WESTERN MYSTICS
The Hidden Harmony 08
Eighth Discourse from the series of 11 discourses - The Hidden Harmony by Osho.
You can listen, download or read all of these discourses on oshoworld.com.
Although this Logos is eternally valid,
yet men are unable to understand it –
not only before hearing it,
but even after they have heard it.
We should let ourselves be guided
by what is common to all.
Yet, although the Logos is common to all,
most men live as if each of them
had a private intelligence of his own.
Human nature has no real understanding;
only the divine nature has it.
Man is not rational;
only what encompasses him is intelligent.
What is divine escapes men’s notice
because of their incredulity.
Although intimately connected with the Logos,
men keep setting themselves against it.
How can anyone hide from that which never sets?
The logos is the logic of the whole, the logic of existence itself; the logos is the ultimate law. It is the same as Lao Tzu calls the Tao, the Upanishads and Vedas have called the rit: the cosmic harmony where opposites meet and disappear, where two become one, where no polarity exists; where all paradoxes are dissolved, all contradictions disappear. What Shankara calls the brahman, Heraclitus calls the logos.
The human mind is logical and human logic is based on the polarity. It’s as if you are standing on a bank of a river and cannot see the bank on the other side. Whatever you think about the bank belongs only to the bank you are on, but the river flows with a bank on either side, it cannot flow with just one. The other may be hiding in mist, it may be so far away that you cannot see it, but the other is there. The other bank is not opposite to the bank you are on because deep down in the river they meet. They are one land and they both support the river like two hands or like two wings. The river flows between them and is a harmony of the two. You are standing on only one of the banks and cannot see the other, so you simply believe in the bank you are on. And you create a system which is based on the knowledge of it. When someone talks about the other bank you think he is contradicting you, you think that he is bringing something irrational, mysterious. The other is bound to be opposite because only the tension of the opposites can hold the river. But the oppositeness is not enmity, the oppositeness is a deep friendship; it is the peak of love.
This is the problem to be solved. If you can solve this you can understand Heraclitus and understand all those who have become awakened, who have known the other shore. Whatever they say will be contradictory because they have to comprehend both. They have to comprehend both winter and summer, day and night, life and death, love and hate, the peak and the valley.
When someone talks about the peak, not referring to the valley at all, his statements will be very rational; you can understand them, they are easy, consistent. When someone talks about the valley, never referring to the peak, he will also be rational. All philosophers are rational; you can understand them very easily. To understand them you need a little learning and training, that’s all, a discipline. But all the mystics are difficult to comprehend. In fact, the more you try to understand them, the more they become mysterious because they talk about the peak and the valley together. They would like to talk about the valley and the peak simultaneously.
It is said in the Upanishads, “He is far and near.” What type of statement is this? Either he is far or he is near. The seer immediately says, “He is far” and adds, “He is near.” He is the greatest and he is the smallest. He is the atom and he is the whole. He is within you and without. Heraclitus says, “God is summer and winter.” Summer? It’s okay; you can understand. God is only winter? That too is okay, you can understand. But both summer and winter? You feel dizzy and the mind says, “This statement is contradictory.”
Human logic seeks a noncontradictory statement – the logos is contradictory. It uses contradiction just as an architect uses bricks in opposition to make an arch. The opposition gives the tension and the strength, and on that arch you can erect a big building. But if you do not put bricks in opposition to each other – logical, consistent, just like a peak or a valley, this bank or that, not both – the building will fall; the arch cannot be made. It needs the tension of the opposites to create strength. Hence there is man and woman. They are the opposite bricks of life. Their very opposition creates the situation where life can exist. They are the two banks between which the river can flow. But the moment you talk about the peak and the valley together, it becomes incomprehensible. Human logic is consistent. The divine logos is contradictory, yet consistent.
Human logic is partial. It tries to understand a part and in trying to understand a part it avoids all that contradicts it. It simply wants to forget all that is contradictory. But the divine is all. It doesn’t choose, everything is involved. It is vast; it is not partial, it is total. That’s the difference between a religious and a philosophical approach. A philosophical approach is logical; that’s why Aristotle says, “Man is a rational being.” And Heraclitus says, “Man is irrational” – because your very reason makes you irrational. The moment you choose the part you have falsified the whole thing. Now this part is only in your mind. In existence this part is always with the opposite, never alone.
Human logic says that God is male. There are some believers in God who think that God is female, but the logos must comprehend both. So Hindus have a concept of ardhanarishwar: God is both male and female. That is the true concept from the logos. It looks contradictory. You must have seen statues of Shiva as half man and half woman, half feminine with one breast and half male. That statue looks absurd, but that is the truth. All your statues of God as male or female are irrational. They are not true because how can God be only male; where does the feminine arise from? To whom will the feminine reach? In what source does the feminine exist?
You talk about God as a he; that is wrong. There are people who talk about God as a she; that too is wrong. He is he plus she, but the mind cannot understand this and mental understanding is not an understanding at all. You will be able to understand only when you try to understand from your own totality, not just from the mind because inside you these two opposite poles meet. You are also an ardhanarishwar; you are both he and she. You are neither male nor female. If you understand your own totality and if you bring it to the universe, to face the universe, you will be able to comprehend. That’s a mystic vision. That is the logos.
So what to do? Ordinarily you are trained to be a man or to be a woman. From the very beginning we say to children, “You are a boy, so behave like one.” To a girl, “You are a girl, so behave like one.” That creates the distinction more and more and the poles are set apart. In a better world we will say to each child, “You are both.” The difference is only of emphasis. “You are neither boy nor girl. You are both.” The difference is only of emphasis. The whole concept of civilization will be different; there will be no question of enmity between man and woman. There will be no problem about who dominates whom. You will be able to see the totality of your being; the totality is beautiful. The part is always ugly.
It’s as if you have taken the tree and cut its roots. How long can the tree remain alive? You have taken the tree – the visible; you have cut the roots – the invisible. The tree goes upward and the roots go downward. You have made a consistent thing. You say, “No! How can these two opposite dimensions exist simultaneously? The tree must go upward and if the roots go downward they are two separate things. Cut them!” This is what has happened.
Man is a visible tree, woman is like the roots. That’s why all the old teachings say that woman is earth and man is sky. They are together; man is rooted in the woman and the woman is reaching higher and higher through the man. They are one. Hell and heaven are not two, just the same ladder.
Heraclitus says, “The way up and the way down are the same.” Hell and heaven cannot be apart. This is the logos: to see the whole ladder. God and the Devil are not two. Theologians will not agree because they will say that you are creating confusion and people will be confused; they will not know who is who. But people are confused and they are confused because of the false logic of the partial human mind. In fact, everything is everything.
It happened…
Mulla Nasruddin was awarding prizes at a local dog show, but he was very worried about something. He was worried about the way people were dressed. He exclaimed, “Look what’s happening in this world! Look at that person with two puppies. He has cropped hair, is wearing pants and smoking cigarettes. Now I’m at a loss as to whether that is a man or a woman, a boy or a girl.”
A bystander replied, “I know she’s a girl because she’s my daughter.”
Mulla Nasruddin said, “I am very, very sorry. Had I known that you were her mother, I would not have been so outspoken.”
The woman replied, “I’m not her mother, I’m her father.”
A meeting of the sexes is now happening. It’s happening in the way people dress, the way they live. That is a very good sign. People are becoming unisex in the way they dress; that’s a very good sign! There is no need to make these distinctions. The reality is a nondistinct whole.
Distinctions are being made by the mind and it has created trouble because you are both. If you are fixed on the idea that you are a male, what will you do with the woman inside? She is there. Sometimes she wants to weep and cry, but you cannot weep and cry. You are a man and you have to behave like a man. You don’t listen to nature; you listen to manmade theories that you are a man. Nature has created tear glands in the eyes and if nature intended that a man should never weep and cry, why create them? If nature intended that a man should not feel, why give him a heart?
A man feels as much as a woman. He suppresses his femininity and goes on suppressing it; that creates an inner conflict. Rather than using the opposite polarities to flow – rather than using the two opposite polarities as a tension, which creates aliveness – you suppress the polarity, which deadens and kills your sensitivity. If a man is not also a woman, one half is crippled, one half of his being is suppressed. And that suppressed being will take revenge. Sooner or later he will go mad because the suppressed part will throw off the dominating part.
Politics is not only outside; politicians have created politics within you. They have created a rift, they have made you fight yourself. And a woman is continuously suppressing the male part. It erupts. It comes up again and again because it is there. Rather than creating a harmony with these two opposite notes, you have been warring, you have been fighting, struggling. The situation would have been beautiful if you could have created a harmony; then a higher quality of being would have arisen within you. Remember, all growth is dialectical.
This word dialectical has to be understood; it is against rational. Reason is a linear process, from one step to another, but the plane remains the same; from A to B, but the plane remains the same. That’s why reason is very, very boring. It has no qualities of the opposite; that’s why it becomes boring.
Just watch: twenty men are sitting together and suddenly a woman enters. Immediately the atmosphere changes. Those twenty men were feeling a little bored; all those men together are bound to feel bored – unless they are homosexuals. If they are healthy they are bound to feel bored. A woman enters and immediately the atmosphere changes. You can see it on their faces; they start smiling, become more polite and don’t use ugly words. They behave themselves. A woman enters and everything changes. A subtle phenomenon happens inside: the entry of the woman becomes an even deeper entry inside of them, of their inner woman. They become whole. For a moment they are no longer parts. Look at twenty women sitting, chattering together, a man enters and immediately a change happens.
If there is only one, the same quality continues; it becomes a boring process. Dialectics means movement through the opposite. Dialectics is: thesis, antithesis, synthesis; one thing against another, a challenge, a tension. Through that tension and challenge a third reality arises, synthesis. The synthesis is always better; it goes on a higher plane.
Reason moves horizontally, dialectics moves vertically.
If you have no enemy and your life is such that you are not opposed to anything, you will lose all salt from your life. If you are not opposed to anything, you will be tasteless, you will be like a dead stone; not like a flower because movement, energy, challenge, comes from the opposite and you grow. When a man meets a woman a dialectical process starts. That’s why love is so very beautiful and a great growth situation. To be related to the other is to be constantly in a challenging situation. To be only related to oneself is boredom – no opposite.
One can move alone if you can find the opposite in your own inner being. That is the meaning of when a man becomes total within and doesn’t need a woman. When a woman becomes total within she doesn’t need a man. A moment comes when a Buddha moves alone, a Mahavira moves alone. There is no need of the other. Not that the woman is bad, but now they have found their inner feminine part, now the dialectics has entered their own being and there is no need to create it outside. Now, inside, there is a continuous thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Now they grow alone, but they also use the same dialectics.
The whole of life is dialectical. The logos is dialectical and reason is a process of the same. You can think of it in these terms. Dialectics is heterosexual; reason, rationality, is homosexual. Rationality is homosexual. That’s why homosexuality is growing in the West because the West has accepted Aristotle, reason. Heraclitus is heterosexual. He will include the opposite. If you listen to reason you will be homosexual. If you listen to reason, the whole quality that comes from the opposite, the tension, will be lost. When it is lost, life becomes boredom. When it is lost, life loses the zest, the enthusiasm, hope, possibilities. Everything is lost because every possibility is opened by the opposite.
When you fall in love for the first time, you meet the opposite. It is as if you have immediately got wings and can fly; poetry arises in your heart. What is happening? ? the opposite has created something in you. Silence alone is not very beautiful; sound alone is not very beautiful, but the meeting of sound and silence is very, very beautiful – that is music.
The meeting of silence and sound is music.
Watch what is happening when someone is playing an instrument, a sitar or a piano. What is he doing? ? he is doing a dialectical process. He creates sound and between two sounds he gives a valley, a silence. The greater the peak, the deeper the valley will be. He creates sound, he creates a peak; he moves higher and higher and higher and brings a climax and suddenly ? the gap, the silence.
You don’t have a musical ear if you listen only to sound and miss the silence between two sounds. When you listen to the sound and the silence, the peak and the valley together, you encounter a new phenomenon. Every peak creates the valley, every valley creates the peak. They move like yin and yang, they move in a circle. Then there is music, there is the hidden harmony.
The logos is dialectical, it is heterosexual. God creates the world because the other is needed. He alone cannot be, the world alone cannot be. If you listen only to the world you will not come to know the inner music of existence; being fed up with the world, you can leave it and only listen to God, but again you miss the harmony. When you listen to the world and God together; when the world becomes the opposite pole; when the world becomes one bank and God the other bank and the river flows – it flows tremendously, it flows beautifully and you hear the harmony. One who hears the harmony between this world and God is a sannyasin.
One who leaves this world and moves to the other extreme is logical, rational, but not dialectical. Go and watch people in shops, in markets; they are dull because they are only of this world. Somehow they are working, pulling and dragging because they are there. So what to do? They are doing something. But you cannot hear the music in them. The opposite: the prayer, the meditation, the silence is not there. That’s why the marketplace has become simply sound; it is a chaos.
Go to the Himalayas, go to the monasteries; the same shopkeepers who have left the world are sitting there. They, too, have no life; they are dull, dirt collecting on them, dead. You will find dead people in the shops, in the temples and monasteries. They are the same people, they have just moved to the other extreme. Harmony is missing in the market and in the monastery.
A man who is harmonious is complex, his simplicity is very, very complex because in his simplicity, the opposite is involved. He has deep compassion, but he can also be angry. He is absolutely detached, but he can also love; he loves and remains detached. In him, the valley and the peak meet. In him, sound and silence meet. If you have a musical ear and a heart, you will see the harmony in such a person. Such a person is rare because he himself has become a logos. Krishna, Lao Tzu, Buddha, Heraclitus, Jesus all live in the logos; they are miniature logoi. The working of their beings is the same as existence; existence mirrors the same in their beings. They don’t reject anything, they use everything.
A man who rejects anything does not know what he is doing. If a man rejects sound he will reject silence too because they exist together. Have you ever known silence without sound? Silence has its own sound. When the night is completely silent, with no traffic, no one moving around, everyone asleep; just watch and listen and you will find that the night has its own sound – very subtle, but its own sound. When one goes deeper inside, to the inner night, where all the sounds of the day have stopped, a sound is heard there too. Hindus have called it aumkar, the sound of the ultimate, om. It is heard. It is there. When the ultimate silence descends on you, the ultimate sound also descends on you – immediately! They are together, they cannot be apart. Silence and sound are two aspects of the same coin. Yes, God is silence and sound. This is the logos.
Now try to follow this sutra. This is very, very meaningful.
Although this Logos is eternally valid,
yet men are unable to understand it –
not only before hearing it,
but even after they have heard it.
This is not a question of hearing or not hearing. It is a question of inner growth. I can talk to you about the logos, I can try to explain it to you; you may even have an intellectual glimpse of it, but that will not give you understanding. It is just like talking to a small child about sex. You can talk, you can bring in all your Freuds and Wilhelm Reichs and the child may even listen, but can a child understand it? If the child is very intelligent he will understand intellectually, but to understand sex a biological growth is needed, a certain maturity of the glands and hormones is needed. To understand sex the child must come to the point where he desires it; only then can he understand, otherwise not.
I was walking down a street and two small children were walking in front of me. One must have been seven and the other about eight. The smaller one was telling the elder, “I walk to school with a girl. I have carried her bag and books seven times and brought her ice cream three times. Do you think I should kiss her now or not?”
The other pondered over it and said, “As I see it, you have already done enough for her. No need to do anything more.”
For a child, this is exactly the thing! You cannot talk about sex to a child. First the sexual desire needs to arise; the child should become sexual first. That is also the problem with religion. You cannot talk to anybody unless the desire arises.
Religion is just like sex. Sex is the desire to meet the opposite on the level of the body, religion is the desire to meet the opposite on the level of being. It is a desire. It is a thirst. Only when it arises can it be talked about. You may bring intellectual questions; that doesn’t mean anything. You may ask whether God exists or not; that is not the point. Are you thirsty? Has the desire arisen to meet the opposite on the level of being; not on the level of body nor of mind, but at the level of being, your totality? Are you ready for that jump? Then understanding is possible.
That’s why Heraclitus says: Although this Logos is eternally valid… The logos is present everywhere: in the trees, the stones, the sky, everywhere. The logos is present in you and all around you because the whole of life is working through the opposite. It is dialectical, it gets enrichment through the opposite. It moves through the antithesis and moves higher to the synthesis, then again the synthesis becomes the thesis. Again the antithesis is created and again a higher synthesis. Life goes on moving that way. It is that way everywhere. It is valid because it is not an argument; it is the way existence is.
Remember, Heraclitus is not arguing, he is simply making a statement. I’m also not arguing, I’m simply making a statement of fact. It is how things are. That’s why he says, “I have searched…” And he has found this dialectic, a dialectical process of existence. This is the deepest insight. It is valid. No question of arguing about it. It is the way existence exists. …yet men are unable to understand it – not only before hearing it, but even after they have heard it. Hearing won’t help. Unless you change, unless you become open to the inside, unless you not only try to follow intellectually, understand intellectually, but feel it, exist through it, to imbibe it like food and digest it so that it flows in your bones, it becomes part of your existence ? only then. These are not theories; you need an inner growth before you can understand it.
We should let ourselves be guided
by what is common to all.
If you cannot understand before hearing it and you cannot understand after hearing it, what is to be done? Heraclitus makes a very beautiful suggestion. It can become really helpful to you. He says:
We should let ourselves be guided
by what is common to all.
Yet, although the Logos is common to all,
most men live as if each of them
had a private intelligence of his own.
The logos is common to all; it is the common ground, the common continent. You follow your own intelligence and think of yourselves as islands, separate from everybody. Private intelligence is foolishness; that is the only foolishness possible, the greatest stupidity. Existence is total; intelligence too. It is of the whole, so you should look to the common.
That is what Zen masters say. They say, “Become ordinary, become common. Don’t try to become extraordinary.” The more common you become, the more ordinary; the more capable of understanding the logos. Don’t try to be very extraordinary, exceptional because the more you try the more you will become like an island, closed, caved-in upon yourself. You are losing your moorings in existence. You are cutting your roots, becoming uprooted. That has happened in the West ? a feeling of uprootedness. Nobody knows where his roots are. When you feel uprooted, you become an egoist and exist as a self-sufficient entity. And that is not possible!
Existence is interrelated, we move into each other. When I am talking to you, what am I doing? ? I am continuously moving in you. When you are listening to me, you are allowing and giving me a door. You breathe and existence enters you; you open your eyes and the sun enters you. Every moment, in twenty-four hours, you are a crossroad. Millions of points, millions of lines meet in you. You are not separate. Just think, can you exist separately? Can you exist totally insulated? You will die within seconds. You are a porous being; existence comes and moves through you. You are just like a room; air flows in, the sun comes and goes continuously and that’s why the room remains clean and fresh. If you are closed you will be dead. The more open you are, the more existence will flow through you; the more existence flows, the more you will be able to understand the logos.
You are not; the whole is. You are a false entity. Hence, the insistence on surrender from all the awakened ones. Don’t fight with existence because you don’t know what you are doing, with whom you are fighting. How can you fight with existence? It’s as if a wave is fighting with the ocean, a leaf is fighting the tree. It is foolish! Don’t try to move upstream; that will simply exhaust you. You will be tired and you will feel frustrated because you cannot succeed.
When you are against existence, there is no success. That’s why you and everyone else are such failures. Ask successful people; they are all failures. Deep down, they have missed. Ask your Napoleons, Hitlers, Rothschilds – they have all failed; they are failures. What have they attained? They fought, tried to move upstream, wanted to become extraordinary in some way or other and simply destroyed themselves. To try to become extraordinary is suicidal; it is a gradual suicide, a slow poisoning of the whole system. Surrender to existence, flow with it, wherever it goes – willy-nilly, wherever it goes.
This word willy-nilly is good. Willy means whether it goes according to your will or not; nilly means whether it negates you or not. Willy means will, and nilly means against the will. Willy-nilly, wherever it goes, you surrender, you float with it. Swimming, even swimming, is not needed.
Why have a private goal of your own? Why not move with the destiny of the whole? Why are you so worried about achieving something on your own? How can you achieve it? ? you cannot; this is simply not possible. Only the whole has a destiny, not you. Only the whole is going somewhere, not you. If you can surrender to the whole, everything is achieved because you become the whole and the whole’s destiny becomes your destiny. The goal of the whole is your goal. The goal is not somewhere else; the whole is happy right now, the whole is blissful right now. Only you are worried. Only you are worried because you are not flowing with the river. You are trying to cut small corners. Who are you and how do you think it can be possible? You will simply fail.
Man always fails, only God succeeds.
Listen: We should let ourselves be guided by what is common to all. Look to the commonness of things and find the common. The more common, the truer; the more exceptional, the more false. Be ordinary and you are nearer the ground, you are nearer the truth. If you can be absolutely ordinary, what else is needed? Every moment becomes such a benediction. What is the problem when you are absolutely ordinary? You eat and eating is a sacrament. You sleep and sleeping is a sacrament. You walk in the sun, what more do you need? You breathe; what else is needed to be happy? You love; what more are you asking? Everything is already given; you are just trying to be exceptional. Follow the rule, the common and don’t try to be the exception, otherwise you will be in misery.
Hell is for all the extraordinary people. They may be in politics, in art, literature. Hell is for all geniuses wherever they are; for all extraordinary people, all egoists. Ego is hell, it gives you suffering because you start unnecessarily conflicting with everything. You are never at ease and unease becomes your lifestyle; with the ego you will always feel unease. Ego is a discomfort; it is the nail in the shoe that continuously pinches, but you want to be extraordinary.
Then…
I was sitting with Mulla Nasruddin and his wife passed by and went out of the door. He said, “Look! There goes a great woman.”
I said, “What do you mean by ‘great’?”
He replied, “She is trying to wear a size four shoe on her size six feet. There goes an extraordinary woman!”
She is suffering, but trying to be exceptional.
In the past in China millions of women used iron shoes to make their feet small, so they would look extraordinary. These women suffered a long time, their whole life and became almost crippled. In China long feet belonged to laborers, the poor, not the rich. It seems life belongs to the poor, not to rich people. So the higher the status of the woman, the queen being the highest, for thousands of years the queens of China were not even able to walk because they had such small feet. It was impossible because feet are always in the right proportion to the body. You cannot have small feet because nature knows better than you. But they were trying to improve upon nature. They suffered a long time. The whole misery of man can be reduced to a single law: if you try to be exceptional you will suffer. Nothing will satisfy you; you will find discontent everywhere.
Mulla Nasruddin was ill and admitted to hospital. There he created a hell all around himself because you cannot find a greater complaint-maker than Mulla Nasruddin; he is simply a continuous complaint. The whole hospital was troubled – the nurses, the doctors. Just to get rid of him, they treated him as carefully as possible so he would quickly be okay and leave. He recovered and the day came for him to be discharged, but again he complained. The doctor heard his noise and asked the nurse, “Now, what is he complaining about? There is nothing to complain about. He’s leaving today.”
The nurse said, “Now he is saying, ‘How can I be cured before the medicines are finished? There must be something wrong.’”
This type of mind comes automatically to an egoist. He is always searching, finding something wrong. When you search, you will find and you will find more than you ask. This is the trouble in the world; whatever you try to find you will find. If you are trying to find something wrong – and the ego always tries to find the wrong because an ego needs continuous discomfort, it exists in discomfort. When everything is okay the ego disappears. Chuang Tzu says, “When the shoe fits, the body is forgotten, the feet are forgotten.” When everything is forgotten, how can you cling to the ego? The ego needs your shoe to continue pinching you so that you can remember who you are. That’s why an egoist cannot love, cannot meditate or pray because if he really prays, everything fits and the ego disappears. The ego means self-consciousness. When something is wrong, only then is there self-consciousness. When everything is right, there is no self-consciousness.
Look to the common, watch out for the common and don’t try to be exceptional. But we want to be exceptional. People come to me and if I say to them, “Sit silently and don’t be bothered so much about meditation and prayer; by and by it will grow.” They reply, “But, by just sitting?” They need something exceptional. If I say to them, “Stand on your head,” it’s okay.
That’s why all over the world, teachers who instruct people to stand on their heads are flourishing; something difficult, uncomfortable, appeals. People try ridiculous postures in the name of Yoga. Simply ridiculous! The more ridiculous, the better; the more difficult, so that you cannot do them, then the ego gets a challenge. So do them! Make absurd postures and think that you are doing something great. Life is simply great. There is no need to improve upon it. If nature wanted you to sit or stand on your head, you would have been created that way. Listen to nature, follow it and don’t create any conflict with it; just follow it and soon you will attain a deep silence which comes when one becomes ordinary.
Just a few days ago – in India it is a constant problem – a young man came and asked, “Should I get married or not?”
I replied, “Just be ordinary. Why not get married?”
He wasn’t willing because not marrying is something exceptional. Marrying is ordinary, becoming a householder and having children is so ordinary. He said, “But all great men have remained unmarried.”
I said to him, “If you want to be great, go somewhere else. To me that is a disease. If you want to be ordinary, only then come to me. Do whatever your nature and whatever your inner feeling wants.” Then I said to him, “Just look inside. Close your eyes and tell me what you would like.”
He replied, “Of course I would like to marry, but that looks so ordinary; wasting your life in ordinary things.”
But the whole of life consists of ordinary things. Greatness is not in things, greatness is in the quality that you bring to your life, to ordinary things.
Just look at Jesus having supper with his friends. He looks more ordinary than a Buddha sitting under the bodhi tree. But the gesture of being ordinary is so beautiful; drinking, eating with friends is so beautiful that nobody can be so beautiful just sitting under a bodhi tree. Jesus has a quality of being just ordinary.
Buddha remained a king even under the bodhi tree. He was born exceptional, extraordinary; he lived and was brought up as a prince. That became his structure. Even under the bodhi tree he is not a beggar. If you go near him you can feel it. You can miss a Jesus if you meet him on the road; you cannot miss Buddha. But I say to you, “Jesus is nearer the logos.”
It happened that way to Buddha because that was the way he was brought up; his past was just that way. But how many people can be born as princes and how many people can be taught that way? Jesus is more human. In all his humanity he is divine because this ordinariness is to follow the common.
Jainas and Buddhists come to me and say, “This Jesus drinks and eats like ordinary people; he stays with ordinary people. How can you say that he is of the same stature as Buddha and Mahavira?” I can tell you that he is exactly how one should be. Mahavira and Buddha may be exceptional, but not everybody can be exceptional and there is no need to be. It may have been natural for them, so it’s okay if they followed their nature. But millions and millions of people cannot sit under bodhi trees doing nothing. They will have to move, to work and do ordinary things in the world.
If there is no way to reach the logos ordinarily, it will remain only for a chosen few. That doesn’t look just; the whole existence seeming to favor only a few. Remember, if existence favors only a few, if it is partial, what’s the need to give you birth? No, nature never favors anyone; it is for all, for all those who are ready to partake. If you are ready to participate, then bliss is for all. Jesus is a carpenter’s son, a poor man. For millions of people that’s how it should be. Someone is a carpenter’s son, someone is a goldsmith’s son and someone is a shoemaker’s son. This is how life is! We have lived according to the exceptional people too much and because of that so much misery has been unnecessarily created.
Live ordinarily, find the common and don’t try to be uncommon; otherwise, with the very effort you will cut your roots from the logos. The logos is common to all, yet most men live as if each of them had a private intelligence of his own. If you live according to the common, if you follow the common and don’t try to become an individual, you will be nearer the logos and you will be able to understand it.
This is the paradox: those who try to be exceptional individuals miss; they miss all individuality and extraordinariness. Those who remain with the ordinary ? with such an ordinariness that there is nothing to claim about it and who never strive to be individuals ? attain the greatest individuality this existence can offer you. Those who remain ordinary become most extraordinary and that extraordinariness comes as a gift. It is nothing on your part, you have not been striving for it. Human nature has no real understanding; only the divine nature has it. Yes, it is as it should be.
We come from the whole, we go back to the whole. Unknown we come, unknown we go ? not knowing from where we are coming, not knowing to what we are going. The whole process is mysterious. How can you have a private intelligence? This is a little difficult and has to be understood very deeply. It is one of the most important points that Heraclitus has given. Consciousness is also common. Just as fish exist in the ocean, the common ocean, we exist in a common consciousness. Your consciousness and my consciousness are not two; just two centers of the same. All around you is consciousness. We are all forms, but within the forms flows the same, the one. That’s why sometimes you also feel a common ground.
Someone is sad; he hasn’t said a single thing to you. You are sitting next to him and suddenly you feel sadness spreading through you. Someone is happy, just happy, not saying anything to you and suddenly you feel happiness entering you. If twenty people are sitting happily together and you put a sad man amongst them, within minutes he will feel a change; his climate will change. Amongst sad people you become sad; amongst long faces you become a long face. Amongst happy people you become happy. That’s why if you enjoy playing with children you become a child again. You may be playing with a child and suddenly you forget all your worries and the world; you become like a child. It is very refreshing. How does it happen? ? it happens because consciousness is a common phenomenon. When you play with a child you have to become a child because you meet the child on common ground.
In the East, because of this, they have insisted that just being near the master, just being near an awakened one and being in the presence, is very, very valuable. In the West they cannot understand this: “What do you mean, ‘in the presence’?” In the East they say: “We are going for darshan.” Darshan means just to see the master; nothing to ask, just being in the presence. They have a certain word for this being in the presence, satsang: being near the truth. If you sit silently with a master, sooner or later you dissolve into each other. The consciousnesses meet. The master enters you, you enter the master. Just simply being near the master, not doing anything, not even making any effort ? one day you can attain. That too is possible, but you have to be very, very open. You can attain, just sitting silently, relaxing, not doing and not creating any barriers. Many have attained because consciousness is the ocean and we are the fish in it. Everything affects everyone else.
Whatever happens in this existence affects everyone else. Not only now; whatever has happened in the past is affecting us also. Not only that; whatever is going to happen in the future is also affecting us because the whole of existence culminates at this moment. Past, future, present, all culminate, converge.
There is no possibility of a private intelligence. Those people we call very, very talented, geniuses, they also feel it. Ask Einstein or Madame Curie, they also feel it. Einstein says that whatever he discovered, he discovered in moments when he was not, when something suddenly possessed him – the total consciousness. Ask the poets; they say that whenever something happens, they are not. They become a vehicle; the common consciousness possesses them.
Madame Curie received the Nobel Prize. It should have been given to the common ground. She was making so much effort to find a solution to a particular mathematical problem and she couldn’t find the way. She struggled and struggled for two years and one night, tired, she fell asleep. Something happened in her sleep; in sleep you are more open, you are not an egoist, you are a nobody and you don’t cling to the identity. That’s why in the morning you feel fresh again, younger, rejuvenated because you have been into the common ground. You moved into consciousness, the ocean. You were not clinging to the private intelligence. For a few seconds you dropped into the whole and the whole revived you, refreshed you.
During the night something happened to Madame Curie; she got up, went to her table and wrote down the solution to what she had been working on for years. She slept again and in the morning she had completely forgotten what had happened in the night. She took a bath, ate her breakfast, did everything and went to the table. She was simply amazed. The solution was there! But who had done it? There was no one else there. Only she was in the room. The servant had come in and couldn’t have done it. She had been working hard. “What’s happening?” She looked again in more detail. It was her own handwriting! A little different because in the night, in sleep… She closed her eyes and tried to remember what had happened. She saw the whole thing like a dream; she had something, so she got up and wrote it down.
You unnecessarily claim that common consciousness is yours. It has never been yours. It is always floating. It is all around you. Become more porous, become more allowing, a deep let-go because only the whole can understand the whole. How can the part understand the whole? How can an atomic part understand the whole? The whole can flow through the part and if the part allows it… That’s what meditation is all about, allowing the whole to flow and you disappear completely from the scene ? suddenly you have become the whole.
Human nature has no real understanding;
only the divine nature has it.
Man is not rational;
only what encompasses him is intelligent.
Not you, but the ocean around you, what encompasses. Not you, but what surrounds you, what is within and without you. Not you because “you” is just a fallacy.
Man is not rational;
only what encompasses him is intelligent.
What is divine escapes men’s notice
because of their incredulity.
You doubt, you cannot believe, cannot trust and that’s why what is divine escapes men’s notice because of their incredulity. There is only one barrier and that is doubt. There is only one gate and that is trust. If you trust nature, everything falls into its right place. If you distrust nature, everything is disturbed.
Why is it so difficult to be natural? ? there is only one difficulty. If you are natural you cannot be somebody. There is no other difficulty. Sex arises, you follow it; then brahmacharya, celibacy, becomes a fight against nature. You are hungry, you eat; fasting becomes a conflict with nature. When you don’t feel hungry, you force yourself to eat; that is also fighting with nature. You go against nature when you don’t feel like making love and you carry on doing it because the wife needs, because society says, this and that. Nature means just following the inner being, whatever it feels, without any imposition from your ego. It will destroy and shatter your ego.
Live like an animal with only one difference; be alert. That’s all. Live like an animal with only one difference; be aware. Don’t fight with nature; just be a witness and allow it. Wherever it leads, is good. All your goals projected from the mind are false. Whatever you do, you won’t succeed. Finally, nature succeeds because only the whole can succeed. So why move unnecessarily into a fight in the beginning? I see people fighting in millions of ways; they change extremes, but they fight.
In the past, in the East and also in the West, people were fighting against sex. They said that there is something wrong in sex because in sex you become natural like an animal and all the preachers have been saying that you should not be like an animal. What is wrong in being animal? Look at the birds, look at the animals; go to the forest and see them! Don’t go to the zoo because there you will not see real animals; they are corrupted by human beings. Go to the wild.
What is wrong with animals? They look so beautiful, nothing is ugly around them. All the moralists, all the so-called religious people, have been teaching you: “Don’t be an animal!” And your ego feels that this is a good goal. How can you be an animal? Sex brings total animality to you. In sex you feel so absolutely animal. You don’t feel like that in anything else because everything else you have changed, polished. You have painted, cultured, cultivated everything – everything! You eat, but you have made such a ritual out of eating and everything around it, that it doesn’t seem to be at all related with hunger. What you eat is not nutritious; it is a show, a facade. Everything is false, plastic flowers all around. But when you move in love, when you make love to a woman or to a man, you become absolutely animal.
You have tried to hide that too. That’s why man makes love at night. Only man makes love at night; otherwise, animals make love in the day. If you make love in the day, it will be deeper because when the sun is in the atmosphere you are more vital. The night is for rest, but man makes love at night because animals make love in the day and he has to make a distinction. What type of egoist effort is this? In the dark, not even with the light on because in the dark you don’t have to face the reality that you are behaving like animals. You don’t make any sound while making love. In fact, you make love as if something has to be done and finished as soon as possible; within seconds it is finished. You have been taught to be against it. Your ego feels good.
Now, in the West, the wheel has turned a complete circle. Since Freud and Wilhelm Reich, sex has been taught more and more. Now, a new thing is happening in the West; if you don’t make love one day, you feel guilty. It seems you have to feel guilty whatever you do. Before you were making love and feeling guilty. “Why do you make love? Why this animality? When will you transcend this? When will the day come when you will not need it?” Now in the West, if one day you don’t feel like making love because you feel tired, you feel guilty and feel that you are doing something wrong; you feel you have to do it. You have to do something, you cannot allow nature to make its own course. They are both the same to me, there is no difference.
In the past, women were not allowed to have an orgasm because how can a woman, so pure, have an orgasm? A woman is a goddess; she should behave like one. So in the past women were simply tolerating sex, just lying like dead bodies, corpses. Even if you make love to a corpse, the corpse will move a little, but not women – goddesses! They are so pure and innocent in nature, they don’t know what is happening; it is just the man who is dragging them into it. So they would lie down with closed eyes because even if a woman leaves her eyes open, that seems like she is curious, interested. Now, in the West, they have created the opposite. If a woman cannot achieve orgasm it is a problem, something is wrong. Now it is a sin not to achieve orgasm. Before, it was a sin to achieve orgasm.
In the past, in the East and in the West, women completely forgot that they could achieve orgasm. They completely forgot that a beautiful ecstasy is possible through sex; if you don’t move and if nature is allowed and movement is allowed while making love, lovers will go completely wild. They will scream, make noises, go mad; that is so animal-like. They will be so ecstatic. If you can be ecstatic in love, soon that ecstasy will open a door for a higher ecstasy. You transcend and the real brahmacharya happens. That is not anything you can force on yourself; that happens through nature itself.
If one follows nature, one reaches.
There is no need for you to make any arrangements for the ultimate goal to happen; nature has already made everything. You are a seed and if you allow nature, the whole blueprint exists in you. It is just like a seed: we sow the seed in the ground and it has the whole blueprint, the whole architecture of the tree. Every leaf that will be produced in the future, every flower that will bloom in the future. The seed has every blueprint in it – only nature has to be allowed.
You have to water it, take care of it; you have to give it good soil and fertilizers – finished! You need not do anything. You need not teach the seed to behave, do this or that or never say to it, “Never do this, otherwise you will never be a tree.” If you teach seeds, trees will not exist in the world because the seeds will go completely mad not knowing what to do. Seeds depend on the universal consciousness, not on a private intelligence.
Man has the blueprint to be a god, just to be a god, nothing less. Man is the seed of God because human consciousness is just the beginning. It has to grow and grow and come to a point where it becomes universal. Nothing is needed on your part. In fact, no discipline, creed, dogma, religion. Nature is enough. You simply have to allow it. You have to be receptive to it and move in trust because you can move only in trust.
If the seed asks, “What is the guarantee that if I leave my shell, which covers me and protects me, that I will grow into a tree? What is the guarantee? And if there is no guarantee I will cling to my shell.” Then what will happen? If the bird in the egg says, “How can I get out? Who is there to give me a guarantee that it will be a better world than I am already in?” What will happen? The shell is a security, it protects. The bird is beautifully protected in the egg, but this is not life. It is like death; of course completely protected, but protected in a grave. Who can give you the guarantee? ? there is no one to give you a guarantee; you have to trust.
The seed trusts and dissolves in the earth. It sprouts into a beautiful tree, flowers, enjoys existence and becomes ecstatic. The bird comes out of the egg, leaves the known for the unknown, takes wing and moves into the vast sky. Nobody knows what is going to happen. With no goal in view, with no purpose or plan, it just takes wing, feels ecstatic on the winds, moves, goes to the farthest corner of the sky and moves into the unknown.
That is how it is also going to happen to you. You are a seed, you are an egg; you are a possibility. Heraclitus hits it exactly right and comes to the exact point where you miss. What is divine escapes men’s notice because of their incredulity. Because you doubt, you miss. Trust and you can reach. Nothing else is needed; just trust, so that nature can unfold.
Although intimately connected with the Logos,
men keep setting themselves against it.
How can anyone hide from that which never sets?
Existence is always, always and always. It never sets. How can you hide from it? It lasts forever and ever. How can you fight it? What you are doing is simply ridiculous, absurd. It is stupid to fight. The only wisdom consists in a let-go, surrender. All that is beautiful starts happening. It is a happening, it is not a doing.
You can create barriers, but you cannot bring it. You can escape from it, you can close your eyes to it, but you cannot create it. It is already there, it is already the case. Only you are missing it because you are sitting with closed eyes ? the doubt closing your eyes, closing your heart – as if you are asleep, intoxicated in doubt.
Karl Marx has said, “Religion is the opium for the masses.” Exactly the opposite is the case. Doubt is the opium, not religion. Through doubt you miss the truth. Through trust you allow it to reach you and you allow yourself to reach it.
Meditate more and more on trust. Imbibe the feeling of trust. Vibrate with a trusting heart. Sing, dance, pray with a trusting heart and soon you will see that only trust pays finally. Doubt can kill. It is negative, it cannot give you life.
Doubt is death. Trust is life.
As the trust grows more and more, the more abundant life becomes available to you.
Enough for today.
yet men are unable to understand it –
not only before hearing it,
but even after they have heard it.
We should let ourselves be guided
by what is common to all.
Yet, although the Logos is common to all,
most men live as if each of them
had a private intelligence of his own.
Human nature has no real understanding;
only the divine nature has it.
Man is not rational;
only what encompasses him is intelligent.
What is divine escapes men’s notice
because of their incredulity.
Although intimately connected with the Logos,
men keep setting themselves against it.
How can anyone hide from that which never sets?
The logos is the logic of the whole, the logic of existence itself; the logos is the ultimate law. It is the same as Lao Tzu calls the Tao, the Upanishads and Vedas have called the rit: the cosmic harmony where opposites meet and disappear, where two become one, where no polarity exists; where all paradoxes are dissolved, all contradictions disappear. What Shankara calls the brahman, Heraclitus calls the logos.
The human mind is logical and human logic is based on the polarity. It’s as if you are standing on a bank of a river and cannot see the bank on the other side. Whatever you think about the bank belongs only to the bank you are on, but the river flows with a bank on either side, it cannot flow with just one. The other may be hiding in mist, it may be so far away that you cannot see it, but the other is there. The other bank is not opposite to the bank you are on because deep down in the river they meet. They are one land and they both support the river like two hands or like two wings. The river flows between them and is a harmony of the two. You are standing on only one of the banks and cannot see the other, so you simply believe in the bank you are on. And you create a system which is based on the knowledge of it. When someone talks about the other bank you think he is contradicting you, you think that he is bringing something irrational, mysterious. The other is bound to be opposite because only the tension of the opposites can hold the river. But the oppositeness is not enmity, the oppositeness is a deep friendship; it is the peak of love.
This is the problem to be solved. If you can solve this you can understand Heraclitus and understand all those who have become awakened, who have known the other shore. Whatever they say will be contradictory because they have to comprehend both. They have to comprehend both winter and summer, day and night, life and death, love and hate, the peak and the valley.
When someone talks about the peak, not referring to the valley at all, his statements will be very rational; you can understand them, they are easy, consistent. When someone talks about the valley, never referring to the peak, he will also be rational. All philosophers are rational; you can understand them very easily. To understand them you need a little learning and training, that’s all, a discipline. But all the mystics are difficult to comprehend. In fact, the more you try to understand them, the more they become mysterious because they talk about the peak and the valley together. They would like to talk about the valley and the peak simultaneously.
It is said in the Upanishads, “He is far and near.” What type of statement is this? Either he is far or he is near. The seer immediately says, “He is far” and adds, “He is near.” He is the greatest and he is the smallest. He is the atom and he is the whole. He is within you and without. Heraclitus says, “God is summer and winter.” Summer? It’s okay; you can understand. God is only winter? That too is okay, you can understand. But both summer and winter? You feel dizzy and the mind says, “This statement is contradictory.”
Human logic seeks a noncontradictory statement – the logos is contradictory. It uses contradiction just as an architect uses bricks in opposition to make an arch. The opposition gives the tension and the strength, and on that arch you can erect a big building. But if you do not put bricks in opposition to each other – logical, consistent, just like a peak or a valley, this bank or that, not both – the building will fall; the arch cannot be made. It needs the tension of the opposites to create strength. Hence there is man and woman. They are the opposite bricks of life. Their very opposition creates the situation where life can exist. They are the two banks between which the river can flow. But the moment you talk about the peak and the valley together, it becomes incomprehensible. Human logic is consistent. The divine logos is contradictory, yet consistent.
Human logic is partial. It tries to understand a part and in trying to understand a part it avoids all that contradicts it. It simply wants to forget all that is contradictory. But the divine is all. It doesn’t choose, everything is involved. It is vast; it is not partial, it is total. That’s the difference between a religious and a philosophical approach. A philosophical approach is logical; that’s why Aristotle says, “Man is a rational being.” And Heraclitus says, “Man is irrational” – because your very reason makes you irrational. The moment you choose the part you have falsified the whole thing. Now this part is only in your mind. In existence this part is always with the opposite, never alone.
Human logic says that God is male. There are some believers in God who think that God is female, but the logos must comprehend both. So Hindus have a concept of ardhanarishwar: God is both male and female. That is the true concept from the logos. It looks contradictory. You must have seen statues of Shiva as half man and half woman, half feminine with one breast and half male. That statue looks absurd, but that is the truth. All your statues of God as male or female are irrational. They are not true because how can God be only male; where does the feminine arise from? To whom will the feminine reach? In what source does the feminine exist?
You talk about God as a he; that is wrong. There are people who talk about God as a she; that too is wrong. He is he plus she, but the mind cannot understand this and mental understanding is not an understanding at all. You will be able to understand only when you try to understand from your own totality, not just from the mind because inside you these two opposite poles meet. You are also an ardhanarishwar; you are both he and she. You are neither male nor female. If you understand your own totality and if you bring it to the universe, to face the universe, you will be able to comprehend. That’s a mystic vision. That is the logos.
So what to do? Ordinarily you are trained to be a man or to be a woman. From the very beginning we say to children, “You are a boy, so behave like one.” To a girl, “You are a girl, so behave like one.” That creates the distinction more and more and the poles are set apart. In a better world we will say to each child, “You are both.” The difference is only of emphasis. “You are neither boy nor girl. You are both.” The difference is only of emphasis. The whole concept of civilization will be different; there will be no question of enmity between man and woman. There will be no problem about who dominates whom. You will be able to see the totality of your being; the totality is beautiful. The part is always ugly.
It’s as if you have taken the tree and cut its roots. How long can the tree remain alive? You have taken the tree – the visible; you have cut the roots – the invisible. The tree goes upward and the roots go downward. You have made a consistent thing. You say, “No! How can these two opposite dimensions exist simultaneously? The tree must go upward and if the roots go downward they are two separate things. Cut them!” This is what has happened.
Man is a visible tree, woman is like the roots. That’s why all the old teachings say that woman is earth and man is sky. They are together; man is rooted in the woman and the woman is reaching higher and higher through the man. They are one. Hell and heaven are not two, just the same ladder.
Heraclitus says, “The way up and the way down are the same.” Hell and heaven cannot be apart. This is the logos: to see the whole ladder. God and the Devil are not two. Theologians will not agree because they will say that you are creating confusion and people will be confused; they will not know who is who. But people are confused and they are confused because of the false logic of the partial human mind. In fact, everything is everything.
It happened…
Mulla Nasruddin was awarding prizes at a local dog show, but he was very worried about something. He was worried about the way people were dressed. He exclaimed, “Look what’s happening in this world! Look at that person with two puppies. He has cropped hair, is wearing pants and smoking cigarettes. Now I’m at a loss as to whether that is a man or a woman, a boy or a girl.”
A bystander replied, “I know she’s a girl because she’s my daughter.”
Mulla Nasruddin said, “I am very, very sorry. Had I known that you were her mother, I would not have been so outspoken.”
The woman replied, “I’m not her mother, I’m her father.”
A meeting of the sexes is now happening. It’s happening in the way people dress, the way they live. That is a very good sign. People are becoming unisex in the way they dress; that’s a very good sign! There is no need to make these distinctions. The reality is a nondistinct whole.
Distinctions are being made by the mind and it has created trouble because you are both. If you are fixed on the idea that you are a male, what will you do with the woman inside? She is there. Sometimes she wants to weep and cry, but you cannot weep and cry. You are a man and you have to behave like a man. You don’t listen to nature; you listen to manmade theories that you are a man. Nature has created tear glands in the eyes and if nature intended that a man should never weep and cry, why create them? If nature intended that a man should not feel, why give him a heart?
A man feels as much as a woman. He suppresses his femininity and goes on suppressing it; that creates an inner conflict. Rather than using the opposite polarities to flow – rather than using the two opposite polarities as a tension, which creates aliveness – you suppress the polarity, which deadens and kills your sensitivity. If a man is not also a woman, one half is crippled, one half of his being is suppressed. And that suppressed being will take revenge. Sooner or later he will go mad because the suppressed part will throw off the dominating part.
Politics is not only outside; politicians have created politics within you. They have created a rift, they have made you fight yourself. And a woman is continuously suppressing the male part. It erupts. It comes up again and again because it is there. Rather than creating a harmony with these two opposite notes, you have been warring, you have been fighting, struggling. The situation would have been beautiful if you could have created a harmony; then a higher quality of being would have arisen within you. Remember, all growth is dialectical.
This word dialectical has to be understood; it is against rational. Reason is a linear process, from one step to another, but the plane remains the same; from A to B, but the plane remains the same. That’s why reason is very, very boring. It has no qualities of the opposite; that’s why it becomes boring.
Just watch: twenty men are sitting together and suddenly a woman enters. Immediately the atmosphere changes. Those twenty men were feeling a little bored; all those men together are bound to feel bored – unless they are homosexuals. If they are healthy they are bound to feel bored. A woman enters and immediately the atmosphere changes. You can see it on their faces; they start smiling, become more polite and don’t use ugly words. They behave themselves. A woman enters and everything changes. A subtle phenomenon happens inside: the entry of the woman becomes an even deeper entry inside of them, of their inner woman. They become whole. For a moment they are no longer parts. Look at twenty women sitting, chattering together, a man enters and immediately a change happens.
If there is only one, the same quality continues; it becomes a boring process. Dialectics means movement through the opposite. Dialectics is: thesis, antithesis, synthesis; one thing against another, a challenge, a tension. Through that tension and challenge a third reality arises, synthesis. The synthesis is always better; it goes on a higher plane.
Reason moves horizontally, dialectics moves vertically.
If you have no enemy and your life is such that you are not opposed to anything, you will lose all salt from your life. If you are not opposed to anything, you will be tasteless, you will be like a dead stone; not like a flower because movement, energy, challenge, comes from the opposite and you grow. When a man meets a woman a dialectical process starts. That’s why love is so very beautiful and a great growth situation. To be related to the other is to be constantly in a challenging situation. To be only related to oneself is boredom – no opposite.
One can move alone if you can find the opposite in your own inner being. That is the meaning of when a man becomes total within and doesn’t need a woman. When a woman becomes total within she doesn’t need a man. A moment comes when a Buddha moves alone, a Mahavira moves alone. There is no need of the other. Not that the woman is bad, but now they have found their inner feminine part, now the dialectics has entered their own being and there is no need to create it outside. Now, inside, there is a continuous thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Now they grow alone, but they also use the same dialectics.
The whole of life is dialectical. The logos is dialectical and reason is a process of the same. You can think of it in these terms. Dialectics is heterosexual; reason, rationality, is homosexual. Rationality is homosexual. That’s why homosexuality is growing in the West because the West has accepted Aristotle, reason. Heraclitus is heterosexual. He will include the opposite. If you listen to reason you will be homosexual. If you listen to reason, the whole quality that comes from the opposite, the tension, will be lost. When it is lost, life becomes boredom. When it is lost, life loses the zest, the enthusiasm, hope, possibilities. Everything is lost because every possibility is opened by the opposite.
When you fall in love for the first time, you meet the opposite. It is as if you have immediately got wings and can fly; poetry arises in your heart. What is happening? ? the opposite has created something in you. Silence alone is not very beautiful; sound alone is not very beautiful, but the meeting of sound and silence is very, very beautiful – that is music.
The meeting of silence and sound is music.
Watch what is happening when someone is playing an instrument, a sitar or a piano. What is he doing? ? he is doing a dialectical process. He creates sound and between two sounds he gives a valley, a silence. The greater the peak, the deeper the valley will be. He creates sound, he creates a peak; he moves higher and higher and higher and brings a climax and suddenly ? the gap, the silence.
You don’t have a musical ear if you listen only to sound and miss the silence between two sounds. When you listen to the sound and the silence, the peak and the valley together, you encounter a new phenomenon. Every peak creates the valley, every valley creates the peak. They move like yin and yang, they move in a circle. Then there is music, there is the hidden harmony.
The logos is dialectical, it is heterosexual. God creates the world because the other is needed. He alone cannot be, the world alone cannot be. If you listen only to the world you will not come to know the inner music of existence; being fed up with the world, you can leave it and only listen to God, but again you miss the harmony. When you listen to the world and God together; when the world becomes the opposite pole; when the world becomes one bank and God the other bank and the river flows – it flows tremendously, it flows beautifully and you hear the harmony. One who hears the harmony between this world and God is a sannyasin.
One who leaves this world and moves to the other extreme is logical, rational, but not dialectical. Go and watch people in shops, in markets; they are dull because they are only of this world. Somehow they are working, pulling and dragging because they are there. So what to do? They are doing something. But you cannot hear the music in them. The opposite: the prayer, the meditation, the silence is not there. That’s why the marketplace has become simply sound; it is a chaos.
Go to the Himalayas, go to the monasteries; the same shopkeepers who have left the world are sitting there. They, too, have no life; they are dull, dirt collecting on them, dead. You will find dead people in the shops, in the temples and monasteries. They are the same people, they have just moved to the other extreme. Harmony is missing in the market and in the monastery.
A man who is harmonious is complex, his simplicity is very, very complex because in his simplicity, the opposite is involved. He has deep compassion, but he can also be angry. He is absolutely detached, but he can also love; he loves and remains detached. In him, the valley and the peak meet. In him, sound and silence meet. If you have a musical ear and a heart, you will see the harmony in such a person. Such a person is rare because he himself has become a logos. Krishna, Lao Tzu, Buddha, Heraclitus, Jesus all live in the logos; they are miniature logoi. The working of their beings is the same as existence; existence mirrors the same in their beings. They don’t reject anything, they use everything.
A man who rejects anything does not know what he is doing. If a man rejects sound he will reject silence too because they exist together. Have you ever known silence without sound? Silence has its own sound. When the night is completely silent, with no traffic, no one moving around, everyone asleep; just watch and listen and you will find that the night has its own sound – very subtle, but its own sound. When one goes deeper inside, to the inner night, where all the sounds of the day have stopped, a sound is heard there too. Hindus have called it aumkar, the sound of the ultimate, om. It is heard. It is there. When the ultimate silence descends on you, the ultimate sound also descends on you – immediately! They are together, they cannot be apart. Silence and sound are two aspects of the same coin. Yes, God is silence and sound. This is the logos.
Now try to follow this sutra. This is very, very meaningful.
Although this Logos is eternally valid,
yet men are unable to understand it –
not only before hearing it,
but even after they have heard it.
This is not a question of hearing or not hearing. It is a question of inner growth. I can talk to you about the logos, I can try to explain it to you; you may even have an intellectual glimpse of it, but that will not give you understanding. It is just like talking to a small child about sex. You can talk, you can bring in all your Freuds and Wilhelm Reichs and the child may even listen, but can a child understand it? If the child is very intelligent he will understand intellectually, but to understand sex a biological growth is needed, a certain maturity of the glands and hormones is needed. To understand sex the child must come to the point where he desires it; only then can he understand, otherwise not.
I was walking down a street and two small children were walking in front of me. One must have been seven and the other about eight. The smaller one was telling the elder, “I walk to school with a girl. I have carried her bag and books seven times and brought her ice cream three times. Do you think I should kiss her now or not?”
The other pondered over it and said, “As I see it, you have already done enough for her. No need to do anything more.”
For a child, this is exactly the thing! You cannot talk about sex to a child. First the sexual desire needs to arise; the child should become sexual first. That is also the problem with religion. You cannot talk to anybody unless the desire arises.
Religion is just like sex. Sex is the desire to meet the opposite on the level of the body, religion is the desire to meet the opposite on the level of being. It is a desire. It is a thirst. Only when it arises can it be talked about. You may bring intellectual questions; that doesn’t mean anything. You may ask whether God exists or not; that is not the point. Are you thirsty? Has the desire arisen to meet the opposite on the level of being; not on the level of body nor of mind, but at the level of being, your totality? Are you ready for that jump? Then understanding is possible.
That’s why Heraclitus says: Although this Logos is eternally valid… The logos is present everywhere: in the trees, the stones, the sky, everywhere. The logos is present in you and all around you because the whole of life is working through the opposite. It is dialectical, it gets enrichment through the opposite. It moves through the antithesis and moves higher to the synthesis, then again the synthesis becomes the thesis. Again the antithesis is created and again a higher synthesis. Life goes on moving that way. It is that way everywhere. It is valid because it is not an argument; it is the way existence is.
Remember, Heraclitus is not arguing, he is simply making a statement. I’m also not arguing, I’m simply making a statement of fact. It is how things are. That’s why he says, “I have searched…” And he has found this dialectic, a dialectical process of existence. This is the deepest insight. It is valid. No question of arguing about it. It is the way existence exists. …yet men are unable to understand it – not only before hearing it, but even after they have heard it. Hearing won’t help. Unless you change, unless you become open to the inside, unless you not only try to follow intellectually, understand intellectually, but feel it, exist through it, to imbibe it like food and digest it so that it flows in your bones, it becomes part of your existence ? only then. These are not theories; you need an inner growth before you can understand it.
We should let ourselves be guided
by what is common to all.
If you cannot understand before hearing it and you cannot understand after hearing it, what is to be done? Heraclitus makes a very beautiful suggestion. It can become really helpful to you. He says:
We should let ourselves be guided
by what is common to all.
Yet, although the Logos is common to all,
most men live as if each of them
had a private intelligence of his own.
The logos is common to all; it is the common ground, the common continent. You follow your own intelligence and think of yourselves as islands, separate from everybody. Private intelligence is foolishness; that is the only foolishness possible, the greatest stupidity. Existence is total; intelligence too. It is of the whole, so you should look to the common.
That is what Zen masters say. They say, “Become ordinary, become common. Don’t try to become extraordinary.” The more common you become, the more ordinary; the more capable of understanding the logos. Don’t try to be very extraordinary, exceptional because the more you try the more you will become like an island, closed, caved-in upon yourself. You are losing your moorings in existence. You are cutting your roots, becoming uprooted. That has happened in the West ? a feeling of uprootedness. Nobody knows where his roots are. When you feel uprooted, you become an egoist and exist as a self-sufficient entity. And that is not possible!
Existence is interrelated, we move into each other. When I am talking to you, what am I doing? ? I am continuously moving in you. When you are listening to me, you are allowing and giving me a door. You breathe and existence enters you; you open your eyes and the sun enters you. Every moment, in twenty-four hours, you are a crossroad. Millions of points, millions of lines meet in you. You are not separate. Just think, can you exist separately? Can you exist totally insulated? You will die within seconds. You are a porous being; existence comes and moves through you. You are just like a room; air flows in, the sun comes and goes continuously and that’s why the room remains clean and fresh. If you are closed you will be dead. The more open you are, the more existence will flow through you; the more existence flows, the more you will be able to understand the logos.
You are not; the whole is. You are a false entity. Hence, the insistence on surrender from all the awakened ones. Don’t fight with existence because you don’t know what you are doing, with whom you are fighting. How can you fight with existence? It’s as if a wave is fighting with the ocean, a leaf is fighting the tree. It is foolish! Don’t try to move upstream; that will simply exhaust you. You will be tired and you will feel frustrated because you cannot succeed.
When you are against existence, there is no success. That’s why you and everyone else are such failures. Ask successful people; they are all failures. Deep down, they have missed. Ask your Napoleons, Hitlers, Rothschilds – they have all failed; they are failures. What have they attained? They fought, tried to move upstream, wanted to become extraordinary in some way or other and simply destroyed themselves. To try to become extraordinary is suicidal; it is a gradual suicide, a slow poisoning of the whole system. Surrender to existence, flow with it, wherever it goes – willy-nilly, wherever it goes.
This word willy-nilly is good. Willy means whether it goes according to your will or not; nilly means whether it negates you or not. Willy means will, and nilly means against the will. Willy-nilly, wherever it goes, you surrender, you float with it. Swimming, even swimming, is not needed.
Why have a private goal of your own? Why not move with the destiny of the whole? Why are you so worried about achieving something on your own? How can you achieve it? ? you cannot; this is simply not possible. Only the whole has a destiny, not you. Only the whole is going somewhere, not you. If you can surrender to the whole, everything is achieved because you become the whole and the whole’s destiny becomes your destiny. The goal of the whole is your goal. The goal is not somewhere else; the whole is happy right now, the whole is blissful right now. Only you are worried. Only you are worried because you are not flowing with the river. You are trying to cut small corners. Who are you and how do you think it can be possible? You will simply fail.
Man always fails, only God succeeds.
Listen: We should let ourselves be guided by what is common to all. Look to the commonness of things and find the common. The more common, the truer; the more exceptional, the more false. Be ordinary and you are nearer the ground, you are nearer the truth. If you can be absolutely ordinary, what else is needed? Every moment becomes such a benediction. What is the problem when you are absolutely ordinary? You eat and eating is a sacrament. You sleep and sleeping is a sacrament. You walk in the sun, what more do you need? You breathe; what else is needed to be happy? You love; what more are you asking? Everything is already given; you are just trying to be exceptional. Follow the rule, the common and don’t try to be the exception, otherwise you will be in misery.
Hell is for all the extraordinary people. They may be in politics, in art, literature. Hell is for all geniuses wherever they are; for all extraordinary people, all egoists. Ego is hell, it gives you suffering because you start unnecessarily conflicting with everything. You are never at ease and unease becomes your lifestyle; with the ego you will always feel unease. Ego is a discomfort; it is the nail in the shoe that continuously pinches, but you want to be extraordinary.
Then…
I was sitting with Mulla Nasruddin and his wife passed by and went out of the door. He said, “Look! There goes a great woman.”
I said, “What do you mean by ‘great’?”
He replied, “She is trying to wear a size four shoe on her size six feet. There goes an extraordinary woman!”
She is suffering, but trying to be exceptional.
In the past in China millions of women used iron shoes to make their feet small, so they would look extraordinary. These women suffered a long time, their whole life and became almost crippled. In China long feet belonged to laborers, the poor, not the rich. It seems life belongs to the poor, not to rich people. So the higher the status of the woman, the queen being the highest, for thousands of years the queens of China were not even able to walk because they had such small feet. It was impossible because feet are always in the right proportion to the body. You cannot have small feet because nature knows better than you. But they were trying to improve upon nature. They suffered a long time. The whole misery of man can be reduced to a single law: if you try to be exceptional you will suffer. Nothing will satisfy you; you will find discontent everywhere.
Mulla Nasruddin was ill and admitted to hospital. There he created a hell all around himself because you cannot find a greater complaint-maker than Mulla Nasruddin; he is simply a continuous complaint. The whole hospital was troubled – the nurses, the doctors. Just to get rid of him, they treated him as carefully as possible so he would quickly be okay and leave. He recovered and the day came for him to be discharged, but again he complained. The doctor heard his noise and asked the nurse, “Now, what is he complaining about? There is nothing to complain about. He’s leaving today.”
The nurse said, “Now he is saying, ‘How can I be cured before the medicines are finished? There must be something wrong.’”
This type of mind comes automatically to an egoist. He is always searching, finding something wrong. When you search, you will find and you will find more than you ask. This is the trouble in the world; whatever you try to find you will find. If you are trying to find something wrong – and the ego always tries to find the wrong because an ego needs continuous discomfort, it exists in discomfort. When everything is okay the ego disappears. Chuang Tzu says, “When the shoe fits, the body is forgotten, the feet are forgotten.” When everything is forgotten, how can you cling to the ego? The ego needs your shoe to continue pinching you so that you can remember who you are. That’s why an egoist cannot love, cannot meditate or pray because if he really prays, everything fits and the ego disappears. The ego means self-consciousness. When something is wrong, only then is there self-consciousness. When everything is right, there is no self-consciousness.
Look to the common, watch out for the common and don’t try to be exceptional. But we want to be exceptional. People come to me and if I say to them, “Sit silently and don’t be bothered so much about meditation and prayer; by and by it will grow.” They reply, “But, by just sitting?” They need something exceptional. If I say to them, “Stand on your head,” it’s okay.
That’s why all over the world, teachers who instruct people to stand on their heads are flourishing; something difficult, uncomfortable, appeals. People try ridiculous postures in the name of Yoga. Simply ridiculous! The more ridiculous, the better; the more difficult, so that you cannot do them, then the ego gets a challenge. So do them! Make absurd postures and think that you are doing something great. Life is simply great. There is no need to improve upon it. If nature wanted you to sit or stand on your head, you would have been created that way. Listen to nature, follow it and don’t create any conflict with it; just follow it and soon you will attain a deep silence which comes when one becomes ordinary.
Just a few days ago – in India it is a constant problem – a young man came and asked, “Should I get married or not?”
I replied, “Just be ordinary. Why not get married?”
He wasn’t willing because not marrying is something exceptional. Marrying is ordinary, becoming a householder and having children is so ordinary. He said, “But all great men have remained unmarried.”
I said to him, “If you want to be great, go somewhere else. To me that is a disease. If you want to be ordinary, only then come to me. Do whatever your nature and whatever your inner feeling wants.” Then I said to him, “Just look inside. Close your eyes and tell me what you would like.”
He replied, “Of course I would like to marry, but that looks so ordinary; wasting your life in ordinary things.”
But the whole of life consists of ordinary things. Greatness is not in things, greatness is in the quality that you bring to your life, to ordinary things.
Just look at Jesus having supper with his friends. He looks more ordinary than a Buddha sitting under the bodhi tree. But the gesture of being ordinary is so beautiful; drinking, eating with friends is so beautiful that nobody can be so beautiful just sitting under a bodhi tree. Jesus has a quality of being just ordinary.
Buddha remained a king even under the bodhi tree. He was born exceptional, extraordinary; he lived and was brought up as a prince. That became his structure. Even under the bodhi tree he is not a beggar. If you go near him you can feel it. You can miss a Jesus if you meet him on the road; you cannot miss Buddha. But I say to you, “Jesus is nearer the logos.”
It happened that way to Buddha because that was the way he was brought up; his past was just that way. But how many people can be born as princes and how many people can be taught that way? Jesus is more human. In all his humanity he is divine because this ordinariness is to follow the common.
Jainas and Buddhists come to me and say, “This Jesus drinks and eats like ordinary people; he stays with ordinary people. How can you say that he is of the same stature as Buddha and Mahavira?” I can tell you that he is exactly how one should be. Mahavira and Buddha may be exceptional, but not everybody can be exceptional and there is no need to be. It may have been natural for them, so it’s okay if they followed their nature. But millions and millions of people cannot sit under bodhi trees doing nothing. They will have to move, to work and do ordinary things in the world.
If there is no way to reach the logos ordinarily, it will remain only for a chosen few. That doesn’t look just; the whole existence seeming to favor only a few. Remember, if existence favors only a few, if it is partial, what’s the need to give you birth? No, nature never favors anyone; it is for all, for all those who are ready to partake. If you are ready to participate, then bliss is for all. Jesus is a carpenter’s son, a poor man. For millions of people that’s how it should be. Someone is a carpenter’s son, someone is a goldsmith’s son and someone is a shoemaker’s son. This is how life is! We have lived according to the exceptional people too much and because of that so much misery has been unnecessarily created.
Live ordinarily, find the common and don’t try to be uncommon; otherwise, with the very effort you will cut your roots from the logos. The logos is common to all, yet most men live as if each of them had a private intelligence of his own. If you live according to the common, if you follow the common and don’t try to become an individual, you will be nearer the logos and you will be able to understand it.
This is the paradox: those who try to be exceptional individuals miss; they miss all individuality and extraordinariness. Those who remain with the ordinary ? with such an ordinariness that there is nothing to claim about it and who never strive to be individuals ? attain the greatest individuality this existence can offer you. Those who remain ordinary become most extraordinary and that extraordinariness comes as a gift. It is nothing on your part, you have not been striving for it. Human nature has no real understanding; only the divine nature has it. Yes, it is as it should be.
We come from the whole, we go back to the whole. Unknown we come, unknown we go ? not knowing from where we are coming, not knowing to what we are going. The whole process is mysterious. How can you have a private intelligence? This is a little difficult and has to be understood very deeply. It is one of the most important points that Heraclitus has given. Consciousness is also common. Just as fish exist in the ocean, the common ocean, we exist in a common consciousness. Your consciousness and my consciousness are not two; just two centers of the same. All around you is consciousness. We are all forms, but within the forms flows the same, the one. That’s why sometimes you also feel a common ground.
Someone is sad; he hasn’t said a single thing to you. You are sitting next to him and suddenly you feel sadness spreading through you. Someone is happy, just happy, not saying anything to you and suddenly you feel happiness entering you. If twenty people are sitting happily together and you put a sad man amongst them, within minutes he will feel a change; his climate will change. Amongst sad people you become sad; amongst long faces you become a long face. Amongst happy people you become happy. That’s why if you enjoy playing with children you become a child again. You may be playing with a child and suddenly you forget all your worries and the world; you become like a child. It is very refreshing. How does it happen? ? it happens because consciousness is a common phenomenon. When you play with a child you have to become a child because you meet the child on common ground.
In the East, because of this, they have insisted that just being near the master, just being near an awakened one and being in the presence, is very, very valuable. In the West they cannot understand this: “What do you mean, ‘in the presence’?” In the East they say: “We are going for darshan.” Darshan means just to see the master; nothing to ask, just being in the presence. They have a certain word for this being in the presence, satsang: being near the truth. If you sit silently with a master, sooner or later you dissolve into each other. The consciousnesses meet. The master enters you, you enter the master. Just simply being near the master, not doing anything, not even making any effort ? one day you can attain. That too is possible, but you have to be very, very open. You can attain, just sitting silently, relaxing, not doing and not creating any barriers. Many have attained because consciousness is the ocean and we are the fish in it. Everything affects everyone else.
Whatever happens in this existence affects everyone else. Not only now; whatever has happened in the past is affecting us also. Not only that; whatever is going to happen in the future is also affecting us because the whole of existence culminates at this moment. Past, future, present, all culminate, converge.
There is no possibility of a private intelligence. Those people we call very, very talented, geniuses, they also feel it. Ask Einstein or Madame Curie, they also feel it. Einstein says that whatever he discovered, he discovered in moments when he was not, when something suddenly possessed him – the total consciousness. Ask the poets; they say that whenever something happens, they are not. They become a vehicle; the common consciousness possesses them.
Madame Curie received the Nobel Prize. It should have been given to the common ground. She was making so much effort to find a solution to a particular mathematical problem and she couldn’t find the way. She struggled and struggled for two years and one night, tired, she fell asleep. Something happened in her sleep; in sleep you are more open, you are not an egoist, you are a nobody and you don’t cling to the identity. That’s why in the morning you feel fresh again, younger, rejuvenated because you have been into the common ground. You moved into consciousness, the ocean. You were not clinging to the private intelligence. For a few seconds you dropped into the whole and the whole revived you, refreshed you.
During the night something happened to Madame Curie; she got up, went to her table and wrote down the solution to what she had been working on for years. She slept again and in the morning she had completely forgotten what had happened in the night. She took a bath, ate her breakfast, did everything and went to the table. She was simply amazed. The solution was there! But who had done it? There was no one else there. Only she was in the room. The servant had come in and couldn’t have done it. She had been working hard. “What’s happening?” She looked again in more detail. It was her own handwriting! A little different because in the night, in sleep… She closed her eyes and tried to remember what had happened. She saw the whole thing like a dream; she had something, so she got up and wrote it down.
You unnecessarily claim that common consciousness is yours. It has never been yours. It is always floating. It is all around you. Become more porous, become more allowing, a deep let-go because only the whole can understand the whole. How can the part understand the whole? How can an atomic part understand the whole? The whole can flow through the part and if the part allows it… That’s what meditation is all about, allowing the whole to flow and you disappear completely from the scene ? suddenly you have become the whole.
Human nature has no real understanding;
only the divine nature has it.
Man is not rational;
only what encompasses him is intelligent.
Not you, but the ocean around you, what encompasses. Not you, but what surrounds you, what is within and without you. Not you because “you” is just a fallacy.
Man is not rational;
only what encompasses him is intelligent.
What is divine escapes men’s notice
because of their incredulity.
You doubt, you cannot believe, cannot trust and that’s why what is divine escapes men’s notice because of their incredulity. There is only one barrier and that is doubt. There is only one gate and that is trust. If you trust nature, everything falls into its right place. If you distrust nature, everything is disturbed.
Why is it so difficult to be natural? ? there is only one difficulty. If you are natural you cannot be somebody. There is no other difficulty. Sex arises, you follow it; then brahmacharya, celibacy, becomes a fight against nature. You are hungry, you eat; fasting becomes a conflict with nature. When you don’t feel hungry, you force yourself to eat; that is also fighting with nature. You go against nature when you don’t feel like making love and you carry on doing it because the wife needs, because society says, this and that. Nature means just following the inner being, whatever it feels, without any imposition from your ego. It will destroy and shatter your ego.
Live like an animal with only one difference; be alert. That’s all. Live like an animal with only one difference; be aware. Don’t fight with nature; just be a witness and allow it. Wherever it leads, is good. All your goals projected from the mind are false. Whatever you do, you won’t succeed. Finally, nature succeeds because only the whole can succeed. So why move unnecessarily into a fight in the beginning? I see people fighting in millions of ways; they change extremes, but they fight.
In the past, in the East and also in the West, people were fighting against sex. They said that there is something wrong in sex because in sex you become natural like an animal and all the preachers have been saying that you should not be like an animal. What is wrong in being animal? Look at the birds, look at the animals; go to the forest and see them! Don’t go to the zoo because there you will not see real animals; they are corrupted by human beings. Go to the wild.
What is wrong with animals? They look so beautiful, nothing is ugly around them. All the moralists, all the so-called religious people, have been teaching you: “Don’t be an animal!” And your ego feels that this is a good goal. How can you be an animal? Sex brings total animality to you. In sex you feel so absolutely animal. You don’t feel like that in anything else because everything else you have changed, polished. You have painted, cultured, cultivated everything – everything! You eat, but you have made such a ritual out of eating and everything around it, that it doesn’t seem to be at all related with hunger. What you eat is not nutritious; it is a show, a facade. Everything is false, plastic flowers all around. But when you move in love, when you make love to a woman or to a man, you become absolutely animal.
You have tried to hide that too. That’s why man makes love at night. Only man makes love at night; otherwise, animals make love in the day. If you make love in the day, it will be deeper because when the sun is in the atmosphere you are more vital. The night is for rest, but man makes love at night because animals make love in the day and he has to make a distinction. What type of egoist effort is this? In the dark, not even with the light on because in the dark you don’t have to face the reality that you are behaving like animals. You don’t make any sound while making love. In fact, you make love as if something has to be done and finished as soon as possible; within seconds it is finished. You have been taught to be against it. Your ego feels good.
Now, in the West, the wheel has turned a complete circle. Since Freud and Wilhelm Reich, sex has been taught more and more. Now, a new thing is happening in the West; if you don’t make love one day, you feel guilty. It seems you have to feel guilty whatever you do. Before you were making love and feeling guilty. “Why do you make love? Why this animality? When will you transcend this? When will the day come when you will not need it?” Now in the West, if one day you don’t feel like making love because you feel tired, you feel guilty and feel that you are doing something wrong; you feel you have to do it. You have to do something, you cannot allow nature to make its own course. They are both the same to me, there is no difference.
In the past, women were not allowed to have an orgasm because how can a woman, so pure, have an orgasm? A woman is a goddess; she should behave like one. So in the past women were simply tolerating sex, just lying like dead bodies, corpses. Even if you make love to a corpse, the corpse will move a little, but not women – goddesses! They are so pure and innocent in nature, they don’t know what is happening; it is just the man who is dragging them into it. So they would lie down with closed eyes because even if a woman leaves her eyes open, that seems like she is curious, interested. Now, in the West, they have created the opposite. If a woman cannot achieve orgasm it is a problem, something is wrong. Now it is a sin not to achieve orgasm. Before, it was a sin to achieve orgasm.
In the past, in the East and in the West, women completely forgot that they could achieve orgasm. They completely forgot that a beautiful ecstasy is possible through sex; if you don’t move and if nature is allowed and movement is allowed while making love, lovers will go completely wild. They will scream, make noises, go mad; that is so animal-like. They will be so ecstatic. If you can be ecstatic in love, soon that ecstasy will open a door for a higher ecstasy. You transcend and the real brahmacharya happens. That is not anything you can force on yourself; that happens through nature itself.
If one follows nature, one reaches.
There is no need for you to make any arrangements for the ultimate goal to happen; nature has already made everything. You are a seed and if you allow nature, the whole blueprint exists in you. It is just like a seed: we sow the seed in the ground and it has the whole blueprint, the whole architecture of the tree. Every leaf that will be produced in the future, every flower that will bloom in the future. The seed has every blueprint in it – only nature has to be allowed.
You have to water it, take care of it; you have to give it good soil and fertilizers – finished! You need not do anything. You need not teach the seed to behave, do this or that or never say to it, “Never do this, otherwise you will never be a tree.” If you teach seeds, trees will not exist in the world because the seeds will go completely mad not knowing what to do. Seeds depend on the universal consciousness, not on a private intelligence.
Man has the blueprint to be a god, just to be a god, nothing less. Man is the seed of God because human consciousness is just the beginning. It has to grow and grow and come to a point where it becomes universal. Nothing is needed on your part. In fact, no discipline, creed, dogma, religion. Nature is enough. You simply have to allow it. You have to be receptive to it and move in trust because you can move only in trust.
If the seed asks, “What is the guarantee that if I leave my shell, which covers me and protects me, that I will grow into a tree? What is the guarantee? And if there is no guarantee I will cling to my shell.” Then what will happen? If the bird in the egg says, “How can I get out? Who is there to give me a guarantee that it will be a better world than I am already in?” What will happen? The shell is a security, it protects. The bird is beautifully protected in the egg, but this is not life. It is like death; of course completely protected, but protected in a grave. Who can give you the guarantee? ? there is no one to give you a guarantee; you have to trust.
The seed trusts and dissolves in the earth. It sprouts into a beautiful tree, flowers, enjoys existence and becomes ecstatic. The bird comes out of the egg, leaves the known for the unknown, takes wing and moves into the vast sky. Nobody knows what is going to happen. With no goal in view, with no purpose or plan, it just takes wing, feels ecstatic on the winds, moves, goes to the farthest corner of the sky and moves into the unknown.
That is how it is also going to happen to you. You are a seed, you are an egg; you are a possibility. Heraclitus hits it exactly right and comes to the exact point where you miss. What is divine escapes men’s notice because of their incredulity. Because you doubt, you miss. Trust and you can reach. Nothing else is needed; just trust, so that nature can unfold.
Although intimately connected with the Logos,
men keep setting themselves against it.
How can anyone hide from that which never sets?
Existence is always, always and always. It never sets. How can you hide from it? It lasts forever and ever. How can you fight it? What you are doing is simply ridiculous, absurd. It is stupid to fight. The only wisdom consists in a let-go, surrender. All that is beautiful starts happening. It is a happening, it is not a doing.
You can create barriers, but you cannot bring it. You can escape from it, you can close your eyes to it, but you cannot create it. It is already there, it is already the case. Only you are missing it because you are sitting with closed eyes ? the doubt closing your eyes, closing your heart – as if you are asleep, intoxicated in doubt.
Karl Marx has said, “Religion is the opium for the masses.” Exactly the opposite is the case. Doubt is the opium, not religion. Through doubt you miss the truth. Through trust you allow it to reach you and you allow yourself to reach it.
Meditate more and more on trust. Imbibe the feeling of trust. Vibrate with a trusting heart. Sing, dance, pray with a trusting heart and soon you will see that only trust pays finally. Doubt can kill. It is negative, it cannot give you life.
Doubt is death. Trust is life.
As the trust grows more and more, the more abundant life becomes available to you.
Enough for today.