SUFISM
Unio Mystica Vol 2 01
First Discourse from the series of 10 discourses - Unio Mystica Vol 2 by Osho.
You can listen, download or read all of these discourses on oshoworld.com.
My friend, everything existing
exists through him;
your own existence is a mere pretense.
No more nonsense! Lose yourself,
and the hell of your heart becomes a heaven.
Lose yourself, and anything can be accomplished.
Your selfishness is an untrained colt.
You are what you are:
hence your loves and hates;
you are what you are:
hence faith and unbelief.
Hope and fear drive fortune from your door;
lose yourself, and they will be no more.
At his door, what is the difference
between Moslem and Christian,
virtuous and guilty?
At his door all are seekers
and he the sought.
God is without cause:
why are you looking for causes?
The sun of truth rises unbidden,
and with it sets the moon of learning.
In this halt of but a week,
to be is not to be,
and to come is to go.
And does the sun exist
for the cock to crow at?
What is it to him
whether you are there or not?
Many have come, just like you,
to his door.
You won’t find your way
in this street; if there is a way,
it is on your road of sighs.
All of you are far
from the road of devotion:
sometimes you are virtuous,
sometimes you are wicked:
so you hope for yourselves, fear for yourselves;
but when your mask of wisdom and folly
at last turns white, you will see
that hope and fear are one.
Truth is not a tradition. It cannot be, because truth is never old. It is eternally new, it is eternally fresh, as fresh as the dewdrops in the morning or the stars in the night.
The claim of tradition is basically anti-truth. The word tradition comes from a root tradere. It means “handed by someone to somebody else, transferred.” From tradere, the word trade also comes. Truth cannot be transferred from one person to another person. It is impossible to transfer it. It is not a thing, hence it is not transferable. It cannot be traded, nobody can give it, nobody can take it. It arises in each individual’s own being, it is a flowering of your own heart.
Hence, Sufism is not a tradition. No true religion can ever be a tradition; every true religion is bound to be a revolution, a rebellion. And Sufism is one of the most profound, most authentic experiments, inquiries, into truth that has happened on this earth. And Hakim Sanai, into whose sutras we will be entering again today, is one of the three greatest Sufis in the whole history of human consciousness. He makes his part of the trio of the three great masters: Attar, Rumi, Sanai.
You will again be moving with one of the greatest souls for a few days. It is a pilgrimage, a holy pilgrimage; you will be walking on sacred ground. Be very alert, watchful, loving, open, vulnerable, then something can arise in you which can become a transformation; something can be triggered in you. But remember, it is not caused from the outside, it is not a question of cause and effect. Hence it is beyond the reach of science. Science can only understand the law of cause and effect. If something can be caused, it is bound to fall into the field of science. But truth cannot be caused.
Still, in the presence of the master it can happen. It happens uncaused; it is a synchronicity. It is as if somebody is dancing and something is triggered in you – not caused, remember, because no dancer can cause a dance in you – but you start feeling something. You start swaying, you suddenly feel a rush of energy, you would like to dance yourself. This is synchronicity: something has happened in you, parallel but not caused.
I will be here just like a hollow bamboo, available to Hakim Sanai so that he can sing his song, so he can dance his dance. If you are open, something can start happening in you. It will not be transferred from me to you – it cannot be transferred; it will not be caused. I will not be the source of it, you will remain the source of it. But it can be triggered: I can function as a catalytic agent.
These few days, walking with Hakim Sanai, can be life-transforming. You will be here with one of the greatest human beings ever – a human being of the caliber of Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed.
But remember the first thing, that truth is not a tradition. If you believe in tradition, you will never come to know what truth is. Tradition is a belief, borrowed; it is knowledge but not experience. Tradition is scripture, philosophy, words and words – words and words about words. It is a great jungle of theories, and you can be deceived by it very easily. The mind is ready to fall into the trap of it.
Because truth is not a tradition, it cannot be approached through the mind. The mind is a tradition, the mind lives out of the past. The mind is always old; the mind is never original, it is never new, it is never fresh, it is never young, it is never alive. The mind is nothing but the accumulated past; all that you have known in the past has become a tape inside you. It is not the reality of this moment. The mind is a tradition.
Hence if somebody says he is a Hindu or a Christian or a Jaina or a Mohammedan, he is saying he is not religious. He is saying he belongs to the past, not to the present. He is saying he belongs to the mind and not to consciousness.
Consciousness is always of the here and now: it knows no past, it knows no future. And that is the beauty of consciousness – it is meditative. The mind is a thought process, a procession of memories, imaginations, dreams, projections. Consciousness is a purity, a mirror, that simply reflects the reality as it is.
All belief systems have to be dropped, only then can you be a Sufi. And to be a Sufi is the greatest thing that can happen to anybody.
Nobody else except man can be deceived by words; nobody except man can be deceived at all.
I have heard…
Marilyn had a parrot for a pet, but the parrot would embarrass her whenever she came into the apartment with a man. He would shout all kinds of obscenities, always leading off with, “Somebody’s gonna get it tonight! Somebody’s gonna get it tonight!”
In desperation, Marilyn went to her local pet shop and explained her parrot problem to the pet shop proprietor.
“What you need,” he said, “is a female parrot too. I don’t have one on hand, but I will order one. Meanwhile, you could borrow this female owl until the female parrot arrives.”
Marilyn took the owl home and put it near her parrot. It was immediately obvious that the parrot did not care for the owl. He glared at it.
That night, Marilyn wasn’t her usual nervous self as she opened the door to bring her gentleman friend in for a nightcap. Then suddenly she heard the parrot screech and she knew that things had not changed.
“Somebody’s gonna get it tonight! Somebody’s gonna get it tonight!” the parrot said.
The owl said, “Whooo? Whooo?”
And the parrot said, “Not you, you big-eyed son-of-a-bitch!”
Only man can be deceived. You cannot deceive even a parrot, but pundits can be deceived and are deceived. Pundits are greater parrots than parrots themselves.
Beware. Your mind is ready to fall into any trap of words. It can create beautiful theories, philosophies; it can go on manufacturing great systems of thought – all imaginary.
Truth has nothing to do with your imagination. Neither has truth anything to do with your inference, your guesswork. Truth is already here: truth is. All that is needed on your part is not to seek and search for it but to be available, open and empty like a mirror, so that you can reflect that which is. Truth surrounds you; truth is within and without. Only truth is. You need not go anywhere, to Kaaba or to Kashi. You need not even go outside your room, you need not even go outside your body, you need not go anywhere.
Sitting silently, doing nothing, the spring comes and the grass grows by itself. Just sitting silently in your own room, when you are empty, it is revealed.
It was revealed to Mohammed when he was utterly silent and empty, it was revealed to Sanai when he was silent and empty, it was revealed to Mahavira when he was silent and empty. To be empty is to be religious.
But you are so full of knowledge, you are so full of unnecessary luggage, your mind is so much in a constant chattering. You may call it the Veda or you may call it the Koran, it doesn’t matter. Unless you are empty, the Veda is not going to happen to you, the Koran is not going to flow through you. Unless you are empty, you will not contact truth – and truth is another name for God. I am using the word truth so that even atheists are not offended, but truth and God are synonymous, interchangeable, they mean the same thing.
Then what is truth if it is not a tradition? It is a revolution, it is a turning in. Tradition looks backward, tradition looks at others, tradition wants something to be given. Revolution looks inward. Nothing has to be given to you from any source; you already have it, it is already the case. Just turning in, just looking in, waiting, watching, going inward to the core of your being – and it is there.
Sufism is an inner journey. By revolution I don’t mean a political revolution. Political revolutions are not revolutions at all; they only substitute one slavery for another. The only revolution there is, is religious. The only revolution there is, is turning away from tradition and turning inward to the source of your being.
Knowing “Who am I?” is the only revolutionary step – the first and the last, the alpha and the omega.
That’s the meaning of becoming a Sufi, or becoming a sannyasin. Sannyasin is my name for the Sufi: one who is fed up with the outside world, who has known its frustrations, who has known its utter futility, who has known all the anxiety and anguish of it and is ready to dive deep within oneself to know “Who am I?” Because unless one knows oneself, all knowledge is useless.
The foremost, the most fundamental thing, is to become aware at the core of your being. And it is a miracle to become aware of it, because at the core of your being you are always pure, always innocent, always virgin, always celibate. At the very core of your being, you have never left the Garden of Eden, you are still in paradise.
That is the name of Hakim Sanai’s book, the Hadiqa. It means The Garden – the garden of God, paradise.
Where is this paradise? There are foolish people who have been searching for the Garden of Eden. A few think it was in Babylon, a few think it was on the continent of Atlantis which has gone down in the ocean – there has been a search. This is whole complete stupidity.
The garden exists in you. Adam has not been expelled from the Garden of Eden, he has fallen asleep. “The original fall” simply means you have forgotten who you are. Adam has become knowledgeable and has lost his purity of consciousness.
That’s the meaning of the parable of the Tree of Knowledge. Adam has eaten from the Tree of Knowledge – that is the original sin. See the beauty of the parable: knowledge is the original sin, to become knowledgeable is to fall from grace. Then how to attain it again? Drop your knowledge, become innocent again. Be a child again, and you will be able to enter the Garden of Eden.
Adam becomes knowledgeable, Christ becomes innocent. Becoming knowledgeable, Adam starts moving outward, falls victim to philosophies, belief systems, theories, words. Jesus drops all tradition; that’s why the Jews were so angry with him. The Jews are a very traditional people, they were angry because he was a revolutionary. He was a dropout – he simply dropped all the knowledge of all the ancient rabbis and he became innocent. But in becoming innocent he again entered that original state of Adam before he had eaten the fruit of knowledge.
I have heard…
Two university professors are walking around the campus. They are well-known historians and are voicing their respective opinions about Jesus. When they are about to part, one says thoughtfully, “You know, he was really a good fellow, but he didn’t publish.”
The professor, the pundit, the knowledgeable person, the scholar, has no understanding about inner experiences. All that he knows is the rubbish of so-called research work, all that he knows is about words. Those words are hollow, they contain nothing, they are meaningless – because meaning arises only out of one’s own experience.
Sufism is an experiment in existential experience. It is not a philosophy; rather, think of it as a ladder. You don’t agree with or believe in a ladder; you don’t believe in it, you don’t disbelieve in it, either. You climb it, and if it breaks you get a new one. Thus, to treat Sufism as a system to be believed in, or committed to, or attached to is to miss the whole point. It is a ladder, not a belief system. Use it, climb it, go beyond it. It is a boat.
Buddha calls his system a raft: that’s exactly what Sufism is. Use it to go to the other shore, to the further shore, then forget all about it. The truth believed is a lie, the truth borrowed is a lie. My truth cannot be your truth; the moment my truth reaches you, it is no longer the same thing. With me, in me, it had the meaning of my experience. When it goes to you, only words reach you – empty, hollow. You can cling to those words, you can believe too much in those words, and you will be lost.
This is something very basic to be remembered, that Sufism is a practical science, it is pragmatic. It does not depend on philosophizing, speculating and guesswork; it points directly to existential experience.
You can know much about love. You can go and look in the libraries, you can look in the Encyclopedia Britannica, and you will know much about love. But it will be about love – it will not be love. To know love, you will have to fall in love; there is no other way, there is no shortcut.
Two Italians in Rome were talking when an airplane flew overhead and one said to the other, “The pope is aboard that plane.”
“No,” said the other, “he is in southern Italy at the summer Vatican.”
“No, he is aboard that plane,” said the other.
One word led to another, and before long, several thousand liras were bet on whether or not the pope was aboard that plane. The two men rushed to the airport in time to observe the pope emerging from the plane.
The one who lost the bet turned to his friend and said, “Tell me, Tony, how could you tell, twenty thousand feet in the air, that the pope was aboard that plane?”
“Easy,” he said. “It says so right on the outside of the airplane: TWA.”
“What does that mean?”
“Top Wop Aboard.”
Sometimes your guess may even work, but still it is never the truth. Truth has to be experienced.
You are guessing about God, you are arguing about God, speculating about God, fighting about God. And no time is left for experiencing him.
Remember always, that to be here with me, we are not interested in any guesswork, we are interested in going to the real experience of it. And when the experience is possible, why bother arguing about it? Why go round and round? Why not penetrate to the very core? You can go round and round for centuries and you will never arrive anywhere. And you can arrive right now, this very moment, if you go inward.
All these sutras of the Hadiqa are just preparing you to take the inner leap, the inner jump.
Sufism is an attempt to unfreeze habits of thinking, to replace them with less stiff and restricting ones. Sufism is criticizing, dissolving and stepping over all prejudices, loosening all rigid and constricting molds of thought. Sufism is relaxing into your own self; it is a let-go.
When all prejudices have been dropped, all concepts rejected, all scriptures burnt, the whole tradition dropped, then you are innocent, you are unpolluted. In that purity of the present moment, the sun rises.
And that is from where one starts growing into a real human being. It is from there that one starts growing even beyond humanity; one starts surpassing, one starts transcending. Real growth knows no limit. You contain something infinite in you, something oceanic; don’t be contented, don’t be satisfied unless you have known it. That contentment will be a suicide.
I see millions of people: they are all dead, they have committed suicide, because they have become contented – and contented with futile things, contented with nothing.
Never be contented unless you have known your inner being, unless you have come to the innermost shrine. Remain discontented. Sufis call it “the divine discontentment.”
Teilhard de Chardin says, “The most real aspect of living is the passion for growth.” Yes, be in a passionate affair with your own growth. Never allow a single day to pass without growing, otherwise you will remain a seed and you will never know the beauties of being a flower. The spring will come and go, and you will remain dead.
Millions of people are dead. They walk, they talk, they do their job, but all that is mechanical, utterly mechanical. They are moving in a kind of sleep, they are somnambulists.
A man took his wife to a Broadway show. During the first act intermission, he had to urinate in the worst way. He hurried to the back of the theater and searched in vain for the men’s room.
At last he came upon a fountain surrounded by pretty foliage. He realized that he had wandered backstage. Noting that no one was around, and in desperation, he opened his pants and pissed into the fountain.
He had difficulty finding his way back to the auditorium, and by the time he sat down next to his wife, the curtain was up and actors were moving about on the stage.
“Did I miss much of the second act?” he whispered.
“Miss it?” she said. “You were in it!”
But that is the situation. People are moving unconsciously, mechanically, unaware; they don’t know what they are doing. How can they know what they are doing when they don’t know who they are? If you don’t know your being, you can’t be aware of your doing; it is impossible. First, one has to be aware of the being – and that is growth. Growing inward is growth, reaching inward is growth.
The sutras:
My friend, everything existing
exists through him;
your own existence is a mere pretense.
No more nonsense! Lose yourself,
and the hell of your heart becomes heaven.
Lose yourself, and anything can be accomplished.
Your selfishness is an untrained colt.
First, remember. Hakim Sanai addresses you as My friend… That’s the attitude of all the great masters. The disciple thinks that the master is very, very far away – and from the side of the disciple it is true, because he is fast asleep. In his sleep, the master is a faraway star.
But the same is not the case from the side of the master. The master knows that you may be asleep but you are a buddha, you may be asleep but you are a god. The disciple may not know that he is a god, but the master knows it. The moment he knows himself to be divine, he knows the whole existence to be divine. From the master’s side, nobody is a disciple, all are masters. A few are asleep, a few are awake; the difference is only that much. From the side of the master, it is only a question of time: tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, or who knows, you may even become enlightened today.
The potential is there. From the side of the seed, the flower is far away. But the flower knows that the seed contains flowers, infinite flowers. From the side of the flower, the seed is a friend.
And if you find a master who does not think in those terms, then remember, know well, he is not a master yet. If he thinks that you are sinners, if he thinks that you are fallen souls, then he is not a master yet; he has not come to realize his own reality.
Buddha is reported to have said, “The day I became enlightened, the whole existence became enlightened for me – even trees, even rocks.”
Hakim Sanai says: My friend, everything existing exists through him… God is the only reality – or call it truth, or nature, or Tao, or whatsoever you will. Names don’t matter. Don’t go on fighting about names; XYZ, anything will do. Just remember one thing, that something is there, miraculously present, which surrounds all, which permeates all.
Sufis say: “As the absolute maximum, God contains all things.” In fact that is the definition of God: one who contains all. He is there enfolding and there unfolding. God is in the seed, God is in the flower – in the seed hidden, in the flower manifest. God is in the sinner and is in the saint – in the sinner asleep, in the saint awake. But all is God: God is equivalent to existence.
Christian mystics use two words: one is complicatio, it means enfolding. God is complicatio, enfolding, and explicatio, unfolding. These are the two movements of God: enfolding and manifesting. Each seed becomes the flower, and then in its own turn the flower becomes the seed, and the circle is complete.
Just as every night you fall asleep, and in the morning you are awake again, so is God – in nature asleep, in buddhas awake. Just to understand it is a great liberation. Suddenly you have self-worth; suddenly you are no longer a condemned being. Suddenly you are an essential part of existence; you are not accidental, you participate in God’s work in your own way. You need God, God needs you; you are not unneeded.
In this century, millions of people are feeling unneeded, because God has disappeared from their lives. And this is one of the most fundamental needs, to be needed. If you feel needed, you feel worthy. If you feel not needed, you feel worthless, you feel like dirt.
That’s why people get married, because a woman will be there who will need them. Husbands don’t like their wives to work, because then they are needed less, then they are worth less. Husbands like their wives to be constantly in need of them; that gives them worth, a feeling of importance.
The wife also in her own way makes the husband utterly dependent; without her he will not be able to exist. Even if she goes away for one day, the husband is at a loss. He cannot find a thing in his own house; he comes to know that without the wife it is impossible to exist. Then they both bring children into the world, and both are happy because the children need them immensely, absolutely.
That’s why people like children – they are helpless, they are dependent. But sooner or later, the children will go their own way. And this is one of the problems in the world: when children have gone their own way and they have settled with their own families, then old people, aged people, start feeling worthless – nobody needs them.
Now it is a psychological truth that once a person starts feeling he is not needed, he starts committing suicide, psychological suicide. He dies ten years earlier. When he is retired from his job he starts shrinking – now he is no longer needed. He was a boss and so many people were clamoring around him; he was doing something essential for the society. That job is gone. Now if he dies, it will not make any difference, the world will continue as it is.
The children have become grown-up, they have gone to live their own lives, and the old people simply feel discarded. They start dying slowly, shrinking. They were healthy when they were in their work, when they were needed they were healthy. But now suddenly something disappears; the earth underneath their feet disappears, they are no longer needed.
We make arbitrary needs. But the man who has the sense that “God exists, and I am needed by God,” never feels worthless – never. To the last moment, to the last breath of his life, he is functioning, serving something higher than himself. He has a context bigger than himself; in that context, meaning arises.
Meaning is always in a certain context. A single word is meaningless; when it is arranged in poetry it has tremendous meaning, now it has a context. The color in a tube is meaningless; once it is spread on the canvas and becomes part of a picture that is bigger than it, it has a context, suddenly meaning arises.
It is reported that once a very rich man asked Pablo Picasso to make a portrait of him, Picasso said, “It will be very costly.” The man was so rich, he said, “Don’t bother about it. You need not even talk about the cost, money doesn’t matter. Make my portrait and whatsoever you demand, I will give.”
After six months the portrait was ready. The rich man came, but the price that was asked was fantastic: one million dollars, just for a small canvas and a few colors. The rich man said, “Are you joking? Just for a few colors and a canvas?”
Picasso said, “Then okay, you can take an empty canvas and a few tubes full of color and you can pay as much as you want.”
The rich man said, “But that is not the same.”
Picasso aid, “That’s what I am trying to point out to you. I have created a context, I have created a gestalt, a pattern. And nobody else can create it, hence the price. It is a Picasso painting. Nobody else can do it the way I have done it, it has my signature on it. The harmony of the colors, the music of the colors, the poetry of the colors – that is the thing. I am not asking the price for the colors but for something that has become expressed through the colors.”
A real painting is not just the sum total of the colors, it is more than the sum total – and that “more” is the meaning. A real life is not the sum total of what you do; unless there is something more to it, you live an inauthentic life. That “more” is God. That poetry is God, the music is God, that surrounds you, floods you.
People come to me and ask, “Where is God?” It is not a question of asking where; God is a meaning, not a person. I cannot indicate, “There – go there, and you will find him.” God has no address, God cannot be located, it is a meaning. You have to create meaning in your life, then God is. God has to be created.
And the start of that creating is to becoming more and more sensitive to the existence that surrounds you. The trees, the rocks, the stars, the earth – you are surrounded by a great poetry. But you remain separate, hence you go on missing it.
My friend, everything existing exists through him; your own existence is a mere pretense. If you live separately, if you think, “I am separate,” if you live as an ego, then your existence is a pretense. Then your existence will remain meaningless. Then you will never know the glory and the grandeur of life; you will never know the splendors that have always been available to you but you went on missing.
If you exist as a separate individual, you have created a wall around yourself, you have become an island. And no man is an island, we are part of an infinite continent. That continent is God. We are parts of an ocean. The moment you recognize that we are parts of an ocean, your life starts having a context bigger than you, higher than you. In that context is the beginning of meaning – and meaning is God.
No more nonsense! says Sanai. Lose yourself, and the hell of your heart becomes a heaven. Just a single step is enough: Lose yourself… Don’t exist as an “I,” don’t go on proclaiming yourself as an ego. Drop the ego, and suddenly, immediately, instantly, the hell of your life turns into a heaven. Misery disappears.
Misery is a by-product of your separation. Bliss is the shadow of falling back into the unity, unio mystica. When again you start feeling like a wave in the ocean, misery cannot exist. What is misery? The fear of death. But you can die only if you are separate, you cannot die if you are not separate.
If the wave thinks, “I am separate from the ocean,” it is going to die; it will remain afraid, trembling. If it knows it is part of the ocean it is not going to die. It will fall back into the source, it will come again; it will go, it will come, it will appear and disappear, but it cannot die.
Birth is appearance, death is disappearance. But neither is birth the beginning nor is death the end: the ocean continues. To have this oceanic feeling is meditation, is prayer.
Lose yourself, and anything can be accomplished. Then the impossible is possible, because nothing is impossible for God. We have unnecessarily become too narrow, too tiny; we have become mundane. We have lost our own heritage, we are not aware of all the beauties that we contain and of all the potential that is intrinsically present in us.
Your selfishness is an untrained colt. Your selfishness is nothing but your unawareness, your lack of discipline. Create an inner discipline, a little training in awareness, and your selfishness will disappear, because your self will disappear.
And when there is no self left, then the real Self with a capital S, the supreme Self, arrives. You disappear as a wave, you appear as the ocean. That is liberation.
Recognize the Self – the self which is not the ego, the self which has nothing of the ego in it. Hindu mystics have called it the atman. Buddha has given it a totally different name, not only different but diametrically opposite: he has called it anatta, no-self.
The Self is a no-self, because there is no ego in it. To be an ego is to fall from your reality – the original sin. The Self is not the ego, absolutely not; it is not personal, either. It is misleading to speak of “my self.” The Self is universal. The moment you say “my self” you have lost track of the universal and you have become small. Now you will feel suffocated; you have created the suffocation yourself.
The Self, the real Self, the supreme Self, is beyond any person, identification, form, process, position. But they all arise in it and dissolve in it – it is the ocean. The Self is the space in which everything appears and disappears. That space has to be found within yourself. Don’t get identified with any content, otherwise the ego arises.
For example, there is sadness surrounding you. Immediately you become identified, you say, “I am sad.” That is stupid, unintelligent, you are unaware, you don’t know what you are saying. You are not the sadness, you are the witness. Sadness is there, but you are separate from it: you are the knower of it.
Say, “I am seeing that sadness surrounds me,” but don’t say, “I am sad.” Anger is there, but don’t say, “I am anger,” or “I am angry.” Simply say, “There is anger, I can see it is there.” Anger is the content of your consciousness, it is not the consciousness itself. Consciousness is the space, the witnessing space.
This is the revolution, if you forget the content and remember the consciousness. Two things are continuously happening in you: the content and consciousness. A thought passes through your mind and you become identified with it; you say, “I am it.” If you are hungry, you say, “I am hungry.” Please be a little more aware: say, “I watch, I am a witness, that the body is feeling hungry.”
When you have eaten well and you feel satiated, don’t say, “I am satiated.” Again, remember. Because of our ignorance we have created a wrong kind of language too. We say, “I am satiated.” You were never hungry and you are never satiated. Hunger was a content, so is satiation. Sadness was a content, so is happiness.
This mindfulness Sufis call zikr, remembrance. Buddha has called it “mindfulness, right awareness.”
Just go on cutting yourself off from the content. Slowly, slowly, the bridge is broken. The day you recognize the fact that you are never the content but always the consciousness, you have arrived home.
The English word contemplation is very beautiful; it comes from a root tem. Tem means “to cut off.” From the same root comes temple; that too is beautiful. Temple means “that which cuts you off from the world,” and contemplation means “the process of cutting yourself off from the mind, from the content.” Identification is the fall: you become Adam, you are expelled. Through disidentification, cutting yourself off from the mind and its contents, you become Christ. You are no longer outgoing, the inner journey has started. Adam has turned toward the source, is returning home.
The self arises out of identification, self with a lower-case s arises out of identification. Self with a capital S arises out of disidentification. And this is the whole art of religion.
You are what you are:
hence your loves and hates;
you are what you are:
hence faith and unbelief.
Right now you are a duality: you are consciousness and content. You are divided into these two. Hence in your whole life there is a dualism. You love a person and you hate the same person, you believe and you disbelieve. And they go together – belief and disbelief, love and hate, anger and compassion, happiness and unhappiness, these are two sides of the same coin. Because you are double, each act of yours is going to be double, dual. And in that duality is misery, because in duality there is tension.
You are always torn apart. You love a woman, and you hate the same woman. Hence couples go on quarreling continuously. It is something to be understood. Why do couples go on quarreling continuously? They love, certainly they love, but why do they hate? It remains a mystery if you don’t understand the duality of man. He is dual in everything. Unless you become disidentified with the mind, you will never become non-dual.
That’s why I say that only one who has arrived can love, and he can love without hate. His love will not have hate at all in it, his flame will be smokeless. Your flame cannot be smokeless, your love will have smoke – your love will remain poisoned with hate. Your belief is nothing but a hidden disbelief; behind your belief there is always doubt. You say, “I believe in God” – but just search a little bit more and you will see that there is doubt.
When one is pure consciousness, there is neither belief nor disbelief. That state is called trust: there is no doubt and there is no belief.
A man, a professor of philosophy, came to Sri Aurobindo and asked him, “Do you believe in God?” And Aurobindo said, “No, not at all.”
The philosopher was very puzzled and confused. He had come a long, long way from a faraway place to see this man, thinking that he had known God. And here is this man, and he says, “I don’t even believe in God.”
The philosopher asked, “What are you saying? You don’t believe in God?”
Aurobindo said, “Yes – I cannot believe in God, because I know him.”
When you know, you know; there is no question of belief. Belief is out of ignorance, belief is because of doubt. If you ask me, I cannot say I believe in God. I know.
You don’t believe in the sun, you know. Do you believe this is day? If somebody believes, that will only show that he is blind. A man who has eyes need not believe that this is day – this is day! Only a blind man can believe this is day.
When consciousness is not contaminated by content moving around you, when your inner space is pure – it is always pure, you just have to recognize the fact – suddenly all duality disappears. And with duality, hell.
Hell is nothing but duality. Loving the same man and hating the same man is hell, believing in God and doubting God is hell. You are moving in diametrically opposite directions, you will fall apart. It is a miracle how you go on holding yourself together at all, why you don’t fall from the wall like Humpty Dumpty.
Hope and fear drive fortune from your door:
lose yourself, and they will be no more.
Sanai says: “Hope and fear are two aspects of the same coin.” If you hope, there will always be fear. Hope is out of fear, it is not against fear. You are hoping that tomorrow something is going to happen, something great for which you have always been hoping. Now, can you be without fear? It may happen, it may not happen; you may be able to make it, you may not be able to make it. It is always a question of to be or not to be, it is always ambiguous, and there is fear.
Buddha says: “Drop hope.” And the first time he said to a disciple, “Drop hope,” the disciple was puzzled. He said, “If I drop hope, then all is lost! Because it is hope I live through, I live for.”
Buddha said, “Don’t be worried – drop hope!” And you will be surprised, because the moment you drop hope, fear disappears. And when there is no fear and no hope, one is integrated; there is no division.
Division is hell. To become integrated is heaven – to become crystallized, to be one: one piece, one whole, one unity; not even a union but a unity. Remember, a union is not a unity, it is an arrangement: you have many selves and they have all arranged to live in a kind of coexistence, they have decided not to fight. This is a union – but the fight can break out at any moment.
Hindus and Mohammedans lived for so many years in Aligarh silently; that was a union. Then one day, anything, any nonsense, and the union is gone. Hindus and Mohammedans had lived so long in this country together; it was a union, it is gone. Now there are two countries, India and Pakistan. Then Pakistan was divided into two countries, Bangladesh and Pakistan.
These are all unions. Unity means all the small selves have disappeared and the supreme Self has arrived. Now there is no possibility of ever becoming divided again.
At his door, what is the difference
between Moslem and Christian,
virtuous and guilty?
At his door all are seekers
and he the sought.
Meditate over these beautiful words of Sanai. At his door… nobody is a Christian or a Mohammedan or a Hindu or a Buddhist. At his door… you are a lover and he the beloved. At his door… you are the seeker and he is the sought. At his door… you are the river and he is the ocean.
And when the Ganges disappears in the ocean, do you think the ocean receives the Ganges in a different way than it receives other rivers? The ocean does not even know the name – which is the Ganges and which is the Brahmaputra and which is the Volga and which is the Amazon. When the river disappears in the ocean it loses all name, all form.
That’s why I say again and again that a really religious person cannot be a Mohammedan and cannot be Hindu and cannot be Jaina and cannot be a Sikh. A really religious person is only a lover, a seeker. He cannot become identified with any church. He cannot have any adjective.
Mohammed is not a Mohammedan, cannot be. And Christ is not a Christian, cannot be. And Buddha is not a Buddhist, cannot be.
And I say to you, don’t you be Hindus and Mohammedans and Christians and Buddhists, either. If you become a Buddhist you will never be a buddha, remember, and if you become a Mohammedan you will never be a mohammed. If you become a Christian you have missed an opportunity of being a christ – and to be a christ is beautiful and to be a mohammed is a benediction. To be a Mohammedan, to be a Hindu, is just ugly; it is just political, and nothing else. It has nothing to do with religion.
Listen to this great Sufi, Sanai: At his door, what is the difference between Moslem and Christian, virtuous and guilty? He says: There is not even a difference between the sinner and the saint. At his door, differences disappear. Nobody is a sinner and nobody is a saint, and nobody is virtuous and nobody is guilty.
You will not reach to godliness as virtuous, because that is the ego. To feel that “I am virtuous” is the subtlest ego – to feel about oneself, “I know, because I have crammed the Vedas; I know, because I can recite the Koran.” If you try to reach God as knowledgeable, you will never reach; his doors will remain closed for you. His doors can open only when you are innocent. When you are neither virtuous nor guilty, when you are neither knowledgeable nor ignorant, when you are neither a man nor a woman, neither white nor black – only then.
I have heard…
A Negro knocked on the door of a church one night. In the day of course he was afraid: the church belonged to white people, they wouldn’t allow him to. But he knew the priest, he was a nice man: maybe at night, when nobody was looking, he might allow him in – he wanted to worship in the church.
The priest opened the door. He was a nice man – but to be a nice man is one thing, and to be a real man is totally different. All these nice formalities are just pseudo, phony. He had been saying great things, but when this Negro knocked on the door and he opened the door and the Negro said, “Would you please allow me to come in? I will not tell anybody, but I want to worship God,” the priest was puzzled: what to do? His mask was that of a nice man, very religious, saintly; because of the mask, he could not say no. But deep down, the reality was that he was as much a sectarian, a believer in color, as anybody else. So his deeper core was not ready to allow the man to come in – the church would be polluted, poisoned.
So he found a strategy, a technique, to avoid. He said, “Yes, you can come in but first you have to become pure. I will give you a prayer: do this prayer, it takes years before one becomes pure. When you have become pure, come back, and if I see that you have become pure, I will allow you to come in.”
The poor man believed him. This was just a strategy to avoid the situation, so that the priest need not say yes or no. And this was a tricky thing. If he ever comes, you can always say, “You have not become pure yet: go and do the prayer some more.”
The man was simple; he went and he prayed. For three weeks, day and night, he was praying. Even when he was working he was praying and praying.
And by the third week, the priest saw him coming toward the church and he became very much afraid, because the man had such a beautiful aura. He was so full of light that the priest was dazzled. He said, “Now it is difficult – what am I going to say? He has done it. He is coming as the purest person I have ever seen. I am not that pure myself; this aura has not appeared around me either. And this man is coming full of light, radiating light.”
And when the man came closer, the priest was trembling. “Now if he asks, I cannot say no. But I have to say no!”
But the man never came. He just came close to the church, laughed, and went away.
The priest was even more puzzled. He rushed after the man, caught hold of him, and said, “What is the matter? You were coming to the church, were you not?”
He said, “No!”
“Then why did you laugh?”
He said, “I laughed because last night God appeared to me, and he said, ‘Man, why are you trying to get into that church? I don’t live there anymore! And believe me,’ he said, ‘that they will never allow you to come in – because they don’t even allow me!’”
Churches are empty, temples are empty, mosques are empty. God no longer lives there.
God is without cause:
why are you looking for causes?
The sun of truth rises unbidden,
and with it sets the moon of learning.
God is without cause: why are you looking for causes? And people go on asking, “How can I attain to God? How can I cause God to happen to me?” God has no cause. He is already here: he does not have to be caused, he does not even have to be called forth. He was here before you have ever been and he will be here long after you are gone forever.
God is. No asceticism is needed. He makes no conditions on you: “First you must fast, then I will come.” It will be a wrong kind of God who wants you to suffer hunger for many, many days, only then will he come. That will be a sadistic God who wants to torture people: “First stand naked in the hot sun for years and years, only then will I come.”
No mother behaves like that with her child. No mother asks the child to remain hungry for many days, only then will she give her love to the child.
God is the matrix, the mater, the mother. God is the mother out of which we all arise and into which we all disappear. God is love! How can he ask for the stupid things that ascetics have been doing down the ages?
Sufism is not ascetic. God wants you to celebrate. Look at these trees, how green they are and how juicy. Look at his roses, how red they are and how alive. Look at his birds on the wing, look at his stars – the whole of existence is a dance, the whole of existence is a constant celebration. Why should he ask you to become long faces, sad, shrunken? Do you think he wants you to become ugly – to torture yourself, to be violent with yourself, then you will be able to cause him, then you will be able to provoke him? He makes no conditions, remember. His love is unconditional. He has loved you already, that’s why he has created you. Now it is not a question of causing him; he has caused you. Then what has to be done?
The sun of truth rises unbidden… You need not call, you need not provoke, you need not even prepare. All that is needed is that you become disidentified from something that you are not. Whenever you are your reality, your natural reality, God is – because that nature is God. And the moment you are disidentified from all the rubbish of the mind, the moon of learning sets and the sun of wisdom rises in you.
Uncalled, uncaused, he comes of his own accord. God is a happening, it is not something that you have to do. You have to allow him, that’s all. You have to become available, open – and he starts descending, and he starts rising, and he surrounds you from all nooks and corners, and he over-floods you and he starts overflowing from you.
This is my experience, this can be your experience too. Sanai is speaking out of his experience; these are not the words of a philosopher, these are the pregnant messages of a mystic.
In this halt of but a week,
to be is not to be,
and to come is to go.
Don’t become too attached to things here, because it is only a question of a week. Whether seven days or seventy years, it doesn’t matter. Soon you will be gone, and all that you have accumulated will be lost. You come empty-handed, you will go empty-handed. Can’t you live empty-handed? If you can live empty-handed, God is all yours.
And by living empty-handed I don’t mean that you have to go to the Himalayas. It is only awareness. You live as you live, you just change the attitude. I am not saying renounce the world; it is his world – if you renounce it, it is insulting to God. I am not saying renounce your family; it is his family – if you renounce it, you are misbehaving with God.
Then what has to be done? Live in the world and yet be not part of it. Remain empty inside, continuously remembering that the consciousness is a pure mirror. In that awareness, God happens. God is a happening.
And does the sun exist
for the cock to crow at?
What is it to him
whether you are there or not?
Many have come, just like you,
to his door.
And don’t brag about your religiousness. Don’t brag about your disciplines, don’t brag that you have done this for God and that for God. Love never brags. Love does things for the sheer joy of it. You do whatsoever is natural to you, for the sheer joy of it. If you want to paint, paint; if you want to sing, sing; if you want to sculpt, sculpt. Whatsoever you feel like doing, do – but remember, you are not the doer, he is the doer. Let him take possession of you.
You disappear. Let him act through you, and then each act becomes so beautiful, so incredibly beautiful, that you cannot imagine. Then whatsoever you do is holy.
You won’t find your way
in this street; if there is a way,
it is on you road of sighs.
All of you are far
from the road of devotion:
sometimes you are virtuous,
sometimes you are wicked:
so you hope for yourselves, fear for yourselves;
but when your mask of wisdom and folly
at last turns white, you will see
that hope and fear are one.
You won’t find your way in this street. What street? The street of duality: the street of hope and fear, the street of love and hate, the street of darkness and light, the street of the Hindu and the Mohammedan. You will not find God on this street; he does not exist in duality. He is prior to duality, he is before the bifurcation happens. Then where will you find him?
…if there is a way – says Sanai – it is on your road of sighs. Tears. Tears of love, sighs of the heart. It is not on the street of the head but on the street of the heart. Sufism proposes a heart-wakefulness: become loving and aware in your heart. Sufism is the path of love.
All of you are far from the road of devotion… Buddhism is the path of meditation, Zen is meditation. Sufism is the path of love, Sufism is love. And there are only two ways to reach him: either through meditation or through love. And they both meet at the peak, they both become one at the peak. If you attain to one, the other is attained just as part of it; it is only a question of emphasis.
If you become meditative you will be surprised: after meditation, love comes of its own accord. If you love, you will be surprised again: just as a shadow, meditation comes behind it.
Love is the heart of meditation, meditation is the heart of love. They are together, two names for the same phenomenon. The approaches are different, but the same peak, the same climax, is attained. A few people will find it easy to follow the path of meditation – in fact fifty percent of people in the world will find it easy to follow the path of meditation: Zen is their way. And fifty percent will find love closer to their being: Sufism is their way.
In a real world, an intelligent world, there will be only two paths, Sufism and Zen, and all else will disappear. All else is futile. Why two? Because there are men and there are women. And remember, by “men” I don’t mean biological men, because there are women who are psychologically men, and there are men who are psychologically women. I mean psychologically. There are men who are more capable of love than any woman, but they are few. There are a few women who are more capable of meditation than any man, but they are few. The majority of women will have to follow Sufism, and the majority of men will have to follow Zen. But it cannot be determined biologically; it is a totally different affair. You have to watch yourself: whichever feels good for you, whichever feels natural, spontaneous, that is your path.
Sanai has the heart of a woman. All Sufis have the heart of a woman.
All of you are far from the road of devotion: sometimes you are virtuous, sometimes you are wicked… But never devoted. Neither virtue is going to help, nor your wickedness is going to help; that keeps you divided.
I have heard…
A man was about to make his first parachute jump and was very nervous. The instructor tried to reassure him that nothing could happen because first the parachute would open by itself; and if by some remote possibility it didn’t, then there was a backup parachute he could pull the string on; and thirdly if both didn’t work he was to call out the name of the Devil three times.
To make the story short, he jumped and the first parachute failed to open, then the second failed to respond, and in desperation he yelled out “Devil” three times and sure enough a giant hand appeared under him and gently carried him to earth and placed him on the ground. He fell to his knees and in prayer position cried out, “Thank God!” whereupon the giant hand reached over and crushed him to death.
God or the Devil, it is again the same duality, and the duality is going to crush you. Virtue or wickedness, it is the same duality, and the duality is going to crush you.
God is not your God, because your God is something against the Devil. God is something beyond your God and Devil: God is transcendental, God is a transcendence. This transcendence is possible, easily possible; it is not arduous either. Let me remind you again: just change your gestalt from the contents to the consciousness, from the mind to the space in which the mind exists.
There are clouds in the sky: you can see the clouds, then you forget the sky. Change your gestalt: see the sky and forget the clouds. That brings transformation.
The sky is your consciousness, and your thoughts, your desires, are nothing but clouds; they come and go. They don’t touch your sky at all, your sky remains virgin. You are pure from eternity, and you will remain pure to eternity. Purity is your nature. To recognize this, to realize this, is to become enlightened.
And keep the fire of discontent burning. Unless you have become enlightened, don’t leave any stone unturned. You have to become that which you are, because only then is there bliss and only then is there freedom and only then is there benediction.
Enough for today.
exists through him;
your own existence is a mere pretense.
No more nonsense! Lose yourself,
and the hell of your heart becomes a heaven.
Lose yourself, and anything can be accomplished.
Your selfishness is an untrained colt.
You are what you are:
hence your loves and hates;
you are what you are:
hence faith and unbelief.
Hope and fear drive fortune from your door;
lose yourself, and they will be no more.
At his door, what is the difference
between Moslem and Christian,
virtuous and guilty?
At his door all are seekers
and he the sought.
God is without cause:
why are you looking for causes?
The sun of truth rises unbidden,
and with it sets the moon of learning.
In this halt of but a week,
to be is not to be,
and to come is to go.
And does the sun exist
for the cock to crow at?
What is it to him
whether you are there or not?
Many have come, just like you,
to his door.
You won’t find your way
in this street; if there is a way,
it is on your road of sighs.
All of you are far
from the road of devotion:
sometimes you are virtuous,
sometimes you are wicked:
so you hope for yourselves, fear for yourselves;
but when your mask of wisdom and folly
at last turns white, you will see
that hope and fear are one.
Truth is not a tradition. It cannot be, because truth is never old. It is eternally new, it is eternally fresh, as fresh as the dewdrops in the morning or the stars in the night.
The claim of tradition is basically anti-truth. The word tradition comes from a root tradere. It means “handed by someone to somebody else, transferred.” From tradere, the word trade also comes. Truth cannot be transferred from one person to another person. It is impossible to transfer it. It is not a thing, hence it is not transferable. It cannot be traded, nobody can give it, nobody can take it. It arises in each individual’s own being, it is a flowering of your own heart.
Hence, Sufism is not a tradition. No true religion can ever be a tradition; every true religion is bound to be a revolution, a rebellion. And Sufism is one of the most profound, most authentic experiments, inquiries, into truth that has happened on this earth. And Hakim Sanai, into whose sutras we will be entering again today, is one of the three greatest Sufis in the whole history of human consciousness. He makes his part of the trio of the three great masters: Attar, Rumi, Sanai.
You will again be moving with one of the greatest souls for a few days. It is a pilgrimage, a holy pilgrimage; you will be walking on sacred ground. Be very alert, watchful, loving, open, vulnerable, then something can arise in you which can become a transformation; something can be triggered in you. But remember, it is not caused from the outside, it is not a question of cause and effect. Hence it is beyond the reach of science. Science can only understand the law of cause and effect. If something can be caused, it is bound to fall into the field of science. But truth cannot be caused.
Still, in the presence of the master it can happen. It happens uncaused; it is a synchronicity. It is as if somebody is dancing and something is triggered in you – not caused, remember, because no dancer can cause a dance in you – but you start feeling something. You start swaying, you suddenly feel a rush of energy, you would like to dance yourself. This is synchronicity: something has happened in you, parallel but not caused.
I will be here just like a hollow bamboo, available to Hakim Sanai so that he can sing his song, so he can dance his dance. If you are open, something can start happening in you. It will not be transferred from me to you – it cannot be transferred; it will not be caused. I will not be the source of it, you will remain the source of it. But it can be triggered: I can function as a catalytic agent.
These few days, walking with Hakim Sanai, can be life-transforming. You will be here with one of the greatest human beings ever – a human being of the caliber of Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed.
But remember the first thing, that truth is not a tradition. If you believe in tradition, you will never come to know what truth is. Tradition is a belief, borrowed; it is knowledge but not experience. Tradition is scripture, philosophy, words and words – words and words about words. It is a great jungle of theories, and you can be deceived by it very easily. The mind is ready to fall into the trap of it.
Because truth is not a tradition, it cannot be approached through the mind. The mind is a tradition, the mind lives out of the past. The mind is always old; the mind is never original, it is never new, it is never fresh, it is never young, it is never alive. The mind is nothing but the accumulated past; all that you have known in the past has become a tape inside you. It is not the reality of this moment. The mind is a tradition.
Hence if somebody says he is a Hindu or a Christian or a Jaina or a Mohammedan, he is saying he is not religious. He is saying he belongs to the past, not to the present. He is saying he belongs to the mind and not to consciousness.
Consciousness is always of the here and now: it knows no past, it knows no future. And that is the beauty of consciousness – it is meditative. The mind is a thought process, a procession of memories, imaginations, dreams, projections. Consciousness is a purity, a mirror, that simply reflects the reality as it is.
All belief systems have to be dropped, only then can you be a Sufi. And to be a Sufi is the greatest thing that can happen to anybody.
Nobody else except man can be deceived by words; nobody except man can be deceived at all.
I have heard…
Marilyn had a parrot for a pet, but the parrot would embarrass her whenever she came into the apartment with a man. He would shout all kinds of obscenities, always leading off with, “Somebody’s gonna get it tonight! Somebody’s gonna get it tonight!”
In desperation, Marilyn went to her local pet shop and explained her parrot problem to the pet shop proprietor.
“What you need,” he said, “is a female parrot too. I don’t have one on hand, but I will order one. Meanwhile, you could borrow this female owl until the female parrot arrives.”
Marilyn took the owl home and put it near her parrot. It was immediately obvious that the parrot did not care for the owl. He glared at it.
That night, Marilyn wasn’t her usual nervous self as she opened the door to bring her gentleman friend in for a nightcap. Then suddenly she heard the parrot screech and she knew that things had not changed.
“Somebody’s gonna get it tonight! Somebody’s gonna get it tonight!” the parrot said.
The owl said, “Whooo? Whooo?”
And the parrot said, “Not you, you big-eyed son-of-a-bitch!”
Only man can be deceived. You cannot deceive even a parrot, but pundits can be deceived and are deceived. Pundits are greater parrots than parrots themselves.
Beware. Your mind is ready to fall into any trap of words. It can create beautiful theories, philosophies; it can go on manufacturing great systems of thought – all imaginary.
Truth has nothing to do with your imagination. Neither has truth anything to do with your inference, your guesswork. Truth is already here: truth is. All that is needed on your part is not to seek and search for it but to be available, open and empty like a mirror, so that you can reflect that which is. Truth surrounds you; truth is within and without. Only truth is. You need not go anywhere, to Kaaba or to Kashi. You need not even go outside your room, you need not even go outside your body, you need not go anywhere.
Sitting silently, doing nothing, the spring comes and the grass grows by itself. Just sitting silently in your own room, when you are empty, it is revealed.
It was revealed to Mohammed when he was utterly silent and empty, it was revealed to Sanai when he was silent and empty, it was revealed to Mahavira when he was silent and empty. To be empty is to be religious.
But you are so full of knowledge, you are so full of unnecessary luggage, your mind is so much in a constant chattering. You may call it the Veda or you may call it the Koran, it doesn’t matter. Unless you are empty, the Veda is not going to happen to you, the Koran is not going to flow through you. Unless you are empty, you will not contact truth – and truth is another name for God. I am using the word truth so that even atheists are not offended, but truth and God are synonymous, interchangeable, they mean the same thing.
Then what is truth if it is not a tradition? It is a revolution, it is a turning in. Tradition looks backward, tradition looks at others, tradition wants something to be given. Revolution looks inward. Nothing has to be given to you from any source; you already have it, it is already the case. Just turning in, just looking in, waiting, watching, going inward to the core of your being – and it is there.
Sufism is an inner journey. By revolution I don’t mean a political revolution. Political revolutions are not revolutions at all; they only substitute one slavery for another. The only revolution there is, is religious. The only revolution there is, is turning away from tradition and turning inward to the source of your being.
Knowing “Who am I?” is the only revolutionary step – the first and the last, the alpha and the omega.
That’s the meaning of becoming a Sufi, or becoming a sannyasin. Sannyasin is my name for the Sufi: one who is fed up with the outside world, who has known its frustrations, who has known its utter futility, who has known all the anxiety and anguish of it and is ready to dive deep within oneself to know “Who am I?” Because unless one knows oneself, all knowledge is useless.
The foremost, the most fundamental thing, is to become aware at the core of your being. And it is a miracle to become aware of it, because at the core of your being you are always pure, always innocent, always virgin, always celibate. At the very core of your being, you have never left the Garden of Eden, you are still in paradise.
That is the name of Hakim Sanai’s book, the Hadiqa. It means The Garden – the garden of God, paradise.
Where is this paradise? There are foolish people who have been searching for the Garden of Eden. A few think it was in Babylon, a few think it was on the continent of Atlantis which has gone down in the ocean – there has been a search. This is whole complete stupidity.
The garden exists in you. Adam has not been expelled from the Garden of Eden, he has fallen asleep. “The original fall” simply means you have forgotten who you are. Adam has become knowledgeable and has lost his purity of consciousness.
That’s the meaning of the parable of the Tree of Knowledge. Adam has eaten from the Tree of Knowledge – that is the original sin. See the beauty of the parable: knowledge is the original sin, to become knowledgeable is to fall from grace. Then how to attain it again? Drop your knowledge, become innocent again. Be a child again, and you will be able to enter the Garden of Eden.
Adam becomes knowledgeable, Christ becomes innocent. Becoming knowledgeable, Adam starts moving outward, falls victim to philosophies, belief systems, theories, words. Jesus drops all tradition; that’s why the Jews were so angry with him. The Jews are a very traditional people, they were angry because he was a revolutionary. He was a dropout – he simply dropped all the knowledge of all the ancient rabbis and he became innocent. But in becoming innocent he again entered that original state of Adam before he had eaten the fruit of knowledge.
I have heard…
Two university professors are walking around the campus. They are well-known historians and are voicing their respective opinions about Jesus. When they are about to part, one says thoughtfully, “You know, he was really a good fellow, but he didn’t publish.”
The professor, the pundit, the knowledgeable person, the scholar, has no understanding about inner experiences. All that he knows is the rubbish of so-called research work, all that he knows is about words. Those words are hollow, they contain nothing, they are meaningless – because meaning arises only out of one’s own experience.
Sufism is an experiment in existential experience. It is not a philosophy; rather, think of it as a ladder. You don’t agree with or believe in a ladder; you don’t believe in it, you don’t disbelieve in it, either. You climb it, and if it breaks you get a new one. Thus, to treat Sufism as a system to be believed in, or committed to, or attached to is to miss the whole point. It is a ladder, not a belief system. Use it, climb it, go beyond it. It is a boat.
Buddha calls his system a raft: that’s exactly what Sufism is. Use it to go to the other shore, to the further shore, then forget all about it. The truth believed is a lie, the truth borrowed is a lie. My truth cannot be your truth; the moment my truth reaches you, it is no longer the same thing. With me, in me, it had the meaning of my experience. When it goes to you, only words reach you – empty, hollow. You can cling to those words, you can believe too much in those words, and you will be lost.
This is something very basic to be remembered, that Sufism is a practical science, it is pragmatic. It does not depend on philosophizing, speculating and guesswork; it points directly to existential experience.
You can know much about love. You can go and look in the libraries, you can look in the Encyclopedia Britannica, and you will know much about love. But it will be about love – it will not be love. To know love, you will have to fall in love; there is no other way, there is no shortcut.
Two Italians in Rome were talking when an airplane flew overhead and one said to the other, “The pope is aboard that plane.”
“No,” said the other, “he is in southern Italy at the summer Vatican.”
“No, he is aboard that plane,” said the other.
One word led to another, and before long, several thousand liras were bet on whether or not the pope was aboard that plane. The two men rushed to the airport in time to observe the pope emerging from the plane.
The one who lost the bet turned to his friend and said, “Tell me, Tony, how could you tell, twenty thousand feet in the air, that the pope was aboard that plane?”
“Easy,” he said. “It says so right on the outside of the airplane: TWA.”
“What does that mean?”
“Top Wop Aboard.”
Sometimes your guess may even work, but still it is never the truth. Truth has to be experienced.
You are guessing about God, you are arguing about God, speculating about God, fighting about God. And no time is left for experiencing him.
Remember always, that to be here with me, we are not interested in any guesswork, we are interested in going to the real experience of it. And when the experience is possible, why bother arguing about it? Why go round and round? Why not penetrate to the very core? You can go round and round for centuries and you will never arrive anywhere. And you can arrive right now, this very moment, if you go inward.
All these sutras of the Hadiqa are just preparing you to take the inner leap, the inner jump.
Sufism is an attempt to unfreeze habits of thinking, to replace them with less stiff and restricting ones. Sufism is criticizing, dissolving and stepping over all prejudices, loosening all rigid and constricting molds of thought. Sufism is relaxing into your own self; it is a let-go.
When all prejudices have been dropped, all concepts rejected, all scriptures burnt, the whole tradition dropped, then you are innocent, you are unpolluted. In that purity of the present moment, the sun rises.
And that is from where one starts growing into a real human being. It is from there that one starts growing even beyond humanity; one starts surpassing, one starts transcending. Real growth knows no limit. You contain something infinite in you, something oceanic; don’t be contented, don’t be satisfied unless you have known it. That contentment will be a suicide.
I see millions of people: they are all dead, they have committed suicide, because they have become contented – and contented with futile things, contented with nothing.
Never be contented unless you have known your inner being, unless you have come to the innermost shrine. Remain discontented. Sufis call it “the divine discontentment.”
Teilhard de Chardin says, “The most real aspect of living is the passion for growth.” Yes, be in a passionate affair with your own growth. Never allow a single day to pass without growing, otherwise you will remain a seed and you will never know the beauties of being a flower. The spring will come and go, and you will remain dead.
Millions of people are dead. They walk, they talk, they do their job, but all that is mechanical, utterly mechanical. They are moving in a kind of sleep, they are somnambulists.
A man took his wife to a Broadway show. During the first act intermission, he had to urinate in the worst way. He hurried to the back of the theater and searched in vain for the men’s room.
At last he came upon a fountain surrounded by pretty foliage. He realized that he had wandered backstage. Noting that no one was around, and in desperation, he opened his pants and pissed into the fountain.
He had difficulty finding his way back to the auditorium, and by the time he sat down next to his wife, the curtain was up and actors were moving about on the stage.
“Did I miss much of the second act?” he whispered.
“Miss it?” she said. “You were in it!”
But that is the situation. People are moving unconsciously, mechanically, unaware; they don’t know what they are doing. How can they know what they are doing when they don’t know who they are? If you don’t know your being, you can’t be aware of your doing; it is impossible. First, one has to be aware of the being – and that is growth. Growing inward is growth, reaching inward is growth.
The sutras:
My friend, everything existing
exists through him;
your own existence is a mere pretense.
No more nonsense! Lose yourself,
and the hell of your heart becomes heaven.
Lose yourself, and anything can be accomplished.
Your selfishness is an untrained colt.
First, remember. Hakim Sanai addresses you as My friend… That’s the attitude of all the great masters. The disciple thinks that the master is very, very far away – and from the side of the disciple it is true, because he is fast asleep. In his sleep, the master is a faraway star.
But the same is not the case from the side of the master. The master knows that you may be asleep but you are a buddha, you may be asleep but you are a god. The disciple may not know that he is a god, but the master knows it. The moment he knows himself to be divine, he knows the whole existence to be divine. From the master’s side, nobody is a disciple, all are masters. A few are asleep, a few are awake; the difference is only that much. From the side of the master, it is only a question of time: tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, or who knows, you may even become enlightened today.
The potential is there. From the side of the seed, the flower is far away. But the flower knows that the seed contains flowers, infinite flowers. From the side of the flower, the seed is a friend.
And if you find a master who does not think in those terms, then remember, know well, he is not a master yet. If he thinks that you are sinners, if he thinks that you are fallen souls, then he is not a master yet; he has not come to realize his own reality.
Buddha is reported to have said, “The day I became enlightened, the whole existence became enlightened for me – even trees, even rocks.”
Hakim Sanai says: My friend, everything existing exists through him… God is the only reality – or call it truth, or nature, or Tao, or whatsoever you will. Names don’t matter. Don’t go on fighting about names; XYZ, anything will do. Just remember one thing, that something is there, miraculously present, which surrounds all, which permeates all.
Sufis say: “As the absolute maximum, God contains all things.” In fact that is the definition of God: one who contains all. He is there enfolding and there unfolding. God is in the seed, God is in the flower – in the seed hidden, in the flower manifest. God is in the sinner and is in the saint – in the sinner asleep, in the saint awake. But all is God: God is equivalent to existence.
Christian mystics use two words: one is complicatio, it means enfolding. God is complicatio, enfolding, and explicatio, unfolding. These are the two movements of God: enfolding and manifesting. Each seed becomes the flower, and then in its own turn the flower becomes the seed, and the circle is complete.
Just as every night you fall asleep, and in the morning you are awake again, so is God – in nature asleep, in buddhas awake. Just to understand it is a great liberation. Suddenly you have self-worth; suddenly you are no longer a condemned being. Suddenly you are an essential part of existence; you are not accidental, you participate in God’s work in your own way. You need God, God needs you; you are not unneeded.
In this century, millions of people are feeling unneeded, because God has disappeared from their lives. And this is one of the most fundamental needs, to be needed. If you feel needed, you feel worthy. If you feel not needed, you feel worthless, you feel like dirt.
That’s why people get married, because a woman will be there who will need them. Husbands don’t like their wives to work, because then they are needed less, then they are worth less. Husbands like their wives to be constantly in need of them; that gives them worth, a feeling of importance.
The wife also in her own way makes the husband utterly dependent; without her he will not be able to exist. Even if she goes away for one day, the husband is at a loss. He cannot find a thing in his own house; he comes to know that without the wife it is impossible to exist. Then they both bring children into the world, and both are happy because the children need them immensely, absolutely.
That’s why people like children – they are helpless, they are dependent. But sooner or later, the children will go their own way. And this is one of the problems in the world: when children have gone their own way and they have settled with their own families, then old people, aged people, start feeling worthless – nobody needs them.
Now it is a psychological truth that once a person starts feeling he is not needed, he starts committing suicide, psychological suicide. He dies ten years earlier. When he is retired from his job he starts shrinking – now he is no longer needed. He was a boss and so many people were clamoring around him; he was doing something essential for the society. That job is gone. Now if he dies, it will not make any difference, the world will continue as it is.
The children have become grown-up, they have gone to live their own lives, and the old people simply feel discarded. They start dying slowly, shrinking. They were healthy when they were in their work, when they were needed they were healthy. But now suddenly something disappears; the earth underneath their feet disappears, they are no longer needed.
We make arbitrary needs. But the man who has the sense that “God exists, and I am needed by God,” never feels worthless – never. To the last moment, to the last breath of his life, he is functioning, serving something higher than himself. He has a context bigger than himself; in that context, meaning arises.
Meaning is always in a certain context. A single word is meaningless; when it is arranged in poetry it has tremendous meaning, now it has a context. The color in a tube is meaningless; once it is spread on the canvas and becomes part of a picture that is bigger than it, it has a context, suddenly meaning arises.
It is reported that once a very rich man asked Pablo Picasso to make a portrait of him, Picasso said, “It will be very costly.” The man was so rich, he said, “Don’t bother about it. You need not even talk about the cost, money doesn’t matter. Make my portrait and whatsoever you demand, I will give.”
After six months the portrait was ready. The rich man came, but the price that was asked was fantastic: one million dollars, just for a small canvas and a few colors. The rich man said, “Are you joking? Just for a few colors and a canvas?”
Picasso said, “Then okay, you can take an empty canvas and a few tubes full of color and you can pay as much as you want.”
The rich man said, “But that is not the same.”
Picasso aid, “That’s what I am trying to point out to you. I have created a context, I have created a gestalt, a pattern. And nobody else can create it, hence the price. It is a Picasso painting. Nobody else can do it the way I have done it, it has my signature on it. The harmony of the colors, the music of the colors, the poetry of the colors – that is the thing. I am not asking the price for the colors but for something that has become expressed through the colors.”
A real painting is not just the sum total of the colors, it is more than the sum total – and that “more” is the meaning. A real life is not the sum total of what you do; unless there is something more to it, you live an inauthentic life. That “more” is God. That poetry is God, the music is God, that surrounds you, floods you.
People come to me and ask, “Where is God?” It is not a question of asking where; God is a meaning, not a person. I cannot indicate, “There – go there, and you will find him.” God has no address, God cannot be located, it is a meaning. You have to create meaning in your life, then God is. God has to be created.
And the start of that creating is to becoming more and more sensitive to the existence that surrounds you. The trees, the rocks, the stars, the earth – you are surrounded by a great poetry. But you remain separate, hence you go on missing it.
My friend, everything existing exists through him; your own existence is a mere pretense. If you live separately, if you think, “I am separate,” if you live as an ego, then your existence is a pretense. Then your existence will remain meaningless. Then you will never know the glory and the grandeur of life; you will never know the splendors that have always been available to you but you went on missing.
If you exist as a separate individual, you have created a wall around yourself, you have become an island. And no man is an island, we are part of an infinite continent. That continent is God. We are parts of an ocean. The moment you recognize that we are parts of an ocean, your life starts having a context bigger than you, higher than you. In that context is the beginning of meaning – and meaning is God.
No more nonsense! says Sanai. Lose yourself, and the hell of your heart becomes a heaven. Just a single step is enough: Lose yourself… Don’t exist as an “I,” don’t go on proclaiming yourself as an ego. Drop the ego, and suddenly, immediately, instantly, the hell of your life turns into a heaven. Misery disappears.
Misery is a by-product of your separation. Bliss is the shadow of falling back into the unity, unio mystica. When again you start feeling like a wave in the ocean, misery cannot exist. What is misery? The fear of death. But you can die only if you are separate, you cannot die if you are not separate.
If the wave thinks, “I am separate from the ocean,” it is going to die; it will remain afraid, trembling. If it knows it is part of the ocean it is not going to die. It will fall back into the source, it will come again; it will go, it will come, it will appear and disappear, but it cannot die.
Birth is appearance, death is disappearance. But neither is birth the beginning nor is death the end: the ocean continues. To have this oceanic feeling is meditation, is prayer.
Lose yourself, and anything can be accomplished. Then the impossible is possible, because nothing is impossible for God. We have unnecessarily become too narrow, too tiny; we have become mundane. We have lost our own heritage, we are not aware of all the beauties that we contain and of all the potential that is intrinsically present in us.
Your selfishness is an untrained colt. Your selfishness is nothing but your unawareness, your lack of discipline. Create an inner discipline, a little training in awareness, and your selfishness will disappear, because your self will disappear.
And when there is no self left, then the real Self with a capital S, the supreme Self, arrives. You disappear as a wave, you appear as the ocean. That is liberation.
Recognize the Self – the self which is not the ego, the self which has nothing of the ego in it. Hindu mystics have called it the atman. Buddha has given it a totally different name, not only different but diametrically opposite: he has called it anatta, no-self.
The Self is a no-self, because there is no ego in it. To be an ego is to fall from your reality – the original sin. The Self is not the ego, absolutely not; it is not personal, either. It is misleading to speak of “my self.” The Self is universal. The moment you say “my self” you have lost track of the universal and you have become small. Now you will feel suffocated; you have created the suffocation yourself.
The Self, the real Self, the supreme Self, is beyond any person, identification, form, process, position. But they all arise in it and dissolve in it – it is the ocean. The Self is the space in which everything appears and disappears. That space has to be found within yourself. Don’t get identified with any content, otherwise the ego arises.
For example, there is sadness surrounding you. Immediately you become identified, you say, “I am sad.” That is stupid, unintelligent, you are unaware, you don’t know what you are saying. You are not the sadness, you are the witness. Sadness is there, but you are separate from it: you are the knower of it.
Say, “I am seeing that sadness surrounds me,” but don’t say, “I am sad.” Anger is there, but don’t say, “I am anger,” or “I am angry.” Simply say, “There is anger, I can see it is there.” Anger is the content of your consciousness, it is not the consciousness itself. Consciousness is the space, the witnessing space.
This is the revolution, if you forget the content and remember the consciousness. Two things are continuously happening in you: the content and consciousness. A thought passes through your mind and you become identified with it; you say, “I am it.” If you are hungry, you say, “I am hungry.” Please be a little more aware: say, “I watch, I am a witness, that the body is feeling hungry.”
When you have eaten well and you feel satiated, don’t say, “I am satiated.” Again, remember. Because of our ignorance we have created a wrong kind of language too. We say, “I am satiated.” You were never hungry and you are never satiated. Hunger was a content, so is satiation. Sadness was a content, so is happiness.
This mindfulness Sufis call zikr, remembrance. Buddha has called it “mindfulness, right awareness.”
Just go on cutting yourself off from the content. Slowly, slowly, the bridge is broken. The day you recognize the fact that you are never the content but always the consciousness, you have arrived home.
The English word contemplation is very beautiful; it comes from a root tem. Tem means “to cut off.” From the same root comes temple; that too is beautiful. Temple means “that which cuts you off from the world,” and contemplation means “the process of cutting yourself off from the mind, from the content.” Identification is the fall: you become Adam, you are expelled. Through disidentification, cutting yourself off from the mind and its contents, you become Christ. You are no longer outgoing, the inner journey has started. Adam has turned toward the source, is returning home.
The self arises out of identification, self with a lower-case s arises out of identification. Self with a capital S arises out of disidentification. And this is the whole art of religion.
You are what you are:
hence your loves and hates;
you are what you are:
hence faith and unbelief.
Right now you are a duality: you are consciousness and content. You are divided into these two. Hence in your whole life there is a dualism. You love a person and you hate the same person, you believe and you disbelieve. And they go together – belief and disbelief, love and hate, anger and compassion, happiness and unhappiness, these are two sides of the same coin. Because you are double, each act of yours is going to be double, dual. And in that duality is misery, because in duality there is tension.
You are always torn apart. You love a woman, and you hate the same woman. Hence couples go on quarreling continuously. It is something to be understood. Why do couples go on quarreling continuously? They love, certainly they love, but why do they hate? It remains a mystery if you don’t understand the duality of man. He is dual in everything. Unless you become disidentified with the mind, you will never become non-dual.
That’s why I say that only one who has arrived can love, and he can love without hate. His love will not have hate at all in it, his flame will be smokeless. Your flame cannot be smokeless, your love will have smoke – your love will remain poisoned with hate. Your belief is nothing but a hidden disbelief; behind your belief there is always doubt. You say, “I believe in God” – but just search a little bit more and you will see that there is doubt.
When one is pure consciousness, there is neither belief nor disbelief. That state is called trust: there is no doubt and there is no belief.
A man, a professor of philosophy, came to Sri Aurobindo and asked him, “Do you believe in God?” And Aurobindo said, “No, not at all.”
The philosopher was very puzzled and confused. He had come a long, long way from a faraway place to see this man, thinking that he had known God. And here is this man, and he says, “I don’t even believe in God.”
The philosopher asked, “What are you saying? You don’t believe in God?”
Aurobindo said, “Yes – I cannot believe in God, because I know him.”
When you know, you know; there is no question of belief. Belief is out of ignorance, belief is because of doubt. If you ask me, I cannot say I believe in God. I know.
You don’t believe in the sun, you know. Do you believe this is day? If somebody believes, that will only show that he is blind. A man who has eyes need not believe that this is day – this is day! Only a blind man can believe this is day.
When consciousness is not contaminated by content moving around you, when your inner space is pure – it is always pure, you just have to recognize the fact – suddenly all duality disappears. And with duality, hell.
Hell is nothing but duality. Loving the same man and hating the same man is hell, believing in God and doubting God is hell. You are moving in diametrically opposite directions, you will fall apart. It is a miracle how you go on holding yourself together at all, why you don’t fall from the wall like Humpty Dumpty.
Hope and fear drive fortune from your door:
lose yourself, and they will be no more.
Sanai says: “Hope and fear are two aspects of the same coin.” If you hope, there will always be fear. Hope is out of fear, it is not against fear. You are hoping that tomorrow something is going to happen, something great for which you have always been hoping. Now, can you be without fear? It may happen, it may not happen; you may be able to make it, you may not be able to make it. It is always a question of to be or not to be, it is always ambiguous, and there is fear.
Buddha says: “Drop hope.” And the first time he said to a disciple, “Drop hope,” the disciple was puzzled. He said, “If I drop hope, then all is lost! Because it is hope I live through, I live for.”
Buddha said, “Don’t be worried – drop hope!” And you will be surprised, because the moment you drop hope, fear disappears. And when there is no fear and no hope, one is integrated; there is no division.
Division is hell. To become integrated is heaven – to become crystallized, to be one: one piece, one whole, one unity; not even a union but a unity. Remember, a union is not a unity, it is an arrangement: you have many selves and they have all arranged to live in a kind of coexistence, they have decided not to fight. This is a union – but the fight can break out at any moment.
Hindus and Mohammedans lived for so many years in Aligarh silently; that was a union. Then one day, anything, any nonsense, and the union is gone. Hindus and Mohammedans had lived so long in this country together; it was a union, it is gone. Now there are two countries, India and Pakistan. Then Pakistan was divided into two countries, Bangladesh and Pakistan.
These are all unions. Unity means all the small selves have disappeared and the supreme Self has arrived. Now there is no possibility of ever becoming divided again.
At his door, what is the difference
between Moslem and Christian,
virtuous and guilty?
At his door all are seekers
and he the sought.
Meditate over these beautiful words of Sanai. At his door… nobody is a Christian or a Mohammedan or a Hindu or a Buddhist. At his door… you are a lover and he the beloved. At his door… you are the seeker and he is the sought. At his door… you are the river and he is the ocean.
And when the Ganges disappears in the ocean, do you think the ocean receives the Ganges in a different way than it receives other rivers? The ocean does not even know the name – which is the Ganges and which is the Brahmaputra and which is the Volga and which is the Amazon. When the river disappears in the ocean it loses all name, all form.
That’s why I say again and again that a really religious person cannot be a Mohammedan and cannot be Hindu and cannot be Jaina and cannot be a Sikh. A really religious person is only a lover, a seeker. He cannot become identified with any church. He cannot have any adjective.
Mohammed is not a Mohammedan, cannot be. And Christ is not a Christian, cannot be. And Buddha is not a Buddhist, cannot be.
And I say to you, don’t you be Hindus and Mohammedans and Christians and Buddhists, either. If you become a Buddhist you will never be a buddha, remember, and if you become a Mohammedan you will never be a mohammed. If you become a Christian you have missed an opportunity of being a christ – and to be a christ is beautiful and to be a mohammed is a benediction. To be a Mohammedan, to be a Hindu, is just ugly; it is just political, and nothing else. It has nothing to do with religion.
Listen to this great Sufi, Sanai: At his door, what is the difference between Moslem and Christian, virtuous and guilty? He says: There is not even a difference between the sinner and the saint. At his door, differences disappear. Nobody is a sinner and nobody is a saint, and nobody is virtuous and nobody is guilty.
You will not reach to godliness as virtuous, because that is the ego. To feel that “I am virtuous” is the subtlest ego – to feel about oneself, “I know, because I have crammed the Vedas; I know, because I can recite the Koran.” If you try to reach God as knowledgeable, you will never reach; his doors will remain closed for you. His doors can open only when you are innocent. When you are neither virtuous nor guilty, when you are neither knowledgeable nor ignorant, when you are neither a man nor a woman, neither white nor black – only then.
I have heard…
A Negro knocked on the door of a church one night. In the day of course he was afraid: the church belonged to white people, they wouldn’t allow him to. But he knew the priest, he was a nice man: maybe at night, when nobody was looking, he might allow him in – he wanted to worship in the church.
The priest opened the door. He was a nice man – but to be a nice man is one thing, and to be a real man is totally different. All these nice formalities are just pseudo, phony. He had been saying great things, but when this Negro knocked on the door and he opened the door and the Negro said, “Would you please allow me to come in? I will not tell anybody, but I want to worship God,” the priest was puzzled: what to do? His mask was that of a nice man, very religious, saintly; because of the mask, he could not say no. But deep down, the reality was that he was as much a sectarian, a believer in color, as anybody else. So his deeper core was not ready to allow the man to come in – the church would be polluted, poisoned.
So he found a strategy, a technique, to avoid. He said, “Yes, you can come in but first you have to become pure. I will give you a prayer: do this prayer, it takes years before one becomes pure. When you have become pure, come back, and if I see that you have become pure, I will allow you to come in.”
The poor man believed him. This was just a strategy to avoid the situation, so that the priest need not say yes or no. And this was a tricky thing. If he ever comes, you can always say, “You have not become pure yet: go and do the prayer some more.”
The man was simple; he went and he prayed. For three weeks, day and night, he was praying. Even when he was working he was praying and praying.
And by the third week, the priest saw him coming toward the church and he became very much afraid, because the man had such a beautiful aura. He was so full of light that the priest was dazzled. He said, “Now it is difficult – what am I going to say? He has done it. He is coming as the purest person I have ever seen. I am not that pure myself; this aura has not appeared around me either. And this man is coming full of light, radiating light.”
And when the man came closer, the priest was trembling. “Now if he asks, I cannot say no. But I have to say no!”
But the man never came. He just came close to the church, laughed, and went away.
The priest was even more puzzled. He rushed after the man, caught hold of him, and said, “What is the matter? You were coming to the church, were you not?”
He said, “No!”
“Then why did you laugh?”
He said, “I laughed because last night God appeared to me, and he said, ‘Man, why are you trying to get into that church? I don’t live there anymore! And believe me,’ he said, ‘that they will never allow you to come in – because they don’t even allow me!’”
Churches are empty, temples are empty, mosques are empty. God no longer lives there.
God is without cause:
why are you looking for causes?
The sun of truth rises unbidden,
and with it sets the moon of learning.
God is without cause: why are you looking for causes? And people go on asking, “How can I attain to God? How can I cause God to happen to me?” God has no cause. He is already here: he does not have to be caused, he does not even have to be called forth. He was here before you have ever been and he will be here long after you are gone forever.
God is. No asceticism is needed. He makes no conditions on you: “First you must fast, then I will come.” It will be a wrong kind of God who wants you to suffer hunger for many, many days, only then will he come. That will be a sadistic God who wants to torture people: “First stand naked in the hot sun for years and years, only then will I come.”
No mother behaves like that with her child. No mother asks the child to remain hungry for many days, only then will she give her love to the child.
God is the matrix, the mater, the mother. God is the mother out of which we all arise and into which we all disappear. God is love! How can he ask for the stupid things that ascetics have been doing down the ages?
Sufism is not ascetic. God wants you to celebrate. Look at these trees, how green they are and how juicy. Look at his roses, how red they are and how alive. Look at his birds on the wing, look at his stars – the whole of existence is a dance, the whole of existence is a constant celebration. Why should he ask you to become long faces, sad, shrunken? Do you think he wants you to become ugly – to torture yourself, to be violent with yourself, then you will be able to cause him, then you will be able to provoke him? He makes no conditions, remember. His love is unconditional. He has loved you already, that’s why he has created you. Now it is not a question of causing him; he has caused you. Then what has to be done?
The sun of truth rises unbidden… You need not call, you need not provoke, you need not even prepare. All that is needed is that you become disidentified from something that you are not. Whenever you are your reality, your natural reality, God is – because that nature is God. And the moment you are disidentified from all the rubbish of the mind, the moon of learning sets and the sun of wisdom rises in you.
Uncalled, uncaused, he comes of his own accord. God is a happening, it is not something that you have to do. You have to allow him, that’s all. You have to become available, open – and he starts descending, and he starts rising, and he surrounds you from all nooks and corners, and he over-floods you and he starts overflowing from you.
This is my experience, this can be your experience too. Sanai is speaking out of his experience; these are not the words of a philosopher, these are the pregnant messages of a mystic.
In this halt of but a week,
to be is not to be,
and to come is to go.
Don’t become too attached to things here, because it is only a question of a week. Whether seven days or seventy years, it doesn’t matter. Soon you will be gone, and all that you have accumulated will be lost. You come empty-handed, you will go empty-handed. Can’t you live empty-handed? If you can live empty-handed, God is all yours.
And by living empty-handed I don’t mean that you have to go to the Himalayas. It is only awareness. You live as you live, you just change the attitude. I am not saying renounce the world; it is his world – if you renounce it, it is insulting to God. I am not saying renounce your family; it is his family – if you renounce it, you are misbehaving with God.
Then what has to be done? Live in the world and yet be not part of it. Remain empty inside, continuously remembering that the consciousness is a pure mirror. In that awareness, God happens. God is a happening.
And does the sun exist
for the cock to crow at?
What is it to him
whether you are there or not?
Many have come, just like you,
to his door.
And don’t brag about your religiousness. Don’t brag about your disciplines, don’t brag that you have done this for God and that for God. Love never brags. Love does things for the sheer joy of it. You do whatsoever is natural to you, for the sheer joy of it. If you want to paint, paint; if you want to sing, sing; if you want to sculpt, sculpt. Whatsoever you feel like doing, do – but remember, you are not the doer, he is the doer. Let him take possession of you.
You disappear. Let him act through you, and then each act becomes so beautiful, so incredibly beautiful, that you cannot imagine. Then whatsoever you do is holy.
You won’t find your way
in this street; if there is a way,
it is on you road of sighs.
All of you are far
from the road of devotion:
sometimes you are virtuous,
sometimes you are wicked:
so you hope for yourselves, fear for yourselves;
but when your mask of wisdom and folly
at last turns white, you will see
that hope and fear are one.
You won’t find your way in this street. What street? The street of duality: the street of hope and fear, the street of love and hate, the street of darkness and light, the street of the Hindu and the Mohammedan. You will not find God on this street; he does not exist in duality. He is prior to duality, he is before the bifurcation happens. Then where will you find him?
…if there is a way – says Sanai – it is on your road of sighs. Tears. Tears of love, sighs of the heart. It is not on the street of the head but on the street of the heart. Sufism proposes a heart-wakefulness: become loving and aware in your heart. Sufism is the path of love.
All of you are far from the road of devotion… Buddhism is the path of meditation, Zen is meditation. Sufism is the path of love, Sufism is love. And there are only two ways to reach him: either through meditation or through love. And they both meet at the peak, they both become one at the peak. If you attain to one, the other is attained just as part of it; it is only a question of emphasis.
If you become meditative you will be surprised: after meditation, love comes of its own accord. If you love, you will be surprised again: just as a shadow, meditation comes behind it.
Love is the heart of meditation, meditation is the heart of love. They are together, two names for the same phenomenon. The approaches are different, but the same peak, the same climax, is attained. A few people will find it easy to follow the path of meditation – in fact fifty percent of people in the world will find it easy to follow the path of meditation: Zen is their way. And fifty percent will find love closer to their being: Sufism is their way.
In a real world, an intelligent world, there will be only two paths, Sufism and Zen, and all else will disappear. All else is futile. Why two? Because there are men and there are women. And remember, by “men” I don’t mean biological men, because there are women who are psychologically men, and there are men who are psychologically women. I mean psychologically. There are men who are more capable of love than any woman, but they are few. There are a few women who are more capable of meditation than any man, but they are few. The majority of women will have to follow Sufism, and the majority of men will have to follow Zen. But it cannot be determined biologically; it is a totally different affair. You have to watch yourself: whichever feels good for you, whichever feels natural, spontaneous, that is your path.
Sanai has the heart of a woman. All Sufis have the heart of a woman.
All of you are far from the road of devotion: sometimes you are virtuous, sometimes you are wicked… But never devoted. Neither virtue is going to help, nor your wickedness is going to help; that keeps you divided.
I have heard…
A man was about to make his first parachute jump and was very nervous. The instructor tried to reassure him that nothing could happen because first the parachute would open by itself; and if by some remote possibility it didn’t, then there was a backup parachute he could pull the string on; and thirdly if both didn’t work he was to call out the name of the Devil three times.
To make the story short, he jumped and the first parachute failed to open, then the second failed to respond, and in desperation he yelled out “Devil” three times and sure enough a giant hand appeared under him and gently carried him to earth and placed him on the ground. He fell to his knees and in prayer position cried out, “Thank God!” whereupon the giant hand reached over and crushed him to death.
God or the Devil, it is again the same duality, and the duality is going to crush you. Virtue or wickedness, it is the same duality, and the duality is going to crush you.
God is not your God, because your God is something against the Devil. God is something beyond your God and Devil: God is transcendental, God is a transcendence. This transcendence is possible, easily possible; it is not arduous either. Let me remind you again: just change your gestalt from the contents to the consciousness, from the mind to the space in which the mind exists.
There are clouds in the sky: you can see the clouds, then you forget the sky. Change your gestalt: see the sky and forget the clouds. That brings transformation.
The sky is your consciousness, and your thoughts, your desires, are nothing but clouds; they come and go. They don’t touch your sky at all, your sky remains virgin. You are pure from eternity, and you will remain pure to eternity. Purity is your nature. To recognize this, to realize this, is to become enlightened.
And keep the fire of discontent burning. Unless you have become enlightened, don’t leave any stone unturned. You have to become that which you are, because only then is there bliss and only then is there freedom and only then is there benediction.
Enough for today.