Upasana Ke Kshan #11

To go with an eye to gain is to go after something small. It is not the great question which gain you have in view. Even to go for spiritual gain—there too it is greed alone that is taking you.

In truth, when we love someone there is no ulterior view—not even the view of gain. If gain comes, that is another matter. When we pray, if there is an eye toward profit, prayer cannot happen.

We go to a sage, but we do not reach him. Whether the gain sought is of money, of health, or of spirituality. I will only say this: you are denying small gain but not denying big gain. Yet if small gain is greed, big gain is big greed. And if you go to a sage with a greedy eye, you will have to return empty-handed. Yes, if you go without the outlook of greed, you might return with hands full. And then it is not necessary that you return with full hands only from a sage—if you stand empty-handed before a tree, or before the rising sun, your hands can be filled there too.

Secondly, I want to tell you: if our outlook is free of greed, there should be at least one place in life where we have no greed at all. We go to a shop, to the market, to a friend, to the voter—everywhere there is some reason.

I call the sage that place where we, tired of all reasons, go. Where, wearied by causes, we want to form a relationship without cause. Therefore, if a “sage” asks you, “Why have you come?” I say he is not a sage. And if you can explain, “I came for this reason,” then you have not gone to a sage.

Life is harassed by causes, tormented by greed. All our relationships are conditional, with strings attached. Only the relationship with saintliness is unconditional.

I had a professor—he taught philosophy. When he had newly arrived, I went to his house to meet him. He was an old man. He asked me, “What brings you?” I said, “It’s hard to say.” I said, “It’s hard to say. And if you ask this again, then I won’t come anymore. I didn’t know one must come only if there is a reason. So I’ll go.” Because I had come absolutely without reason. I had thought at least a professor of philosophy would understand that there is a certain flavor in meeting without reason. The truth is, only in meeting without reason is there flavor. And whenever in life we can meet someone without reason, the flower that blooms between us—that is friendship, that is love.

So I agree with you; what you say is perfectly right. I will only add: the second point you make is simply the first extended onto another plane.

There is an incident with Ramakrishna: at Vivekananda’s home there was great hardship. His father had died, leaving heavy debts. At home there was only one meal a day—and even that just enough for either the mother or Vivekananda. So he would tell his mother, “A friend has invited me today; I’m going to eat there,” and go off to the village. He would wander the streets and come back. There was no invitation, no friend had called—but this way the mother would eat; otherwise she would feed him and remain hungry herself.

Ramakrishna came to know that he had been hungry for days. He said, “What kind of madman are you! Why don’t you go into the temple and ask God? You go inside; I’ll sit outside.” He pushed him in by force. An hour later he returned—filled with great joy. Ramakrishna asked, “Did you ask? Did you get it?”

Vivekananda said, “What thing?” Ramakrishna said, “I sent you to pray for your difficulty.” Vivekananda said, “I forgot. In the presence of the Divine, if I could keep my belly in mind, then communion with the Divine could not happen. I forgot.” This went on for a couple of days. Then Ramakrishna grew very annoyed and said, “Are you mad or what!” But Vivekananda said, “The moment I enter the temple, the moment Their presence touches me, neither I remain, nor my belly remains, nor my hunger remains, nor any request remains. So I return having given myself; I cannot ask.”

Satsang with a sage is causeless.

It is like stopping to behold the beauty of a flower—nothing to be gotten. Like lifting your eyes to the moon and stars at night—nothing to be gotten. Likewise, the flowers that bloom within a human being—that is what we call a sage. If you go to them with a reason—if you go to a flower with a reason that you will sell it in the market or offer it to God—then too the aesthetic relationship with the flower, the relationship with the flower itself, will not arise. Because that relationship is pure poetry—where there is no profit, no greed.

So, Paage-ji, you are right to say that if someone goes to cure an illness, to gain wealth, to win an election—he is going for reasons; he is a fool; he is going to the wrong place. No—I am saying even if he goes for any reason whatsoever, to attain liberation, to attain God—still he is going wrong. Because a person who goes with a reason does not reach the sage. The sage’s place is that place where we go without cause.

There was a Zen master, Rinzai. The emperor of Japan went to meet him and said, “I’ve heard great praise, so I’ve come. Show me the whole monastery—what you do where.” In the middle stood a vast temple whose spires glittered for miles. Rinzai took the emperor through every small cell: here the monks bathe; here they eat; here is the library, they read here.

Again and again the emperor asked, “Don’t take me round useless spots—what do you do in that central building?” Whenever the emperor asked, Rinzai fell silent, as if deaf! He showed the entire monastery—latrines, toilets, baths, everything. The emperor said, “Either I’m mad or you are! I keep asking you: in that big central building, what do you do?” He would just fall silent. At last the farewell at the gate arrived. As the emperor mounted his horse he said again, “What kind of man are you? I haven’t understood anything.”

Rinzai said, “Since you won’t accept otherwise, I must tell you: you ask the wrong question. You asked me to show you the place where monks do what they do. That place—the central building—is where a monk goes when he has nothing to do. That is our place of prayer. We do not go there to do anything. When we are tired of doing and the wish arises not to do, the wish for non-doing, then we go there. And you asked where monks do things—I have shown you all that: here they bathe, here they eat, here they sleep, here they study. That is the temple—there we do nothing. And whoever goes there to ‘do’ cannot enter the temple. We, tired of doing, go there in order not to do. There we do nothing at all. There we are absorbed in non-being.”

A sage is that place where, if we go under the sway of asking, of getting, of any greed, then no relationship can happen. It simply cannot. Then we are looking for a shop, or for a doctor, or an astrologer. Better, as you say, to seek that in the place where the doctor is.

It is a very difficult matter. And what you are saying, you are saying quite upside down. Two points. First, the natural state is not the final state. Because if the natural state were the final state, then the unnatural state would be the primary state. And from the unnatural one cannot reach the natural. If there can be a natural state, it will have to be the original one.

Exactly! But if you are merely holding such a notion, then that notion is not sahaj. Even that notion isn’t sahaj if it is only a notion.

No. What I am saying is this: firstly, if it is only our notion that the self is in its spontaneous state—already so—if it is a notion, then that notion is never spontaneous. A notion is always of the mind and cannot be spontaneous. If it is an experience, then it can be spontaneous. And there is a great difference between a notion and an experience.

Now, this too is something to think about. It is something to think about that only an experience that remains forever can be called natural; that which comes and goes cannot be natural.

Sahaj means precisely this: that which, once it comes, does not go. Therefore we can never say that the sahaj experience happens to me sometimes and at other times it does not.

No. This—this very point, you see—as soon as we latch onto it, if we begin to look at the body as an enemy, then...

Only the mind can be ill at ease. The self cannot be ill at ease; the body cannot be ill at ease. Both are naturally at ease. The uneasiness that arises—the complication, the complexity—belongs to the mind. And why of the mind? What we have been saying is exactly the basis of that uneasiness. The mind is uneasy because it is always asking for something; it is not content with what is, it keeps demanding. It even asks, “Tomorrow let me have the natural, spontaneous state of the self”—then it will never happen. Because as long as I am saying, “Let me get something—tomorrow,” it cannot be. And if it is to be realized naturally, it is here and now; there is no question of tomorrow.

It is bound to be negative. All spirituality is negative. All spirituality is negative.

No. When you say “to end,” you are placing a condition even on sahaj, which is wrong. Because if sahaj depended on any condition, it would no longer remain sahaj. If you say that when desires end, whatever happens is sahaj, then it means the ending of desire is a condition without which sahaj cannot be. Then sahaj is very weak and desires are very strong. Then it will never happen. No, it is not so; sahaj does not happen through the ending of desires.

Yes, what I am saying is something else. I am saying that sahaj means: that which is unconditional. You cannot impose even so small a condition on it as, "When desire departs, then it will be."

No, it is not a matter of removing. That is why I am telling you: a natural life is a life of acceptance, not of removal. If desire is in you, then it is—accept it; what is the point of talking about removing it? And the moment there is total acceptance, naturalness bears fruit.

There is anger within me. One approach is: let me remove it, then a natural life will blossom. But a so‑called natural life that blossoms on the condition that anger has first been removed cannot be natural. If there is anger in me, I agree to it—because there is no other way. I have found anger just as I have found my eyes, just as I have found my hands—I have found anger like that too. There is anger. I neither suppress it nor try to remove it. It is there; I accept it. And the moment I accept it—it goes; it is not removed—then certainly naturalness flowers. In removal there is a condition; for it to fall away is another matter.

If I accept anger and say, “It is given by God. What is, is. This is how I am. I am an angry man. I am a bad man.” And I do not say that tomorrow I will become a good man. Because it is out of what is bad today that tomorrow will emerge. My tomorrow will emerge out of me. It is not going to come from outside me; it is my own extension, my own continuity. So how can I wish that tomorrow I will be good? Because from what I am—out of this very seed—my tomorrow will be born, the day after tomorrow will be born, the future will be born; out of this will come my soul, my God, my liberation—from what I am.

Whoever goes on fighting against this “I” can never be natural. Yes, he can put on a show of being natural. He can build a framework that looks natural.

So those sadhus and saints you mention—if you are reporting them rightly—who say, “We managed ninety‑nine percent, but it never becomes complete,” they are the kind of people who have tried to be natural. But the one who has accepted life—anger, sex, whatever is—he will say, “I am one hundred percent natural.” Because if he happens to become angry, you cannot say to him, “Ah, you got angry—how can you be natural?” He will say, “This is natural anger.” “Natural” means something else.

And when a man like Kabir says, “Sadho, sahaj samadhi bhali,” his meaning is not that it will be fulfilled under some condition. He is saying exactly this: “Sahaj samadhi” means I have dropped the fight and I am surrendered; I do not struggle. I accept life as it is—if it is bad, then bad; if it is hell, then hell—I accept it. Out of this acceptance, naturalness is born. Out of this total acceptability, naturalness is born. And that which is natural is unconditional—in the sense that we have made no effort for it, we have made no attempt for it, we have devised no method for it.

Because there is a very delightful truth: whatever we gain by a method will be lost when the method is dropped. And whatever we cultivate—if tomorrow we do not cultivate it—it will wither away.

Page ji once brought a Sufi fakir to me. His devotees told me, “He sees God everywhere—in the trees, in stones, in plants—God appears everywhere.” I asked him, “Does it appear to you, or do you look?” He said, “No, no, it appears to me.” But he said it so nervously—“No, no, it appears to me.” So I asked, “Think again once—did you not at some point begin practicing seeing?” He said, “I did begin; otherwise how would it appear? Thirty years ago I began the practice of seeing, I tried to see in everything, and slowly it began to appear.”

I said to him, “Stay with me for eight days. And now make no effort to see. For thirty years you have tried to see, and now it appears. For eight days, drop the trying.” He said, “You are not an atheist, are you? What wrong thing are you saying! If I drop it even for an hour, it will stop appearing.” Then what is appearing now is not a natural experience. It is effort‑based—an effort to see. Then it is our experience; God has nothing to do with it. We are imposing it upon the world of experience. The moment we stop imposing it, even for an instant, the projection will be lost, and the world will appear as stone‑stone; God will disappear from it.

Stone appearing as stone is natural; stone appearing as God is unnatural. The day when seeing stone as stone would require effort, and seeing stone as God would happen by itself—that day we would say a natural experience has happened. But such an experience cannot be lost. That experience which has to be maintained is unnatural. And that for which we have to make effort—even if we made it in the past and have now forgotten—if we stop today, it will be lost today.

So about those sadhus you speak of: if they say that a natural life has not happened, and as long as the body is there it cannot happen, then they still have an enmity with the body; the body has not been accepted. Otherwise it is God’s very body—how would it obstruct you? If God, with such a vast universe existing, can be natural, and I, with so small a body, cannot be natural, I cannot accept that this is naturalness. If he says, “As long as there is anger, I cannot be natural; as long as there is sex, I cannot be natural,” then he will fight, cut, and erase these. And whatever is built in the end will be his own construction; it will not be natural.

Natural means we have dropped the fight; we do not fight; there is no effort on our part.

Yes.

It is precisely when you say “after all” that a little difficulty arises.

Trying itself is the contrivance, dear sir!

This thing you say—going on, going on, going on—this will not happen, never. Because the way you are thinking, it implies a conclusion reached by many actions. When you say, “by and by.”

Then what does it mean?

When we say, “as we go along,” we even make the natural, the spontaneous (sahaj) into a destination—somewhere far away. And sahaj is that which is not far; it is right now, here. And when we make it a destination and we say, “walking, slowly, slowly, by doing and doing, it will be attained,” that itself means it is not already attained; someday it will be.

Yes, this fear...

No, that is not the question. The bigger question is: how will it become a matter of experience? That it is not experiential—that much is certain. Because if it were experiential, then there would be nothing to discuss at all.

Yes, that is exactly what I am saying: it does not happen. If there is to be an experiential realization, it will come through understanding this truth—that the spontaneous cannot be attained by any system, any process, or any sadhana. This realization will come through the experience of thousands upon thousands of failures in life, not through experiences of success. It will not happen by trying to make it happen. Day after day we will try everything, and we will find: it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen.

No, if you say they are merely ways of speaking...

This, this is our difficulty...

This too has been a mishap in our land. In our land a mishap has occurred—and it is a big one. First, almost everything that could be, is known to us only as words. Second, we even parcel out life’s deepest experiences by the distances created by words; it’s only a verbal gap. And third, we accept certain things as beliefs in such a way that we feel there is no longer any need to inquire into them—and we have no real knowing of them.

For example, we say, “The soul is naturally effortless.” Now that becomes a creed. From accepting it, a great difficulty arises: we start arranging our whole life around the belief. Whether the soul is effortless or not can only be known as experience; it cannot be held as a belief. And the day it becomes an experience, we will see we could never have attained it by turning it into a belief. It will be something that descends upon us. And for that descent, I am saying, there is a difference that matters. If there is a difference in conclusions, it is not too troublesome—it is a difference of words. But there is also the question of how one arrives.

Herrigel, a German thinker, lived in Japan for three years. He studied archery with a Zen master. The master said, “Through archery I will give you an indirect indication of meditation.” For the Zen master says that what is natural cannot be indicated directly. “Therefore I cannot make you meditate straightaway. Do something else; in the doing, some day there will be a moment of non-doing. Then I will point out: this is how meditation is. The difficulty is: how to indicate that which happens through non-doing? Even the act of pointing would become a doing.”

Herrigel practiced archery with such devotion that within a year and a half his shots were a hundred percent accurate. He told his master, “My aim is unfailing now—please give me something more.”

The master said, “Your aim may be unfailing, but the moment has not yet come for me to indicate what meditation is.”

Herrigel asked, “When will that moment come? My shots are perfect. I thought once I mastered archery, I’d get the indication toward meditation.”

The master replied, “No, that moment is not arriving. You are still shooting the arrow; the arrow is not yet shooting itself. There is still effort. You still take aim, you still set your target. Your mind still tightens as you release. I am waiting for the moment when the arrow goes from you, but not by you—when it goes naturally; when there is no inner strain in you—then I will point out: meditation is like this.”

Another year and a half passed. Every day Herrigel insisted, “My aim is absolutely right. Everything is correct. There are no mistakes now. When will you give the indication?”

The master said, “You are not understanding. Our purpose is not that you hit the target. Our purpose is that you can let the arrow go the way an eagle sometimes rides the sky without flapping her wings. She is not ‘swimming’ the air; she simply glides—no effort. I am waiting for such a moment.”

Three years went by. He was exhausted. And a German mind can scarcely imagine anything beyond effort; the very idea of non-effort is beyond its grasp. At last Herrigel said, “Forgive me. I will return home. This is beyond me. It seems sheer madness. If I shoot, I shoot—how else will the arrow fly? If I aim, I aim. The doer will be there. Please forgive me. I leave tomorrow. But at least give me a certificate that I have learned archery.”

The master said, “I cannot write it. I cannot. Because the arrow has not yet gone from you; you go on making it go. It is only practice. I cannot call you an archer. An archer is one who does not shoot—and the arrow goes.” Now Herrigel was even more baffled.

Next morning he came to take leave. The master was teaching others. Herrigel sat down and watched. For the first time he had not come to learn; he had come to say goodbye. He was relaxed. He watched the master lift the bow, release the arrow. For the first time he was not in the mood of doing. And he saw a profound difference: the man was not lifting the bow; the bow seemed to be lifting. The man was not releasing the arrow; the arrow seemed to be released. As if there were no distance between the one who makes it happen and what happens—it was one event. There was no doer behind it; only being, only happening remained. Herrigel stood up, took the bow and arrow from the master’s hands, and shot. And the master said, “I will give you the certificate today. Today you are not there—and the arrow went! Meditation is such an occurrence.”

When we start talking about method, then in a certain sense what you say is right—that it will happen by “walking and walking.” But it will not happen by walking and walking; it will happen through the failure of walking. Walking and walking, every time it will seem you are walking and the goal is not reached. One day you will be so tired that you will sit down and say, “Now I will not walk; there is no path, no goal, and no ‘me’; nothing is going to happen.” On the day such a helpless, utterly powerless state comes, that day it happens. And what happens that day is not the result of your walking.

I'm not telling you to go ahead; I'm telling you to stop. You are saying the same thing again—there is no real difference in it. I'm not saying that by going ahead you will become natural; you already are natural. As long as you keep going ahead, you will not be able to be natural.

No— for someone it can be today itself, today. For someone it can be today itself!

No. That very provision of kramamukti makes even those for whom it could happen fall into the laziness of gradualism—and then it does not happen. What really creates the difficulty is that we start thinking, “It can’t happen to me; how can it happen right now?” And if “not now” is the mind’s trend, then at any moment—“not now”—this is going to be the mind’s trend. Ten years later it will be the same mind; it will say, “Not now.” There will be kramamukti—only gradualness. Because the same mind that is saying, “Not now,” will still be my mind ten years later. It will say, “Not now.” And the mind that has said, “It will happen tomorrow,” will tomorrow also say, “It will happen tomorrow.” That “postponing mind” just goes on postponing.

This is not a question. It is not really a big question. Because then no harm is being done. That is to say, what I am saying...

No, I cannot just sit accepting that. Because life does not allow one to believe a lie; life grips you from all sides and does not let you believe a lie. Life does not let you believe a lie.

No. You cannot sit by mere belief. However much you sit believing that you are Brahman, let the tiniest pebble strike and you will know you are not. It makes no difference. Life does not allow mere believing.

You can’t just sit on assumptions. Hunger will arise and you’ll know. Someone will insult you and you’ll know. The slightest shove and you’ll know.

No. If he can say that much, if he can say that much, if he can say this much—that anger is natural, hunger is natural, illness is natural, death is natural—if he can say that much, then do not worry about whether it has happened to him or not. Because he is not causing you any harm—that’s one thing. He is not causing you any harm. And even if he does cause harm, it will be to himself. And the delight is that the day...

Life will not let you believe it. And the irony is that you can always deceive others, but you cannot deceive yourself.

No, you will not be able to give.

No, Paage-ji, you cannot just sit on the basis of such an assumption.

You can say it to others. You can say it to others! But you will know all the while where the pain is. The irony is that we can deceive only others about self-knowledge; we cannot deceive ourselves. And when you cannot deceive yourself—and self-knowledge is an utterly private affair—then what is the point? In other matters, deceiving another can do damage; in the matter of self-knowledge, deceiving anyone has no meaning.

If I say, “I am enlightened,” it cannot harm you; if anyone is harmed, it will be me. And the fun is, in this matter you cannot fool yourself. Even while I’m saying again and again, “I am enlightened,” all the while I know I am not. In fact, my saying it is deep proof that I am not; otherwise there would be no need to say it at all.

If a man goes on shouting in the street every day, “I am a man, not a woman,” he is giving proof that he is in doubt. A man knows he is, and the matter is finished—it doesn’t even occur to him. A man remembers his being a man only when, in some moment, he finds he is not. With health too: we get no news of health; only in sickness do we come to know. A healthy person doesn’t even know that he is healthy; only a sick person keeps knowing whether he is or is not. A healthy person means one to whom it doesn’t even occur that there is a body. Self-knowledge is such a deep health that it makes itself known to you.

As for the happening itself... the moment we begin to think of it in a gradual way, we gain the ability to postpone. The danger lies there. The moment we think, “Slowly, slowly it will happen; tomorrow it will happen,” postponement begins. So I say: if someone sits today believing “it has happened,” there is no danger—because he cannot fool himself. But the one who sits believing “it will happen tomorrow” can sit for infinite births. He can sit because there is no end to tomorrow. Today too he will say, “It will happen tomorrow.” He will keep postponing every day. He has the convenience of postponing daily.

What I am saying is: yes, there is the first danger you mention—that someone may sit believing it has happened. But even if he sits like that, inside he knows it has not happened. The second danger is far more real: he can postpone to tomorrow. There is no test for checking; only when tomorrow comes will you know! And when tomorrow comes, he will push it to the next tomorrow. He can postpone birth after birth.

In this country, the danger has not come from people sitting and believing they are Brahman-knowers; the danger has come from a solid faith in rebirth. The danger came from the notion that there are many lives—what’s the hurry? “We’ll attain it in the next life, and if not in the next, then in the one after.” We have given ourselves the eternal convenience of postponement. If I am convinced that time offers such leeway—that it can happen anytime—then there is danger: I will put it off till tomorrow. Then what cannot be trusted to tomorrow, I will do today. If I want to enjoy a woman, I’ll do it today; Brahman I’ll enjoy tomorrow. If money is to be earned, I’ll earn it today; Brahman I’ll earn tomorrow. If a house is to be built, I’ll build it today; liberation I’ll build tomorrow.

The danger here has not come from Brahman-knowledge; our deep danger has come from a very long conception of time—“there are infinite births; it will happen, it can happen anytime.” And so we postpone. “It isn’t going to happen today; it will happen gradually. And we are weak; how can it happen all at once? It will go on happening gradually; we will keep working at it.”

This tendency to postpone, born of the gradualist idea, is dangerous. That is why I keep saying, again and again: it will not be gradual. Though I know it won’t happen for everyone today, still I say: it will not be gradual. It happens today! And if the intensity of “today” enters your vision, then it may happen tomorrow, it may happen the day after—but whenever it happens, it happens today. Whenever it happens, it happens today!

You are doing exactly that. You are doing exactly that.

Not about the seeker. The human mind's way of thinking is postponement. It is not the seeker's issue. The way the human mind thinks is to put things off.

Yes.

If you truly want, you will want it this very day.

Yes, that's exactly what I mean.

Yes, yes.

No, it is a matter for discussion. And when we say that it cannot be understood through the other, we are making ourselves very small. Because the other is not as “other” as we assume. And when we say, “It will happen only through oneself,” we have misused a very deep truth. “Through oneself” does not mean being an egoist; it is not ego or self-importance. To say “through oneself” only means to remember this much: do not mistake another’s experience for your own.

But the other’s experience is not entirely the other’s. We are involved in the other’s experience. We are involved in the other’s experience! When someone dies here, it is not only he who dies; in a very deep way, he brings me the news of my own death. The other may be the one who dies, but I too die. If there is even a little understanding, a little vision, it would be an error to say that only the other dies—I too die. And my own death stands revealed in the other’s death.

Yes.

Yes, yes—exactly.

In fact, when we turn these things into a doctrine, we get into difficulty.

Yes, we get into difficulties. Whether satsang is necessary or unnecessary is not the big question.

That happens because the other is not absolutely other; somewhere, at a deeper level, we are connected with one another. And when profound events happen to someone else, their touch, their vibration, their wave, reaches and touches us too. No person is an island.

Yes, there is no separate island. We are all continents. And continents are vast—far larger than we take ourselves to be—and within them much of the “other” is already contained. And this is why… it can be learned. It cannot be captured; it can be learned. And learning is one thing; capturing is another. There is no need to make anyone an authority. But there is also no need to fall into the madness of believing that the limit of knowing is exactly what we already know.

Therefore life is a very fine, delicate balance. When we immediately split things into two clean halves… someone says satsang is essential; then someone else appears who says it’s not essential at all, it’s harmful. Someone declares the guru absolutely indispensable, that without a guru there will be no knowing; then someone else says that from a guru there will never be any knowing. And life is not like that. Life is not like that! Here, nothing happens through the guru—and here, a great deal does happen through the guru.

That is to say, life is very subtle. And when we divide it into such dead compartments, it becomes difficult.

When someone says, “Everything will happen through satsang,” that too creates danger. Then people keep doing satsang with eyes closed. They just sit with closed eyes and think that satsang will do everything. And when someone says, “Nothing will happen through satsang,” then they close their doors to others, sit inside their house thinking that whatever is to happen will happen only by oneself. That too creates danger.

Life cannot be parceled into dead doctrines. And every living principle includes its opposite—every living principle. Whatever is a living truth absorbs its opposite; it does not stand against it, it assimilates it. It says, “That end is mine as well.” Then one can certainly inquire: how, how can it come today, how can that event happen? In that direction, much can be explored.

And one can learn a great deal from the other as well. But first, if we take the other as “other,” learning is obstructed. Because the moment we regard the other as other, resistance begins. Then the possibility of dialogue diminishes and the possibility of dispute increases. The moment we take the other as other, we start defending ourselves—after all, one must protect oneself from that other. Then what we call dialogue does not remain possible.

The other is not so “other”; he too is an extension of me. Or it may be a corner of my own mind that speaks through the other. In my mind too there is that corner from which Paage-ji speaks. And in Paage-ji’s mind too there is that corner from which I speak. When we can hear it as a voice from a corner of our own mind, understanding becomes very easy. Understanding becomes very easy! Then these are our own notes, however contrary they may appear. However many opposing tones there are, all of them compose the music. With such an outlook, the possibility for learning is great. And it is not necessary that learning happen only through words. And the meaning of satsang…

The point is different. Yes, it’s not about words at all. Satsang simply means association—just sitting close. The word ‘Upanishad’ arose in this very sense. It means: to sit near.

Sitting close—sitting close to one who has known. What has been received by sitting close to him has become the Upanishads. By sitting close. Just sitting by.

Yes, let it be so.

Yes, that is exactly the likelihood—that they become too many. Because this is how it is… conversation does carry one away; conversation takes you far. So here, the ones farthest are Paage-ji and I. For these others here there is no reason to be far; they can come nearer. A word, the moment it is spoken, takes you away. The moment a word is uttered, it sets thinking in motion. The moment I say something, you begin to think. The moment you start thinking, you set out on a distant journey. Silence brings you close. That is why the deep meaning of satsang is simply to sit near. And many times what we cannot say through words descends into experience just by sitting close. And then the other is not other. Then the other is not other. In silence the other is not other. In silence the boundaries we have, our limits, interpenetrate. When we sit very quietly next to someone—sit quietly, even keep the eyes closed and simply sit—within a little while there are no longer two people in that room. The Quakers’ meeting is very endearing to me. They just sit silently. Twenty-five people gather, and they sit in silence. And the rule is this: if ever someone feels like speaking, they will stand and speak. But there is never any prior notice about who will speak or on what subject; that is not the point. Many times it happens that for months they keep meeting and no one speaks—they sit for an hour and leave. Then one day someone feels like speaking and speaks; and if not, they simply get up and go. This is the meaning of satsang—to sit in silence, to sit close. And then satsang can happen anywhere, wherever you can sit in silence. Then it is not necessary that it happen only in the presence of a saint. It can happen beside a tree. It can happen on the seashore. But the original meaning of satsang has been lost. It has come to mean that we sit, talk, and discuss. That original meaning has been lost.

Yes. In fact, whatever words we have are all of a sequential language. The moment you accept, you accept everything—there is no denial left in you. What seems bad to you is accepted, and what seems good is accepted. So, the very moment there is total acceptance of both the bad and the good, integration arises within you, because there is no longer any need for division inside.

Otherwise, Bachchu Bhai, there are two persons: one Bachchu Bhai who is religious, good, and another Bachchu Bhai who is condemned, who must be corrected. And you are the one doing both jobs. One part of you is doing the bad, and another part is doing the good.

It is as if I make my two hands fight: the left hand is mine, the right hand is mine, the strength is mine—so there will be no victory. There will only be conflict. In the end I will exhaust myself, because both hands are mine. The day I realize that both hands are mine—whom am I making win, whom am I making lose?—the fists will open and the fight will stop. Then within, a wholeness, an integration, a totality is born; for the first time you become one. And in the life of one who is one, revolution begins to happen. In the life of one who is two, disturbances go on happening—because this being two is our disturbance.

And what is the difficulty? One Bachchu Bhai is good and one Bachchu Bhai is bad; then our life becomes only sin and repentance, nothing else. One part does the bad deed, and then the good part repents. The good part keeps repenting and the bad part keeps doing the bad. This goes on for a lifetime. And by repenting—by our remorse—what we usually achieve is only to get the bad part ready to do wrong again.

Whenever I get angry, my good part feels sad and says, “Again you did the same wrong thing; now don’t do it.” Then my ego settles down: “Yes, I did something bad, but I also repented. I am not a bad man; a bad act happened—that’s another matter. I am a good person.” By repenting I return to the same old place; tomorrow I will get angry again. And this will continue. It is a vicious circle.

So, as long as you are fighting, you cannot be one—because you are not fighting someone else; you are fighting yourself. The moment the fight stops and you accept your totality as it is, without an inch of rejection, for the first time you come together. And the delightful thing is: once you are together, transformation does not have to be done—it begins to happen. The process that begins then is no longer your act; it is an event.

I was just reading a story. In Oxford there is a university scholars’ debating club—this incident is about two hundred and fifty years old. All the discussion there was in Latin. An old woman would come every day, sit, listen, and go away. One day a man asked her, “The discussion here is in Latin—do you understand Latin?” She said, “No, I don’t understand Latin.” “Then what do you understand here?” She said, “I understand at least this much: when a man, while discussing, gets angry, I know he has lost. I go back. I can tell who has lost and who has won. I don’t understand your language at all, but I can tell who has lost.”

That anger is a sign of weakness; and that joy is an expression of strength.

The weaker a person is, the more he goes into the wrong. The more strength gathers within, the harder it becomes to go into the wrong. The powerful simply do not go into it. The greater the strength, the more the wrong starts looking childish to you—no longer worthy of you. It isn’t that it is “bad”; it simply ceases to be worthy of you. It becomes just irrelevant; the very possibility of doing it is no longer there. And this accumulation of strength begins when the inner conflict stops. There is a reservoir within you; it begins to overflow. And the changes that begin are not your doing, not the doing of the little fellow. They are the work of that within you which is greater than the little fellow. And then one day you find the little fellow has been washed away. He could remain only as long as there were two; otherwise he cannot remain—he is gone.

Yes, it will—absolutely.

They will come. They will surely come.

In exactly that measure, it will surface.

It does disappear. It does disappear.

No—do not try to get out. If you try to come out of it, you will never be able to, because then the duality continues.

No, you have not understood me. You have not understood me at all. Then acceptance is not complete. When we say we have accepted, then there is no room to raise again the question of when we will be free of this anger, when we will be free of this lust. If such a question can arise, the acceptance is not total.

No, you have not understood me—you have not understood what I’m saying. What I mean is this: very often we even take up “witnessing” and “acceptance” as tools for fighting.

Our difficulty is that this fighting mind of ours is so deep-rooted that if I say to you, “By accepting, anger will disappear,” you say, “All right, I’ll accept—but the anger must go.” Then you turn acceptance itself into a weapon of struggle. Such acceptance can never be complete.

No; when I say that with acceptance anger will go, I’m not saying that if you accept you will successfully separate yourself from anger. I am saying that the spontaneous consequence of acceptance is the disappearance of anger.

If the consequence is not coming, understand that there is a lack in the acceptance. If the consequence is not coming, know that there is a deficiency in the acceptance! And if you are trying to produce the result, that itself is proof that acceptance is lacking. Why are you trying to bring about a result?—because there is non-acceptance.

You say, “Anger should not remain, lust should not remain. You said that through acceptance they would not remain, but they are; they still arise.” Then you have not accepted. The very notion of acceptance has not yet occurred. The repressive mind is still at work, and that same repressive mind is subtly using even acceptance. Then the web becomes even more entangled. The fight continues; only the style has changed. Even now you keep checking, “Look, anger is still coming.”

No; acceptance means precisely this: I drop the worry of checking—if it comes, it comes; I am at ease with it. The day you are wholly willing, fully okay with it, that very day you will find that suddenly anger does not arise. Because the moment your acceptance is total, the very possibility of anger ends. But that is a consequence. It is not a “result,” not the fruit of some procedure. It is a shadow that follows an event.

Just as if I say, “If you come here, your shadow will come here,” the coming of the shadow is natural. Exactly so, behind acceptance, witnessing happens naturally; and behind witnessing, suchness happens naturally. There is nothing for you to do in it.

As for what you have to “do”—in my view, what a human being has to do—two words suffice. If we use the Buddhist term, it is “acceptance.” If we use the terms of the Upanishads, the bhaktas, and the Sufis, it is “surrender.” It is only a difference of words. Acceptance means: there is no need to posit God; we simply accept what is. But if acceptance cannot happen, then surrender may be possible.

Yes, yes.

Yes, yes—it's everyone's. Everyone's.

Only then, only then will it happen; otherwise, it will not happen. So, in what you are asking, there is a lack of acceptance. Do not ask that at all. Either surrender...

Watching will continue; let it be.

Yes—this, this very thought of yours, that it has overpowered you, the moment you think it you have already made two parts. No; if there is acceptance, then don’t say, ‘Anger came to me,’ say, ‘I became anger.’ It is not a question of it coming—you became anger. And if you truly watch the moment of anger, anger does not come; you become anger. You are the anger. It is not that you are standing apart and have become angry—there are not two things. And when love comes, it is not that the lover is standing separate inside and here is love; you are love itself. This splitting into two that you are doing is a thought that comes later, in retrospect. In the very moment when anger arises, in the very moment when anger arises, if its...

In that very moment, you do not see.

—from behind.

This language we are using is our interpretation, seized from behind, after the fact. Let me give you an example: when you feel hunger—leave anger aside for a bit, because anger carries so many associations, and the mind has branded it as bad. To accept it is not easy at all. Deep down we are so certain it is bad that no matter how much we accept it on the surface, inside the sting, the thorn of its “badness,” keeps pricking. That conditioning is seated in the mind for millions of years; it cannot be erased in a day.

Take hunger instead. There, we don’t have the same sense of “bad.” When hunger seizes you, if you really look, you won’t find “I am hungry”; you will find “I am hunger.” Drop the words and go a little inside the hunger, and you will discover: hunger has become your very being. Hunger has become your very being!

But in language we have to break things up. With language there is a difficulty. Look: so many of us sit here simultaneously; but if we begin to speak, I will speak, then you will speak, then another will speak. Speech cannot be simultaneous; it immediately becomes sequential. Our being can be simultaneous, but our speaking cannot. In speaking, one speaks, then the next, then the next—forming a long, one-dimensional line.

When you stand at the doorway and look out—sky, moon, trees, flowers, fragrance, the sounds of the street—they are simultaneous, all at once. But when you think about them, they are no longer simultaneous. You say, “I saw the moon, I saw the stars, there was noise in the street, a fragrance came”—it has become one-dimensional, a chain.

So the moment you view any inner experience through thought, it begins to appear stretched out, elongated. Then it seems: there was hunger, I felt hunger, I experienced hunger, then I ate, then the hunger went. But when you enter the very moment of hunger, the existential moment, you find you are hunger. And that experience is immensely precious. Then there is no rejecter left, because there is no one standing behind; there is only hunger. Neither an acceptor nor a rejecter—only then is acceptance complete. For if an acceptor is still present, rejection is still operative.

If I say, “I totally accept you,” I am testifying that rejection existed in my mind; setting it aside, I am now accepting you. Otherwise the statement has no meaning.

With anger and sex the difficulty is greater, because those words are heavily loaded. We carry a great burden around them. So it is harder to look at them. The mind keeps saying, “When will you get rid of this? When will you be free of it?”

No! Not for long—try an experiment for just fifteen days. For fifteen days decide that getting rid of anything is not the aim. Make this your first decision: we are not going to seek liberation from it. Whatever is there, we are going to know what it is. For now, we will only know. After fifteen days we can consider whether to drop it or not. For a solid fifteen days I will only keep knowing what is—anger, sex—what it is like, how it feels, what sort of taste it has, what event occurs. I will only keep knowing.

Like a man left on an unknown island who, for the moment, decides nothing—where to build a house, whom to befriend, whom to oppose—he simply roams around and looks at what is. Just to make an acquaintance with the whole terrain of ourselves: where anger is, where love is, where hatred is. Do not bother about acceptance yet—only about knowing. And in the very knowing you will find that acceptance arises. And in that acceptance you will find that witnessing arises. And in that witnessing you will… The one step needed from your side is only acceptance; the rest comes on its own.

I say this again and again: when a man jumps from a roof, he has to take only one step. If he asks, “What should I do after I jump?” we will say, “You do nothing; the ground will do the rest. It will pull you.” You need do nothing further. Just take the one step, because that one step is what is keeping you from the earth’s pull, that’s all.

One step from man, and a thousand from the divine. One step from our side—call it acceptance or surrender, or give it any name—witnessing. One step in which we are wholly willing, with no complaint in us, no urge to cut anything off. This is what I call a theist—a man of trust. Once this one step is taken, the other steps arise by themselves; you do not have to take them.

But take care: if you take even this step only in order to separate yourself from anger or sex, then the step has not been taken at all—the disturbance will continue.

Yes, it has arisen from this. It has arisen from this, but it will not be completed by this. It will begin from here—the first idea will arise from this—but it will fail. Now let the second process begin from the very failure of that. It won’t happen through this; it happens through that. Anyone who starts will inevitably begin like this: “This is bad, it troubles me, brings me sorrow, throws me into hell—how do I get out of it?” But the attempt to get out… let me give you an example. A man cannot fall asleep; naturally he will try to bring on sleep. And by trying, sleep never comes, because it is wholly antithetical. Every kind of effort breaks sleep—even the effort to bring sleep. When you are trying to bring sleep, your wakefulness only increases, because every effort arouses. You will say, “But the one who can’t sleep will of course try to make sleep happen.” Quite right. Yet one day he will have to see that trying to bring sleep does not bring sleep.

Yes, the exhaustion of effort will bring sleep. When effort fails and one day you say, “To hell with this sleep, and to hell with this trying”—and you just lie there—then sleep will come. So now you have to take the second step. When even trying seems futile—otherwise, it doesn’t happen.