Shiksha Main Kranti #8

Ask the mantra-scholars about that. What I am saying here is that the new arts are making uses that are absurd. Sculptures are being made of a kind you cannot call anyone’s statue. If you want to make a statue of “man,” it has to be made so that no one’s face appears in it—because if any face appears, it becomes someone’s; it is no longer of “man.”

So if you want to make a statue of man, it must not have my face, not your face, not anyone’s face. The moment there is any particular face, it becomes some person’s and ceases to be “manhood.” So we make a statue in which there is no one’s face—such a statue can be made; we imagined it would be a statue of humanity, but it won’t remain even of a single human. What I am saying is: it will not become of “humanity,” and what could have been of one person will also vanish; even that will depart. It will become faceless. In the attempt to make it of humanity, only the face is lost—and that is exactly what has happened.

Therefore all the experiments of new art are moving toward facelessness. All faces are lost there, and everything has gone beyond our understanding. And those who say, “We understand it,” say so either out of fashion or to avoid appearing unintelligent. The other dimensions of new art are such that you do not, and should not, understand them. The effort is that if you understand, the meaning falls into your grip; and if meaning is grasped, then the form is grasped, a form is made—finished. No, the whole endeavor is that it should not come into your understanding. But what cannot be conveyed with words you do understand—how will it be conveyed with words you do not understand? I am saying: when a comprehensible word cannot tell it, the incomprehensible word will not tell it either. What do I mean?

I mean that if we can become aware of the total impotence of the intellect—so that not a shred of hope remains in it! “Hoping against hope” has been going on for so long. Some people fall by the roadside and declare the matter hopeless—that is another story. But generally we go on nursing hope that we will find a way. If Kalidasa couldn’t find it, Ezra will. If the old sculptors didn’t find it, Picasso will. We are trying to find some way by which we can say the unsayable.

I am saying that the day a person understands that “as such this is absurd,” the issue is not that with some new device we will manage to say it; the issue is that it cannot be said. It is not that we will find better words—better forms, better poetry, better painting—no. What is, is not sayable. It is not that it has not been said up till now but may be said later—no, it simply cannot be said. The reality you speak of cannot be spoken. Then it means it can only be known, and it will be useful to understand the difference and the distance between knowing and saying. That which cannot be said can still be known.

Our trouble is that we keep trying to make what can be known also something that must be said. That is our entire problem. When Buddha says, “I have known nirvana,” we immediately ask, “Say, what is nirvana?” A man says, “I have known God,” and we ask, “Then speak—what is God?” If he cannot speak, we laugh: “Then you must not have known; if you had known, speak! And if you cannot speak, admit you have not known—because if it has been known, why can it not be spoken!”

I am saying: there is something true here. There is a human need, a basic need, that whatever we have known we want to say—because we want to make the other a participant in what we have known. If I go behind the house and see a flower bloom that makes me dance with joy, I want to come back and tell my friends, “A flower has bloomed there—it is blissful.” That is, I want to share a portion of joy. And not share a portion of sorrow. If I am miserable, I want no one to come—sorrow contracts. If I am joyous, I want to distribute it, to spread out, to tell ten people. It is absolutely natural that one who knows will want to say it; it is a basic need. But not all our needs are necessarily fulfilled. Even our basic needs need not be fulfilled.

We do know, and we want to say; and in attempting to say we search for symbols—because without them there is no way to speak. We search for symbols. The symbol is our attempt to indicate what we have known. But our attempt does not succeed. Art fails, poetry fails, sculpture fails—everything fails. And the greater the sculptor, the greater the sense of failure; the greater the poet, the greater the sense of failure; the greater the saint, the greater the sense of failure. A small one does not feel such failure; if it is a borrowed experience being repeated, then he can go on saying the standard words. But if the experience is truly yours, you will discover for the first time that there are no words—because the experience is yours, and you are happening on the earth for the first time in that way; and there are no words because no one has ever had an experience exactly like yours. Yes, if it is a borrowed experience—if, in a woman’s face, you too see the moon—then from Kalidasa onward everyone has been calling it the moon. You too can compose a poem in which a woman’s face appears moonlike. But that experience is very incomplete, stale, second-hand—handled by a thousand hands. You can say it, and another can understand it, because it is everyone’s experience.

But the more private the experience, the deeper it is, the more private it becomes. And the experience of the divine, being the ultimate, the extreme—there is no experience deeper than that—is utterly private; it is happening to you for the first time in your way. In that depth you find no words and no symbols. You try to make them. The moment you try to make them, the trouble begins: you say one thing, something else is understood; you tell something, something else is heard. Then an upheaval begins that continues for thousands of years. Take Krishna’s Gita—commentaries are still going on. Which means what he said has not yet been understood. There should be no need for commentary. Hundreds and thousands have been written, and people are still writing them—meaning the poor great man’s words are still in turmoil: “What did he say?” The commentary says, “He said this.”

Gandhi says, “He said this”; Tilak says, “He said this”; Vinoba says… Thousands keep telling us what he said. And the irony is: when he himself spoke and we did not understand, what will we understand when Vinoba or Gandhi or Tilak speak? And then there will be commentaries on them—what did Tilak mean; and there is no end to it. Still, symbols other than words reach deeper than words. For instance, I may not be able to say something to you, but I could stand up and hug you—and that may say something, because the body, touch, is far older than words.

Words are a very late arrival, and my words and your words can differ; but my body’s touch and your body’s touch cannot differ. It may be that what I cannot say in words, I pick up a tanpura and begin to dance wishing to say, “I am very happy.” You ask, “What is happiness? What kind of happiness?” Perhaps I dance, and you catch a glimpse of happiness. But these too are symbols. Still I cannot say what I want to say. When I tire and look at you and hear your applause, I will think you understood something; my outer dimension bore a small fruit. But what I wanted to say did not reach you. I may go away sad—the thing that was to be conveyed could not be delivered. Through dance, through art, through painting—everywhere we have tried to say something.

I am saying: we have tried to speak through symbols, but symbols have failed. We have not yet fully realized this. And I am not saying only that symbols have failed; I am saying symbols are bound to fail. The reason is that the symbol is not reality; it is something else.

I saw the sun rise one morning and was filled with bliss. Then I made a picture—drew some lines and made a sun. I brought you the painting and said, “It gave me great joy.” You looked, said, “All right,” and put it aside. Because after all, lines are lines; they are not the sun! And colors are colors; they are not the sun’s colors! However hard I tried, what I drew on a small sheet is a sound from a thousand miles away; it is not what was there.

No matter how successful the symbol becomes, it never becomes reality; the painting will never become the sun. Which is why symbols are bound to fail. Yes, but there is a danger with symbols—and that danger is, in a way, useful. The danger is that you may never go outside at all, because you think: the painting hangs in the house, so the sun hangs in the house—why go out? You remain entangled with the painting and never know the sun.

So far symbols have not communicated; they have obstructed. One clutches the Gita—the sun of the home is the book’s sun. Another sits at home clutching the Quran. Someone clings to Mahavira, someone to Buddha. For us, what are these great ones? Only symbols! What they spoke is all that has remained in our hands. What is Krishna for us? Only what he spoke; if his words were lost, Krishna would be lost—for us. Who knows how many great ones are lost who did not speak, or who spoke and were not captured—and so are lost! The symbol gets seized. Those who attempted it had wished to convey something through the symbol. The difficulty has become such that if—now dead—they could return, the first thing they would do is to snatch your religious scriptures away! They had thought they would say something, but could not say it; and those who could have gone to search for themselves did not go—because they assumed, “We already have the book.”

Art has failed, philosophy has failed, scriptures have failed, gurus have failed—and the reason for the failure is that truth can never be made into a symbol. Truth is truth, and if you wish to know it you must stand face to face. There is no way to bring a symbol in between. But in communication, symbols enter; therefore communication and realization are different matters.

Communication, if it does one thing—and this is my understanding—you may ask me: “Then why am I working so hard? If I hold that nothing can be said by speaking, why do I speak?” My entire answer is only this: by speaking, only this much of a condition can be created—that one day you feel that speaking is absurd, useless. Nothing happened—neither by speaking nor by listening. Only in this negative sense is communication useful: we keep knocking our heads and knocking our heads; then your head too gets sore. I say, “Stop this nonsense,” and you say, “Be quiet—now I don’t want to hear anything more.” If such a moment comes and you feel panicked and say, “This cannot be known this way,” then perhaps you step outside, leave the painting here—there is the sun! Then there is no question of our engaging in dialogue or not.

There is a lovely note in Rabindranath’s life. One night he was reading a book on beauty. It was two in the morning; reading and reading he became tired. In anger he flung the book down, blew out the lamp—and then stood up and began to dance. Because as long as he had been reading the book, he had not even noticed that outside it was a full-moon night. The moment he shut the book and put out the lamp, all the moonbeams poured in. In the cabin of the barge where he was, the moon was outside; so long as the lamp burned inside, it could not enter. When the moonlight came in, he began to dance, and he said, “What a fool I am! I wasted half the night reading a book to know what beauty is, while beauty was standing outside the whole time, knocking at the door: ‘Blow out the lamp, close the book, and I will come in’—but there was no way to meet me!”

Had I met Rabindranath, I would have told him: it could have happened that at dusk you fell asleep, and the moon would still have been standing outside. At least by reading until midnight you created a contrary state—“This is all useless; nothing is understood from it.” Only because you could fling the book, could you see the moon. The book could not tell you what beauty is; but the flinging of the book is a state of mind without which perhaps beauty could not be known.

That is what I am saying: philosophy has only one use—to harass you so much that one day you can fling the book. In that weary, impoverished state when there is no path, no direction, no hope—perhaps then your eyes will see That which is. It is there anyway; there is no question about that. If its being depended on my communicating it, there would be some danger. Whether I communicate or not makes no difference to its being—it is. The danger arises when we proceed as if communication will happen. Communication, in one sense, is impossible; intellectual communication is impossible—that impossibility is its very name. Then is any other communication possible? If not, what communication will you do? We can sit silently; but when we sit silently, there will be no talking between you and me. When we sit silently, there will be communion with reality—mine with my reality, yours with your reality.

If I put it this way: words orient us toward one another; silence orients us toward truth. When we converse, you look at me and I at you—we are entangled with each other. When words drop away, neither do I look at you nor you at me; then we are compelled to look at That which is. A moment should come in life when everything becomes futile. But it will not come unless there has been labor with words—unless the exercise has been undertaken.

Truth cannot be defined. What you quoted is a definition of our longing, not of Truth. Our longing is that Truth be like that—Sat-Chit-Ananda: being, consciousness, and bliss. This is the human wish: that being not be suffering—otherwise we are finished. If the world is suffering, and Truth too is suffering, and even liberation is suffering, then where shall we go? So we want a moksha where there is no sorrow at all; a moksha where there is no ignorance at all, only knowledge; a moksha where there is no darkness at all, only light.

This Sat-Chit-Ananda is not a definition of Truth; it is our aspiration. And our aspirations are very pleasing to us. Therefore, we love the scripture in which this is written, and if Vivekananda says it, he becomes a great master for us. The root reason is simply that our desires feel gratified. If a guru were to come and say, “Truth is very painful, utterly dark, and ignorance through and through,” you would say, “What need have we of you? Why are you here?” We already bear enough ignorance and enough suffering—if moksha too is the same, then there is no way out. Our desires are such: that the soul be immortal, that we never die, that there be only happiness and no sorrow.

But this is not a definition of Truth. My own understanding is that wherever there is bliss, there will also be new and deeper dimensions of sorrow—and there should be. The suffering we presently know is very shallow because the happiness we know is also shallow. In fact, their measure is equal. The day bliss becomes so deep that every pore trembles, do not fall into the illusion that sorrow will not be equally deep; that day sorrow too will be so deep that every pore will tremble. Our sensitivity grows on both sides equally. If a person has a great sense of beauty, he will have an equal sense of ugliness. It is impossible that one feels only beauty and not ugliness. They grow together. If someone delights greatly in cleanliness, then his pain in uncleanness will increase in the same measure.

But our longing wants a world where there is no darkness, only light. Fortunately, God does not fulfill our longings—otherwise we would be in great trouble. If there were only light, light itself would become unnerving. Even the joy we feel at dawn is earned in the darkness of night. And when the bliss of love arrives, the pain endured in hatred has also contributed to it. It does not stand alone.

Truth will be so vast that it will contain both sorrow and bliss, darkness and light, God and the Devil. Since Truth encompasses the whole, it includes immortality and it also includes death—complete death. Truth holds all that is. But we do not want to see the whole, because we are frightened by the implications of seeing it entire. We prefer to cut out and choose. These so-called definitions are our choices, our longings.

The rishis say, “Lead us from darkness to light.” In that prayer the rishi is, in a way, lodging a complaint against God: Why darkness? We want only light. As if saying, “You made a big mistake in giving darkness; I want only light, lead me to light.” But Truth is both darkness and light. It is life and it is death. These two that appear to us as opposites will be understood only when we can see them as the two ends of the same thing. When we can know such opposites together, then all fragmentation will depart from our mind; then no longings will remain, because longing will have no meaning. Then, when darkness is, we will know it is the preparation for light; when light is, we will know it is the preparation for darkness. When sorrow is, we will know that happiness is nearby; when happiness is, we will know—be ready, sorrow is coming. That will be our preparedness, and we will know: this is life. But longings are very pleasant; and under the name of religion, much that goes on is simply our wish-fulfillment—and we are the ones who suffer, we are the ones who are afflicted.

Bertrand Russell said something very fine: if the world were truly happy, what would become of religious teachers? Because it is the unhappy who set out in search of happiness. If the world truly became happy, who would…? Have you ever noticed that when you are in a moment of joy, no “why” arises—why the world is, why I was born, why God made this—heaven or hell or what? No questions arise. In joy, everything is accepted—as it is. There is not the slightest sense of any question anywhere. But when you are in sorrow, then all the questions begin to arise. And once questions arise, answers are needed. Those answers that suit our mind, we turn into religion.

A true answer does not become a religion; an answer that pleases the mind becomes a religion. And a true answer is not necessarily pleasing to the mind, because it is not necessary that Truth runs according to your mind. Yes, you can choose to run according to Truth. But Truth is under no obligation to run according to you. The answers that our mind likes, that feel right, that seem to satisfy us—those we adopt.

I am not saying there is no charm in such sayings; and Vivekananda’s words appeal to you not because they are true, but because they are agreeable to your mind. If they were not agreeable, you would not like them.

We have imagined such a thing. But our imaginings solve nothing. However much we may want to choose only happiness and reject sorrow, we fail to see that in choosing happiness we are creating sorrow. It is like a coin of which I want to throw away one side. I will go mad, because I have begun something that cannot be completed. I want to discard one side of the coin and keep the other. At the most, I can keep the side I prefer facing up and the other facing down—that’s all. But how long will I go on turning it over? Whatever I keep on top, I will soon grow bored of, because I’ll keep looking at it; and the amusing thing is that sorrow is not as boring as happiness becomes.

In fact, a sorrowful person is never bored. Only happy people get bored. Boredom is the characteristic of the happy. So you will be surprised to find that the more miserable people are, the less suicide there is. They seem less perturbed, less beset by worry, because the unhappy person has no leisure to be bored—he is busy at his task, busy trying to flip the coin. But when the coin has been flipped, what will you do then? Once you have pushed sorrow down and brought happiness on top, then what? And if you flip the coin again, below lies sorrow. So the moment someone becomes happy, his trouble begins.

If the gods have any suffering, it is boredom. Even in moksha, if there is any suffering, it will be boredom—and so much boredom that I don’t think a single one would remain in moksha; they would all have fled. We cannot even imagine their boredom, because where happiness is totally available, what will you do? The relish is in struggling with sorrow; happiness does not come, and all the fun is in the longing for it. And when it does come, after a short while we find ourselves asking, “Now what?” Then you will be surprised to see that a happy person starts looking for sorrow with his own hands; he devises tricks by which sorrow will arrive.

There was a dervish, Mulla Nasruddin. I keep telling his story. He is sitting outside a village at dusk, on a dark night. A man dismounts from his horse, sets a very large bag before Nasruddin and says, “In this are diamonds and jewels worth millions. I am ready to give it to anyone if I can get just a little happiness. I have searched from village to village; I cannot find happiness. I am utterly distraught. Should I die, what should I do? I have everything, except happiness. Someone told me there is a fakir, Nasruddin—go to him. Are you Nasruddin? I’ve come to you.” The fakir stood up and said, “Yes, it’s me.” The man said, “You want happiness?” “I want happiness,” said the man, “I’m ready to lose everything—if only for a single moment I can taste happiness.”

Hearing this, the fakir grabbed the bag and ran. The man cried out, “What are you doing? I thought you were a knower of God!” But when the fakir didn’t stop, the man ran after him. The village knew the fakir well. He began circling through lanes and alleys. The village gathered. The rich man shouted, “I have been robbed! I’m ruined! My life is finished! My life’s savings are in that bag and this man turned out to be a thief. He is no spiritual man—catch him and save me—I’m done for!” After circling the village, the fakir returned to the very spot and dropped the bag there, standing by the tree. The rich man arrived, hugged the bag to his chest and cried, “Oh God, thank you!” The fakir said, “Did you get a little happiness? This too is a way to get happiness. For you, this is the only way left. There is no other way for you—because what else will you do?”

What we want—that only happiness remain—is not possible. Even if it did, happiness itself would begin to hurt. Hence, the one I call truly seeing is the one who looks at life in its reality, not through the lens of desire. There are two ways: one, to view life through desires. When I say, “I want only happiness,” I am not concerned with life; I am only saying, “I want.” I do not ask whether life has any concern for me. I was not, and life was; I will not be, and life will be—and not a leaf will stir, not a wave will tremble. Nothing at all will happen. What concern has life with my being or not being? I am here for two moments and I say, “It should be like this, it should be like that.” When I see that I was not and everything was, and that I will not be and everything will be, then it is fitting to ask, “What should be?” And when I look at what is, I discover that sorrow and happiness are two sides of the same coin. When both are two sides of one coin, which will I keep and which will I discard? So I consent: if happiness comes, then for happiness; if sorrow comes, then for sorrow. And this consenting, this acceptability, lowers one into a joy we know nothing about. That joy is not the opposite of sorrow; it remains even in sorrow. It is not synonymous with pleasure, because when pleasure passes, it still remains. Even to call it “bliss” is a slight mistake. Therefore the Buddha, with a bit more discerning intelligence, did not use the word ananda but used the word peace, because in “bliss” somewhere the idea of pleasure lurks. However much we try to protect it, in bliss there remains a shade of pleasure. A quiet mind remains—whether there is happiness or sorrow—and it can remain only when both have been accepted equally, because both are. Nor do we have to make an effort to accept; rather, once it becomes clear that rejection has no meaning, the matter is finished.

But we keep imposing desires; that is why we have raised such religions, such gurus, who show us ways to gratify our desires. They tell us they will lead us to supreme bliss; we try to reach. We never even ask whether the very craving to become is the mark of a suffering person—and how can a suffering person be supremely blissful? By chanting a mantra? Can such a cheap trick work, that we obtain supreme bliss? We think we will gain supreme bliss by fasting, by not eating at night, by not smoking, by not drinking tea. If that is all the distance, then there is no difference between a miserable man and one supremely blissful—only the difference of cigarettes and betel leaf, a petty difference that no person of courage would care for. If the only difference between moksha and the earth is that in moksha people don’t smoke, don’t drink tea, and don’t go to the movies—if that’s all, who would want moksha? It makes no sense. The difference must be far more radical. Otherwise, it is no difference at all.

Difference means that where we are, two kinds of lives are possible: one that imposes desire, and one that accepts reality. That’s all. The one who imposes desire, whatever he does, will remain in suffering. It is not that the one who does not impose desires will have no sorrows—I am not saying that. Sorrows will come, but he will not remain in sorrow.

Desire is there, of course. What are we doing? We don’t even look at it. We try to see the world in line with it. Desires are part of reality. It is a fact that within me there is a wish to be immortal—this I should know. But instead of knowing this, I will clutch a scripture which says, “Yes, one must be immortal—guaranteed; those who are on our side will become immortal, those not on our side will perish!”

What I am saying is: man is unhappy, therefore he wants to find happiness. And since he keeps seeking happiness but never sees that happiness and sorrow are two sides of the same coin, however much happiness he seeks he will remain unhappy—and keep seeking happiness. What I am saying is that fundamentally he fails to see that what he seeks is not happiness; a basic mistake is occurring. The mistake is that he is rejecting sorrow and seeking happiness, whereas happiness is a part of sorrow. That is, I am seeking birth and do not want to die; I am seeking youth and do not want to grow old. This is a great difficulty. If I want youth, old age is part of it; it is simply youth on the decline. When the flood has come, it must recede; when morning has happened, evening will be. Now I seek the morning and want to be spared the evening; but the moment I seek morning, I have arranged for evening—now evening will come. If I seek only morning, then evening will be suffering, and all night I will seek morning; morning will come, and again the preparations for evening will begin—and I will suffer again.

And the fun is that neither your seeking brings the morning, nor does it bring the evening. Morning comes on its own, evening comes on its own. Your problem is that you are imposing on one—“let this remain”—and telling the other—“this must not happen.” Neither of them cares whether you are or are not; they will keep happening.

In life, happiness and sorrow wheel around; everything is moving. The moment you begin to choose—“I will live only with this”—you have begun your suffering; that is the path of suffering. When you become unhappy, you search for happiness with even greater force—and the more forcefully you seek happiness, the more forcefully you suffer. Then arises a vicious circle from which escape becomes difficult. This must be seen. And our trouble is that even when we ask why we are unhappy, we want to find some cause for the unhappiness: “We must have done something bad, some sin, therefore we suffer.” The other man is happy—“he must have done some virtue.”

Happiness and unhappiness are not related to virtue and sin. Happiness and unhappiness are related to the imposition of our desires—how intensely we live in the urge to impose. But one day disillusionment arrives. It becomes clear that nothing happens by imposition: morning comes and comes; evening comes and comes. Morning will still come; it’s not that it won’t. Evening will also come. But the sting will go, the pain will pass. And then, having lived the morning rightly, there is no reason not to live the evening rightly too. The point is: the one who has fully lived the morning will, by midday, himself say, “Now let evening come.” The one who has truly lived youth will begin to feel a longing for old age. The one who has truly lived youth will begin to long for old age. The one who has truly lived will also want to die.

Nietzsche said something beautiful: when the fruit ripens, it wants to fall. Once it is fully ripe, it wants only to fall. Only unripe fruits are afraid that they might fall; and because all our lives we remain unripe, we are afraid of death. Thus circles upon circles keep forming. Afraid of dying, we cling to the doctrine that says, “You will not die.” I am not saying you will die; I am saying: if, instead of imposing our desires, we concern ourselves with knowing what is, the matter will be complete—otherwise, it will not.

There is poverty, disease, suffering, exploitation—should we accept even all that? This is a very good question, and the more I reflect on it, the stranger an insight I have. First, this will appear contradictory, but it is so! The person who does not accept pleasure and pain at the personal level ends up accepting all the sicknesses at the social level. Take our country: we have never accepted pleasure and pain at the level of the individual. We are constantly seeking moksha—liberation from pleasure and pain. But at the social level we have accepted everything.

If you see this, the converse is also true: the person who accepts everything at the personal level will accept nothing at the social level. Only the one who has accepted totally within can be a revolutionary, because being a revolutionary involves the continuous possibility of suffering—for the joy of the revolution goes to others; the revolutionary himself does not get it. So only one who can accept suffering can create revolution.

When a person accepts himself as he is in all kinds of pleasure and pain, he does not have to make any effort to reject at the social level. No—his spontaneous behavior becomes such that he cannot accept at the social level. I am not saying he will or should refuse; I am saying it simply happens that way.

The one who lives in total acceptance on the personal plane lives in total rejection on the social plane. And the one who lives in acceptance on the social plane lives in rejection within, and keeps saying at his own level, “I am in pain; I won’t hear this; I won’t do that”—such a person ends up accepting everything socially. The reason is that the person preoccupied with doing everything for himself never develops any sense of society. The very notion, the consciousness of society, arises only in the one who is finished at the personal level—who has nothing left to do there, for whom the matter is settled, who has accepted that “what is, is.” Then what will I do? After all, I will do something. On the personal plane I am free of doing. So the energy of creation, of construction, of even destruction—where will it go? It will become active somewhere.

At the center of the person, where the work of energy is complete, that energy spreads outward and goes to work around society. It is not that “he applies himself”—I am not saying that. Yes: it happens! And if all one’s energy is tied up with “How will my next birth be pure? How will I get to heaven? How shall I earn merit and avoid sin? Should I eat this or not? Drink this or not?”—if all consciousness is entangled there, then the very notion of society will not arise. We won’t even come to know that there is anyone besides ourselves.

A people, an individual, a society that is so individualistic will even go so far as to say: you have neither wife nor mother nor father nor brother nor son—this is all illusion. Only you are true; everything else is illusion, maya. Save yourself from it; don’t get caught in its snares. No one will go with you in death, nor in merit, nor in sin. You are utterly alone; take care of yourself. Don’t even bother that if a woman is dying of hunger, she is dying—she is suffering the fruits of her past sin. What have you to do with it? If your child is begging on the street, he must be begging because he must—his own karmic fruits. You take care of yourself.

In such an individualistic outlook, if one accepts everything, then the “person” does not remain at all. If you observe, the ego of the person is born out of resistance. The more the “I” fights—“I don’t want this; I want that”—in that very struggle my “I” arises: “I am.” Choice creates the “I”; there cannot be a choiceless ego. Then there is no way left to preserve it. “I am”—what does it mean? The sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening—where am I? That is to say, I insist, “There should be only morning, not evening!” The sun will take eight or ten hours to set. For those eight or ten hours I will strengthen my “I”: “I have not let it set yet; I am still holding the sun back; it is still morning.” When it does set, I will surely think that the fruits of past karmas have obstructed me—while the sun is setting on its own and rising on its own. It has nothing to do with me. Meanwhile my ego goes on getting stronger. But when I have accepted that this is how it is, then suddenly all my energy and all my power spread in all directions and get involved in working.

In my view, a revolutionary is born out of total acceptance. It seems the opposite, because a revolutionary negates. And the two halves of life—what we call the affirmative and the prohibitive, the positive and the negative—if I am positive toward myself, I will be negative toward society, because that is the other half. If I become negative toward myself, I will become positive toward society. That is my other half; somewhere I will remain one half. If you want to do good to society, then on the level of the person there should be acceptance; and if you want to rot society, then at the level of the person there should be rejection. Therefore there is a continual contradiction in what I say.

Many people come and say, “In the morning meditation you teach: accept everything; and in the evening gathering you say: reject everything—now what should I do?” The sun rises in the morning; in the evening it sets—what can I do! We never go and say to the sun, “You rise in the morning and set in the evening—there is a contradiction between the two. If you rise in the morning, why do you set in the evening?” No. In the morning I say just this: accept. In the evening I say just this: reject. Both are parts of life. One more question someone has asked—let us take this as the last.

These are all fantasies. In fact, there is no need to get caught in the idea that millions of years ago man was happy. Nor is it true that man must be unhappy. Some people understand, and they are always happy in the sense that they accept suffering too. Those who do not understand are always unhappy, in the sense that in their very rejection of suffering they go on becoming more and more miserable. And it has never been that all of humanity was once happy and then all of humanity became unhappy. Nor that once there was acceptance and now everything has turned into rejection. It has never been so. Every age has its own diseases, its own sorrows—they change.

A new age creates new diseases, new sorrows, but sorrow is always there, illness is always there, trouble is always there—and it will remain so. We keep on fighting; we save on one side and it appears on the other. Pasteur and the scientists worked so hard; if Pasteur were to return now he would probably be alarmed, because he tried to save human beings so that children would not die. Now there are too many children; now we must prevent them from being born, and if they are born we must find ways to kill them. So we have to think about feticide and abortion. And it would be no surprise that if the numbers continue to increase, then just as we talk about birth control, we will be forced to talk about killing the elderly after a certain age—the other side of the same coin. It will happen!

If this matter does not stop, if we cannot prevent the birth of children—and we are not being able to—then there is only one other measure: just as we retire people at fifty-five or fifty-eight, at seventy we will say, “Retire from life altogether,” because children keep coming and there is no way left to protect ourselves. Now the scientist who saved us from diseases—when eight out of ten children would die, he saved them—has created a big entanglement. Who can say now that it was good? Because now we will have to kill the eight, or prevent them, or do something.

From this side we make arrangements; from that side something falls apart. My understanding is that a total arrangement is never possible—because a total arrangement would have no meaning. Whenever we arrange on one side, exactly the opposite stands up on the other. Because life always produces its opposite, the balance—if we could ever weigh it—will remain exactly what it always was. There will be no difference. It may be that today a man has a Fiat, and a thousand years ago his father had a bullock-cart. The neighbor then had a chariot; the neighbor now has an Impala. The distance between them is the same as it was between the bullock-cart and the chariot, and as it is between the Fiat and the Impala. The proportion stands just the same. The bullock-cart man was as unhappy seeing the chariot as the Fiat owner is today seeing the Impala. The Impala has arrived, the bullock-cart and chariot have gone, but the crux of the matter stands where it was.

The proportion is the same—and that is where a great mistake occurs. You have ten rupees and I have a hundred; you are poor and I am rich. Tomorrow you have a hundred and I have a thousand; the gap keeps remaining exactly as it was—nothing really changes.

My own understanding is that life is as it has always been; its forms change, its shapes change. The whole affair is as it was. What can change in all of this is only whether a person accepts it or rejects it—and that was true then and is true today. If the bullock-cart man back then had accepted, “Good—you have a chariot, I have a bullock-cart,” and moved on in his bullock-cart, he would have been just as happy as the Fiat owner today who, seeing the one with an Impala, says, “Good—you have an Impala, I have a Fiat,” and moves on. The very same flavor that came to him will become available to this man.

Life is the same, always the same. It depends on what stance we take. And, as I said, there are two kinds of stances: one is that we go on imposing desires endlessly; the other is that we come to know what is, we recognize it, we see it. And the moment we see it, inevitably acceptance happens—because there is simply no question of rejecting it.

I call only such a person, to whom such acceptance has happened, religious. And when the acceptance is so total, peace fills you by itself; and in that peace we can see much that we could never see in restlessness.

And let me repeat the first thing at the end: what becomes visible in that peace is not communicable; it cannot be said. In that peace we come to know something that cannot be bound in words. You may writhe, you may be distressed, you may shout—but nothing comes of it. Yes, only this much can happen: perhaps someone may catch hold of our yearning, our pain, our effort to explain, and think, “Certainly this man has seen something!” Like when a mute person comes among us and starts shouting, waving his hands and feet, trying to tell us: we may not understand what he wants to say, but we can at least understand this much—that something has happened to him. And if he tries to take us by the hand and lead us outside to show us, he will not be able to do it; but he can communicate at least this much: “I am not able to communicate—and yet there is something.” If only so much happens, perhaps we will start walking. This is my only effort! I do not trust anything more than that. That is, I am not a believer in words; I am a believer in communion—not a believer in the intellect.

But then people have difficulty with me, because day and night I keep explaining: think, do not accept without thinking, do not believe—and then I say that I am not an intellectualist. And I say all this so that you wear the intellect out: think it through thoroughly, argue it out completely, argue and argue until it gets exhausted. Once it gets exhausted and falls, you will be outside it; the old skin will lie there like a snake’s sloughed-off skin, and the snake will have come out. And it will not come out if you believe, because the skin will not split. It will not come out if you take up faith prematurely—because the intellect’s exhaustion is necessary for it to fall away.

One is that belief which we grasp without using the intellect at all—that is below the intellect. And one is that reverence, that trust, which becomes available when the intellect is tired—that is beyond the intellect. The two are completely different, though they may appear similar.

That is why sometimes the supremely wise may appear supremely foolish—there is no difficulty in that. Because they are the two ends: one is below the intellect, the other is beyond it.

There is no doubt that the stream of thoughts goes on continuously, but thoughts in themselves are powerless until I support them, until I give them energy. So the only practice is this: do not give a thought any strength from your side; if it comes, let it come; if it goes, let it go. Do not establish any identification, any kind of friendship, with thought. Keep only this much awareness: I am merely the watcher. Let them come and let them go. Gradually you will find that a thought which arises and receives no support from you dies utterly lifeless. And by sustained practice, suddenly you will find that its arising too has stopped.

Through this same witnessing, the thoughts stored within us will also be shed. They will come, rise, stand fully, but if we remain silent and give no support, they have no path except dissolution. However gripping a worry may seem, keep watching silently. Do not entertain the feeling, “I am becoming anxious,” because then collaboration begins. Hold only this feeling: “I am seeing that there is anxiety.” Do not even think, “I am anxious.” That thought—then the cooperation has begun. Non-cooperation means I am maintaining a distinction between myself and the anxiety, between myself and the thought; between that which is happening and the one who is seeing; I am maintaining a distinction. Keep cultivating exactly this distinction: whatever is happening within me, I am different from it.

Whatever is happening outside me, I am different from it. Keep cultivating this awareness. A point will come when all that from which I am different dissolves, and ultimately only that remains with which I am non-separate. With the dissolution of the different, the non-different remains. The experience of that remainder is self-experience. So, even with that, do not identify; do not establish any relationship.

Essentially there are only two states—first, we are seeing and something is seen; and second, we are seeing and nothing is seen. For now, whenever we look within, something will appear. Whatever appears—that is thought. But a point will come, by continued seeing, when we go on seeing and nothing appears. When nothing appears, the experience will not be of thought but of consciousness, because now nothing at all is appearing there. When nothing is appearing, the capacity to see, that power of knowing which until now has been seeing this or that, now—since there is no one there to be seen—has no other course but to see itself.

The knowledge we have—its objects must be taken away, so it has nothing left to look at. When it has nothing left to look at, still the capacity to see remains. And when there is nothing to see, whom will that capacity see? In that final moment, when consciousness finds nothing to look at, it looks at itself. This looking at oneself is called self-knowledge.

Therefore there is only one sadhana: we keep taking away, thinning out, dissolving the targets—the contents—of our consciousness. Up to a point, when there is some content, consciousness is other-oriented. But when there is no content, that consciousness becomes self-consciousness. As long as we are seeing something, we are not seeing ourselves. When nothing remains to be seen, whom will we see? We ourselves. The practice is only this: remove, little by little, all the objects before consciousness—those upon which consciousness stops and lingers, and because of which it does not return to itself.

The way to thin them out is non-cooperation. Right now we are their makers—that is, we are the ones maintaining them. When we sit idle, some thought or other is running, because without our cooperation they cannot run. Withdraw your cooperation from whatever thoughts are running, and do nothing else; regard just this as samayik, as meditation. If all thoughts dissolve, you will feel no ego and no person within. You will know only being—only being will be known, in which the distinction “I am an individual” or “I am the whole” will not be felt. Only pure being will remain—pure existence. In truth, because of the thoughts accumulated upon that pure existence, we appear to be a person.

This sense that I am “A,” you are “B,” you are “C”—the A, B, C we have pasted on—is our thought-power. We commonly say, “I will become liberated”—this is not quite right. “I will become liberated” assumes that even after liberation the “I” will remain—as an “I.” That is not the case. The liberation of “I” is liberation from “I” as well. In what remains, it is not possible to find anything like this “I,” because that “I,” that ego, that sense of being a person, was merely the echo of an aggregation of thoughts. The composite of those very thoughts was what we called “I.” When thoughts slip away, the I too slips away.

There was a Buddhist monk, Nagasena—an extraordinary monk—and there is a very sweet story. A Greek general named Menander, whom Alexander left behind in India, invited Nagasena to the royal court for discussion. He was very eager for religious debate. People went to welcome him outside the village and brought the monk Nagasena in a chariot. Five hundred monks were with him. At the palace gate Menander bowed to Nagasena. Nagasena alighted from the chariot. Menander said, “We welcome the monk Nagasena.” Nagasena said, “I accept the welcome, although there is no such one as the monk Nagasena.” Menander said, “What are you saying? Then who accepts?” Nagasena said, “It is merely a convenience, so that you won’t feel hurt; but truly, there is no such one as the monk Nagasena.” Menander said, “Then who has come? You have come, you are standing before me—who are you?” He said something wonderful: “This chariot—this is a chariot, isn’t it?” Menander said, “Certainly it is a chariot.” He said, “If we remove its wheels and then ask you, ‘Is this a chariot?’ what will you say? You will say, ‘This is not a chariot; these are wheels.’ If we take off each part and ask you, ‘What is this?’ you will say, ‘These are wheels; this is the front pole; this is the rear axle,’ and so on. If we remove all the parts of the chariot, none of them is called ‘chariot.’ Then where is the chariot? A chariot is only an assemblage. If all the parts are pulled apart, no assemblage remains. A chariot is only a combination.” Nagasena said, “Just as a chariot is a combination, so too the person named Nagasena is only a combination. When these are removed, Nagasena will not remain. What remains will be difficult to call ‘Nagasena.’”

The Jains have called this ego-dissolution and self-realization. That soul is not a person, not an ego. The Buddhists have even called it no-self. They said, there is no soul. There is not much difference between the two. To imprint the remainder with the notion of an “I” is foolishness.

As I move within, the “I” dissolves—this is something to understand. As I move outward, the “I” grows denser—the “I” extends. The more you move inward, the more the “I” becomes rarefied. The person who has gone that much outside himself—his “I” you will find stronger; and the person who has gone that much within himself—in him you will not find “I.” And if we observe closely, our going out is only for the pleasure of a strengthened “I”—there is no other pleasure. One who erects a great mansion takes pleasure in it; one who becomes a great scholar or a great holy man also takes pleasure in it. All that is the pleasure of “I.” The more we accumulate such things, the more the “I” fills up and becomes heavy. Something substantial begins to be felt; we can then say, “I—I am not an ordinary person.” The “I” becomes that much more solid and weighty.

In the world there are only two races, two kinds of people—one race is to strengthen the “I,” and one race is to dissolve the “I.” One type of person is moving in the direction where the “I” becomes denser and denser. The denser the “I,” the greater the distance from the soul. The more intense the sense of “I,” the farther we go from the soul. In other words, if rightly understood, the intensity of “I” is the instrument for measuring the distance from the soul. And the more the “I” becomes rarefied, the closer one comes to oneself. And the moment we come wholly into ourselves, we find there is no “I.”

That is to say, upon attaining the real “I,” the “I” we have known as “I” ceases to be.

The suffering in the world—if everyone were to attain inner peace, the problem would dissolve, and action would only become better. A peaceful mind can act far better than an agitated or deranged one. Peace is not opposed to action; restlessness is opposed to action. Whatever a restless person does will be unskillful, because restlessness obstructs action. Whatever a peaceful person does becomes skillful, because peace supports action. So in my view, if peaceful people increase in the world, the world’s efficiency will increase.

Take Kabir—he kept weaving cloth. It is said no weaver ever made such cloth. When he brought his fabric to market, people would rush to it as if mad. To purchase Kabir’s cloth was itself a joy. People would say, “No one has ever woven cloth like this,” and Kabir would reply, “No one has woven, with such peace and for God, as I do. What can I do? I do not weave for you; I weave for God. I know the God within you—he will wear it. For him, nothing inferior can be woven. And when I weave, I am full of God—there is no room for error.” The cloth Kabir wove carried a meaning of its own—of another order.

There was a potter named Gora, a fakir as well. The pots he made were wondrous. All the truly worthy works in this world have been done by the peaceful, not by the restless. Because of the restless come troubles; because of them, noble action does not happen. Because of the peaceful, it does.

Just remember: this notion lodged in our minds—that peaceful people run away—is wrong. It is the restless who run away, in panic and disturbance. The peaceful return. Mahavira and Buddha went to the forests when they were still restless. When they became peaceful, they came back. Have you ever heard of anyone who, having become peaceful, did not return to the town? The restless go from the settlement to the forest; but once peaceful, they return to the settlement. And after that—who sits idle empty-handed? Mahavira, after his attainment, remained ceaselessly active for forty years. Buddha was active until the very moment of his death.

As he was dying—his final hour—he said to his disciples, “Now I leave the body.” Ananda said, “We will let no one in. We will stand outside; no one should enter now.” The Buddha was sinking into samadhi when a young man came running from afar. He said to Ananda, “If I miss this moment, where will I find the Tathagata again? Let me in. Let me hear a word that can change my life.” Ananda said, “Now it is too late.” His name was Subhadra. He replied, “You are right—but then when, in which birth, will I meet such a one?” From inside, Buddha said, “Do not stop Subhadra; let him enter. Let no one say a stain of sin remained on the Tathagata—that Subhadra stood saying, ‘I am thirsty, give me,’ and they did not give. I can wait a little. Let Subhadra come in.” Even while dying, Buddha was showing Subhadra how peace and bliss may be found.

The immediate cause of Buddha’s death was a poor blacksmith who invited him to a meal. In Bihar, mushrooms that sprout in the rains are dried and kept by poor people for curry. That poor blacksmith cooked a mushroom curry and served it to Buddha. Sometimes they are poisonous. From that poison, pain spread through the body. Returning to his dwelling, Buddha saw the poison taking hold and said, “Go and tell that blacksmith he is supremely blessed that the Tathagata accepted his final offering. Such good fortune is rarely attained. Announce it in the whole village, so that after my passing people do not go and harass him, saying that my death occurred because of his food. Tell them he is most blessed that the Tathagata received his last meal—a fortune that comes only once in aeons.”

This is the mark of the peaceful person: even after his death, he does not want anyone troubled. He has no concern for his own dying. He is dying after eating that man’s food, yet his concern is that people might harass the man after his death. A restless person makes arrangements of another kind.

I once read a story: An old man was dying. He had seven strapping sons. He called them and said, “I have something special to tell—if you promise.” The elder sons did not get up; the youngest, naive boy went close. The father whispered in his ear, “I have just one request. When I die, throw pieces of my corpse into the neighbor’s house. When I see the neighbor being seized by the king’s men and taken to jail, my soul will be deeply satisfied. I am dying anyway—let him be punished!”

Restlessness breeds restlessness all around. Peace breeds peace all around. From a peaceful person, no harm to this world is possible—only benefit. From a restless person, no benefit is possible—only harm.

So to me, religious practice is not opposed to the world. In religious practice I see the world’s welfare and fulfillment. If industriousness has declined, perhaps it is because of restlessness. With peace, actions become excellent. The peaceful will be able to set everything in order.