KABIR
The Fish in the Sea is Not Thirsty 10
Tenth Discourse from the series of 15 discourses - The Fish in the Sea is Not Thirsty by Osho.
You can listen, download or read all of these discourses on oshoworld.com.
Have you heard the music that no fingers enter into?
Far inside the house,
entangled music –
what is the sense of leaving your house?
Suppose you scrub your ethical skin until it shines,
but inside there is no music,
then what?
Mohammed’s son pours over words and points out this
and that,
but if his chest is not soaked dark with love,
then what?
The yogi comes along in his famous orange.
But if inside he is colorless, then what?
Kabir says: every instant that the sun is risen,
if I stand in the temple, or on a balcony,
in the hot fields, or in a walled garden,
my own lord is making love with me.
What is God? The moment the question is asked, the idea of a person arises in the mind – and God is not a person. Those who think of God as a person start, from the very beginning, moving in the wrong direction. They will never arrive. They will go round and round in circles, they will travel much, but they will never reach anywhere.
If the first step is wrong, all else goes wrong. The first step has to be absolutely right because the first step is half the journey already. In fact, as far as you are concerned, the first step is the whole of the journey – because the other step is to be taken toward you by God.
You take one step, he takes the other step. And the meeting. The distance between you and God is only two steps. The initiative has to be from your side.
God is not a person, but that’s what you have been told down the ages. God is a presence. God is not substance but significance. Once God is understood as significance, your life starts changing. You don’t argue about God, whether he exists or not; you are no longer interested in theology. The whole of theology becomes rubbish. You start moving in a totally different way, in an altogether different dimension.
If God is significance, you have to create a certain meaning in your life because only meaning can meet the meaning. You have to create significance in your life because only significance can meet the significance. You have to become more aware, more loving, more aesthetic, more sensitive.
If God were a person, it would have been a totally different approach. God is not a person, but only a fragrance. You will need great sensitivity to comprehend that significance, that fragrance, that music.
In these sutras today, Kabir is talking about something very fundamental. Listen to his words. Don’t only hear, listen. Don’t only listen, meditate with him, go with him. He is not a philosopher, he is not propounding a system of thought; he is a poet. He is singing his own experience. He is not concerned with concepts. He is pouring his heart into his songs, he is pouring himself into his words.
You have to be very sensitive to understand this great poetic expression of mysticism, this great poetic expression of religion. Religion can only be expressed through poetry, music, dance. Any other way of expressing religion falls short, is inadequate. The mysterious has to be indicated only by something mysterious. God cannot be approached through the mind of calculation, mathematics. It is not possible to approach God through prose. The door opens only when you approach him through poetry.
Poetry is more liquid, more vague, not so solid as prose. Prose says something clearly, poetry only hints. Prose shouts, poetry only whispers. Prose is for the mundane world, poetry is for the sacred.
So whenever it happens that a person becomes a buddha, his expression, without any effort, becomes that of poetry. He may not compose poetry literally, but whatever he says, whatever he is, is poetry.
Kabir was absolutely illiterate, never went to school, wasn’t able to read or write. Still, when it happened, he exploded in great poetry. When the experience arose in his being, when the doors opened and mysteries were revealed, he bloomed in thousands of flowers. No other poet can be compared with Kabir. There have been greater poets than Kabir, but they were mere poets – talented, with great art, but Kabir has a personal experience of the divine which is missing in other poets. They may be talking about God, but it is mere talk. With Kabir it is not just talking. It is his heartfelt experience – it is existential.
Have you heard the music that no fingers enter into?
The original is:
Sunta nahin dhun ki khabar,
anakad ka baja bajta?
Sunta nahin dhun ki khabar…
Why aren’t you listening to the inner music which is constantly arising? You are made of it. It is not something foreign to you. It does not come from the outside. It is the music of your very existence, of your being. It is the music of your inner harmony, it is the music of your inner rhythm.
Sunta nahin dhun ki khabar…
Why don’t you listen to the inner rhythm of your being? Where do you go on rushing to? You are searching for this inner rhythm – sometimes in money, power, prestige – in so many kinds of relationships. You go on begging. You want to know something of the transcendental, you are thirsty for the transcendental.
Once in a while, even in ordinary life, it happens. You know those few moments when suddenly one day you wake up in the morning and everything seems to fit perfectly. The birds are singing, the air is fragrant, the sun is rising and suddenly you feel that all is quiet. You are no longer separate for a moment and you feel a great joy arising in you for no reason at all. You suddenly feel vibrant, utterly rejuvenated, at home. Maybe the night’s deep sleep and rest, maybe the beautiful morning, the song of the birds, the fresh air, the dewdrops on the grass leaves shining in the early sun – all this created the context. Not by your effort, but just by accident, you fell in harmony with yourself and with existence. Remember, it happens always together. Whenever you fall in harmony with yourself, you fall in harmony with existence too.
Harmony has two sides. The individual and the universal. If the individual is in harmony, there is no reason why he should not be in harmony with the whole. If inside you all conflict has disappeared – even for a single moment – in that moment you are part of the whole, you are no longer an island, you are no longer separate. All walls have suddenly disappeared and you are no longer imprisoned.
In that moment you know the glory, the splendor, that life is. That splendor is God, that feeling is God. That experience of harmony is God. God is not a person, but the presence that is felt when you are in harmony and also in harmony with existence – that accord. That accord is called: dhun. Sunta nahin dhun ki khabar… Listen to that accord which is available every moment of your life. It happens only accidentally because you have not prepared yourself for it, to receive it consciously. So it happens only once in a while.
Once Leo Tolstoy was asked, “How many experiences of divine ecstasy did you have in your life?”
He started crying, great tears started rolling down from his eyes. He said, “Not more than seven in my life of seventy years, but I am grateful for those seven moments. I am miserable too because in those moments it was so self-evident that is could be the flavor of my whole life. In those moments, I was so certain that this could be my experience day in, day out, year in, year out; that this could spread over my whole life and become my flavor. But it didn’t happen. Those moments came on their own and they went on their own. But I am still grateful to God, that even once in a while without any conscious effort on my part, he has been knocking on my door.”
This happens to everyone. It happens in spite of you. If you look back, you can remember a few moments… And those will be the moments when you were relaxed, those will be the moments when there was no particular desire in your mind, when you were not worried, when you were not tense, when somehow you simply were.
Watch these sudden accidental moments minutely, because there is the secret key. That’s how the fundamentals of religion have been discovered. Watching these sudden moments which come and go. And one never knows why they come and why they go. Watching the context, the space in which they happen – people started trying to create that context.
If it happens in a relaxed state, when you are very loose, nontense, then you can create the context. You can relax. If it happens to you while swimming, you can swim and create the context. If it happens to you while running – and it happens to different people in different ways. Many runners know that if you go on running, running, running, beyond a certain limit, suddenly it happens – because man’s energies have three layers.
The first layer is only for day-to-day activities; it is a very thin layer. It is enough for your office, wife, children – the ordinary life. The second layer is for emergencies. Your house is on fire; you may have been feeling very tired after the whole day’s work and you were coming home and hoping to have a good rest. Suddenly when you reach home your house is on fire. Immediately, all fatigue disappears and you are no longer tired. You have forgotten all about rest and the whole night long you try to put the fire out. Even after the whole night’s work, you are not tired. It was not the ordinary level of energy that worked; that was exhausted. The emergency layer started working.
The third layer is deeper than that. If you go on and on… For example, if for one, two, three days, you go on working, then the emergency level will also be finished – and you come in contact with the cosmic layer. That is the source of life; that is inexhaustible. Whenever you are in contact with it, tremendous joy starts overflowing in you.
It happens to joggers, runners, swimmers sometimes. The first layer finished, then the second layer and if you go on running the second layer is also finished. The moment you are in contact with the third, a tremendous ecstasy happens for no reason at all.
It may happen to you while making love, it may happen to you while listening to music; it may happen to you while simply lying in your bed doing nothing; it may happen to you while painting, absorbed, utterly absorbed in it. Or it may happen in a thousand and one ways. But watch. Whenever it happens – whenever that tremendous blissful moment comes to you, when existence knocks on your door – watch in what context it is happening. Be alert. Look around. In what space is it happening? Then you have the key. Whenever you create that context, that space, the moment will come again.
You cannot make it happen, but you can make yourself available for it to happen. You cannot force it to happen, but you can create all that is necessary for it to happen. It is not a doing on your part, it is a happening. But, still, you can play a great role. That’s how all techniques of meditation have been developed. That’s how Yoga came into existence. Sunta nahin dhun ki khabar…
That accord is present in you, because without it you cannot be alive. That music is already there, flowing underground in you because that music is your connection with the whole. Once it is cut you will be dead. You are alive – that is enough proof that the music is happening. The only thing is to go deep inside your own being and to find where it is happening. Have you heard the music that no fingers enter into? This is a music that is not created by fingers on any musical instrument. There is no musical instrument within you and there is no one playing on the instrument. It is pure music.
Indian mystics use a special word for it: Anahad ka baja bajita. Anahad – it is boundless and it is uncreated. It is the sound of one hand clapping. But the Indian mystics go a little deeper. They say that there is not even one hand clapping – there is neither hand nor instrument, but pure music, just music.
The experience of the mystics is that life consists of the stuff called music. Just as physics says that life consists of electrons, electricity, mystics say that life consists of music. In a way they are both right because music is nothing but a certain vibration of electricity. It may be true vice versa also – electricity may be nothing but a certain density of music, of sound. Have you heard the music that no fingers enter into? Kabir is talking to his disciples who have come to seek God. Someone must have asked him about God and he is talking about music. To talk about God is almost useless, but to talk about music is certainly of great significance. If you can hear your inner music, you will know God is.
Far inside the house,
entangled music –
what is the sense of leaving your house?
Kabir says, “Where are you going to find God?” People go to Kashi and to Kaaba, to Jerusalem and to Tibet; people go to all kinds of places in search of some significance. They feel that their life is meaningless, they feel that their life is empty, they feel that their life is nothing but a long, long tale told to them by an idiot. They know that their life is just noise, meaningless, gibberish. They know that deep down there is nothing but a kind of hollowness. And they search. There must be some source somewhere which can quench their thirst. There must be some place somewhere where they can encounter God, where they can attain some significance, where their life can have some meaning. But this search is futile. They will be frustrated again and again – because the truth they are searching for is already within their being. What they are seeking is in the seeker himself; the sought is in the seeker. You need not go anywhere. You simply have to learn how not to go anywhere.
The greatest art is just to be, without going anywhere. Not going to the past, the future, in desires, in psychological spaces, in psychic travels – not to go anywhere, just to be. Right now, if you are just here, immediately something is felt; something which is intangible. You cannot show it to anyone else, you cannot share your experience with someone who has not known it. But your whole being starts feeling a kind of intoxicatedness, a drunkenness. You become full of juice, you become full of aliveness, and a very indirect, subtle, delicate experience of the presence of something bigger than you. That’s what godliness is all about.
Far inside the house… The original is:
Ras mand mandir bajta
bahar sune to kya hua?
Kabir says: “Music is already happening inside your own temple.” Kabir calls you “the temple.” And except for your body there is no other temple in the world. Your bodies are temples, sacred places because the holiest of the holy resides in you. Look at what the priests have been telling you, what your so-called saints have been telling you. They have been teaching you life-negative attitudes, body-negative attitudes. They have been telling you that the body is the culprit, that the body is the source of sin. They have been telling you to torture the body, to destroy the body. They have been teaching you that unless you destroy your body totally you will not be able to know godliness.
The truth is just the contrary. Unless you love your body immensely, respect your body immensely, you will not be able to know godliness at all. The body is its outer expression. If the body is the temple, godliness is the deity inside it.
Ras mand mandir bajta…
Within the temple of your body, the music is already happening. Just go in. The word ras has to be understood. Ras literally means juice. You will be surprised to know that the mystics of this country have called God the ultimate juice: Rasao vai saha – it is the ultimate juice. But if you go to your so-called saints, you will find them very dry, with no juice at all. You will find them almost dead, with no life flowing in them. They have destroyed their bodies. They are living a kind of death, but this is thought to be very respectable. What has really happened? What has gone wrong? Why have these pathological, mentally deranged, psychologically ill people, become so dominant? Why have they possessed religion?
Neurotic people have one quality in them: the quality of being fanatics. Only neurotics can be fanatics. It is very difficult to fight with fanatics. Wherever a fanatic is, sooner or later he is going to become a leader. He is so troublesome, he is such a troublemaker that you have to make him a leader, just to pacify him. He will only be at rest when he is at the top, when he is the boss.
Neurotics have a tendency to become leaders. Adolf Hitler was a neurotic and became one of the greatest leaders of human history. He was a madman, but madmen have a few qualities in them which no sane man can ever have. They compete and they compete with their total energy, they compete madly. They are so mad that they don’t think, they act. While the sane person thinks, the mad person acts. The sane person goes on thinking and the mad person has already reached and acted and done. The sane person thinks of consequences, the mad person thinks nothing – he simply rushes in.
Adolf Hitlers become leaders in politics and the same kind of people become leaders in religion too. The pathological people also have a tendency to become organized. The sane person wants to be left alone because he enjoys his aloneness. He wants his own space, he wants freedom – freedom from the crowd. The mad person wants the crowd. Left alone he becomes disturbed. In his aloneness he starts seeing his madness. He always goes in the crowd; he wants to live with the crowd twenty-four hours a day. He is a lover of the crowd.
The sane person moves in solitude and the insane person searches for the crowd. Your religions are nothing but crowds. Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Jainism. All different crowds. When Mohammed became enlightened, he was alone, meditating in the mountains. When Buddha became enlightened, he was alone, under a tree, meditating by the side of the River Niranjana – alone. When Mahavira became enlightened he was absolutely alone in the forest, standing underneath a tree, naked in the sun.
Enlightenment has happened to people when they were utterly alone. But leadership does not come that way. Leadership comes when you move in a crowd. Not only that, when you fulfill the expectations of the crowd – stupid expectations, superstitious expectations, but you have to fulfill them – you become the religious or political leader. Mad people have a great organizing capacity. They fulfill the expectations of the crowd. The crowd looks up to them, the crowd respects them and is afraid. Everyone is afraid. The crowd wants to be organized because in organization there seems to be power.
An NAACP official telephoned the Library of Congress and told the chief librarian that the library had eighteen thousand books with the word nigger in them and all the books had to be removed in a week.
“But,” protested the librarian, “we have fifty thousand volumes with the word bastard in them.”
“I know,” said the official, “but those bastards are not organized.”
In this world, organization is power and mad people have a great magnetic force to organize. They cannot be alone, they seek others who cannot be alone, who are also seeking. It becomes a mutual arrangement.
Religions, at the source, are born out of a meditative aloneness, but the moment it becomes known that a buddha has happened, the mad people start organizing, the mad people start gathering a crowd. That crowd finally crystallizes into Hinduism, Mohammedanism, Christianity. All their notions are based not in the enlightenment of their founders, real founders, no, but in the pseudo founders, the priests. And the priests have been telling you that life is irreligious, that the body has to be denied, that it is not a temple, that it is not a place to be worshipped in.
Kabir is saying a totally different thing. And that’s what my emphasis is: the body is sacred – because all is sacred. Have you heard the music that no fingers enter into? Far inside the house; entangled music – what is the sense of leaving your house? Where are you going? You need not leave the body, you need not leave anything, you need not renounce anything. Remember, Kabir never renounced anything. He lived a very ordinary life just as everyone else lives – the life of a householder. He was a father, a husband, and his whole life he continued to work. He was a weaver and he continued to weave clothes, even when he had thousands of disciples. Many times his disciples would come to him and say, “You need not work at all. We are ready to provide everything for you and your needs are not many. Why do you go on working?”
Kabir would laugh and say, “You don’t understand. I work for God, I weave clothes for God – because the customers who come to purchase clothes from me are divine. How can I stop my work?”
This quality is true religiousness. This quality is possible only if you are in love with life. And to be in love with life creates ras – juice. Then you don’t become dry, you don’t become a desert, then you become an oasis.
The so-called religious people of this country are against me because I am teaching you the way of ras – the way of life, love, juice, music. I am teaching you to become an oasis, not a desert. I would like you to be in a constant rejoicing because I am not teaching you renunciation but rejoicing. All the people who have been carrying this nonsense idea of renouncing the world are bound to be against me. That is natural. It is expected. This has been happening always and it seems, unfortunately, that down the ages, man hasn’t learned anything at all. It is exactly the same today as it was in the days of Buddha, as it was in the days of Jesus, as it was in the days of Kabir.
Suppose you scrub your ethical skin until it shines,
but inside there is no music,
then what?
Morality is not religion, although a religious person is always moral. But not vice versa – a moral person need not be religious. A religious person is necessarily moral because religion means the experience of the divine. How can one who has experienced the presence of godliness be immoral? In fact, he is the criterion, the decisive factor as to what is moral.
Whatever an enlightened person does is moral; there is no other way to decide. It is not a question of him trying to do that which is moral. Whatever he does is moral. He cannot do any harm to anyone, he is a blessing to existence. When existence has blessed him, what else is left for him, except to be a blessing to existence? What existence has given him, he goes on giving to everyone else. His heart is full of bliss and the bliss starts overflowing. That overflowing bliss is real morality.
Morality means compassion, morality means love, morality means creativity. Morality means making the world a little more beautiful than you found it, leaving it a little more beautiful and giving it a new plane, a new level, a new dimension of existence.
The immoral person is destructive because he is miserable and can only share his misery with others. Remember, you can give to others only that which you have. If you are miserable, whatever you say is immaterial, you will make others miserable. If you are blissful, you need not say anything, you will make others blissful. Your very presence will trigger blissfulness in their being. Your very presence will create a synchronicity in others. Your music, your juice, will create ripples of joy. Whoever is close to you will become infected with your joy, your ecstasy, will become drunk – and that’s what morality is.
Kabir says: Suppose you scrub your ethical skin until it shines, but inside there is no music, then what? Then what is the use of it? Yes, that can be done, that is being done. There are people who go on cultivating character, who go on cultivating morality. They become great moralists, puritans, very righteous. They do only that which is right, but it is a forced doing; it is not spontaneous. It is not out of their being, it is just a forced phenomenon. It is a facade. They have created a beautiful curtain around themselves and behind it is the corpse, a stinking corpse, but on the surface they have decorated themselves with flowers. The crowd can be deceived by them, but deep down they are the same people. Even worse because all that they are showing on the surface is pseudo. They are just the opposite inside. They are hypocrites. They say one thing and are just the opposite of it. They do one thing, but their being has no correspondence with it. They are split, they are schizophrenic.
We have put the whole of humanity in a state of schizophrenia because of this cultivated morality. Everyone is more or less made into a hypocrite. Society forces you to do it. If you don’t do it, you cannot live, you cannot survive. It has become almost a necessity that you don’t show your reality. You show only that which people want you to show and you keep everything else hidden inside. Your inner being goes on accumulating poisons and poisons and poisons; you live a hell within, decorated with beautiful flowers. Those flowers are also plastic because they cannot be true flowers. True flowers need roots in your being.
A really religious person has no morality imposed upon himself. His morality arises out of his consciousness. He is not trying to do the right thing, he is not trying to avoid the wrong. He simply remains conscious and acts out of his consciousness. And whatever he does is right. In fact, it is impossible to do anything wrong consciously.
A beautiful story is told about a great mystic, Nagarjuna…
He was a naked fakir, but loved by all real seekers. A queen was also deeply in love with Nagarjuna. One day, she asked him to come to the palace, to be a guest there. Nagarjuna went. The queen asked him a favor.
Nagarjuna said, “What do you want?”
The queen said, “I want your begging bowl.”
Nagarjuna gave it – that was the only thing he had, his begging bowl. And the queen brought a golden begging bowl, studded with diamonds and gave it to Nagarjuna. She said, “Now you keep this. I will worship the begging bowl that you have carried for years. It has some of your vibe. It will become my temple. A man like you should not carry an ordinary wooden begging bowl. Keep this golden one. I have had it made especially for you.”
It was really precious. If Nagarjuna had been an ordinary mystic he would have said, “I cannot touch it. I have renounced the world.” But for him it was all the same, so he took the bowl.
When he left the palace, a thief saw him. He could not believe his eyes: “A naked man with such a precious thing. How long can he protect it?” So the thief followed.
Nagarjuna was staying outside the town in an ancient ruined temple with no doors, no windows. It was just a ruin. The thief was very happy. “Soon Nagarjuna will have to go to sleep and there will be no difficulty. I will get the bowl.”
The thief was hiding behind a wall just outside the doorway and Nagarjuna threw the bowl just outside. The thief could not believe what had happened. Nagarjuna threw it because he had watched the thief coming behind him and knew perfectly well that he was not coming for him. He was coming for the bowl, “So why unnecessarily let him wait? Be finished with it so he can go and I can also rest.”
Such a precious thing. And Nagarjuna has thrown it so easily. The thief could not go without thanking him. He knew perfectly well that it had been thrown for him. He peeked in and said, “Sir, accept my thanks. But you are a rare being. I cannot believe my eyes. A great desire has arisen in me. I am wasting my life by being a thief – and there are people like you too? Can I come in and touch your feet?”
Nagarjuna laughed and said, “Yes, that’s why I threw the bowl outside – so that you could come inside.”
The thief was trapped. The thief came in, touched the feet… And at that moment he was very open because he had seen that this man was no ordinary man. He was very vulnerable, open, receptive, grateful, mystified, stunned. When he touched the feet, for the first time in his life he felt the presence of the divine.
He asked Nagarjuna, “How many lives will it take for me to become like you?”
Nagarjuna replied, “How many lives? – it can happen today, it can happen now!”
The thief said, “You must be kidding. How can it happen now? I am a thief, a well-known thief. The whole town knows me, although they have not yet been able to catch me. Even the king is afraid of me because thrice I have entered and stolen from the treasury. They know it, but they have no proof. I am a master thief. You may not know about me because you are a stranger in these parts. How can I be transformed right now?”
Nagarjuna said, “If for centuries in an old house there has been darkness and you bring a candle, can the darkness say, ‘For centuries and centuries I have been here. I cannot leave just because you have brought a candle in. I have lived so long’? Can the darkness give resistance? Will it make any difference whether the darkness is one day old or millions of years old?”
The thief could see the point that darkness cannot resist light; when light comes, darkness disappears. Nagarjuna said, “You may have been in darkness for millions of lives – that doesn’t matter – but I can give you a secret; you can light a candle in your being.”
The thief said, “What about my profession? Have I to leave it?”
Nagarjuna said, “That is for you to decide. I am not concerned with you and your profession. I can only give you the secret of how to kindle a light within your being. Then it is up to you.”
The thief replied, “But whenever I have gone to any saints, they always say, ‘First stop stealing, only then can you be initiated.’”
It is said that Nagarjuna laughed and said, “You must have gone to thieves, not to saints. They know nothing. Just watch your breath – the ancient method of Buddha. Just watch your breath coming in, going out. Whenever you remember, watch your breath. Even when you go to steal, when you enter someone’s house in the night, go on watching your breath. When you have opened the treasure and the diamonds are there, go on watching your breath and do whatever you want to do – but don’t forget to watch the breath.”
The thief said, “This seems to be simple. No morality? No character needed? No other requirement?”
Nagarjuna said, “Absolutely none. Just watch your breath.”
After fifteen days the thief was back, but he was a totally different man. He fell at the feet of Nagarjuna and said, “You trapped me and you trapped me so beautifully that I never even suspected. I tried for these last fifteen days – it’s impossible. If I watch my breath, I cannot steal. If I steal, I cannot watch my breath. Watching the breath, I become so silent, so alert, so aware, so conscious, that even diamonds look like pebbles. You have created a difficulty for me, a dilemma. Now what am I supposed to do?”
Nagarjuna replied, “Get lost – do whatever you want to do. If you want that silence, peace, bliss that arises in you when you watch your breath, then choose that. If you think all those diamonds, gold and silver are more valuable, then choose that. It is for you to choose. Who am I to interfere in your life?”
The man said, “I cannot choose to be unconscious again. I have never known such moments. Accept me as one of your disciples, initiate me.”
Nagarjuna replied, “I have initiated you already.”
Religion is based not in morality, but in meditation. Religion is rooted not in character, but in consciousness. A really religious person has no character at all. He is characterless. But let me define what I mean by “characterless.” I don’t mean the ordinary meaning that you find in the dictionary because in the dictionary, the man of bad character is called characterless. That is wrong because he has a character. Maybe it is bad, but he is not characterless. Someone has good character, someone has bad character, but both have characters. The sinner and the saint, both have characters, but the really religious man is characterless. He is neither good nor bad. He is beyond. He has no character because he does not function out of his past. He acts moment to moment, he acts spontaneously; he has no ready-made formula, he has no routine. He does not act out of habits. That’s what character is: creating good habits is good character, creating bad habits is bad character. Creating consciousness, not habits, is religiousness.
Suppose you scrub your ethical skin until it shines, but inside there is no music, then what? You can go on scrubbing your ethical skin, you can go on polishing your morality and become a really polished man, but if inside there is no music, if meditation has not happened, if you have not heard the unheard, if you have not seen the unseen; if you have not penetrated into the unknowable, if that soundless sound is not heard, it is all futile. You are simply wasting your time.
A Zen story…
A disciple is meditating and has been meditating for at least twenty years. He has been doing all kinds of things, such as yoga postures, meditative techniques. One day the master appears and the disciple is sitting like a buddha, absolutely silent – at least on the outside – unmoving like a marble statue. The master starts rubbing a brick on a stone just in front of him. He creates so much noise by rubbing the brick on the stone that the disciple has to open his eyes a little bit and see who is creating the nuisance.
Seeing that the master himself is doing this, he cannot believe it. A master is not supposed to disturb the disciple while he is meditating. What kind of master is he? But a master is a master, so you cannot be rude to him. He waits, but how long can you wait? The constant rubbing of the brick on the stone – setting his teeth on edge. Finally he says, “Stop it. What are you doing?”
The master said, “And what have you been doing for twenty years? Scrubbing, scrubbing – trying to polish your mind? You call that meditation? Your postures, your techniques are all mind-based. I am trying to make a mirror out of this brick.”
The disciple replied, “That is impossible. You can go on rubbing, but the brick will never become a mirror.”
The master says, “That’s what I have come to say to you. Twenty years you have been rubbing, scrubbing, polishing and the mind has not become meditation, the mind has not become a mirror. Drop the mind. Don’t cultivate it.”
By dropping the mind, it becomes a mirror. The mind itself never becomes a mirror. The mind is the barrier. Hidden behind the mind is your consciousness. Once you enter behind the mind, you hear the music. That music transforms you into a new being. It is a rebirth.
Mohammed’s son pours over words and points out this and that,
but if his chest is not soaked dark with love,
then what?
Kabir says that this is so with everyone – the Hindu pundit goes on speculating upon words, playing upon words. The Mohammedan scholar: Mohammed’s son pours over words… Words have become so important that we have forgotten that we have to enter a wordless state of consciousness. Go on repeating the Koran, the Bible, the Vedas and it is of no use at all because you will only be gathering more and more knowledge – all borrowed. A truth borrowed becomes a lie. A truth expressed in words immediately loses its truthfulness. Words are too small and cannot contain the great sky of the truth within themselves. They crush the truth, they destroy it. When words reach you, you will give a meaning to them which is yours.
Krishna speaks, Jesus speaks, I am speaking to you… If there are two thousand people here, do you think everyone is hearing the same thing? There are two thousand meanings. The speaker is one, my meaning is one, but immediately I assert it, it becomes two thousand – two thousand meanings.
A shaggy tale used by New Testament scholars to poke a little fun at their more skeptical associates begins when several archaeologists working near Jerusalem unearth some human skeletal remains. Upon examination they prove to be the bones of Jesus. Overwhelmed by the burden of such unsettling knowledge, the archaeologists decide to inform the Pope. The Pope, of course, is shocked. What does this mean for the future of the Christian faith?
If those bones are really those of Jesus, that means he was never resurrected, that means the resurrection was false, that the whole story was invented. And with the resurrection disappearing, the whole ground underneath Christianity will disappear.
Before releasing this information to the press and allowing it to be sensationally exposed to the stunned eyes of the faithful, the Holy Father determines to call a council of the world’s great theologians to see if they can help him understand and interpret this calamitous event. What is more, because the implications of the news obviously affect all Christians, it seems wise to make this an ecumenical council, one to which theologians of all denominations will be invited. Slowly and painfully, his Holiness works his way down the list of theologians, making telephone calls to each of them. All are heard to make the appropriate gasps of dismay, after which they promise to hasten to Rome for the conference.
The last name on the Pope’s list is that of a German New Testament scholar with a reputation for being highly skeptical in respect to all manner of historical information about Jesus. The Holy Father debates with himself whether this gentleman should be informed. Finally, in the interests of ecumenism and because in this case such an already formed attitude of skepticism might actually be of some use, he makes the telephone call. The German critic, instead of being overwhelmed by the news that Jesus’ bones had not been resurrected, registers his surprise in a fashion which takes the Pope’s own breath away.
“Ach so,” the scholar responds, “then he did live.”
The same news. One is worried about resurrection, but the other’s response is totally different. His worry is, “Ach so, then he did live.” If the bones are genuine, then Jesus becomes a historical figure.
Whenever you hear something, you hear it always from your background, it is your background that interprets it. The meaning is given by you.
“Young man” said the judge, looking sternly at the defendant, “it is alcohol and alcohol alone that is responsible for your present sorry state.”
“I am glad to hear you say that,” replied Mooney with a sigh of relief. “Everyone else says it’s all my fault!”
It is natural that words will be interpreted by each person according to his own past. That’s why I insist again and again: please listen to me without bringing in your past, listen to me without any background, listen to me not as Christians, Hindus and Mohammedans, otherwise you will miss it. Not only will you miss it, you will misunderstand it.
Listen to me as you listen to music or the sound of running water or the wind passing through the pine trees. Then there is a possibility of some communion happening and a possibility that some meaning that I am trying to convey reaches you. But it is really difficult. It is one of the most difficult things in the world to be a disciple.
To be a disciple means listening without any background, just listening without interpreting, just listening without for or against, without believing, without disbelieving – a pure kind of listening. The beauty of truth is that if you can listen silently with no judgment, if it is true, it will ring bells in your heart. But the bells will ring in the heart, not in the head. If it is untrue, no bells will ring in the heart. You will know whether it is true or untrue – not by thinking about it, but just by listening in total silence.
Mohammed’s son pours over words and points out this and that, but if his chest is not soaked dark with love, then what? Unless your heart responds, the head cannot become a bridge to existence. Your heart needs to be soaked with love. But you don’t know anything about the heart. Society has not allowed you to go through the heart; it has tried in every way to bypass the heart. The whole effort of society is to pull you to the head directly, without moving through the heart – because the ways of the heart are mysterious, uncontrollable.
The ways of the head are controllable, manipulatable. Hence society is interested in your head, not in your heart. Society wants you to understand that there is no heart but only the head. The heart is nothing but a blood-pumping system; that’s what society wants you to believe. This is one of the greatest untruths ever told.
By “heart” is not meant the physical part. The physical part is simply a blood circulation system, but hidden behind the physical, just corresponding to it, very close to it, behind it, is the real heart. Just as hidden behind the brain is the mind, so hidden behind the lungs is the heart and hidden behind the body is the soul.
Don’t be finished with the physical. Always remember, corresponding to each physical phenomenon in you, there is a spiritual phenomenon. Unless your heart starts functioning: …is soaked dark with love… And why dark? – because love has the depth of darkness, the density of darkness. Love grows in mysterious ways, but not in the light because light makes everything demystified. Love is more dark than anything else. It is a dark, dense, mysterious world.
If you are afraid of the dark, you will be afraid of love too. If you are afraid of the night, you will be afraid of love too. If you are afraid of the dark, the night, death, love, then you are afraid of all that is mysterious. You will have to exist only on the surface and will never be able to penetrate to the center of being.
The original is:
Ik prem-ras chakha nahin,
amli hua to kya hua?
You haven’t tasted the juice of love – and you have become a great saint? You have great character and great morality – and you haven’t even tasted the juice of love? All your saintliness and all your morality is holy cow dung. You are carrying an unnecessary weight. The sooner you drop it the better.
The yogi comes along in his famous orange.
But if inside he is colorless, then what?
The real question is of getting colored inside. The outer color is only symbolic. It is a gesture; it is not the end, it is the beginning. It is simply you saying, “I am ready.” But don’t think that if you are wearing orange, sannyas has happened. Your gesture has happened, you have moved on the way.
There are two initiations. One is the formal. The day you become a sannyasin, you change to orange – that is formal. But without the formal, the informal is difficult. If you cannot even change your clothes, how will you change your being? But just changing your clothes is not synonymous with changing your being.
Kabir says: The yogi comes along in his famous orange. But if inside he is colorless, then what?
Vakif nahin us rang se
kapare range se kya hua?
You haven’t known the color of godliness, you haven’t known the color of love, you haven’t known the color of life. Orange is the color of blood, life; orange is the color of fire, love, the sunrise, the transformation – the declaration that the night has ended.
But the being has to be colored. Your soul has to become red with love, with joy, with celebration. In India, orange is the color of spring – a springtime has to come in your inner being so that flowers that have waited and waited for centuries can bloom, so that buds can open.
Kabir says: every instant that the sun is risen,
if I stand in the temple, or on a balcony,
in the hot fields, or in a walled garden,
my own lord is making love with me.
Meditate over this tremendously important statement: …my own lord is making love with me.
The man of absolute consciousness remains in a constant orgasmic state. Just as two lovers reach an orgasmic climax only for a moment and it is gone, and a sadness comes in the wake; the man of total awareness, the buddha, the enlightened person, remains for twenty-four hours a day in an orgasmic state: …my own lord is making love with me. Kabir says, “Wherever I am, it makes no difference – in the temple or in the mosque or in the fields or in a walled garden – it doesn’t matter where I am. Wherever I am, my lord, my beloved, is making love with me.”
Love is the quintessence of religion. And to be orgasmic is to be a sannyasin – to become so orgasmic that it continues day in, day out. Even when you are asleep, the meeting continues. You go on melting and merging into existence and existence goes on melting and merging into you.
The wall between you and the whole has been removed, there is no separation. That state of non-separation, that state of unio mystica – the mystic union – is the ultimate expression of love. The lowest is the man–woman relationship and the ultimate, the highest, is the meeting of the meditator with the whole.
Hence I say the journey is from sex to superconsciousness. Sex is the beginning of the journey. Don’t reject it. If you reject the beginning, you will never reach the end. But remember that it is only the beginning; don’t get stuck there. You have to go farther and farther ahead, you have to transcend it. As you go higher in meditation, the less and less sexual you are bound to become.
This is happening every day to my sannyasins. The whole country thinks that nothing but sex is happening here, but the reality is just the opposite. This may be the only place where thousands of people are totally losing interest in sex – because going through it is going beyond it. To go beyond, one has to go through because without knowing it there is no way to transcend it.
The sexual orgasm reveals two secrets to you. One is that in the climax, at the peak, the ego disappears; the second, time disappears. These are the two secrets of meditation. One day while meditating, you will come to know that sex is not needed at all because the ego and time can disappear without going into sex at all.
Sex is a natural way of meditation; it is a gift of nature, to keep reminding you that this is possible. Mind, time, ego, can all disappear. If they can disappear for a single moment, why not forever? Sex is a natural window into godliness, but only a window. You need not remain confined behind it. You can jump out of the window and come into the open, in the sun, under the sky. But the window made it possible for you. And because sex helps you to know a few moments of egolessness, timelessness, mindlessness, it makes it possible that you can long for, desire a permanent state, an eternal state of orgasmic joy – sat-chit-anand.
Kabir is absolutely right. No one else has said it so clearly: …my own lord is making love with me. It is happening every moment of the day, irrespective of where I am, of what I am doing. This has to become the experience of each of my sannyasins.
This is my message to you. You have to actualize this potential in you. One day you have to be able to declare to the world: “The lord is making love with me twenty-four hours a day. I am in an orgasmic state. Not only am I in an orgasmic state, but I am the orgasmic state.”
That’s what enlightenment is all about. Once it is achieved, no one can fall from it. Once it is achieved, all is achieved.
Enough for today.
Far inside the house,
entangled music –
what is the sense of leaving your house?
Suppose you scrub your ethical skin until it shines,
but inside there is no music,
then what?
Mohammed’s son pours over words and points out this
and that,
but if his chest is not soaked dark with love,
then what?
The yogi comes along in his famous orange.
But if inside he is colorless, then what?
Kabir says: every instant that the sun is risen,
if I stand in the temple, or on a balcony,
in the hot fields, or in a walled garden,
my own lord is making love with me.
What is God? The moment the question is asked, the idea of a person arises in the mind – and God is not a person. Those who think of God as a person start, from the very beginning, moving in the wrong direction. They will never arrive. They will go round and round in circles, they will travel much, but they will never reach anywhere.
If the first step is wrong, all else goes wrong. The first step has to be absolutely right because the first step is half the journey already. In fact, as far as you are concerned, the first step is the whole of the journey – because the other step is to be taken toward you by God.
You take one step, he takes the other step. And the meeting. The distance between you and God is only two steps. The initiative has to be from your side.
God is not a person, but that’s what you have been told down the ages. God is a presence. God is not substance but significance. Once God is understood as significance, your life starts changing. You don’t argue about God, whether he exists or not; you are no longer interested in theology. The whole of theology becomes rubbish. You start moving in a totally different way, in an altogether different dimension.
If God is significance, you have to create a certain meaning in your life because only meaning can meet the meaning. You have to create significance in your life because only significance can meet the significance. You have to become more aware, more loving, more aesthetic, more sensitive.
If God were a person, it would have been a totally different approach. God is not a person, but only a fragrance. You will need great sensitivity to comprehend that significance, that fragrance, that music.
In these sutras today, Kabir is talking about something very fundamental. Listen to his words. Don’t only hear, listen. Don’t only listen, meditate with him, go with him. He is not a philosopher, he is not propounding a system of thought; he is a poet. He is singing his own experience. He is not concerned with concepts. He is pouring his heart into his songs, he is pouring himself into his words.
You have to be very sensitive to understand this great poetic expression of mysticism, this great poetic expression of religion. Religion can only be expressed through poetry, music, dance. Any other way of expressing religion falls short, is inadequate. The mysterious has to be indicated only by something mysterious. God cannot be approached through the mind of calculation, mathematics. It is not possible to approach God through prose. The door opens only when you approach him through poetry.
Poetry is more liquid, more vague, not so solid as prose. Prose says something clearly, poetry only hints. Prose shouts, poetry only whispers. Prose is for the mundane world, poetry is for the sacred.
So whenever it happens that a person becomes a buddha, his expression, without any effort, becomes that of poetry. He may not compose poetry literally, but whatever he says, whatever he is, is poetry.
Kabir was absolutely illiterate, never went to school, wasn’t able to read or write. Still, when it happened, he exploded in great poetry. When the experience arose in his being, when the doors opened and mysteries were revealed, he bloomed in thousands of flowers. No other poet can be compared with Kabir. There have been greater poets than Kabir, but they were mere poets – talented, with great art, but Kabir has a personal experience of the divine which is missing in other poets. They may be talking about God, but it is mere talk. With Kabir it is not just talking. It is his heartfelt experience – it is existential.
Have you heard the music that no fingers enter into?
The original is:
Sunta nahin dhun ki khabar,
anakad ka baja bajta?
Sunta nahin dhun ki khabar…
Why aren’t you listening to the inner music which is constantly arising? You are made of it. It is not something foreign to you. It does not come from the outside. It is the music of your very existence, of your being. It is the music of your inner harmony, it is the music of your inner rhythm.
Sunta nahin dhun ki khabar…
Why don’t you listen to the inner rhythm of your being? Where do you go on rushing to? You are searching for this inner rhythm – sometimes in money, power, prestige – in so many kinds of relationships. You go on begging. You want to know something of the transcendental, you are thirsty for the transcendental.
Once in a while, even in ordinary life, it happens. You know those few moments when suddenly one day you wake up in the morning and everything seems to fit perfectly. The birds are singing, the air is fragrant, the sun is rising and suddenly you feel that all is quiet. You are no longer separate for a moment and you feel a great joy arising in you for no reason at all. You suddenly feel vibrant, utterly rejuvenated, at home. Maybe the night’s deep sleep and rest, maybe the beautiful morning, the song of the birds, the fresh air, the dewdrops on the grass leaves shining in the early sun – all this created the context. Not by your effort, but just by accident, you fell in harmony with yourself and with existence. Remember, it happens always together. Whenever you fall in harmony with yourself, you fall in harmony with existence too.
Harmony has two sides. The individual and the universal. If the individual is in harmony, there is no reason why he should not be in harmony with the whole. If inside you all conflict has disappeared – even for a single moment – in that moment you are part of the whole, you are no longer an island, you are no longer separate. All walls have suddenly disappeared and you are no longer imprisoned.
In that moment you know the glory, the splendor, that life is. That splendor is God, that feeling is God. That experience of harmony is God. God is not a person, but the presence that is felt when you are in harmony and also in harmony with existence – that accord. That accord is called: dhun. Sunta nahin dhun ki khabar… Listen to that accord which is available every moment of your life. It happens only accidentally because you have not prepared yourself for it, to receive it consciously. So it happens only once in a while.
Once Leo Tolstoy was asked, “How many experiences of divine ecstasy did you have in your life?”
He started crying, great tears started rolling down from his eyes. He said, “Not more than seven in my life of seventy years, but I am grateful for those seven moments. I am miserable too because in those moments it was so self-evident that is could be the flavor of my whole life. In those moments, I was so certain that this could be my experience day in, day out, year in, year out; that this could spread over my whole life and become my flavor. But it didn’t happen. Those moments came on their own and they went on their own. But I am still grateful to God, that even once in a while without any conscious effort on my part, he has been knocking on my door.”
This happens to everyone. It happens in spite of you. If you look back, you can remember a few moments… And those will be the moments when you were relaxed, those will be the moments when there was no particular desire in your mind, when you were not worried, when you were not tense, when somehow you simply were.
Watch these sudden accidental moments minutely, because there is the secret key. That’s how the fundamentals of religion have been discovered. Watching these sudden moments which come and go. And one never knows why they come and why they go. Watching the context, the space in which they happen – people started trying to create that context.
If it happens in a relaxed state, when you are very loose, nontense, then you can create the context. You can relax. If it happens to you while swimming, you can swim and create the context. If it happens to you while running – and it happens to different people in different ways. Many runners know that if you go on running, running, running, beyond a certain limit, suddenly it happens – because man’s energies have three layers.
The first layer is only for day-to-day activities; it is a very thin layer. It is enough for your office, wife, children – the ordinary life. The second layer is for emergencies. Your house is on fire; you may have been feeling very tired after the whole day’s work and you were coming home and hoping to have a good rest. Suddenly when you reach home your house is on fire. Immediately, all fatigue disappears and you are no longer tired. You have forgotten all about rest and the whole night long you try to put the fire out. Even after the whole night’s work, you are not tired. It was not the ordinary level of energy that worked; that was exhausted. The emergency layer started working.
The third layer is deeper than that. If you go on and on… For example, if for one, two, three days, you go on working, then the emergency level will also be finished – and you come in contact with the cosmic layer. That is the source of life; that is inexhaustible. Whenever you are in contact with it, tremendous joy starts overflowing in you.
It happens to joggers, runners, swimmers sometimes. The first layer finished, then the second layer and if you go on running the second layer is also finished. The moment you are in contact with the third, a tremendous ecstasy happens for no reason at all.
It may happen to you while making love, it may happen to you while listening to music; it may happen to you while simply lying in your bed doing nothing; it may happen to you while painting, absorbed, utterly absorbed in it. Or it may happen in a thousand and one ways. But watch. Whenever it happens – whenever that tremendous blissful moment comes to you, when existence knocks on your door – watch in what context it is happening. Be alert. Look around. In what space is it happening? Then you have the key. Whenever you create that context, that space, the moment will come again.
You cannot make it happen, but you can make yourself available for it to happen. You cannot force it to happen, but you can create all that is necessary for it to happen. It is not a doing on your part, it is a happening. But, still, you can play a great role. That’s how all techniques of meditation have been developed. That’s how Yoga came into existence. Sunta nahin dhun ki khabar…
That accord is present in you, because without it you cannot be alive. That music is already there, flowing underground in you because that music is your connection with the whole. Once it is cut you will be dead. You are alive – that is enough proof that the music is happening. The only thing is to go deep inside your own being and to find where it is happening. Have you heard the music that no fingers enter into? This is a music that is not created by fingers on any musical instrument. There is no musical instrument within you and there is no one playing on the instrument. It is pure music.
Indian mystics use a special word for it: Anahad ka baja bajita. Anahad – it is boundless and it is uncreated. It is the sound of one hand clapping. But the Indian mystics go a little deeper. They say that there is not even one hand clapping – there is neither hand nor instrument, but pure music, just music.
The experience of the mystics is that life consists of the stuff called music. Just as physics says that life consists of electrons, electricity, mystics say that life consists of music. In a way they are both right because music is nothing but a certain vibration of electricity. It may be true vice versa also – electricity may be nothing but a certain density of music, of sound. Have you heard the music that no fingers enter into? Kabir is talking to his disciples who have come to seek God. Someone must have asked him about God and he is talking about music. To talk about God is almost useless, but to talk about music is certainly of great significance. If you can hear your inner music, you will know God is.
Far inside the house,
entangled music –
what is the sense of leaving your house?
Kabir says, “Where are you going to find God?” People go to Kashi and to Kaaba, to Jerusalem and to Tibet; people go to all kinds of places in search of some significance. They feel that their life is meaningless, they feel that their life is empty, they feel that their life is nothing but a long, long tale told to them by an idiot. They know that their life is just noise, meaningless, gibberish. They know that deep down there is nothing but a kind of hollowness. And they search. There must be some source somewhere which can quench their thirst. There must be some place somewhere where they can encounter God, where they can attain some significance, where their life can have some meaning. But this search is futile. They will be frustrated again and again – because the truth they are searching for is already within their being. What they are seeking is in the seeker himself; the sought is in the seeker. You need not go anywhere. You simply have to learn how not to go anywhere.
The greatest art is just to be, without going anywhere. Not going to the past, the future, in desires, in psychological spaces, in psychic travels – not to go anywhere, just to be. Right now, if you are just here, immediately something is felt; something which is intangible. You cannot show it to anyone else, you cannot share your experience with someone who has not known it. But your whole being starts feeling a kind of intoxicatedness, a drunkenness. You become full of juice, you become full of aliveness, and a very indirect, subtle, delicate experience of the presence of something bigger than you. That’s what godliness is all about.
Far inside the house… The original is:
Ras mand mandir bajta
bahar sune to kya hua?
Kabir says: “Music is already happening inside your own temple.” Kabir calls you “the temple.” And except for your body there is no other temple in the world. Your bodies are temples, sacred places because the holiest of the holy resides in you. Look at what the priests have been telling you, what your so-called saints have been telling you. They have been teaching you life-negative attitudes, body-negative attitudes. They have been telling you that the body is the culprit, that the body is the source of sin. They have been telling you to torture the body, to destroy the body. They have been teaching you that unless you destroy your body totally you will not be able to know godliness.
The truth is just the contrary. Unless you love your body immensely, respect your body immensely, you will not be able to know godliness at all. The body is its outer expression. If the body is the temple, godliness is the deity inside it.
Ras mand mandir bajta…
Within the temple of your body, the music is already happening. Just go in. The word ras has to be understood. Ras literally means juice. You will be surprised to know that the mystics of this country have called God the ultimate juice: Rasao vai saha – it is the ultimate juice. But if you go to your so-called saints, you will find them very dry, with no juice at all. You will find them almost dead, with no life flowing in them. They have destroyed their bodies. They are living a kind of death, but this is thought to be very respectable. What has really happened? What has gone wrong? Why have these pathological, mentally deranged, psychologically ill people, become so dominant? Why have they possessed religion?
Neurotic people have one quality in them: the quality of being fanatics. Only neurotics can be fanatics. It is very difficult to fight with fanatics. Wherever a fanatic is, sooner or later he is going to become a leader. He is so troublesome, he is such a troublemaker that you have to make him a leader, just to pacify him. He will only be at rest when he is at the top, when he is the boss.
Neurotics have a tendency to become leaders. Adolf Hitler was a neurotic and became one of the greatest leaders of human history. He was a madman, but madmen have a few qualities in them which no sane man can ever have. They compete and they compete with their total energy, they compete madly. They are so mad that they don’t think, they act. While the sane person thinks, the mad person acts. The sane person goes on thinking and the mad person has already reached and acted and done. The sane person thinks of consequences, the mad person thinks nothing – he simply rushes in.
Adolf Hitlers become leaders in politics and the same kind of people become leaders in religion too. The pathological people also have a tendency to become organized. The sane person wants to be left alone because he enjoys his aloneness. He wants his own space, he wants freedom – freedom from the crowd. The mad person wants the crowd. Left alone he becomes disturbed. In his aloneness he starts seeing his madness. He always goes in the crowd; he wants to live with the crowd twenty-four hours a day. He is a lover of the crowd.
The sane person moves in solitude and the insane person searches for the crowd. Your religions are nothing but crowds. Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Jainism. All different crowds. When Mohammed became enlightened, he was alone, meditating in the mountains. When Buddha became enlightened, he was alone, under a tree, meditating by the side of the River Niranjana – alone. When Mahavira became enlightened he was absolutely alone in the forest, standing underneath a tree, naked in the sun.
Enlightenment has happened to people when they were utterly alone. But leadership does not come that way. Leadership comes when you move in a crowd. Not only that, when you fulfill the expectations of the crowd – stupid expectations, superstitious expectations, but you have to fulfill them – you become the religious or political leader. Mad people have a great organizing capacity. They fulfill the expectations of the crowd. The crowd looks up to them, the crowd respects them and is afraid. Everyone is afraid. The crowd wants to be organized because in organization there seems to be power.
An NAACP official telephoned the Library of Congress and told the chief librarian that the library had eighteen thousand books with the word nigger in them and all the books had to be removed in a week.
“But,” protested the librarian, “we have fifty thousand volumes with the word bastard in them.”
“I know,” said the official, “but those bastards are not organized.”
In this world, organization is power and mad people have a great magnetic force to organize. They cannot be alone, they seek others who cannot be alone, who are also seeking. It becomes a mutual arrangement.
Religions, at the source, are born out of a meditative aloneness, but the moment it becomes known that a buddha has happened, the mad people start organizing, the mad people start gathering a crowd. That crowd finally crystallizes into Hinduism, Mohammedanism, Christianity. All their notions are based not in the enlightenment of their founders, real founders, no, but in the pseudo founders, the priests. And the priests have been telling you that life is irreligious, that the body has to be denied, that it is not a temple, that it is not a place to be worshipped in.
Kabir is saying a totally different thing. And that’s what my emphasis is: the body is sacred – because all is sacred. Have you heard the music that no fingers enter into? Far inside the house; entangled music – what is the sense of leaving your house? Where are you going? You need not leave the body, you need not leave anything, you need not renounce anything. Remember, Kabir never renounced anything. He lived a very ordinary life just as everyone else lives – the life of a householder. He was a father, a husband, and his whole life he continued to work. He was a weaver and he continued to weave clothes, even when he had thousands of disciples. Many times his disciples would come to him and say, “You need not work at all. We are ready to provide everything for you and your needs are not many. Why do you go on working?”
Kabir would laugh and say, “You don’t understand. I work for God, I weave clothes for God – because the customers who come to purchase clothes from me are divine. How can I stop my work?”
This quality is true religiousness. This quality is possible only if you are in love with life. And to be in love with life creates ras – juice. Then you don’t become dry, you don’t become a desert, then you become an oasis.
The so-called religious people of this country are against me because I am teaching you the way of ras – the way of life, love, juice, music. I am teaching you to become an oasis, not a desert. I would like you to be in a constant rejoicing because I am not teaching you renunciation but rejoicing. All the people who have been carrying this nonsense idea of renouncing the world are bound to be against me. That is natural. It is expected. This has been happening always and it seems, unfortunately, that down the ages, man hasn’t learned anything at all. It is exactly the same today as it was in the days of Buddha, as it was in the days of Jesus, as it was in the days of Kabir.
Suppose you scrub your ethical skin until it shines,
but inside there is no music,
then what?
Morality is not religion, although a religious person is always moral. But not vice versa – a moral person need not be religious. A religious person is necessarily moral because religion means the experience of the divine. How can one who has experienced the presence of godliness be immoral? In fact, he is the criterion, the decisive factor as to what is moral.
Whatever an enlightened person does is moral; there is no other way to decide. It is not a question of him trying to do that which is moral. Whatever he does is moral. He cannot do any harm to anyone, he is a blessing to existence. When existence has blessed him, what else is left for him, except to be a blessing to existence? What existence has given him, he goes on giving to everyone else. His heart is full of bliss and the bliss starts overflowing. That overflowing bliss is real morality.
Morality means compassion, morality means love, morality means creativity. Morality means making the world a little more beautiful than you found it, leaving it a little more beautiful and giving it a new plane, a new level, a new dimension of existence.
The immoral person is destructive because he is miserable and can only share his misery with others. Remember, you can give to others only that which you have. If you are miserable, whatever you say is immaterial, you will make others miserable. If you are blissful, you need not say anything, you will make others blissful. Your very presence will trigger blissfulness in their being. Your very presence will create a synchronicity in others. Your music, your juice, will create ripples of joy. Whoever is close to you will become infected with your joy, your ecstasy, will become drunk – and that’s what morality is.
Kabir says: Suppose you scrub your ethical skin until it shines, but inside there is no music, then what? Then what is the use of it? Yes, that can be done, that is being done. There are people who go on cultivating character, who go on cultivating morality. They become great moralists, puritans, very righteous. They do only that which is right, but it is a forced doing; it is not spontaneous. It is not out of their being, it is just a forced phenomenon. It is a facade. They have created a beautiful curtain around themselves and behind it is the corpse, a stinking corpse, but on the surface they have decorated themselves with flowers. The crowd can be deceived by them, but deep down they are the same people. Even worse because all that they are showing on the surface is pseudo. They are just the opposite inside. They are hypocrites. They say one thing and are just the opposite of it. They do one thing, but their being has no correspondence with it. They are split, they are schizophrenic.
We have put the whole of humanity in a state of schizophrenia because of this cultivated morality. Everyone is more or less made into a hypocrite. Society forces you to do it. If you don’t do it, you cannot live, you cannot survive. It has become almost a necessity that you don’t show your reality. You show only that which people want you to show and you keep everything else hidden inside. Your inner being goes on accumulating poisons and poisons and poisons; you live a hell within, decorated with beautiful flowers. Those flowers are also plastic because they cannot be true flowers. True flowers need roots in your being.
A really religious person has no morality imposed upon himself. His morality arises out of his consciousness. He is not trying to do the right thing, he is not trying to avoid the wrong. He simply remains conscious and acts out of his consciousness. And whatever he does is right. In fact, it is impossible to do anything wrong consciously.
A beautiful story is told about a great mystic, Nagarjuna…
He was a naked fakir, but loved by all real seekers. A queen was also deeply in love with Nagarjuna. One day, she asked him to come to the palace, to be a guest there. Nagarjuna went. The queen asked him a favor.
Nagarjuna said, “What do you want?”
The queen said, “I want your begging bowl.”
Nagarjuna gave it – that was the only thing he had, his begging bowl. And the queen brought a golden begging bowl, studded with diamonds and gave it to Nagarjuna. She said, “Now you keep this. I will worship the begging bowl that you have carried for years. It has some of your vibe. It will become my temple. A man like you should not carry an ordinary wooden begging bowl. Keep this golden one. I have had it made especially for you.”
It was really precious. If Nagarjuna had been an ordinary mystic he would have said, “I cannot touch it. I have renounced the world.” But for him it was all the same, so he took the bowl.
When he left the palace, a thief saw him. He could not believe his eyes: “A naked man with such a precious thing. How long can he protect it?” So the thief followed.
Nagarjuna was staying outside the town in an ancient ruined temple with no doors, no windows. It was just a ruin. The thief was very happy. “Soon Nagarjuna will have to go to sleep and there will be no difficulty. I will get the bowl.”
The thief was hiding behind a wall just outside the doorway and Nagarjuna threw the bowl just outside. The thief could not believe what had happened. Nagarjuna threw it because he had watched the thief coming behind him and knew perfectly well that he was not coming for him. He was coming for the bowl, “So why unnecessarily let him wait? Be finished with it so he can go and I can also rest.”
Such a precious thing. And Nagarjuna has thrown it so easily. The thief could not go without thanking him. He knew perfectly well that it had been thrown for him. He peeked in and said, “Sir, accept my thanks. But you are a rare being. I cannot believe my eyes. A great desire has arisen in me. I am wasting my life by being a thief – and there are people like you too? Can I come in and touch your feet?”
Nagarjuna laughed and said, “Yes, that’s why I threw the bowl outside – so that you could come inside.”
The thief was trapped. The thief came in, touched the feet… And at that moment he was very open because he had seen that this man was no ordinary man. He was very vulnerable, open, receptive, grateful, mystified, stunned. When he touched the feet, for the first time in his life he felt the presence of the divine.
He asked Nagarjuna, “How many lives will it take for me to become like you?”
Nagarjuna replied, “How many lives? – it can happen today, it can happen now!”
The thief said, “You must be kidding. How can it happen now? I am a thief, a well-known thief. The whole town knows me, although they have not yet been able to catch me. Even the king is afraid of me because thrice I have entered and stolen from the treasury. They know it, but they have no proof. I am a master thief. You may not know about me because you are a stranger in these parts. How can I be transformed right now?”
Nagarjuna said, “If for centuries in an old house there has been darkness and you bring a candle, can the darkness say, ‘For centuries and centuries I have been here. I cannot leave just because you have brought a candle in. I have lived so long’? Can the darkness give resistance? Will it make any difference whether the darkness is one day old or millions of years old?”
The thief could see the point that darkness cannot resist light; when light comes, darkness disappears. Nagarjuna said, “You may have been in darkness for millions of lives – that doesn’t matter – but I can give you a secret; you can light a candle in your being.”
The thief said, “What about my profession? Have I to leave it?”
Nagarjuna said, “That is for you to decide. I am not concerned with you and your profession. I can only give you the secret of how to kindle a light within your being. Then it is up to you.”
The thief replied, “But whenever I have gone to any saints, they always say, ‘First stop stealing, only then can you be initiated.’”
It is said that Nagarjuna laughed and said, “You must have gone to thieves, not to saints. They know nothing. Just watch your breath – the ancient method of Buddha. Just watch your breath coming in, going out. Whenever you remember, watch your breath. Even when you go to steal, when you enter someone’s house in the night, go on watching your breath. When you have opened the treasure and the diamonds are there, go on watching your breath and do whatever you want to do – but don’t forget to watch the breath.”
The thief said, “This seems to be simple. No morality? No character needed? No other requirement?”
Nagarjuna said, “Absolutely none. Just watch your breath.”
After fifteen days the thief was back, but he was a totally different man. He fell at the feet of Nagarjuna and said, “You trapped me and you trapped me so beautifully that I never even suspected. I tried for these last fifteen days – it’s impossible. If I watch my breath, I cannot steal. If I steal, I cannot watch my breath. Watching the breath, I become so silent, so alert, so aware, so conscious, that even diamonds look like pebbles. You have created a difficulty for me, a dilemma. Now what am I supposed to do?”
Nagarjuna replied, “Get lost – do whatever you want to do. If you want that silence, peace, bliss that arises in you when you watch your breath, then choose that. If you think all those diamonds, gold and silver are more valuable, then choose that. It is for you to choose. Who am I to interfere in your life?”
The man said, “I cannot choose to be unconscious again. I have never known such moments. Accept me as one of your disciples, initiate me.”
Nagarjuna replied, “I have initiated you already.”
Religion is based not in morality, but in meditation. Religion is rooted not in character, but in consciousness. A really religious person has no character at all. He is characterless. But let me define what I mean by “characterless.” I don’t mean the ordinary meaning that you find in the dictionary because in the dictionary, the man of bad character is called characterless. That is wrong because he has a character. Maybe it is bad, but he is not characterless. Someone has good character, someone has bad character, but both have characters. The sinner and the saint, both have characters, but the really religious man is characterless. He is neither good nor bad. He is beyond. He has no character because he does not function out of his past. He acts moment to moment, he acts spontaneously; he has no ready-made formula, he has no routine. He does not act out of habits. That’s what character is: creating good habits is good character, creating bad habits is bad character. Creating consciousness, not habits, is religiousness.
Suppose you scrub your ethical skin until it shines, but inside there is no music, then what? You can go on scrubbing your ethical skin, you can go on polishing your morality and become a really polished man, but if inside there is no music, if meditation has not happened, if you have not heard the unheard, if you have not seen the unseen; if you have not penetrated into the unknowable, if that soundless sound is not heard, it is all futile. You are simply wasting your time.
A Zen story…
A disciple is meditating and has been meditating for at least twenty years. He has been doing all kinds of things, such as yoga postures, meditative techniques. One day the master appears and the disciple is sitting like a buddha, absolutely silent – at least on the outside – unmoving like a marble statue. The master starts rubbing a brick on a stone just in front of him. He creates so much noise by rubbing the brick on the stone that the disciple has to open his eyes a little bit and see who is creating the nuisance.
Seeing that the master himself is doing this, he cannot believe it. A master is not supposed to disturb the disciple while he is meditating. What kind of master is he? But a master is a master, so you cannot be rude to him. He waits, but how long can you wait? The constant rubbing of the brick on the stone – setting his teeth on edge. Finally he says, “Stop it. What are you doing?”
The master said, “And what have you been doing for twenty years? Scrubbing, scrubbing – trying to polish your mind? You call that meditation? Your postures, your techniques are all mind-based. I am trying to make a mirror out of this brick.”
The disciple replied, “That is impossible. You can go on rubbing, but the brick will never become a mirror.”
The master says, “That’s what I have come to say to you. Twenty years you have been rubbing, scrubbing, polishing and the mind has not become meditation, the mind has not become a mirror. Drop the mind. Don’t cultivate it.”
By dropping the mind, it becomes a mirror. The mind itself never becomes a mirror. The mind is the barrier. Hidden behind the mind is your consciousness. Once you enter behind the mind, you hear the music. That music transforms you into a new being. It is a rebirth.
Mohammed’s son pours over words and points out this and that,
but if his chest is not soaked dark with love,
then what?
Kabir says that this is so with everyone – the Hindu pundit goes on speculating upon words, playing upon words. The Mohammedan scholar: Mohammed’s son pours over words… Words have become so important that we have forgotten that we have to enter a wordless state of consciousness. Go on repeating the Koran, the Bible, the Vedas and it is of no use at all because you will only be gathering more and more knowledge – all borrowed. A truth borrowed becomes a lie. A truth expressed in words immediately loses its truthfulness. Words are too small and cannot contain the great sky of the truth within themselves. They crush the truth, they destroy it. When words reach you, you will give a meaning to them which is yours.
Krishna speaks, Jesus speaks, I am speaking to you… If there are two thousand people here, do you think everyone is hearing the same thing? There are two thousand meanings. The speaker is one, my meaning is one, but immediately I assert it, it becomes two thousand – two thousand meanings.
A shaggy tale used by New Testament scholars to poke a little fun at their more skeptical associates begins when several archaeologists working near Jerusalem unearth some human skeletal remains. Upon examination they prove to be the bones of Jesus. Overwhelmed by the burden of such unsettling knowledge, the archaeologists decide to inform the Pope. The Pope, of course, is shocked. What does this mean for the future of the Christian faith?
If those bones are really those of Jesus, that means he was never resurrected, that means the resurrection was false, that the whole story was invented. And with the resurrection disappearing, the whole ground underneath Christianity will disappear.
Before releasing this information to the press and allowing it to be sensationally exposed to the stunned eyes of the faithful, the Holy Father determines to call a council of the world’s great theologians to see if they can help him understand and interpret this calamitous event. What is more, because the implications of the news obviously affect all Christians, it seems wise to make this an ecumenical council, one to which theologians of all denominations will be invited. Slowly and painfully, his Holiness works his way down the list of theologians, making telephone calls to each of them. All are heard to make the appropriate gasps of dismay, after which they promise to hasten to Rome for the conference.
The last name on the Pope’s list is that of a German New Testament scholar with a reputation for being highly skeptical in respect to all manner of historical information about Jesus. The Holy Father debates with himself whether this gentleman should be informed. Finally, in the interests of ecumenism and because in this case such an already formed attitude of skepticism might actually be of some use, he makes the telephone call. The German critic, instead of being overwhelmed by the news that Jesus’ bones had not been resurrected, registers his surprise in a fashion which takes the Pope’s own breath away.
“Ach so,” the scholar responds, “then he did live.”
The same news. One is worried about resurrection, but the other’s response is totally different. His worry is, “Ach so, then he did live.” If the bones are genuine, then Jesus becomes a historical figure.
Whenever you hear something, you hear it always from your background, it is your background that interprets it. The meaning is given by you.
“Young man” said the judge, looking sternly at the defendant, “it is alcohol and alcohol alone that is responsible for your present sorry state.”
“I am glad to hear you say that,” replied Mooney with a sigh of relief. “Everyone else says it’s all my fault!”
It is natural that words will be interpreted by each person according to his own past. That’s why I insist again and again: please listen to me without bringing in your past, listen to me without any background, listen to me not as Christians, Hindus and Mohammedans, otherwise you will miss it. Not only will you miss it, you will misunderstand it.
Listen to me as you listen to music or the sound of running water or the wind passing through the pine trees. Then there is a possibility of some communion happening and a possibility that some meaning that I am trying to convey reaches you. But it is really difficult. It is one of the most difficult things in the world to be a disciple.
To be a disciple means listening without any background, just listening without interpreting, just listening without for or against, without believing, without disbelieving – a pure kind of listening. The beauty of truth is that if you can listen silently with no judgment, if it is true, it will ring bells in your heart. But the bells will ring in the heart, not in the head. If it is untrue, no bells will ring in the heart. You will know whether it is true or untrue – not by thinking about it, but just by listening in total silence.
Mohammed’s son pours over words and points out this and that, but if his chest is not soaked dark with love, then what? Unless your heart responds, the head cannot become a bridge to existence. Your heart needs to be soaked with love. But you don’t know anything about the heart. Society has not allowed you to go through the heart; it has tried in every way to bypass the heart. The whole effort of society is to pull you to the head directly, without moving through the heart – because the ways of the heart are mysterious, uncontrollable.
The ways of the head are controllable, manipulatable. Hence society is interested in your head, not in your heart. Society wants you to understand that there is no heart but only the head. The heart is nothing but a blood-pumping system; that’s what society wants you to believe. This is one of the greatest untruths ever told.
By “heart” is not meant the physical part. The physical part is simply a blood circulation system, but hidden behind the physical, just corresponding to it, very close to it, behind it, is the real heart. Just as hidden behind the brain is the mind, so hidden behind the lungs is the heart and hidden behind the body is the soul.
Don’t be finished with the physical. Always remember, corresponding to each physical phenomenon in you, there is a spiritual phenomenon. Unless your heart starts functioning: …is soaked dark with love… And why dark? – because love has the depth of darkness, the density of darkness. Love grows in mysterious ways, but not in the light because light makes everything demystified. Love is more dark than anything else. It is a dark, dense, mysterious world.
If you are afraid of the dark, you will be afraid of love too. If you are afraid of the night, you will be afraid of love too. If you are afraid of the dark, the night, death, love, then you are afraid of all that is mysterious. You will have to exist only on the surface and will never be able to penetrate to the center of being.
The original is:
Ik prem-ras chakha nahin,
amli hua to kya hua?
You haven’t tasted the juice of love – and you have become a great saint? You have great character and great morality – and you haven’t even tasted the juice of love? All your saintliness and all your morality is holy cow dung. You are carrying an unnecessary weight. The sooner you drop it the better.
The yogi comes along in his famous orange.
But if inside he is colorless, then what?
The real question is of getting colored inside. The outer color is only symbolic. It is a gesture; it is not the end, it is the beginning. It is simply you saying, “I am ready.” But don’t think that if you are wearing orange, sannyas has happened. Your gesture has happened, you have moved on the way.
There are two initiations. One is the formal. The day you become a sannyasin, you change to orange – that is formal. But without the formal, the informal is difficult. If you cannot even change your clothes, how will you change your being? But just changing your clothes is not synonymous with changing your being.
Kabir says: The yogi comes along in his famous orange. But if inside he is colorless, then what?
Vakif nahin us rang se
kapare range se kya hua?
You haven’t known the color of godliness, you haven’t known the color of love, you haven’t known the color of life. Orange is the color of blood, life; orange is the color of fire, love, the sunrise, the transformation – the declaration that the night has ended.
But the being has to be colored. Your soul has to become red with love, with joy, with celebration. In India, orange is the color of spring – a springtime has to come in your inner being so that flowers that have waited and waited for centuries can bloom, so that buds can open.
Kabir says: every instant that the sun is risen,
if I stand in the temple, or on a balcony,
in the hot fields, or in a walled garden,
my own lord is making love with me.
Meditate over this tremendously important statement: …my own lord is making love with me.
The man of absolute consciousness remains in a constant orgasmic state. Just as two lovers reach an orgasmic climax only for a moment and it is gone, and a sadness comes in the wake; the man of total awareness, the buddha, the enlightened person, remains for twenty-four hours a day in an orgasmic state: …my own lord is making love with me. Kabir says, “Wherever I am, it makes no difference – in the temple or in the mosque or in the fields or in a walled garden – it doesn’t matter where I am. Wherever I am, my lord, my beloved, is making love with me.”
Love is the quintessence of religion. And to be orgasmic is to be a sannyasin – to become so orgasmic that it continues day in, day out. Even when you are asleep, the meeting continues. You go on melting and merging into existence and existence goes on melting and merging into you.
The wall between you and the whole has been removed, there is no separation. That state of non-separation, that state of unio mystica – the mystic union – is the ultimate expression of love. The lowest is the man–woman relationship and the ultimate, the highest, is the meeting of the meditator with the whole.
Hence I say the journey is from sex to superconsciousness. Sex is the beginning of the journey. Don’t reject it. If you reject the beginning, you will never reach the end. But remember that it is only the beginning; don’t get stuck there. You have to go farther and farther ahead, you have to transcend it. As you go higher in meditation, the less and less sexual you are bound to become.
This is happening every day to my sannyasins. The whole country thinks that nothing but sex is happening here, but the reality is just the opposite. This may be the only place where thousands of people are totally losing interest in sex – because going through it is going beyond it. To go beyond, one has to go through because without knowing it there is no way to transcend it.
The sexual orgasm reveals two secrets to you. One is that in the climax, at the peak, the ego disappears; the second, time disappears. These are the two secrets of meditation. One day while meditating, you will come to know that sex is not needed at all because the ego and time can disappear without going into sex at all.
Sex is a natural way of meditation; it is a gift of nature, to keep reminding you that this is possible. Mind, time, ego, can all disappear. If they can disappear for a single moment, why not forever? Sex is a natural window into godliness, but only a window. You need not remain confined behind it. You can jump out of the window and come into the open, in the sun, under the sky. But the window made it possible for you. And because sex helps you to know a few moments of egolessness, timelessness, mindlessness, it makes it possible that you can long for, desire a permanent state, an eternal state of orgasmic joy – sat-chit-anand.
Kabir is absolutely right. No one else has said it so clearly: …my own lord is making love with me. It is happening every moment of the day, irrespective of where I am, of what I am doing. This has to become the experience of each of my sannyasins.
This is my message to you. You have to actualize this potential in you. One day you have to be able to declare to the world: “The lord is making love with me twenty-four hours a day. I am in an orgasmic state. Not only am I in an orgasmic state, but I am the orgasmic state.”
That’s what enlightenment is all about. Once it is achieved, no one can fall from it. Once it is achieved, all is achieved.
Enough for today.