TAO
Tao The Three Treasures Vol 3 01
First Discourse from the series of 10 discourses - Tao The Three Treasures Vol 3 by Osho.
You can listen, download or read all of these discourses on oshoworld.com.
On the pursuit of knowledge, Lao Tzu says:
Without stepping outside one’s doors
one can know what is happening in the world.
Without looking out of one’s windows
one can see the Tao of heaven.
The further one pursues knowledge
the less one knows.
Therefore the sage knows without running about,
understands without seeing,
accomplishes without doing.
Religion is not knowledge, it is knowing. Knowledge is of the mind, knowing is of the being – and the difference and the distance is tremendously vast. The difference is not only quantitative, it is also qualitative.
Knowledge and knowing – they are as different as heaven and hell, earth and the sky, so the first thing to understand is the difference between knowledge and knowing. Knowledge is never of the present, it is always of the past. The moment you say you know, it is already a dead thing. It has already left its marks on the memory; it is like dust clinging to you. You have already moved away from it.
Knowing is always immediate, knowing is here and now. You cannot say anything about it, you can only be. The moment you speak of it, even knowing becomes knowledge; that’s why all those who have known say it cannot be said. The moment you speak of it, its very nature changes; it has become knowledge. It is no longer the beautiful alive phenomenon of knowing.
Knowing has no past, it has no future, it has only the present. And remember, the present is not part of time. People ordinarily think that time is divided between the past, the future, and the present. They are absolutely wrong. Time is divided between the past and the future; the present is not a part of time at all. You cannot catch hold of it in time. Pursue it and you will miss. Try to grasp it and it will always be out of your reach, because it is part of eternity not part of time.
The present is eternity crossing time. It is a meeting point where eternity and the temporal meet.
In the present is knowing, in the past is knowledge – and knowledge creates the future. The past creates the future: the future is a by-product of the past. Whenever you know, you start planning. The more you know, the more you plan. Knowing means the past, planning means the future – then you don’t allow the future freedom, you try to fix it into the pigeonholes of the past. You would like it to be just a repetition of the past – however modified, decorated, but just a repetition of the past.
A man of knowledge is a man of planning, and life is an unplanned flow. Life is freedom. You cannot pigeonhole it, you cannot categorize it. That’s why a man of knowledge misses life. He knows much, and he knows nothing. He knows too much and he is just empty and hollow. You cannot find a shallower person than a man of knowledge. He is just surface and surface; he has no depth because depth comes through eternity.
Time is horizontal, it moves in a line on the horizon. Eternity is vertical, it moves into depth and height. That is the meaning of Jesus’ cross: time crossing eternity, or eternity crossing time. Jesus’ hands are time, they move into the past and the future, crucified in time, resurrected into eternity. His being is vertical – everybody’s being is vertical, only the body, the hands, the material part of you, is horizontal.
Knowledge creates the future, and the future creates worry. The more you know, the more worried, the more uneasy. You are never at ease, at home – a deep trembling inside. It is a pathology. A man of knowing is totally different – he lives here. This moment is all, as if tomorrow exists not – and really it exists not, it has never existed. It is part of the game of the mind. It is a dream of the man of knowledge.
This moment is all, and the total. Knowing moves into this moment vertically, goes deeper and deeper and deeper. A man of knowing has depth; even his surface is nothing but part of depth. He has no superficial surface, his surface is also part of depth. And a man of knowledge? – he has no depth, his depth is also part of his surface.
This is the paradox: that a man of knowing knows and a man of knowledge does not know, cannot know, because knowledge cannot meet life. That is the barrier – on the contrary, the only barrier, the hindrance. It is just like this: a mother knows that the child is hers; the father has knowledge that the child is his. The father has only a belief. Deep down, he does not know. Only a mother knows!
It happened…
Mulla Nasruddin was working as a vizier to a small kingdom. The king was very generous – not very rich, the kingdom was small, but still very generous. Every year, Nasruddin would come and tell him, “My wife has given birth to a child,” and the king would give valuable presents to him, to the child, to the mother – but then it became too much because it was every year.
When the twelfth child was born and Nasruddin came, the king said, “Now Mulla, it is too much – and the world is suffering so much from overpopulation. What are you doing? If you go at this speed you will create a small nation. You go on, every year – stop it! Let this child be the last. And if you cannot stop, if you are unable to stop, then it is better to commit suicide rather than to overburden the earth.”
Nasruddin was very depressed. Then the thirteenth child was born – what to do? So he thought, it is better now not to go to the king – go to the forest and commit suicide, as the king has said. So he went to the forest and prepared everything to hang himself. Just a split second and he would have been hanging under the tree, dead – and then suddenly he said to himself, “Nasruddin! Beware! You may be hanging the wrong man!”
A father simply believes, a mother knows. Knowing is like a mother, knowledge is like a father.
All knowledge is belief. Knowing is not belief, it is knowing. It is your perception, it is your vision, it is your growth. It is just like the mother – the child grows in her womb, she knows the child is her part, her own extension, her own being, blood and bone. A father is extrinsic, he is not intrinsic. He simply believes that the child is his.
A man of knowledge believes that he knows. A man of knowing knows.
Knowing is a transformation in your being, it is like a pregnancy – you have to carry it. You have to give birth to yourself. A resurrection into eternity, a turning away from time and a moving into no time, a conversion from mind to no-mind, but something so tremendous that you know it is happening in you.
A man of knowledge goes on collecting dust from the buddhas. Those who have known, he believes in them. Whatever he believes in is dead. He has not given birth to himself. He has collected knowledge from others, everything is borrowed – and how can knowledge be borrowed? How can being be borrowed? If knowledge is going to be true, it is going to be of the nature of being.
George Gurdjieff used to ask people – seekers who would come to him – the first thing he used to ask is, “Are you interested in knowledge or being? Because here we give being and we are not concerned about knowledge, so decide well. If you are concerned with knowledge, go somewhere else. If you are concerned with being, remain here. But make a very, very clear decision.”
What is the difference between being and knowledge? The same as the difference between knowledge and knowing. Knowing is being.
It is not something that is being added to you, it is something you grow into. Knowledge is something which is added to you. You don’t grow through it; rather you carry it as a burden. So you will always find a man of knowledge burdened, heavily burdened. He is carrying mountains of knowledge on his shoulders. You will see his face very serious, deadly serious, and his heart completely crushed under the burden.
A man of knowing is weightless. He has nothing to carry, he can fly into the sky. The gravitation of the earth does not affect him. He is not pulled toward the earth because the earth can pull only that which is heavy. He remains on the earth but he is not of the earth. That is the meaning of Jesus’ saying – he says again and again, “My kingdom is not of this world.” It is of some other world, the world of being, of eternity.
If you understand the distinction well, then remember never to move on the path of knowledge. Move on the path of knowing, being, because only then do you gain something: not that you have more information, but that you become more. And that is the crucial point to be understood – you have to become more.
Your poverty is not of information, your poverty is of being. You are poor, and you go on hiding that poverty through accumulating things. And knowledge is also a thing. Words, theories, philosophies, systems, theologies – all things. Subtle, abstract – but still things. You are not growing, you remain the same, and you create a delusion around you that you have come to know.
These sutras of Lao Tzu have to be understood in this light.
Without stepping outside one’s doors
one can know what is happening in the world.
Because deep down you are the world. The world is nothing but you writ large. In fact there is no need to go anywhere to know anything; if you know yourself you have known the whole humanity. If you know your anger you have known all anger. If you know your violence you have known all wars. There is no need to go to Vietnam, no need to go to Korea, no need to go to Palestine, or anywhere. If you know your violence you have known all violence. If you know your love you have known all – the whole history of love; never-written, never-known, even that you have known because you are the seed.
It is just like taking a drop of water from the ocean; you analyze that drop. You have known the whole ocean if you know the drop. Because in the small drop the whole ocean is condensed, it is a miniature ocean. If you analyze the drop and come to know that it consists of H2O, you know that the whole ocean consists of H2O. Now there is no need to go on and on and on; one drop is enough. If you know the taste of one drop, that it is salty, you know that the whole ocean is salty – and that drop is you.
Without stepping outside one’s doors one can know what is happening in the world. Because you are the world, an atomic world, and everything is happening in you. It may be happening on a vaster scale in the world, the quantity may be more, but the quality is the same.
Understanding oneself one understands all.
There is a beautiful story in the Upanishads. A young man, Shvetketu, came back from his guru’s house – from his gurukul, the family of his guru – learned, and of course, as young men are bound to be, very proud of his learning. Haughty. Egoistic.
His father, the seer Uddalak, watched him coming, entering the village. The father watched him from the window and became sad: “This is not learning! He has become a man of knowledge. This is not knowing.” Uddalak said to his own heart, “I never sent him for this. He missed the point. He wasted his time!” Because knowing is humble. Not humble in the sense that it is opposite to ego, it is not related to ego at all, not even as an opposite – because even the opposite carries something of it.
Not feeling that his son was humble, the father became very, very sad. He is getting old, and here comes this boy having wasted many years of his life – why does he look so proud? Knowing always makes you humble.
This word humble is beautiful. It comes from the root humus; the root really means earthy, of the earth, unpretentious. And the same root is the base of the words human and humanity. You become human only when you become humble, you become humble only when you are of the earth. Of the earth in the sense: unpretentious, simple, unconditioned, earthy.
Here comes the son so proud and haughty, he must have become a man of knowledge – and he had become one. He came, he touched his father’s feet, but it was just a formality. How can a man who has become so egoistic bow down?
The father said, “Shvetketu, I see your body bent, but not you. And what misfortune has happened to you? Why do you look so haughty? A man of knowing becomes humble, Shvetketu. Have you heard anything about that one, knowing which, one knows all?”
Shvetketu said, “What are you talking about? How can one know all by knowing one? Absurd! I have known all that could be known in the university, I have become as profound as one can become in all the subjects that are taught there. I have exhausted the whole possibility of learning. When my master said to me, ‘Now you know all and you can go back home,’ only then did I come back. But of what you are speaking, that ‘one’ – never heard of it. Nobody talked about it in the university. We learned grammar, language, history, myth, philosophy, theology, religion, poetry. Everything that is known to man I have learned. I have become proficient, and I have attained the highest degree that the university can confer. But we never heard about that ‘one’ – what are you talking about? Have you gone mad? How can one know all by knowing one?”
Uddalak said, “Yes, that one is you. Shvetketu, tattvamasi – that art thou. If you know this one you will know all. All that you have known is just rot. You have wasted your energy. Go back! Never come again unless you know that one by knowing which all is known.
“Because,” said Uddalak to his son, “in our family no one has been a brahmin just by name. We have called ourselves brahmins because we have known the brahman. You don’t belong to our family if you don’t know that one, go back!”
You are that one: that art thou. A very small seed, almost invisible to yourself. Unless you search deep, and search long, with perseverance and patience, you will not encounter it.
That seed is within you; it is your withinness. And the whole vast world is nothing but you written on a large canvas. Man is humanity. You are the world.
Says Lao Tzu:
Without stepping outside one’s doors
one can know what is happening in the world.
Without looking out of one’s windows
one can see the Tao of heaven.
There is no need to look out of the windows – the windows are your senses. Eyes, ears, nose – these are the windows, there is no need to look from these windows. Without looking out of one’s windows one can see the Tao of heaven. You can see the ultimate within.
Have you seen Buddha images, sitting silently with closed eyes, unmoving? There are stories in India about people remaining in meditation for so long that birds settled on their bodies, they made their nests in their hair, and ants crawled for so long on them that they forgot – the ants forgot completely that here sits a man. They started living there.
What were these men doing? Creepers crawled on their body thinking it was a good support. So unmoving, what were they doing there? They were not doing anything. Closing all their windows they were looking at the splendor of splendors, they were looking at themselves. It is such a tremendous mystery and such a beautiful phenomenon that nothing like it can ever be encountered anywhere else – because wherever you go and whatever you see, the report will be secondhand.
I can see your face but my eyes will be the mediators, they will report: I will never be able to see your face directly, it will be always indirect. I can go to a rosebush and look at the beautiful flowers, but that beauty is secondhand because my eyes will report. There is an agency. I cannot come in direct contact with the rose; the eyes will always be there. The smell will come through the nose. I can listen to the singing birds but that song will always be secondhand, and unless you know firsthand, how can you know: …the Tao of heaven?
How can you know the ultimate? The very ground of being? There is only one possibility of coming in contact with the ultimate – directly, immediately, without any mediators – and that is, inside yourself. Close all the doors and windows and move within.
It happened…
One of the wisest women ever born was Rabiya al-Adabiya. She was a Sufi, a great mystic, incomparable. She was sitting inside her hut with closed eyes doing something – nobody knows what.
Another mystic of the name of Hassan was staying with her, and it was morning, and the sun started coming up, and it was tremendously beautiful. The birds singing and the trees happy again to see the light, and the whole world celebrating the morn. Hassan stood there, then he called Rabiya saying, “Rabiya, come out! See the glory of God! What a beautiful morning.”
Rabiya said, “Hassan, rather on the contrary, you come in and see God himself. Out there I know is beauty, the beauty of creation, but it is nothing compared to the beauty of the creator. So rather, you come in!”
I don’t know whether Hassan understood or not, but this is the whole thing. Knowledge goes out. When you go out you can know many things but it will be secondhand information.
That’s what science is: science is always secondhand, it can never be firsthand. It can never have that freshness which religion can have. However deep an Einstein goes, the depth will be of the outside. He cannot come out of it fresh.
And Albert Einstein felt it in his last days – somebody asked him just two or three days before he died, “What would you like to be, if there is another opportunity given by God to you to come to the earth, what would you like to become?”
He said, “Next time rather than becoming a scientist, I would prefer to become a plumber. I would like to live a simple and ordinary life. I would like to live absolutely unknown to the outer world. I would like to live anonymously, nobody knowing about me, so that nobody disturbs me.”
He is groping in the right direction. He is groping in the same direction where he can become a buddha any day.
When one gets fed up with the outside one turns in. Then one would like to close all the doors and all the windows and just rest within. Without looking out of one’s windows one can see the Tao of heaven.
Science goes on discovering laws and laws and laws but it will never discover the law, and the law is the meaning of the word Tao. Science will go on discovering gods and gods and gods but will never discover the god, and the god is the meaning of the word Tao: the very ultimate, beyond which nothing exists, beyond which nothing is possible.
Science goes on discovering – and every day the more science discovers, the more old theories are discarded and thrown into the rubbish bin. And this is going to happen to every scientific theory one day or other. All scientific theories are doomed to be thrown onto the rubbish heap because they don’t know the law. They are only reflections in the lake not the real moon. The real moon is within and the whole world functions as a mirror.
When you see beauty in a roseflower, have you ever pondered over whether the beauty is there in the roseflower or the beauty is poured by you? Because there are moments when you pass the same rosebush but nothing happens: the rose then is not a rose, nothing special, nothing extraordinary, just an ordinary rose. But in another moment – in another mood, in another state of mind – suddenly it takes on a beauty, a flavor. It becomes a new dimension. Doors open, mysteries are revealed. What is happening is that the rose is just a mirror. Whatever you pour into it, you see.
You come before a mirror, you look in the mirror, the mirror simply mirrors you: it is you. If you are ugly the mirror reports an ugly figure, if you are beautiful the mirror reports beauty.
There are moments when you are ugly then all roses become ugly; there are moments when you are sad then all moons become sad; there are moments when you are in hell then the earth becomes hell. You create reality around you, you project reality around you. You have within you the creator, the one by knowing which all is known.
That’s why in aesthetics, thinkers for centuries have been trying to define what beauty is, and have not been able to define it. They cannot because it does not exist there outside. It is a pouring from within. The roseflower is not beautiful; you create the beauty around it. It is just like a peg: you hang beauty on it, it becomes beautiful. That’s why when a poet passes by, the roseflower is so beautiful you cannot conceive! And then a scientist passes absolutely oblivious of the fact that the rose has bloomed, the rose is blooming, that the rose exists. Then a businessman passes; he looks at the rose and thinks how much he can earn out of it if he sells it. Then comes a child, plucks the rose, plays for a few moments, forgets about it, goes on his way. The rose is nothing. It is you who brings the meaning to it.
People come to me every day and they ask again and again in a thousand and one ways, “What is the meaning of life?” It has no meaning. You bring meaning to it. You create meaning. Meaning is not an objective fact, so don’t look for meaning and don’t search for meaning. If you go on searching you are bound to come to the truth that life is meaningless.
That’s how existentialists in the West have come to discover that life is meaningless – and they have stopped there, which is very unfortunate. In the East we have come to know it but we never stopped there. Buddha also came to know that life is meaningless but he never stopped there. This is stopping halfway! Life is meaningless, but that doesn’t mean that your life needs to be meaningless, no. Life is meaningless if you don’t bring meaning to it. There is no meaning in it, the meaning has to be given to it. You pour down your being into life, it becomes vibrant with meaning. Then it sings, it dances, it becomes divine.
People ask me, “Where is God? Can you show us?” I cannot show you God. Nobody can show you because God has to be found within. Then you can see him anywhere. Then in a rose you will see him – the rose will become the mirror and you will see God. Then a bird is singing in the morning, and suddenly the note takes on a flavor which was never there – you contributed it, it becomes divine.
Once godliness is discovered within, everything becomes divine. If you have not discovered it within and you go on asking, “Where is God?” and you go on asking for his address, you will never reach. All addresses are false because he lives within you, he needs no address.
There is a beautiful story, very ancient…
It is said that God created the world and everything was beautiful, then he created man and everything became horrible. With man entered hell. And man started complaining and it became almost impossible for God to sleep or to do anything – so many people, and they went on knocking at his door day and night, and it became a nightmare. He must have thought many times to destroy man so that the peace of the world could be regained.
But then a wise counselor said, “There is no need to destroy man, simply change your abode. Don’t live here on this earth” – God used to live here, and because of you he had to leave his abode.
So God asked, “Where should I go?”
Another counselor said, “It is good that you go to Everest.”
God said, “You don’t know – sooner or later there will come a man named Hillary; he will reach there and the whole thing will start again.”
Then somebody said, “Go to the moon.”
God said, “You don’t know; these things won’t help much. Sooner or later man is going to reach everywhere. Suggest to me somewhere he will not even suspect I am.”
Then the old counselor came near to him, said something into his ear, and God nodded. He said, “Yes, you are right.”
The old man had suggested, “Then hide within man. He will never suspect that. He will search and seek everywhere except in his own inner world.”
The story is beautiful. Almost factual. Not a story but a truth.
Without looking out of one’s windows
one can see the Tao of heaven.
The further one pursues knowledge
the less one knows.
Looks paradoxical, but only looks paradoxical. It is not. It is a simple fact. The more one pursues knowledge the less one knows. Go to the pundits: they know so much, but look into their eyes – not even a glimmer. Watch them – not even a gesture of knowing. Be with them, and there is nothing, they are hollow, absolutely false. Nothing inside, just a painted hollowness, a decorated hollowness, decorated by many scriptures: the words of those who have known, but all borrowed, all dead. And surrounded by these dead words they have almost become dead themselves.
Go to a man of knowledge and you will taste dust around him. He may look very, very old, ancient, almost in the grave, but you will not find the freshness that is part of life. You will not see a living river in him, flowing, moving always into the unknown. Knowledge is a limitation, however vast, but a limitation still. That’s why Socrates says, “When I was young I thought I knew all. When I became a little mature I started suspecting, and then I came to realize that I don’t know that much. When I really became old I realized that I don’t know at all.”
It happened…
The oracle at Delphi declared, “Socrates is the wisest man on earth today.”
The people who heard this went to Socrates and they said, “This is a paradox! We are puzzled. Then who is right? If the oracle is right then you are wrong, if you are right then the oracle is wrong – and neither can be wrong. We believe in you, we have known you, we have been around you, we have felt you – that you must be true. Whatever you say, it cannot be a lie. But the oracle, the divine oracle, has never been found telling lies.
“All that has been predicted by the Delphic oracle has always been found true, so we are in a fix. Help us. You say you don’t know anything, in fact you say that you know only one thing – that you know nothing. And then comes this oracle and says, ‘Socrates is the wisest man on earth.’”
Socrates said, “There must have been some misunderstanding because I know more about myself than anybody can know about me, and I tell you again that I know nothing. At the most this much I can permit – that I know that I know nothing. Nothing more. Go and ask the oracle again, there has been some misunderstanding. Either you have not interpreted it rightly or something else – go again!”
They went again and asked the oracle and she laughed and said, “That’s why we say he is the wisest man on earth, because he knows only that he knows nothing.”
There is no paradox. This is the indication of a wise man: that he has come to realize that knowledge is futile, that knowledge knows nothing, that knowledge is rubbish, that knowledge is nonsense. However logical it pretends to be – those are all pretensions.
The further one pursues knowledge the less one knows. Why does it happen? Because the further you pursue knowledge, the further you are going away from yourself. The more you try to find the truth somewhere outside of you, the further away you are moving: the further away from the whole in search of the whole, the further away from yourself in search of your authentic being, the further away from consciousness in your search.
What are you searching for? That which you are searching is already within you. Religion is the search for that which is already the case. Religion is the search for that which is already the reality.
If you go further away from yourself, you will know less and less and you will think you know more and more. Scriptures you will know, words you will know, theories – and you can go on spinning and you can go on weaving more and more out of these words and you can make palaces in the air. But they cannot be more than airy, abstract. They don’t exist, they are made of the same stuff as dreams. Thoughts and dreams are made of the same stuff – they are ripples on the surface of the ocean; they have nothing substantial in them. If you want to know the truth, come back home.
I always say: seek and you will miss, don’t seek – and find. Because the very effort to seek means that you have taken it for granted that it is not with you already. From the very beginning your search is doomed. One day, seeking, searching, accumulating knowledge, the fact will strike home that you are a fool, that it would have been better – before going into the vast world to seek – to have looked inside.
Again a small parable of Rabiya al-Adabiya…
One evening, the sun was setting and the neighborhood found her searching for something on the street. An old woman, everybody loved her; of course everybody thought her a little crazy, but she was a beautiful person. So they all rushed to help her and they asked, “What has been lost? What are you searching for?”
She said, “My needle. I was doing some needlework and I have lost my needle. Help me! You are so kind.” So they all engaged in the search.
Then one man, seeing the fact that the street was so big and the needle was such a small tiny thing and that unless they exactly knew where it had been dropped, it would be almost impossible to find, came to Rabiya and said, “Tell us exactly the spot.”
Rabiya said, “Don’t ask that because in fact I did not lose it outside my house, I lost it inside.”
They all stopped searching and said, “Crazy woman! Then why are you searching here outside in the street when you have lost it inside the house?”
Rabiya said, “There is much darkness, here is a little light. How can you seek when there is darkness? And you know I am poor, not even a lamp with me. How can you seek when there is darkness? So I am seeking here because still a little sunlight is left, and still something can be done to search.”
The people started laughing. They said, “You are really crazy! We know that in darkness it is difficult to search, but then the only way is to borrow a lamp from somebody, and search for it there.”
Rabiya said, “I never thought you people were so wise. Then why do you always seek outside? I was just following your ways. If you understand so well, why don’t you borrow a lamp from me and search inside? I know there is darkness.”
This parable is meaningful. You search outside, there is a reason: because inside everything is so dark. You close your eyes and there is dark night, you cannot see anything. Even if something is seen it is nothing but a part of the outside reflected in the inner lake – thoughts floating that you have gathered in the marketplace, faces coming and going, but they belong to the outside world. Just reflections of the outside, and vast darkness. One becomes afraid. Then one thinks it is better to seek outside; there at least there is light.
But that is not the point. Where have you lost your truth? Where have you lost your being? Where have you lost your godliness? Where have you lost your happiness, your bliss? Before you go to the infinite ways of the outside world, it will be better to first look within. If you cannot find there, then it is all right – go and search outside. But that has never happened. Whoever has looked within has always found because it is already there. Only a look is needed, a conversion, a returning of consciousness. Just a deep look.
The further one pursues knowledge
the less one knows.
Therefore the sage knows without running about…
In the running you are missing: wasting life, energy, opportunity. Don’t go on running about and about and about. Stop running: that’s all that meditation is about. Stop running, sit quietly with closed windows and doors, settle inside, rest inside, relax inside. Let the turmoil settle a little – then start looking.
It will be like groping in the beginning; in the beginning the darkness will be too much, but as you become accustomed to it, the darkness starts changing its quality.
It is just like when you come from the outside and it has been a hot day and the sun has been too cruel. You come inside your house and you cannot see – everything looks dark – because the eyes are focused with the sun, the eyes are accustomed to too much light. A sudden change – the eyes will take a little time to settle, that’s all. Patience is needed. When you move inward, nothing will be seen. Don’t be impatient, don’t say just after a minute that “All the buddhas are false – they say inside is bliss, I don’t see anything.”
It happened to one of the most penetrating thinkers the West has ever produced, it happened to David Hume. Again and again coming across the Eastern teachings: “Go within. Close your eyes, see.” One day he thought, “Let us try,” knowing well that there is nothing – these Eastern people are mad, illogical, irrational, introverts, fooling themselves and nobody else. But he said, “Better at least to try.” He closed his eyes just a single minute. Then he opened them and wrote down in his diary, “There is nothing except darkness, a few thoughts floating, a few sensations, and nothing else.”
Don’t be so impatient. Wait. Let things settle inside, it takes time. You have been unsettling them for so many lives, settling will take a little time, a little patience. And nothing else is needed. You need not try to settle them because that will disturb them again, you will stir them up more. Simply don’t do anything. That is the meaning of Lao Tzu’s beautiful phrase wu-wei: do by not doing. You simply don’t do anything and it happens; that is doing by not doing. Just close your eyes and wait and wait and wait and you see layers of disturbance falling, settling, things falling into their places – and silence. By and by darkness becomes light, and “the one” is known, by knowing which all is known. Because that one is the seed. That art thou, Shvetketu.
Therefore the sage knows without running about,
understands without seeing,
accomplishes without doing.
And that is the greatest accomplishment: that which is accomplished without doing anything at all. Remember, whatever you can do cannot go beyond you. How can it? If you do it, it will remain lower than you, it cannot go higher than you. Whatever you do will be part of your mind, it cannot be transcendental. Whatever you do will be done by the ego, it cannot be your being. So non-doing is the only way to do it.
Sitting still, sitting quietly, not doing anything – and the grass grows by itself. Then the effort, the doing, is still. Such a tremendous and vast silence descends on you.
I was reading a Japanese poem just a few days ago. A line of it penetrated me very deeply, became part of my heart. It says:
When the bird is not singing the mountain is yet more silent.
When there is no doing, even the bird is no longer singing, nothing is there, everything calm and quiet. Suddenly you become aware that nothing has been lacking from the very beginning: that which you are seeking, you have always been that. Suddenly you realize that the master of masters is sitting there on the throne. And you start laughing.
Bokuju became enlightened. Enlightened? Don’t take the word very seriously, it is nothing serious. It is the ultimate in fun, it is the last joke. Bokuju became enlightened and he started laughing, a belly laugh, he became crazy.
People gathered and they started asking, “What is the matter? Please tell us, what has happened?”
He said, “Nothing has happened. Just I was mad, searching and seeking that which is already there in me.”
Whenever people used to ask Bokuju, “What did you do when you became enlightened?” he would say, “I laughed, and I laughed loudly.” And he said, “I have still not stopped laughing. Whether you hear it or not is not the point – I have still not stopped laughing.” What a joke! You have it already and you have been searching and seeking. And you could not find it, not because it was not there but because it was so much there, and so close to you that you could not see it.
The eyes can see that which is far away, the eyes can see that which is distant – because the eyes need a perspective. The hands can touch that which is different and distant; the ears can hear that which is outside. That’s why Lao Tzu says the sage: …understands without seeing. Because how can you see yourself? Who will see whom? The seer and the seen are one, no eyes are needed. Who will do it? Who will make the effort? It will be just like a dog chasing its own tail, it will be simply foolish.
And this is what you are doing, chasing your own tail. Stop and see it is your own tail, there is no need to chase it – and by chasing it you are not going to get it, ever. By chasing it you miss, by non-chasing you accomplish: …accomplishes without doing.
And then time disappears. Then the mind disappears, because the mind is there to know something, the mind is the faculty of knowing. When you have known, there is no point for the faculty to remain, it simply disappears.
Time disappears; time was there because you were frustrated, it is created out of frustration – so that you can hope for the future, and somehow bear the frustration, and tolerate it, and console yourself.
The mind and time are not two things but aspects of one thing. When both disappear for the first time, you are in your absolute glory. Say it this way: you have become a god, a buddha.
And ask the awakened: they all say the same thing, that it has to be accomplished without any effort on your part. It is the effort that has created the whole mess. Dropping all effort, just sitting silently looking within – wu-wei.
Enough for today.
Without stepping outside one’s doors
one can know what is happening in the world.
Without looking out of one’s windows
one can see the Tao of heaven.
The further one pursues knowledge
the less one knows.
Therefore the sage knows without running about,
understands without seeing,
accomplishes without doing.
Religion is not knowledge, it is knowing. Knowledge is of the mind, knowing is of the being – and the difference and the distance is tremendously vast. The difference is not only quantitative, it is also qualitative.
Knowledge and knowing – they are as different as heaven and hell, earth and the sky, so the first thing to understand is the difference between knowledge and knowing. Knowledge is never of the present, it is always of the past. The moment you say you know, it is already a dead thing. It has already left its marks on the memory; it is like dust clinging to you. You have already moved away from it.
Knowing is always immediate, knowing is here and now. You cannot say anything about it, you can only be. The moment you speak of it, even knowing becomes knowledge; that’s why all those who have known say it cannot be said. The moment you speak of it, its very nature changes; it has become knowledge. It is no longer the beautiful alive phenomenon of knowing.
Knowing has no past, it has no future, it has only the present. And remember, the present is not part of time. People ordinarily think that time is divided between the past, the future, and the present. They are absolutely wrong. Time is divided between the past and the future; the present is not a part of time at all. You cannot catch hold of it in time. Pursue it and you will miss. Try to grasp it and it will always be out of your reach, because it is part of eternity not part of time.
The present is eternity crossing time. It is a meeting point where eternity and the temporal meet.
In the present is knowing, in the past is knowledge – and knowledge creates the future. The past creates the future: the future is a by-product of the past. Whenever you know, you start planning. The more you know, the more you plan. Knowing means the past, planning means the future – then you don’t allow the future freedom, you try to fix it into the pigeonholes of the past. You would like it to be just a repetition of the past – however modified, decorated, but just a repetition of the past.
A man of knowledge is a man of planning, and life is an unplanned flow. Life is freedom. You cannot pigeonhole it, you cannot categorize it. That’s why a man of knowledge misses life. He knows much, and he knows nothing. He knows too much and he is just empty and hollow. You cannot find a shallower person than a man of knowledge. He is just surface and surface; he has no depth because depth comes through eternity.
Time is horizontal, it moves in a line on the horizon. Eternity is vertical, it moves into depth and height. That is the meaning of Jesus’ cross: time crossing eternity, or eternity crossing time. Jesus’ hands are time, they move into the past and the future, crucified in time, resurrected into eternity. His being is vertical – everybody’s being is vertical, only the body, the hands, the material part of you, is horizontal.
Knowledge creates the future, and the future creates worry. The more you know, the more worried, the more uneasy. You are never at ease, at home – a deep trembling inside. It is a pathology. A man of knowing is totally different – he lives here. This moment is all, as if tomorrow exists not – and really it exists not, it has never existed. It is part of the game of the mind. It is a dream of the man of knowledge.
This moment is all, and the total. Knowing moves into this moment vertically, goes deeper and deeper and deeper. A man of knowing has depth; even his surface is nothing but part of depth. He has no superficial surface, his surface is also part of depth. And a man of knowledge? – he has no depth, his depth is also part of his surface.
This is the paradox: that a man of knowing knows and a man of knowledge does not know, cannot know, because knowledge cannot meet life. That is the barrier – on the contrary, the only barrier, the hindrance. It is just like this: a mother knows that the child is hers; the father has knowledge that the child is his. The father has only a belief. Deep down, he does not know. Only a mother knows!
It happened…
Mulla Nasruddin was working as a vizier to a small kingdom. The king was very generous – not very rich, the kingdom was small, but still very generous. Every year, Nasruddin would come and tell him, “My wife has given birth to a child,” and the king would give valuable presents to him, to the child, to the mother – but then it became too much because it was every year.
When the twelfth child was born and Nasruddin came, the king said, “Now Mulla, it is too much – and the world is suffering so much from overpopulation. What are you doing? If you go at this speed you will create a small nation. You go on, every year – stop it! Let this child be the last. And if you cannot stop, if you are unable to stop, then it is better to commit suicide rather than to overburden the earth.”
Nasruddin was very depressed. Then the thirteenth child was born – what to do? So he thought, it is better now not to go to the king – go to the forest and commit suicide, as the king has said. So he went to the forest and prepared everything to hang himself. Just a split second and he would have been hanging under the tree, dead – and then suddenly he said to himself, “Nasruddin! Beware! You may be hanging the wrong man!”
A father simply believes, a mother knows. Knowing is like a mother, knowledge is like a father.
All knowledge is belief. Knowing is not belief, it is knowing. It is your perception, it is your vision, it is your growth. It is just like the mother – the child grows in her womb, she knows the child is her part, her own extension, her own being, blood and bone. A father is extrinsic, he is not intrinsic. He simply believes that the child is his.
A man of knowledge believes that he knows. A man of knowing knows.
Knowing is a transformation in your being, it is like a pregnancy – you have to carry it. You have to give birth to yourself. A resurrection into eternity, a turning away from time and a moving into no time, a conversion from mind to no-mind, but something so tremendous that you know it is happening in you.
A man of knowledge goes on collecting dust from the buddhas. Those who have known, he believes in them. Whatever he believes in is dead. He has not given birth to himself. He has collected knowledge from others, everything is borrowed – and how can knowledge be borrowed? How can being be borrowed? If knowledge is going to be true, it is going to be of the nature of being.
George Gurdjieff used to ask people – seekers who would come to him – the first thing he used to ask is, “Are you interested in knowledge or being? Because here we give being and we are not concerned about knowledge, so decide well. If you are concerned with knowledge, go somewhere else. If you are concerned with being, remain here. But make a very, very clear decision.”
What is the difference between being and knowledge? The same as the difference between knowledge and knowing. Knowing is being.
It is not something that is being added to you, it is something you grow into. Knowledge is something which is added to you. You don’t grow through it; rather you carry it as a burden. So you will always find a man of knowledge burdened, heavily burdened. He is carrying mountains of knowledge on his shoulders. You will see his face very serious, deadly serious, and his heart completely crushed under the burden.
A man of knowing is weightless. He has nothing to carry, he can fly into the sky. The gravitation of the earth does not affect him. He is not pulled toward the earth because the earth can pull only that which is heavy. He remains on the earth but he is not of the earth. That is the meaning of Jesus’ saying – he says again and again, “My kingdom is not of this world.” It is of some other world, the world of being, of eternity.
If you understand the distinction well, then remember never to move on the path of knowledge. Move on the path of knowing, being, because only then do you gain something: not that you have more information, but that you become more. And that is the crucial point to be understood – you have to become more.
Your poverty is not of information, your poverty is of being. You are poor, and you go on hiding that poverty through accumulating things. And knowledge is also a thing. Words, theories, philosophies, systems, theologies – all things. Subtle, abstract – but still things. You are not growing, you remain the same, and you create a delusion around you that you have come to know.
These sutras of Lao Tzu have to be understood in this light.
Without stepping outside one’s doors
one can know what is happening in the world.
Because deep down you are the world. The world is nothing but you writ large. In fact there is no need to go anywhere to know anything; if you know yourself you have known the whole humanity. If you know your anger you have known all anger. If you know your violence you have known all wars. There is no need to go to Vietnam, no need to go to Korea, no need to go to Palestine, or anywhere. If you know your violence you have known all violence. If you know your love you have known all – the whole history of love; never-written, never-known, even that you have known because you are the seed.
It is just like taking a drop of water from the ocean; you analyze that drop. You have known the whole ocean if you know the drop. Because in the small drop the whole ocean is condensed, it is a miniature ocean. If you analyze the drop and come to know that it consists of H2O, you know that the whole ocean consists of H2O. Now there is no need to go on and on and on; one drop is enough. If you know the taste of one drop, that it is salty, you know that the whole ocean is salty – and that drop is you.
Without stepping outside one’s doors one can know what is happening in the world. Because you are the world, an atomic world, and everything is happening in you. It may be happening on a vaster scale in the world, the quantity may be more, but the quality is the same.
Understanding oneself one understands all.
There is a beautiful story in the Upanishads. A young man, Shvetketu, came back from his guru’s house – from his gurukul, the family of his guru – learned, and of course, as young men are bound to be, very proud of his learning. Haughty. Egoistic.
His father, the seer Uddalak, watched him coming, entering the village. The father watched him from the window and became sad: “This is not learning! He has become a man of knowledge. This is not knowing.” Uddalak said to his own heart, “I never sent him for this. He missed the point. He wasted his time!” Because knowing is humble. Not humble in the sense that it is opposite to ego, it is not related to ego at all, not even as an opposite – because even the opposite carries something of it.
Not feeling that his son was humble, the father became very, very sad. He is getting old, and here comes this boy having wasted many years of his life – why does he look so proud? Knowing always makes you humble.
This word humble is beautiful. It comes from the root humus; the root really means earthy, of the earth, unpretentious. And the same root is the base of the words human and humanity. You become human only when you become humble, you become humble only when you are of the earth. Of the earth in the sense: unpretentious, simple, unconditioned, earthy.
Here comes the son so proud and haughty, he must have become a man of knowledge – and he had become one. He came, he touched his father’s feet, but it was just a formality. How can a man who has become so egoistic bow down?
The father said, “Shvetketu, I see your body bent, but not you. And what misfortune has happened to you? Why do you look so haughty? A man of knowing becomes humble, Shvetketu. Have you heard anything about that one, knowing which, one knows all?”
Shvetketu said, “What are you talking about? How can one know all by knowing one? Absurd! I have known all that could be known in the university, I have become as profound as one can become in all the subjects that are taught there. I have exhausted the whole possibility of learning. When my master said to me, ‘Now you know all and you can go back home,’ only then did I come back. But of what you are speaking, that ‘one’ – never heard of it. Nobody talked about it in the university. We learned grammar, language, history, myth, philosophy, theology, religion, poetry. Everything that is known to man I have learned. I have become proficient, and I have attained the highest degree that the university can confer. But we never heard about that ‘one’ – what are you talking about? Have you gone mad? How can one know all by knowing one?”
Uddalak said, “Yes, that one is you. Shvetketu, tattvamasi – that art thou. If you know this one you will know all. All that you have known is just rot. You have wasted your energy. Go back! Never come again unless you know that one by knowing which all is known.
“Because,” said Uddalak to his son, “in our family no one has been a brahmin just by name. We have called ourselves brahmins because we have known the brahman. You don’t belong to our family if you don’t know that one, go back!”
You are that one: that art thou. A very small seed, almost invisible to yourself. Unless you search deep, and search long, with perseverance and patience, you will not encounter it.
That seed is within you; it is your withinness. And the whole vast world is nothing but you written on a large canvas. Man is humanity. You are the world.
Says Lao Tzu:
Without stepping outside one’s doors
one can know what is happening in the world.
Without looking out of one’s windows
one can see the Tao of heaven.
There is no need to look out of the windows – the windows are your senses. Eyes, ears, nose – these are the windows, there is no need to look from these windows. Without looking out of one’s windows one can see the Tao of heaven. You can see the ultimate within.
Have you seen Buddha images, sitting silently with closed eyes, unmoving? There are stories in India about people remaining in meditation for so long that birds settled on their bodies, they made their nests in their hair, and ants crawled for so long on them that they forgot – the ants forgot completely that here sits a man. They started living there.
What were these men doing? Creepers crawled on their body thinking it was a good support. So unmoving, what were they doing there? They were not doing anything. Closing all their windows they were looking at the splendor of splendors, they were looking at themselves. It is such a tremendous mystery and such a beautiful phenomenon that nothing like it can ever be encountered anywhere else – because wherever you go and whatever you see, the report will be secondhand.
I can see your face but my eyes will be the mediators, they will report: I will never be able to see your face directly, it will be always indirect. I can go to a rosebush and look at the beautiful flowers, but that beauty is secondhand because my eyes will report. There is an agency. I cannot come in direct contact with the rose; the eyes will always be there. The smell will come through the nose. I can listen to the singing birds but that song will always be secondhand, and unless you know firsthand, how can you know: …the Tao of heaven?
How can you know the ultimate? The very ground of being? There is only one possibility of coming in contact with the ultimate – directly, immediately, without any mediators – and that is, inside yourself. Close all the doors and windows and move within.
It happened…
One of the wisest women ever born was Rabiya al-Adabiya. She was a Sufi, a great mystic, incomparable. She was sitting inside her hut with closed eyes doing something – nobody knows what.
Another mystic of the name of Hassan was staying with her, and it was morning, and the sun started coming up, and it was tremendously beautiful. The birds singing and the trees happy again to see the light, and the whole world celebrating the morn. Hassan stood there, then he called Rabiya saying, “Rabiya, come out! See the glory of God! What a beautiful morning.”
Rabiya said, “Hassan, rather on the contrary, you come in and see God himself. Out there I know is beauty, the beauty of creation, but it is nothing compared to the beauty of the creator. So rather, you come in!”
I don’t know whether Hassan understood or not, but this is the whole thing. Knowledge goes out. When you go out you can know many things but it will be secondhand information.
That’s what science is: science is always secondhand, it can never be firsthand. It can never have that freshness which religion can have. However deep an Einstein goes, the depth will be of the outside. He cannot come out of it fresh.
And Albert Einstein felt it in his last days – somebody asked him just two or three days before he died, “What would you like to be, if there is another opportunity given by God to you to come to the earth, what would you like to become?”
He said, “Next time rather than becoming a scientist, I would prefer to become a plumber. I would like to live a simple and ordinary life. I would like to live absolutely unknown to the outer world. I would like to live anonymously, nobody knowing about me, so that nobody disturbs me.”
He is groping in the right direction. He is groping in the same direction where he can become a buddha any day.
When one gets fed up with the outside one turns in. Then one would like to close all the doors and all the windows and just rest within. Without looking out of one’s windows one can see the Tao of heaven.
Science goes on discovering laws and laws and laws but it will never discover the law, and the law is the meaning of the word Tao. Science will go on discovering gods and gods and gods but will never discover the god, and the god is the meaning of the word Tao: the very ultimate, beyond which nothing exists, beyond which nothing is possible.
Science goes on discovering – and every day the more science discovers, the more old theories are discarded and thrown into the rubbish bin. And this is going to happen to every scientific theory one day or other. All scientific theories are doomed to be thrown onto the rubbish heap because they don’t know the law. They are only reflections in the lake not the real moon. The real moon is within and the whole world functions as a mirror.
When you see beauty in a roseflower, have you ever pondered over whether the beauty is there in the roseflower or the beauty is poured by you? Because there are moments when you pass the same rosebush but nothing happens: the rose then is not a rose, nothing special, nothing extraordinary, just an ordinary rose. But in another moment – in another mood, in another state of mind – suddenly it takes on a beauty, a flavor. It becomes a new dimension. Doors open, mysteries are revealed. What is happening is that the rose is just a mirror. Whatever you pour into it, you see.
You come before a mirror, you look in the mirror, the mirror simply mirrors you: it is you. If you are ugly the mirror reports an ugly figure, if you are beautiful the mirror reports beauty.
There are moments when you are ugly then all roses become ugly; there are moments when you are sad then all moons become sad; there are moments when you are in hell then the earth becomes hell. You create reality around you, you project reality around you. You have within you the creator, the one by knowing which all is known.
That’s why in aesthetics, thinkers for centuries have been trying to define what beauty is, and have not been able to define it. They cannot because it does not exist there outside. It is a pouring from within. The roseflower is not beautiful; you create the beauty around it. It is just like a peg: you hang beauty on it, it becomes beautiful. That’s why when a poet passes by, the roseflower is so beautiful you cannot conceive! And then a scientist passes absolutely oblivious of the fact that the rose has bloomed, the rose is blooming, that the rose exists. Then a businessman passes; he looks at the rose and thinks how much he can earn out of it if he sells it. Then comes a child, plucks the rose, plays for a few moments, forgets about it, goes on his way. The rose is nothing. It is you who brings the meaning to it.
People come to me every day and they ask again and again in a thousand and one ways, “What is the meaning of life?” It has no meaning. You bring meaning to it. You create meaning. Meaning is not an objective fact, so don’t look for meaning and don’t search for meaning. If you go on searching you are bound to come to the truth that life is meaningless.
That’s how existentialists in the West have come to discover that life is meaningless – and they have stopped there, which is very unfortunate. In the East we have come to know it but we never stopped there. Buddha also came to know that life is meaningless but he never stopped there. This is stopping halfway! Life is meaningless, but that doesn’t mean that your life needs to be meaningless, no. Life is meaningless if you don’t bring meaning to it. There is no meaning in it, the meaning has to be given to it. You pour down your being into life, it becomes vibrant with meaning. Then it sings, it dances, it becomes divine.
People ask me, “Where is God? Can you show us?” I cannot show you God. Nobody can show you because God has to be found within. Then you can see him anywhere. Then in a rose you will see him – the rose will become the mirror and you will see God. Then a bird is singing in the morning, and suddenly the note takes on a flavor which was never there – you contributed it, it becomes divine.
Once godliness is discovered within, everything becomes divine. If you have not discovered it within and you go on asking, “Where is God?” and you go on asking for his address, you will never reach. All addresses are false because he lives within you, he needs no address.
There is a beautiful story, very ancient…
It is said that God created the world and everything was beautiful, then he created man and everything became horrible. With man entered hell. And man started complaining and it became almost impossible for God to sleep or to do anything – so many people, and they went on knocking at his door day and night, and it became a nightmare. He must have thought many times to destroy man so that the peace of the world could be regained.
But then a wise counselor said, “There is no need to destroy man, simply change your abode. Don’t live here on this earth” – God used to live here, and because of you he had to leave his abode.
So God asked, “Where should I go?”
Another counselor said, “It is good that you go to Everest.”
God said, “You don’t know – sooner or later there will come a man named Hillary; he will reach there and the whole thing will start again.”
Then somebody said, “Go to the moon.”
God said, “You don’t know; these things won’t help much. Sooner or later man is going to reach everywhere. Suggest to me somewhere he will not even suspect I am.”
Then the old counselor came near to him, said something into his ear, and God nodded. He said, “Yes, you are right.”
The old man had suggested, “Then hide within man. He will never suspect that. He will search and seek everywhere except in his own inner world.”
The story is beautiful. Almost factual. Not a story but a truth.
Without looking out of one’s windows
one can see the Tao of heaven.
The further one pursues knowledge
the less one knows.
Looks paradoxical, but only looks paradoxical. It is not. It is a simple fact. The more one pursues knowledge the less one knows. Go to the pundits: they know so much, but look into their eyes – not even a glimmer. Watch them – not even a gesture of knowing. Be with them, and there is nothing, they are hollow, absolutely false. Nothing inside, just a painted hollowness, a decorated hollowness, decorated by many scriptures: the words of those who have known, but all borrowed, all dead. And surrounded by these dead words they have almost become dead themselves.
Go to a man of knowledge and you will taste dust around him. He may look very, very old, ancient, almost in the grave, but you will not find the freshness that is part of life. You will not see a living river in him, flowing, moving always into the unknown. Knowledge is a limitation, however vast, but a limitation still. That’s why Socrates says, “When I was young I thought I knew all. When I became a little mature I started suspecting, and then I came to realize that I don’t know that much. When I really became old I realized that I don’t know at all.”
It happened…
The oracle at Delphi declared, “Socrates is the wisest man on earth today.”
The people who heard this went to Socrates and they said, “This is a paradox! We are puzzled. Then who is right? If the oracle is right then you are wrong, if you are right then the oracle is wrong – and neither can be wrong. We believe in you, we have known you, we have been around you, we have felt you – that you must be true. Whatever you say, it cannot be a lie. But the oracle, the divine oracle, has never been found telling lies.
“All that has been predicted by the Delphic oracle has always been found true, so we are in a fix. Help us. You say you don’t know anything, in fact you say that you know only one thing – that you know nothing. And then comes this oracle and says, ‘Socrates is the wisest man on earth.’”
Socrates said, “There must have been some misunderstanding because I know more about myself than anybody can know about me, and I tell you again that I know nothing. At the most this much I can permit – that I know that I know nothing. Nothing more. Go and ask the oracle again, there has been some misunderstanding. Either you have not interpreted it rightly or something else – go again!”
They went again and asked the oracle and she laughed and said, “That’s why we say he is the wisest man on earth, because he knows only that he knows nothing.”
There is no paradox. This is the indication of a wise man: that he has come to realize that knowledge is futile, that knowledge knows nothing, that knowledge is rubbish, that knowledge is nonsense. However logical it pretends to be – those are all pretensions.
The further one pursues knowledge the less one knows. Why does it happen? Because the further you pursue knowledge, the further you are going away from yourself. The more you try to find the truth somewhere outside of you, the further away you are moving: the further away from the whole in search of the whole, the further away from yourself in search of your authentic being, the further away from consciousness in your search.
What are you searching for? That which you are searching is already within you. Religion is the search for that which is already the case. Religion is the search for that which is already the reality.
If you go further away from yourself, you will know less and less and you will think you know more and more. Scriptures you will know, words you will know, theories – and you can go on spinning and you can go on weaving more and more out of these words and you can make palaces in the air. But they cannot be more than airy, abstract. They don’t exist, they are made of the same stuff as dreams. Thoughts and dreams are made of the same stuff – they are ripples on the surface of the ocean; they have nothing substantial in them. If you want to know the truth, come back home.
I always say: seek and you will miss, don’t seek – and find. Because the very effort to seek means that you have taken it for granted that it is not with you already. From the very beginning your search is doomed. One day, seeking, searching, accumulating knowledge, the fact will strike home that you are a fool, that it would have been better – before going into the vast world to seek – to have looked inside.
Again a small parable of Rabiya al-Adabiya…
One evening, the sun was setting and the neighborhood found her searching for something on the street. An old woman, everybody loved her; of course everybody thought her a little crazy, but she was a beautiful person. So they all rushed to help her and they asked, “What has been lost? What are you searching for?”
She said, “My needle. I was doing some needlework and I have lost my needle. Help me! You are so kind.” So they all engaged in the search.
Then one man, seeing the fact that the street was so big and the needle was such a small tiny thing and that unless they exactly knew where it had been dropped, it would be almost impossible to find, came to Rabiya and said, “Tell us exactly the spot.”
Rabiya said, “Don’t ask that because in fact I did not lose it outside my house, I lost it inside.”
They all stopped searching and said, “Crazy woman! Then why are you searching here outside in the street when you have lost it inside the house?”
Rabiya said, “There is much darkness, here is a little light. How can you seek when there is darkness? And you know I am poor, not even a lamp with me. How can you seek when there is darkness? So I am seeking here because still a little sunlight is left, and still something can be done to search.”
The people started laughing. They said, “You are really crazy! We know that in darkness it is difficult to search, but then the only way is to borrow a lamp from somebody, and search for it there.”
Rabiya said, “I never thought you people were so wise. Then why do you always seek outside? I was just following your ways. If you understand so well, why don’t you borrow a lamp from me and search inside? I know there is darkness.”
This parable is meaningful. You search outside, there is a reason: because inside everything is so dark. You close your eyes and there is dark night, you cannot see anything. Even if something is seen it is nothing but a part of the outside reflected in the inner lake – thoughts floating that you have gathered in the marketplace, faces coming and going, but they belong to the outside world. Just reflections of the outside, and vast darkness. One becomes afraid. Then one thinks it is better to seek outside; there at least there is light.
But that is not the point. Where have you lost your truth? Where have you lost your being? Where have you lost your godliness? Where have you lost your happiness, your bliss? Before you go to the infinite ways of the outside world, it will be better to first look within. If you cannot find there, then it is all right – go and search outside. But that has never happened. Whoever has looked within has always found because it is already there. Only a look is needed, a conversion, a returning of consciousness. Just a deep look.
The further one pursues knowledge
the less one knows.
Therefore the sage knows without running about…
In the running you are missing: wasting life, energy, opportunity. Don’t go on running about and about and about. Stop running: that’s all that meditation is about. Stop running, sit quietly with closed windows and doors, settle inside, rest inside, relax inside. Let the turmoil settle a little – then start looking.
It will be like groping in the beginning; in the beginning the darkness will be too much, but as you become accustomed to it, the darkness starts changing its quality.
It is just like when you come from the outside and it has been a hot day and the sun has been too cruel. You come inside your house and you cannot see – everything looks dark – because the eyes are focused with the sun, the eyes are accustomed to too much light. A sudden change – the eyes will take a little time to settle, that’s all. Patience is needed. When you move inward, nothing will be seen. Don’t be impatient, don’t say just after a minute that “All the buddhas are false – they say inside is bliss, I don’t see anything.”
It happened to one of the most penetrating thinkers the West has ever produced, it happened to David Hume. Again and again coming across the Eastern teachings: “Go within. Close your eyes, see.” One day he thought, “Let us try,” knowing well that there is nothing – these Eastern people are mad, illogical, irrational, introverts, fooling themselves and nobody else. But he said, “Better at least to try.” He closed his eyes just a single minute. Then he opened them and wrote down in his diary, “There is nothing except darkness, a few thoughts floating, a few sensations, and nothing else.”
Don’t be so impatient. Wait. Let things settle inside, it takes time. You have been unsettling them for so many lives, settling will take a little time, a little patience. And nothing else is needed. You need not try to settle them because that will disturb them again, you will stir them up more. Simply don’t do anything. That is the meaning of Lao Tzu’s beautiful phrase wu-wei: do by not doing. You simply don’t do anything and it happens; that is doing by not doing. Just close your eyes and wait and wait and wait and you see layers of disturbance falling, settling, things falling into their places – and silence. By and by darkness becomes light, and “the one” is known, by knowing which all is known. Because that one is the seed. That art thou, Shvetketu.
Therefore the sage knows without running about,
understands without seeing,
accomplishes without doing.
And that is the greatest accomplishment: that which is accomplished without doing anything at all. Remember, whatever you can do cannot go beyond you. How can it? If you do it, it will remain lower than you, it cannot go higher than you. Whatever you do will be part of your mind, it cannot be transcendental. Whatever you do will be done by the ego, it cannot be your being. So non-doing is the only way to do it.
Sitting still, sitting quietly, not doing anything – and the grass grows by itself. Then the effort, the doing, is still. Such a tremendous and vast silence descends on you.
I was reading a Japanese poem just a few days ago. A line of it penetrated me very deeply, became part of my heart. It says:
When the bird is not singing the mountain is yet more silent.
When there is no doing, even the bird is no longer singing, nothing is there, everything calm and quiet. Suddenly you become aware that nothing has been lacking from the very beginning: that which you are seeking, you have always been that. Suddenly you realize that the master of masters is sitting there on the throne. And you start laughing.
Bokuju became enlightened. Enlightened? Don’t take the word very seriously, it is nothing serious. It is the ultimate in fun, it is the last joke. Bokuju became enlightened and he started laughing, a belly laugh, he became crazy.
People gathered and they started asking, “What is the matter? Please tell us, what has happened?”
He said, “Nothing has happened. Just I was mad, searching and seeking that which is already there in me.”
Whenever people used to ask Bokuju, “What did you do when you became enlightened?” he would say, “I laughed, and I laughed loudly.” And he said, “I have still not stopped laughing. Whether you hear it or not is not the point – I have still not stopped laughing.” What a joke! You have it already and you have been searching and seeking. And you could not find it, not because it was not there but because it was so much there, and so close to you that you could not see it.
The eyes can see that which is far away, the eyes can see that which is distant – because the eyes need a perspective. The hands can touch that which is different and distant; the ears can hear that which is outside. That’s why Lao Tzu says the sage: …understands without seeing. Because how can you see yourself? Who will see whom? The seer and the seen are one, no eyes are needed. Who will do it? Who will make the effort? It will be just like a dog chasing its own tail, it will be simply foolish.
And this is what you are doing, chasing your own tail. Stop and see it is your own tail, there is no need to chase it – and by chasing it you are not going to get it, ever. By chasing it you miss, by non-chasing you accomplish: …accomplishes without doing.
And then time disappears. Then the mind disappears, because the mind is there to know something, the mind is the faculty of knowing. When you have known, there is no point for the faculty to remain, it simply disappears.
Time disappears; time was there because you were frustrated, it is created out of frustration – so that you can hope for the future, and somehow bear the frustration, and tolerate it, and console yourself.
The mind and time are not two things but aspects of one thing. When both disappear for the first time, you are in your absolute glory. Say it this way: you have become a god, a buddha.
And ask the awakened: they all say the same thing, that it has to be accomplished without any effort on your part. It is the effort that has created the whole mess. Dropping all effort, just sitting silently looking within – wu-wei.
Enough for today.