a little apart from one another. Make full use of this night. Something can happen—something can be born within. Sit a little apart—don’t worry about the cold or anything else. Keep some distance and let the mind receive whatever benefit this night can bestow.

See that you do not touch each other. Keep a little distance from people; man is a dangerous creature—let go a little of your attachment to nearness. Move a little aside. Yes, move a little—right now we are sitting quite crowded. If you won’t make even this space now, then with all that I am saying, where will you make space? Difficult! You don’t even leave a bit of ground!