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Kabir

THE FISH IN THE SEA IS NOT THIRSTY

Chapter 1: But Man Is

 

 

Energy Enhancement                Enlightened Texts                Kabir                The Fish in the Sea is Not Thirsty

 

 

I LAUGH WHEN I HEAR THAT THE FISH IN THE WATER

IS THIRSTY.

YOU DON'T GRASP THE FACT THAT WHAT IS MOST

ALIVE OF ALL IS INSIDE YOUR OWN HOUSE;

AND SO YOU WALK FROM ONE HOLY CITY TO THE NEXT

WITH A CONFUSED LOOK!

KABIR WILL TELL YOU THE TRUTH: GO WHEREVER YOU

LIKE, TO CALCUTTA OR TIBET;

IF YOU CAN'T FIND WHERE YOUR SOUL IS HIDDEN,

FOR YOU THE WORLD WILL NEVER BE REAL!

I DON'T KNOW WHAT SORT OF A GOD WE HAVE BEEN

TALKING ABOUT.

THE CALLER CALLS IN A LOUD VOICE TO THE HOLY ONE

AT DUSK.

WHY? SURELY THE HOLY ONE IS NOT DEAF.

HE HEARS THE DELICATE ANKLETS THAT RING ON THE

FEET OF AN INSECT AS IT WALKS.

GO OVER AND OVER YOUR BEADS, PAINT WEIRD DESIGNS

ON YOUR FOREHEAD,

WEAR YOUR HAIR MATTED, LONG, AND OSTENTATIOUS,

BUT WHEN DEEP INSIDE YOU THERE IS A LOADED GUN,

HOW CAN YOU HAVE GOD?

The fish in the sea is not thirsty -- but man is. Man lives in God, and is absolutely unaware of it. Man is born in God, breathes in God, and one day will dissolve in God. MAN IS GOD, made of the stuff called God, and yet completely oblivious of the fact.

The fish is not thirsty in the sea, but man is. God is the sea -- God surrounds you, within and without. All that is is divine. God is not a person: God is the presence that is overflowing everywhere in all directions. The radiance, the beauty of existence, the splendour, the majestic, the miraculous, the mysterious -- the whole magic of life is God.

God has not to be worshipped: God has to be lived. And to live God you need not go anywhere -- you are already in him. To live God you need not cultivate any character. God is already the case. He is your consciousness.

To live God you need not become a Hindu or a Mohammedan or a Christian -- you are already in it, he is already in you. It is not a question of the future. THIS very moment God is showering on you. But you are closed. He comes, but you don't receive him. He knocks on your doors, but you don't listen to him. And he has been knocking for ages.

The old biblical story is: when Adam disobeyed God, he was frightened, obviously. God came in  search of him. Afraid, he went behind a bush just to hide from God. he was not courageous enough to face him, to encounter him. And the story says God called in the Garden of Eden, "Adam, where are you?"

Adam heard it, yet did not respond.

This is not just a story, this is not something that happened in the past: this is what is happening with EACH of you. God calls you -- either you don't hear, or, even if sometimes you hear, you don't respond. You are hiding! You are hiding from the truth of your own being; you are hiding from yourself. You don't want to see your original face: God IS your original face. and unless you see your original face, you will live in misery.

Misery is nothing but remaining ignorant of one's own being. To be alert, to be conscious, of all that has been given to you, to be conscious of all that has been bestowed upon you, to be conscious of the treasures that are hidden in your being, is to be blissful.

Man is very strange, the strangest animal on the earth. no other animal lives in such anguish -- even trees are far more blissful, even rocks have more of the heart than man. They are in tune with God, or in tune with totality. man has lost the connection. Man has broken the bridge.

Why has it happened? It has to be understood. And it has happened to almost all. Only once in a while does there happen a person who reconnects himself with God -- a Jesus, a Buddha, a Kabir -- but only once in a while. and these people are so few that they cannot be believed.

People go on talking about Jesus, Buddha, Mahavira, Zarathustra, Mohammed, but deep down they doubt their very existence. They HAVE to doubt! Nothing like that has happened to you. You have not tasted any of the nectar that they talk about. your life is just bitter, your life is nauseous, your life is sick -- and they talk of wholeness and of health, and of great bliss and of eternal peace... and you know nothing of these things!

Your only experience is that of a very poisoned life, a very poisoned spirit. Your experience is so much opposed to what these few people say -- how can you believe in them? And you are the majority. Millions and millions will support your experience that life is hell.

And Krishna sings songs celestial on his flute, songs of the beyond. And Kabir sings songs unbelievable! You may listen out of courtesy; you may not say anything out of formality; or maybe just the presence of a Jesus, of a Kabir, of a Bayazid, is so enchanting, so charming, it has such a charisma that it overpowers you, that you become dumb, that you cannot say no. But your not saying no does not mean that you are saying yes. They are two totally different things.

Not to say no is one thing, and to say yes is a totally different phenomenon. Not to say no is not going to change you. The no will remain in you -- silent, unspoken. The no will surround your being like a transparent capsule. You may not be able to see it, you may be able to see through it, but it will not allow you to meet and merge with existence -- unless your are capable of saying YES! That single word, 'yes', contains all the religions; all the Vedas and the Bibles and the Korans are contained in the single word 'yes'.

That is the meaning of the word Christians, Jews and Mohammedans have been using to complete their prayers -- AMEN. AMEN means, "yes, God, yes -- I say to total yes to you."

You may not argue with Kabir -- it is difficult to argue with a man like Kabir. His presence has such weight; his eyes, his fragrance, are hypnotic. Even in you want to argue you would not like to argue. But the argument remains. And once Kabir is gone, Jesus is gone, the argument surfaces, the no comes to the surface, and the formal silence is found to be impotent.

People go to the churches and to the temples and to the mosques, and it is all formality. It is nothing but Sunday religion. It is a social phenomenon; they are not individually committed, they are not involved. They are not going to the church or the temple to be transformed. It has a social utility; it is a kind of club -- you can call it a religious club, where people can meet and gossip and talk. It is a meeting-place, but not a meeting-place between you and God. That's what it is supposed to be, but it is not.

You go to the temple empty-handed, you come back from the temple empty-handed. Nothing has been happening there. It cannot happen this way. God needs commitment, involvement; God asks for your totality, your surrender, your yes.

And when you say yes, with no strings attached to it, with no conditions, when the yes is unconditional, and has not been said out of coercion but has welled up spontaneously within you, it has a tremendous beauty to it, and tremendous power too. Its very fire transforms you from the base metal into gold, from an ordinary human being into an extraordinary divine existence.

But, remember, your yes should not come out of any sort of coercion, physical or psychological. Somebody is a Christian because he has been coerced from his very childhood to be a Christian, and somebody is a Jew because he has been coerced from the very beginning to be a Jew. A great psychological conditioning is going on. Children are being exploited; children are being forced to be Hindus, Jainas, Buddhists. The parents are not even aware of what they are doing to their children: they are preventing their children from ever becoming religious. Yes, that's what they are doing to their children. In the name of religion they are poisoning their innocent souls. They think, they may even believe, that they are helping their children towards God. The truth is just the contrary: they are creating great barriers.

Once a man has said yes under coercion, once a man has yielded because he was forced to yield, you have destroyed his capacity to say yes spontaneously for ever. He will say yes only when he is coerced.

Children are helpless. They depend on you, they cannot survive without you -- you can exploit their vulnerability, you can exploit their helplessness. And that's what has been done on the earth for centuries and centuries. Hence, so much talk of God, and you cannot see God anywhere; so much talk of religion, so much of theology, but nothing of the existential.

Everybody is religious in a way -- somebody is Hindu, somebody is Mohammedan, somebody is Christian -- and nobody is religious in reality. We have created a fiction of being religious, and the fiction is so cheap, is so easily available, who is going then on the adventure to seek and search for God? That is arduous. One has to risk -- one has to risk one's ego, and that is the MOST arduous thing in life.

UNLESS ONE IS READY TO DISSOLVE ONE'S EGO, the fish is going to remain thirsty. Dissolve the ego and all thirst disappears, because the moment you dissolve the ego, the wall between you and the ocean disappears; then you are part of the ocean. How can you be thirsty then?

And man is certainly thirsty! hungry, in deep anguish. Man lives a very phony life, inauthentic. He only pretends to live; he does not really live. He goes through all the empty gestures of living, but look at people, look at yourself, look at others -- you will not see the dance. People are dragging; life seems to be a burden, a great burden, somehow to be tolerated. Life is not a celebration, and that's what it should be.

Your steps don't have the quality of dance. Your heart is not throbbing with ecstasy. You are not pulsating and vibrating with joy, with love. You are not overflowing with energy.What kind of life is this? Just going round and round in circles, dead, dull, stupid routines. Just hoping that tomorrow something will happen... and the tomorrow never comes, and nothing ever happens. Waiting for Godot, and Godot never comes. You go on waiting and waiting and waiting and all that ever comes is death.

But life is so miserable that even death feels like a relief. Life is so empty that it is very rare to find a human being who has not contemplated, some time or other, committing suicide. Life is so empty that we go on keeping ourselves occupied -- with any rubbish, just to remain occupied so that we don't see the emptiness, so we don't see the inner vacuum, the inner darkness.

Just watch and you will see that man is living in great anguish, anxiety. Man is already in hell. When somebody asks me, "Osho, do you believe there is a hell?" I always say, "There is no question of believing -- you are living in it." Hell cannot be doubted; heaven can be doubted but not hell. Hell is such a day-to-day reality! But why? -- why should it be so? Why did it happen in the first place? We will have to understand something special about human beings.

Man is the only animal on the earth, in fact in the whole of existence, who is dual. Other animals are not dual: they are what they are, hence there is no problem. A tiger is a tiger, and a peacock is a peacock, and a dog is a dog. With man there is something special. That is the glory of man, if we understand it. If we don't understand it, this becomes the agony.

Man is not what he is: he can be more. Man is not finished: man is a growth. Man is the only growing being in existence, the only evolving being in existence. Man is a potential and much has to become actual in him. And unless you start transforming your potential into the actual, your life will remain empty. The seed is empty. If the seed remains a seed it will remain in anguish; it will not feel the joy of fulfillment, the contentment that comes when the seed has become the tree and the tree has bloomed.

Man is a seed -- the seed of God. When man blooms, God becomes manifest. That's why we have called Buddha 'Bhagwan'; Mahavira, Krishna, 'Bhagwan'. It simply means that their seed is no more a seed; the seed has disappeared in the soil of existence, and they have come to their ultimate blossoming. Godliness has bloomed in them. The fragrance of divineness has been released. They are fulfilled, utterly fulfilled. Joyous they are because they have come home. Now there is nowhere to go.

Man is the only animal who is an unfinished product. Nature HAS brought man to a certain point, and from that point man has been made responsible. Now you are responsible for your growth. Nature cannot do any more; whatsoever was possible through nature has already happened -- it has brought you to the threshold. You have to take the further journey now; you have to become a pilgrim.

If you don't become a pilgrim, if your life does not take the quality of adventure, of search, of enquiry, you will remain empty -- and you will remain thirsty, and you will remain hungry. You will remain spiritually starved. Don't take yourself for granted -- that is the problem, exactly that is the very crux of the problem: we take ourselves for granted, we think as if we are what we are supposed to be.

Man is a paradox. Man is not what he thinks he is -- man is far more. Man's capacities are immense. In fact, there are no limits to man's growth. One can go on and on and on... It is an infinite journey. There is no goal! There is a beginning of the pilgrimage but no end.

To know God is to know that life is an eternal pilgrimage. What is the meaning when we say God is infinite. You can go ON attaining, but you can never say that now the dead end has come.

This is the beauty of existence -- it goes on giving you more and more opportunities. When you have climbed one peak, another peak starts giving you challenges.

The misery of man is that he thinks he is what he is supposed to be. He thinks that he is already that which he can be. Man remains satisfied with the superficial; then there will remain a deep discontent in your soul. That's what Kabir is trying to say

Kabir is one of the greatest revolutionaries who has ever walked on the earth. His insight is of tremendous value. If you can fall en rapport with his vision you will be enriched -- you will be enriched beyond all your expectations.

I LAUGH, says Kabir, WHEN I HEAR THAT THE FISH IN THE WATER IS THIRSTY.

HE IS TALKING ABOUT YOU, not about the fish -- you are the fish. Kabir says "I laugh..." The Buddhas have always been laughing.

It is said of Hotei, a Japanese Buddha -- he is known as the laughing Buddha -- that the day he became enlightened he started laughing and then he never stopped laughing. Many years he lived; he would move from one town to another, laughing, from one marketplace to another, laughing. He would stand in the marketplace and his laughter was catching, infectious, and people would gather and people would start laughing. And the laughter would go on spreading... and soon the whole village would be involved in it.

People used to ask Hotei, "What is your message?" He said, "Laughter is my message."

People used to ask him, "Why do you laugh so much?"

He said, "What else can I do? Man is so ridiculous, man is so absurd!"

That's exactly what Kabir is saying:

I LAUGH WHEN I HEAR THAT THE FISH IN THE WATER IS THIRSTY.

Life surrounds you with all its joys, with immense possibilities, opportunities. And you go on crying and weeping! Your anguish goes on deepening as you grow older. Children can laugh, but the older you become, the more the laughter disappears. And whenever you laugh, it is phony; it is just a painted laughter. It has no roots in your heart.

Why have people become so serious? They know they are missing something. They know that life is slipping out of their hands. They know that this should not be so, but it is so -- they are miserable. And when someone attains, like Kabir, he is bound to laugh.

If a fish comes to you and says, "I am thirsty," what will you do? Will you feel any sympathy for the fish? Will you feel any kind of empathy for the fish? You will simply laugh, and you will say, "If you are thirsty then you are simply stupid. There is no need to be thirsty! You are in the sea already. Why should you be thirsty?"

Man is in anguish, great anguish. We go on hiding it, because what is the point of bringing it to others? Nobody can help. We go on carrying dark nights in our beings, great turmoil, great pain, great wounds. We go on hiding! It is pointless to tell anybody; nobody can help. It is better not to talk about the wounds that you are carrying in your soul; it is better to forget about all those wounds.

That's why intoxicants have been so important down the ages. There has never been a time when something or other was not used by man to forget the inner wounds, to forget this whole nonsense that we have made out of life. People go on talking against alcohol, against drugs, but they don't understand the psychology behind it.Just talking against them is not going to prevent people. You can legalize, you can prohibit, but still intoxicants will be used.

Unless man becomes blissful, they cannot be prevented. If man lives in misery, he will need something or other to forget the misery. Otherwise, it will be too much! In fact, my own insight is this: if all the drugs and all the intoxicants could be simply removed from the world, man would immediately go mad. The whole world would be a madhouse.

People are somehow keeping themselves together. They can drink alcohol, and for a few hours they can forget the world and the misery that the world brings to them; they can forget their own selves. They can be lost into oblivion. They know perfectly well it is not going to change anything. But then nothing seems to change anything. At least for a few hours one can forget all about it.

Intoxicants will disappear from the world only when meditation has become a world-wide phenomenon, when each single individual has created some meditativeness in his being; when each single individual has become aware, "There is no need to be miserable. Misery is created by me. Life is not misery: life's nature is bliss. It is my stupidity that I am creating misery out of it."

Misery needs great efforts, bliss is natural -- you cannot create bliss, you can only create misery. And if you don't create misery, bliss comes of its own accord. Bliss comes effortlessly -- you cannot practise it. But for misery you have to make great efforts -- and you ARE making great efforts to remain miserable. You have invested much in your misery.

Kabir is right; he says, "I laugh..." It looks a little hard, looks a little cruel, that a man like Kabir should say:

I LAUGH WHEN I HEAR THAT THE.FISH IN THE WATER IS THIRSTY.

It is not cruel, it is not hard. It's simply how it should be. All the Buddhas have been laughing; they may have said so, they may not have said so. Hotei laughed publicly; Gautam Buddha must have laughed privately, but laughter is bound to be there.

I am saying it because this is my own experience too. When you come with all your miseries to me, I listen very sympathetically -- I don't laugh. But deep down there is laughter. I listen, very patiently and very attentively... I don't want to hurt you, I don't want to be impolite to you. But if you want to know the truth, then the reality is that you are simply showing how ridiculous you are, how stupid you are.

And God is not responsible for your stupidity. It is your own work. God creates every human being with great intelligence. You can see in children's eyes: all children are intelligent. It is very difficult to find a stupid child. If you can find a stupid child, that simply means he is already old.

Children are so overflowing with intelligence. Where does all this intelligence disappear to? What happens to this intelligence? The society is against intelligence; the society does not want intelligent people to be around. Intelligent people seem to he dangerous to the society.

The society wants stupid people because stupid people are easy to manage, easy to dominate, easy to manipulate, easy to order. Stupid people are obedient -- even where obedience is sin they are obedient. Stupid people can be forced to become machines, and the society needs machines, not men. The society is not interested in you; it is interested in your efficiency. And machines certainly are more efficient than men. The machine is the model, and man has to follow the model. Make man more and more stupid and he will come closer and closer to the machine. He will be a good clerk, a good station master, a good teacher in a school, a good collector... but unintelligent.

If he is intelligent, he may not be a clerk at all; he may not waste his life in writing stupid documents, collecting garbage in files. He may be more respectful towards his own being. He may choose some other way to live. He will not be just a deputy collector. How can you ask an intelligent man to be just a policeman? Impossible! And where will you find the thousands and thousands for your armies? Intelligent people are not cattle; intelligent people cannot be told to do stupid things. They will say, "No!"

Just think: the man who dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima, if he had been intelligent he would have simply said "No!" Even at the risk of his own life he would have said no. He would have said, "If you want to kill me, kill me, but I am not going to kill one hundred thousand people. They have not committed any sin. They are innocent civilians -- small children, old people.... They have no responsibility for the war! They have not caused it. Why should I drop the atom bomb? It is better to die than to kill one hundred thousand people."

If the man had been intelligent, he would have immediately said no. But he must have been utterly stupid: he dropped the atom bomb, and had a good night's sleep. His sleep was not disturbed.

In the morning when he was asked, "Could you sleep in the night?" he said, "Certainly, I slept well! I did my duty, I finished my job, and then I had a good night's sleep. Whenever I do my duty perfectly well, I always sleep well."

One hundred thousand people burnt within five seconds, and not even a nightmare came to this man? Just think: we must have destroyed his intelligence totally; we must have reduced him to a machine. Machines don't have any conscience, machines don't have any consciousness, machines don't have any heart. And the society needs machines, more and more efficient machines. Hence the universities go on reducing people to stupid people. If you are a BA it means you have a certificate that you have lost much of your intelligence. If you are an MA, even more; if you are a PhD, finished! No hope for you.

It is said that when Henry Thoreau came back from the university, an old man of his village came to see him and was very much surprised. Seeing the old man very much puzzled and surprised, Thoreau asked him, "Why do you look so puzzled? Why are you so much surprised?"

He said, "I am surprised because you have really done a great job: you have saved your intelligence, although you have been to the university. You still look intelligent! This very rarely happens: to escape from the university and still remain intelligent -- because the whole machinery of education is to make you mechanical."

A new education is needed in the world, which will make you more conscious, not more knowledgeable, which will make you more loving, not more logical. Logic is good -- if love remains the master, then logic is a good servant; but logic should not be the master, and love should not be the servant.

Knowledge is good if consciousness remains in control. But if knowledge is in control, if the head is in control, then the heart is killed, destroyed.

The society does not need intelligent people, hence it has created conditionings -- social, religious, political, educational -- great psychological strategies have been invented down the ages to reduce you to a thing, to reduce you to something pseudo, to reduce you so that you can become a commodity in the marketplace.

You have to be aware, because you exist in a society which is against your intelligence.

My sannyasins are trying to do... what the society has destroyed in them, they are trying to revive. What the society has done, they are trying to undo it. That's the whole work of sannyas -- and that has ALWAYS been the work of a real true religion.

I LAUGH, says Kabir, WHEN I HEAR THAT THE FISH IN THE WATER IS THIRSTY.

YOU DON'T GRASP THE FACT THAT WHAT IS MOST

ALIVE OF ALL IS INSIDE YOUR OWN HOUSE;

AND SO YOU WALK FROM ONE HOLY CITY TO THE NEXT

WITH A CONFUSED LOOK!

YOU DON'T GRASP THE FACT THAT WHAT IS MOST

ALIVE OF ALL IS INSIDE YOUR OWN HOUSE...

YOU HAVE NOT BEEN TOLD. The secret has been hidden from you. Nobody has told you to go in; nobody has given you any chance to be in. Parents are not telling their children, "Sometimes just be. Don't do anything. Just sit silently under a tree, search in, ask 'Who am I?"' No school, no college, no university, is telling you to meditate. In fact, they think meditation has nothing to do with education.

The government of India has written a letter. They don't recognize this commune as educational. Why? "Because what does meditation have to do with education?" And I say to them, "If meditation has nothing to do with education, then what else can become the foundation of a true education? What else?"

But I know: some stupid fool in some office must have written that. He is not aware of what meditation is. Meditation simply means to be with yourself in your absolute aloneness, so that you can have a taste of your own being. To be with yourself is meditation.

In my philosophy of life, only two things are valuable: one is meditation, the other is love. And both are complementary. Meditation means the joy of being alone, and love means the joy of being together with somebody. These are the two wings of a true education. Meditation means independence, freedom -- freedom from all, even from the beloved, because even the presence of the beloved encroaches on your space. It is good for the time being, it is good to overlap your space with somebody, it is good to meet and merge, but ultimately, AND fundamentally, you are alone. And you have to learn how to be alone, and not only how to be alone, but joyously alone, ecstatically alone.

Meditation means sitting silently, doing nothing... just being! The world is too full of doing. The society teaches you to do this, to do that -- why? Because if you do this, you will have that; if you don't do this, you will not have that. Doing is a way of having more, and we are conditioned to have more and more and more -- as if by having more we will really be satisfied, contented; as if by having more we will really become rich.

The truth is just the opposite: the more you have, the more you feel your inner poverty -- in contrast. The richer you become in the outside world, the emptier you feel inside, and no outer richness can fill the inner gap. Nothing from the outside can be taken in. You can have as much wealth as possible, but it will go on piling up outside you; and the bigger the heap, the more you will see your inner emptiness, nothingness, hollowness -- the more miserable you will become.

Hence, the richer a society gets, the more and more it becomes interested in religion. Poor societies cannot be religious; it is almost impossible. I am not saying a poor person cannot be religious -- a poor person CAN be -- but a poor society cannot be. A poor person may be an exception: Kabir was a poor man -- and attained to the highest peak possible, became a Buddha. But the poor society as such cannot be religious.

The poor society remains interested in having more and more, and if you want to have more you will have to do more. You will have to put your whole energy into doing -- and meditation is just the opposite of doing. Meditation is a state of non-doing, it is a state of utter passiveness. It is a state of being: one simply IS... and ENJOYING that simple isness. And then something starts happening inside -- without any doing on your part.

SITTING SILENTLY,

DOING NOTHING,

THE SPRING COMES,

AND THE GRASS GROWS BY ITSELF....

Something starts growing in you.

One thing, the most important thing in life, is meditation. No education can be called real education. Even the word 'education' simply means to draw out that which is within you. This commune is educational, because our effort is to draw out whatsoever is in you. And your so-called universities are NOT educational; they don't fulfill the requirement of being educational. They stuff people from the outside; they don't draw out, they force in. Even literally they are not educational.

The whole effort in the so-called educational institutions is to stuff people with more and more knowledge, because knowledge will help them to do more and do more efficiently, and if they can do things more efficiently, they will have more things. This is what you call education? This is not real education.

Real education will teach a person the most fundamental truth: "I am alone. I come alone, I will go alone. And between coming and going, I can deceive myself that I am not alone, but that is only a deception. Intrinsically I remain alone. Aloneness is my intrinsic nature, so I have to fall in tune with it, I have to dive deep into it. I have to know exactly what it is -- what is this aloneness?"

And it is tremendously beautiful, it is incredibly beautiful, unbelievably beautiful. When you enter into your aloneness, you start becoming aware of God, you start becoming aware of your treasures hidden within you. You start becoming aware of the kingdom of God that is within you.

Kabir says:

YOU DON'T GRASP THE FACT THAT WHAT IS MOST

ALIVE OF ALL IS INSIDE YOUR OWN HOUSE...

But nobody teaches you. The whole teaching is: "Go out! Search for money, for power, for prestige" -- and they are not found within. Peace is found within, silence is found within, stillness is found within, godliness is found within. But those are not the goals that you have been taught to fulfill; those are not your targets.

It is said of a great Sufi mystic, Bayazid:

One day, some people came to Sheikh Bayazid's door and knocked. He opened his upstairs window and looked out saying, "What do you want?"

"Oh," they said, "we are looking for Bayazid."

He said, "Well, I have been looking for Bayazid for ten years now, and I have not found him yet!" and closed the window.

This is what meditation is all about: trying to find oneself.

And the other most important thing is love. Love means trying to find oneself reflected in the other. Love is a mirror. Meditation is a search without a mirror; love is nothing but seeing yourself in the eyes of the other you love, reflected in his being, and a way of enjoying the togetherness.

We ARE alone, but we are not alone in the sense that we exist alone. We are alone, but there are other people around us -- who are ALSO alone! We exist with many people who are alone. Bridges have to be made. Love is the meeting of two alonenesses. One aloneness is immensely beautiful -- what to say about when two alonenesses meet and merge? A great flowering happens, life becomes more mysterious, more joyous.

And then one learns the rhythm: sometimes be alone, enjoy yourself; sometimes be together, enjoy love, friendship. When tired of togetherness, escape into yom innermost being; when tired of your aloneness, escape into the being of the other.

It is like walking on a tightrope: sometimes you lean towards the left, and then you know that if you lean any more you will fall, so you start leaning towards the right. Then again a point comes when you know that if you lean more towards the right you will fall, and you start leaning towards the left. That balance, the balance of the tightrope-walker, is the balance that gives richness to man. Walk between love and meditation, balancing each other. Become rich with meditation and love.

But, remember, the first thing is meditation. If you don't know who you are, you will not be able to love either. If you don't know inner blissfulness you will not be able to share it with anybody else either.

But people don't go in; they are running hither and thither -- they are running everywhere except inwards. And all this running is nothing but dreaming, desiring. Just watch your mind! What does your mind go on doing? In the night it dreams, in the day it dreams... it goes on running and running. It moves in circles, but those circles are all dreams.

The truth is yom consciousness, not your mind. Your mind is created by the society: your consciousness comes from God. Move to the consciousness; change the gestalt. Your emphasis has to be changed -- that's what it means to be religious. That's what conversion is: changing your attention from the mind to consciousness.

Mind is a social by-product -- the Hindu mind, the Christian mind, the communist mind, the Catholic mind -- these are social by-products. The society has put ideas in yom head: that is your mind. Shift your consciousness, your attention, to that which is God-created; otherwise you will live in dreams. And dreams cannot fulfill. Dreams are dreams -- they are not really there....

Two friends meet on the street after several years of not seeing each other. The usual salutation of "How are you?" provokes the answer from Saul that he feels awful -- is suffering terribly from a strong dream. It seems that every night, the moment he goes to sleep, he dreams he is getting on the train from Tel Aviv to Haifa. The train reaches Haifa, but he does not get off. He returns to Tel Aviv, and upon arriving, he wakes up to find the new day and he is hot and tired from the trip.

Morris exclaims that he too is in a similar shape for basically the same reason. It seems that every night he dreams that the door on the left side of his bedroom opens and in walks Sophia Loren. She strips stark naked and walks into the room and climbs into his bed. At the moment he turns on his left side, the door on the right side of the bedroom opens, and in comes Raquel Welch -- equally as naked -- she climbs into the other side of the bed. He turns to be with Raquel and Sophia taps his shoulder. He turns to her and there is Raquel touching him. All night long he is turning from one side to the other. He is a wreck when he wakes up.

Saul immediately says, "For Christ's sake, why didn't you phone me? That's what friends are for. I would gladly come over and help you any night."

Morris answers, "I did phone you several times -- but each time I called I was told you had just caught the train for Haifa."

The mind goes on dreaming.... The mind keeps you un-aware of who you are, so many dreams that the truth is lost. In the rubbish of your dreams the diamond of your being is covered.

Kabir says:

YOU DON'T GRASP THE FACT THAT WHAT IS MOST ALIVE OF ALL IS INSIDE YOUR OWN HOUSE; AND SO YOU WALK FROM ONE HOLY CITY TO THE NEXT WITH A CONFUSED LOOK!

YOU CAN SEE -- all faces look confused. It is very rare to find a face which does not look confused, which has a transparency to it, a clarity. And whenever a face has clarity, transparency, the face has beauty -- a beauty that is not of the physical body only, a beauty that is something from the beyond, a beauty that wells up from within.

But look at people's faces -- just confused, split, schizophrenic. That's what their being is: their faces are only reflecting their being. Faces are mirrors. One part of yom being wants to go to the north, another part wants to go to the south, and another part to the east and another still to the west... and you are torn apart. Your faces show that -- a confused look.

You don't know who you are, where you are, why you are. Everything seems to be just accidental. You feel like a driftwood with no direction, with no sense of direction even. Where are you going? Why are you? For what? The question mark is there on every face, and the reason? Kabir is right -- the reason is you have not looked at the deepest core of your being, where there is a space, a center of the cyclone, a space which is indivisible. In fact, that space known makes you an individual. 'Individual' means indivisible -- one who is not falling in parts, one who is one piece.

And that center is there in everybody's being, but you never go there. And even if sometimes the desire to search within arises, you again start searching outside. Somebody goes to Kaaba, because a great desire has arisen in him to know who he is. Why are you going to Kaaba? Somebody goes to Kashi, somebody to Mathura, somebody to Tibet... and people go on. But still the search remains somewhere outside.

Even if the right question arises, you move in wrong directions. If you really want to know who you are, you need not ask anybody else. Nobody can answer it.

And even if somebody answers, that answer will not become your answer. That will become at the most information, but not knowing; and information is futile because you will interpret the information according to your own mind. You will read the Gita, you will read the Koran, you will listen to great teachers, but you will understand according to your own mind. You will translate everything according to yourself, according to your level of being. And then all gets lost.

Not only will the information be of no help to you, it will create more confusion in you. The more learned a person is, the more confused he is. If you read the Vedas and the Koran and the Bible and the Dhammapada, you will become more and more confused, because each Buddha says, in his own way, the same truth, but it is said in millions of ways. But you will not be able to understand the truth, because you don't know what the truth is.

The real process is first to know within and then go into the Vedas and the Gita and the Koran, and they will all become witnesses to your experience, they will authenticate your experience. They will witness that you are right, and you will witness that they are right. Otherwise, all reading, studying, is going to create more and more confusion, because who is going to interpret it?

"Listen," the man said to his friend Albert, "I have got this female gorilla that I bought a while back. It cost me a lot of money. The problem is that I can't find any male gorilla to mate with it. I was wondering if you would mate with my gorilla for a hundred dollars."

"Hmmm, let me think this over," replied Albert.

The next day Albert went over to his friend's house and said, "I will do it, only under three conditions."

"What are the conditions?" asked the friend.

"One is that there is no hugging and kissing, and no foreplay. Two is that all the children are to be raised Catholic. Three is that you give me at least two weeks to come up with the hundred dollars."

Who is going to interpret? You cannot understand more than you know; you can understand only that much which you know on your own. Hence, the real Master does not impart information: he imparts being. He does not make you more knowledgeable: he makes you more meditative, he makes you more silent. He does not give you theories, hypo-theses, philosophies: he throws you upon yourself again and again and again. And he has to do it in spite of you, even against you, because you want clearcut answers, you want some philosophy to cling to, some idea to believe in. And the real Master will never give you any idea, any theology. In fact he will take all ideas away from you, and all theologies -- Catholic and Protestant and Hindu and Mohammedan. And slowly slowly he will leave you utterly naked, so that you can see yourself as you are -- not according to some idea, but actually as you are. That is revelation.

That can happen within you. You need not go anywhere.

KABIR WILL TELL YOU THE TRUTH: GO WHEREVER YOU

LIKE, TO CALCUTTA OR TIBET;

IF YOU CAN'T FIND WHERE YOUR SOUL IS HIDDEN,

FOR YOU THE WORLD WILL NEVER BE REAL!

If you live in dreams, your world will remain nothing but dreams, your world will remain unreal.

In the East, the Buddhas have always called the world MAYA -- illusion, a magic show; nothing real, nothing substantial in it. They don't mean that these trees around the Buddha Hall are unreal; they don't mean that you can pass through the wall because the wall is unreal; they don't mean that whether you eat stones or bread, it doesn't matter because both are unreal.

What they mean is totally different. They don't mean that this world is unreal -- they simply mean that unless you drop all your dreams you will be creating a world of your own, you will be projecting a world of your own. The real world will function only as a screen and you will project your dreams on it. You will never see the real world. The real world is God, but you will go on projecting your own dreams, and you will live in maya, in illusion.

Mind is illusion, not the world. Let me emphasize it, because it has become a great misunderstanding around the world that the East teaches that the world is illusory -- that is a misunderstanding. The East teaches that the MIND IS illusory, and the world created by the mind is bound to be illusory -- because only an illusion can come out of another illusion.

The true world -- that which is -- is not illusory. But you have not known it yet; you have no inkling of it. You can know it only when you drop all dreaming.

It is said that when Rabbi Kotzker drove out of town with Rabbi Hirsh of Tomashov, they came to a bridge where several women began to throw stones at them.

"Have no fear," said Kotzker. "They are not real women, nor are their stones real. They are mere phantoms."

Rabbi Hirsh was silent for a moment, then asked, "Might we not be phantoms too?"

"No," came Kotzker's answer, "as long as we have at some time had a genuine urge to repent."

The word 'repent' has to be understood; it has been mis-understood down the ages. 'Repent' is repeated again and again by Jesus; he says again and again, "Repent! Repent! because the end of the world is close by." From the Greek, when Jesus statements were translated into English, a great misfortune happened -- to many words. This word 'repent' is one that has suffered the most. It is a translation of a Greek word 'metanoia'; 'metanoia' means turning in, 'metanoia' means meditation. 'Repent' also means return -- return to the source. It has nothing to do with the idea of repentance that you have been taught in your churches, that your priests have been telling you. 'Repent' has nothing to do with repentance. 'Repent' means: Turn in! Return back! Come to the source of your being! Come to the very core of your being!

And Rabbi Kotzker's answer is immensely beautiful, of great value. He says, "No -- as long as we have at some time had a genuine urge to repent." If we have even a genuine urge to meditate, for metanoia, for turning back in, then we are real. But we are real only IN meditation; otherwise we are also unreal. Because in meditation dreaming stops -- that's what meditation is all about: stopping of the dreaming mind. No dreams, no thoughts -- a total silence. Nothing stirs. Absolute stillness. Not even a ripple. No content. Pure consciousness. Just the mirror... in that mirroring, you are real and whatso-ever you see is real. In fact, the seer and the seen are no more two: in that tremendous moment, the observer is the observed, the seer is the seen, the knower is the known. The distinction between the subject and the object disappears. That's what is called 'God-realization'.

KABIR WILL TELL YOU THE TRUTH: GO WHEREVER YOU

LIKE, TO CALCUTTA OR TIBET;

IF YOU CAN'T FIND WHERE YOUR SOUL IS HIDDEN,

FOR YOU THE WORLD WILL NEVER BE REAL!

Go in! Turn in! Find out who you are! And you have started moving towards God. Moving towards one's own being moving towards God.

I DON'T KNOW WHAT SORT OF A GOD WE HAVE BEEN TALKING ABOUT.

KABIR SAYS: "People go on talking about God, but I DON'T KNOW WHAT SORT OF A GOD WE HAVE BEEN TALKING ABOUT" -- because if you have not known yourself, all talk about God is just rot, meaningless. It is nonsense.

THE CALLER CALLS IN A LOUD VOICE TO THE HOLY ONE AT DUSK.

In the Mohammedan mosque:

THE CALLER CALLS IN A LOUD VOICE TO THE HOLY ONE AT DUSK. WHY? SURELY THE HOLY ONE IS NOT DEAD.

We have created our own gods -- rather than looking at the reality we have imagined our own gods, we have dreamed our own gods. And we have made our own rituals. Now, calling loudly to the God simply means your God is deaf. In fact, no word is needed between you and your God -- loud or not loud -- no word is needed between you and your God, because God understands only one language. It is not German, it is not English, it is not Hindi, it is not Sanskrit, it is not Arabic, it is not Greek. God understands only one language: the language of silence.

WHY? SURELY THE HOLY ONE IS NOT DEAF.

HE HEARS THE DELICATE ANKLETS THAT RING ON THE

FEET OF AN INSECT AS IT WALKS.

There is no need to shout. In fact, real prayer is not saying something to God, but, on the contrary, listening to God, listening silently..."Does he have something to say to me?" All the prayers that you go on doing are pointless. Learn to listen whether God has something to say to you, learn to listen to the still small voice within you. Stop talking. Stop the inner talk, the inner chattering. In that silence, prayer arises on its own.

Prayer is a silent heart full of gratitude.

GO OVER AND OVER YOUR BEADS, PAINT WEIRD DESIGNS

ON YOUR FOREHEAD,

WEAR YOUR HAIR MATTED, LONG, AND OSTENTATIOUS,

BUT WHEN DEEP INSIDE YOU THERE IS A LOADED GUN,

HOW CAN YOU HAVE GOD?

You can go on doing rituals, but if your heart is full of violence. if you have a loaded gun in the heart... and that's what the case is. Mohammedans have been fighting with Hindus. Hindus have been fighting with Mohammedans; Christians have been killing Mohammedans, Mohammedans have been killing Christians. Religions have been a calamity to the world, not a blessing, a curse, not a benediction. More people have been killed, butchered, murdered, raped, in the name of religion than in any other name.

This is very strange! Prayer is on the lips, and a loaded gun in the heart. Unless your inner violence disappears, you cannot be prayerful.

And why is there inner violence? Because there is competition: everybody is trying to outdo others; everybody is trying to go ahead of others. That's what you have been taught: to be ambitious. Ambition is the root cause of all violence, and ALL your education is that of ambition: "Be the first! Attain to the gold medal!" And then your whole life you are trying to be the first, to become the prime minister or the president.

We teach people ambition, competition. And when you are ambitious, how can you be prayerful? And when you are ambitious, how can you turn in? Ambition has to be fulfilled there, outside -- in New Delhi, in Washington, in Moscow -- somewhere there.... These are the new holy places.

The ambitious person cannot turn in; it is impossible. The competitive person cannot turn in; he is always looking at the other, he is always at war. How can he be loving? How can he be meditative?

Kabir is right. He says, "You go on talking about God, great theology is created, great philosophical argument continues -- and in the heart a loaded gun?" The real question is a transformation in the heart. But up to now that has not happened.

A very proper old lady bought a parakeet which was guaranteed to be able to speak, but all she could say was, "I am a whore, I am a whore!" very enthusiastically, while flapping her wings. The very proper woman complained to her minister, who told her of a couple in his congregation who owned two male parakeets who behaved very properly and could perhaps influence the woman's parakeet.

The minister borrowed the couple's male parakeets and lent them to the woman. She put them in the cage and they settled together on a perch opposite that of the woman's parakeet. Very soon they lowered their heads and engaged in a beautiful, low-voiced prayer. The female parakeet flapped her wings and sang, "I am a whore, I am a whore!"

Whereupon one male parakeet nudged the other with his wing and said, "Our prayers have been heard!"

 

Next: Chapter 2: Feel, Love and Feel Alone, Question 1

 

Energy Enhancement            Enlightened Texts           Kabir           The Fish in the Sea is Not Thirsty

 

 

 
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