The third question:

Question 3

YOU HAVE SAID MANY TIMES THAT AT FIRST GREAT EFFORT IS NEEDED, BUT THERE COMES A POINT WHERE EFFORT CEASES. THEN ONE REACHES THE LIMIT OF ONE'S EFFORTS; FURTHER PUSHING TO OPEN THE DOOR IS FUTILE. THEN ONE DAY, ONE STEPS BACK AND THE DOOR OPENS OF ITS OWN ACCORD.

AFTER A LIFETIME OF SEARCHING FOR ENLIGHTENMENT, I HAVE COME TO THE POINT WHERE I HAVE LOST INTEREST IN LIFE, IN KNOWLEDGE, IN MEDITATION, IN ATTAINMENT. NOTHING SEEMS TO MATTER ANY MORE. YET I DO NOT FEEL I HAVE COME TO THAT FINAL PEAK OF EFFORT WHERE NOW THE OBVERSE OF EFFORT IS HAPPENING -- THE YIN COMPLEMENTING THE YANG.

ARE THERE NOT MANY MINOR PEAKS AND VALLEYS IN WHICH THE ENERGY REVERSES ITSELF AND WE REST WITHOUT EFFORT, BEFORE THE FINAL CESSATION OF EFFORT? HOW DOES ONE RECOGNIZE THE FINAL PEAK?

The question is from Elsie Albright.

FIRST: you ask, YOU HAVE SAID MANY TIMES THAT AT FIRST GREAT EFFORT IS NEEDED BUT THERE COMES A POINT WHERE EFFORT CEASES. THEN ONE REACHES THE LIMIT OF ONE'S EFFORTS; FURTHER PUSHING TO OPEN THE DOOR IS FUTILE.

No, I have not said that, that further pushing of the door is futile. The further pushing of the door becomes impossible. Only then have you reached the peak of your efforts. It is not futile, it is not that you decide that now it is futile. No -- you cannot push. You have put your whole energy into it, now there is no more left. It is not a question of deciding on your part whether to push any more or not. If you decide, that simply means the peak was not yet close by, it was far away. You could have pushed a little more but you decided that it was futile. I have not said that.

The peak is reached only when it becomes impossible to push. You simply fall down. You have put in all that you had and there is no more left. You simply collapse. In that collapse you reach the ultimate in effort.

Remember, it is not a decision on your part to stop making any more efforts. No, you cannot make any -- even if you decide to, even if you think 'A little bit more.' You are exhausted, you are spent, there is no more left in you. You simply collapse. Remember the word 'collapse'.

And then I have not said that FURTHER PUSHING TO OPEN THE DOOR IS FUTILE. THEN ONE DAY ONE STEPS BACK AND THE DOOR OPENS OF ITS OWN ACCORD. I have not even said that.

You cannot step back. If you can step back you could have stepped ahead. It takes the same energy -- if you can go one step back why can't you go one step ahead? No, you simply collapse; you don't go anywhere, going becomes impossible. Forward or backward is irrelevant, you simply can't go anywhere. You collapse on the spot where you are; all going simply disappears.

And I have not said either that the door opens of its own accord. I have been saying that the door is already open. The door has never been closed. But because you were pushing, your push was creating the closedness of the door. Your effort to attain was preventing you; your desire to reach was the barrier.

Now, in this state of collapse, you open your eyes and there is no longer any desire. Suddenly you see: your eyes have clarity. The desire was like a cloud on your eyes. Now there is no desire to achieve anything, nothing is left, you are simply spent. When you open your eyes in that state of spentness, your eyes are clear. It is a rebirth; you are born again. Your eyes have a luminosity they never had: you can simply see the door is not closed.

In fact the door exists not. You were creating it; your pushing, your effort, was really an effort to prove yourself. All efforts prove only one thing: the ego. They don't prove anything else. Effort means the ego is trying to prove itself, to prove to the world that 'I am somebody.' And when the 'I' exists, God becomes absent. Because you are too full of the 'I' you cannot see God. You are blind.

When the 'I' is no more there, you are spent, finished. You can see: God is present. And then one sees that God has always been present -- there was no need to ever go anywhere to find Him. Only He is. HE IS.

You say: AFTER A LIFETIME OF SEARCHING FOR ENLIGHTENMENT.

All search is for the ego. No search is for enlightenment. You cannot search for enlightenment -- the search creates the seeker, and the seeker is the barrier. The search goes on creating you more and more. Somebody is searching for money: he is not searching for money, remember, he is searching for the ego -- that can only be projected through the money. Nobody searches for money.

You have been searching for political power -- you wanted to become a president of a country or a prime minister. Nobody is searching for political power; political power is just an excuse to project the ego. We understand that -- we call these searches worldly. I would like to remind you: all search is worldly -- search for God, search for enlightenment, or whatsoever you like to call it. Searching is worldly because search means desire, and desire is the world.

You cannot desire God. God happens only when there is no desire, so to desire God is a contradiction in terms. You cannot desire enlightenment: enlightenment is only when there is no desire left, so it is a contradiction in terms.

One can only understand desire. In understanding the desire, the desire disappears. One sees the stupidity of desire, one sees the illusoriness of desire. One sees how the desire creates tensions, anxieties, how the desire creates madness. Seeing it -- just seeing it in its totality and its madness -- is getting rid of it. Not that you have to try to get rid of it, because that will again be another desire. This has to be understood very deeply because this is one of the most profound things to understand: seeing that desire leads nowhere, one simply ceases to desire. And in that moment, that cessation of desire, enlightenment happens.

You say: AFTER A LIFETIME OF SEARCHING FOR ENLIGHTENMENT.

That is where you are wrong. All that search is an ego search, all that search is an ego trip. You don't call it money, you don't call it power, you don't call it prestige -- now you call it enlightenment. You have simply changed the name. You have only changed the label; the container is the same and the content is the same. You are deceiving yourself. There is no other-worldly desire, all desires are worldly.

When desiring ceases, the other world opens. The other world is hidden in this world. But because your eyes are full of desire, full of the ego, you cannot see it.

Just watch. You are in the market and somebody comes and says your house is on fire. You rush towards the house, you cannot see anything else. Somebody may be saying hello, good morning, somebody may be insulting you, shouting at you, but you don't notice anything. Your house is on fire: you don't have time, you don't have consciousness, for all that is going on in the marketplace. A magician is showing his tricks and you rush by: your house is on fire. A beautiful woman passes by: on any other day you would have stopped, your breathing would have stopped, but today it doesn't matter. You can't even remember whether she was a woman or a man, beautiful or ugly, young or old.

And this is not an ordinary phenomenon, to forget whether she was a man or a woman, because this is the only thing that you never forget. You can forget the name of a person, you can forget his religion, you can forget his address, his phone number. You can even forget his face, you can forget his age, you can forget everything -- but you never forget whether he was a man or a woman. Have you ever observed the phenomenon? You never forget this. Have you ever wondered whether he was a he or a she? It never happens -- because your man simply goes so deeply towards the woman, your woman is attracted so deeply by the man, that you cannot forget. It becomes part of your consciousness.

But when your house is on fire there is a possibility, you may not remember. What is happening? Your eyes are projected towards the fire. And it may be just a rum our -- when you reach home, the children may be playing and there is no fire; somebody played a joke. But it still worked. You were projected so much into the future that you became absent to the present.

That's what is happening in desire. You want money: it will take ten years', twenty years' work to arrive. Now twenty years' future is projected. You start planning: when you have money what house you are going to purchase and what car, and what woman you are going to marry, and how you will live -- twenty years' time, and you start projecting. Now your eyes start moving away and away, farther and farther away from the present.

And God is present, God is not in the future.

Enlightenment is now or never. So when you think about enlightenment you are always thinking of the future. That's what Kabir says again and again: It is here! It is now! Don't project it in the future, otherwise you will miss it. Enlightenment is not like a treasure hidden somewhere that you have to search for. Enlightenment is your nature, it is you. It is already given, you need not go anywhere for it.

But you have been going to this master, to that master, to this religion, to that religion. That's what you mean: AFTER A LIFETIME OF SEARCHING FOR ENLIGHTENMENT... You went wrong from the first moment; your first step was wrong. Enlightenment cannot be desired, it cannot become a goal. Once you make a goal out of it you will go on missing -- one life, two lives, a thousand lives.

Now you say: I HAVE COME TO THE POINT WHERE I HAVE LOST INTEREST IN LIFE.

It is because of that enlightenment that you have lost interest in life because life is present and enlightenment is far away. And you are interested in the faraway -- how can you be interested in the close, the obvious? Life is this woman, this man. Life is this food, life is this music, life is this. ITI ITI: this and this and this. And enlightenment is that -- far away; maybe it will take millions of lives to travel to it. And you will have to climb mountains and you will have to swim oceans and then you will arrive.

If you become interested too much in the future you start losing contact with life, you start losing interest in life.

You say: I HAVE COME TO A POINT WHERE I HAVE LOST INTEREST IN LIFE, IN KNOWLEDGE, IN MEDITATION, IN ATTAINMENT.

You have lost interest in life. You have not yet lost interest in knowledge, otherwise you would not have. asked the question -- for what? A question means a search for knowledge; a question is that and nothing else. A question is a groping for knowledge, for more knowledge. That is true that you have lost interest in life. That happens to all enlightenment seekers.

That's where I am against the tradition. I don't want you to become an enlightenment seeker, I want you to become enlightened this very moment. I want you to declare to yourself: 'I am enlightened.' And live an enlightened life after that, don't become unenlightened again! -- because the mind tends to become unenlightened again. One moment you say 'Okay, I am enlightened.' But then something happens and you become unenlightened. Somebody insults you, so you say 'For a moment let me be unenlightened again. Later on I will see. First I have to see to this man and I have to show him that you can't take me for granted, you can't take me as if I am enlightened. I will show you that I can still be unenlightened.'

There are a thousand and one temptations to become unenlightened again and again and again. And I know, many times you HAVE become enlightened. And I am not saying that those moments are wrong or those moments are illusory -- no. You have touched it, you have penetrated it, you had a vision. But it didn't last; you were not capable enough to keep it flowing. For a moment it came like lightning, and then it was gone. You could not make a small lamp out of it.

I have not come across a single man in my life who has not had enlightened moments. You yourself don't believe that you can be enlightened, so you don't even take note of them. Some day walking on the beach and the sun is beautiful and the breeze is salty... and a moment comes, a door opens. Suddenly you start seeing things as you have never seen them. You are utterly lost in the moment; there is no past and no future. You have forgotten who you are, you have forgotten what you want to become, you simply ARE -- in tune with the ocean and the wind and the sun. This is enlightenment -- although I know you are not capable of living in it, because you have not created a meditative space inside you. So it comes and goes.

If you have created a meditative space inside you, that meditative space will be able to contain it. That's what meditation is all about: the capacity to contain enlightenment. Enlightenment comes to everybody -- but you have so many holes in your being, it flows out, it simply leaks out.

Seeing a tree in full bloom, the spring has come and you are in a kind of awe. Seeing the green and the red and the gold of the tree, you are transported into another world. This is enlightenment. You fall back; the gravitation is too much. Your wife comes and says 'What are you doing here?' -- and you are back again in your unenlightened state.

And you are not courageous enough to accept the fact, because you don't respect yourself. You have been taught by the so-called religious people to condemn yourself. You cannot accept that 'Enlightenment can happen to me. It happens to Buddha -- okay. It happens to Christ -- maybe. But it can't happen to me. To me? It can't happen to me.' You have not respected yourself, you have not loved yourself.

Otherwise enlightenment comes to everybody, all and sundry. It comes to sinners, it comes to saints. Enlightenment has no condition for coming. In fact to use the word 'coming' is not right -- it arises. The impact of the sun and the beach, the impact of the morning breeze, and it arises inside you, a wave. Then it relapses back because you don't have the space to contain it.

Be meditative and you will be able to contain that moment for longer periods. And when you are totally meditative... and what do I mean by 'meditative'? When you are totally thoughtless. It is thought that functions as a hole in your being -- and you have so many thoughts, so you have so many holes. Your bucket is full of holes: with this bucket you go to a well and you try to draw water. When you lower the bucket down into the well, when it is in the water it is full of water. Then you start drawing it and the water starts leaking. By the time it reaches your hands it is empty.

And it is not that it was not full of water when it was in the well -- it was. Exactly like that, it happens: there are moments when you are full of enlightenment.

Making love to your woman it happens. In that orgasmic space suddenly you are enlightened. You are a Krishna, and your wife, your beloved, is a Radha. You are no longer ordinary human beings. Suddenly you belong to eternity and not to time. Suddenly you are no longer physical bodies -- you have Buddha bodies in that moment. But then it is lost; you fall back.

It is like jumping. You can jump, and when you jump you lose the earth, the gravitation -- for a moment you are part of the sky. But then you fall back because you don't have wings.

You will have to grow wings. Meditation is not really a search for enlightenment; enlightenment comes without any search. Meditation is just growing wings, or creating a space inside you so that when the guest comes you can persuade the guest to live inside you and become the host.

AFTER A LIFETIME OF SEARCHING FOR ENLIGHTENMENT I HAVE COME TO THE POINT WHERE I HAVE LOST INTEREST IN LIFE...

The religious people always come, are bound to come, to that point where they lose interest in life -- because your religions are against life, anti-life. And life is God, so your religions are all anti-God.

... IN KNOWLEDGE... No, that you have not lost -- the question still arises.

... IN MEDITATION... No, that you cannot lose, because you have not known what meditation is. How can you lose interest in something which you have not known? You can lose interest only in something which you have known -- familiarity creates boredom. Meditation you have not known. If you had known meditation, enlightenment would have happened.

And you say: I HAVE LOST INTEREST IN ATTAINMENT.

That too you have not lost. All that has happened through your search for enlightenment is that your life has gone down the drain. You have missed your life. But it is never too late -- you are still alive and breathing, and the possibility is still there.

NOTHING SEEMS TO MATTER ANY MORE. YET I DO NOT FEEL I HAVE COME TO THAT FINAL PEAK OF EFFORT...

Your feeling is right, you have not come to the final peak of effort.

ARE THERE NOT MANY MINOR PEAKS AND VALLEYS IN WHICH THE ENERGY REVERSES ITSELF AND WE REST WITHOUT EFFORT BEFORE THE FINAL CESSATION OF EFFORT?

Yes, there are many; millions, in fact. Before the absolute enlightenment -- what Buddha has called parinirvana -- before the absolute enlightenment there are many many satoris, many samadhis. Small, big, many. Before you utterly disappear, you come many times to small peaks, big peaks. And many times it happens: the door opens. That's what I would like you to be aware of.

Be alert of all that is happening around you. In your very ordinary life the extraordinary is hidden. It calls you sometimes, it is heard. Sometimes it is very visible, almost tangible; sometimes it is very close, you can hug it. Yes, sometimes it is far away -- in fact what is happening is that whenever your mind is clouded too much by thoughts it is far away. The quantity of your thoughts is the distance. Whenever your mind is less burdened with thoughts it is close by. Whenever there are only thin layers of thought and you can see through them, peek through them, it is very close -- you can hug it, it is tangible.

When your thoughts are utterly gone, a state of no-mind has arisen in you. Then it is you -- not even close. Enlightenment is you. But you have disappeared, you are no more to be found. Before that, many small satoris happen.

Here, to my sannyasins, it is an almost everyday phenomenon. It happens all the time, and it happens in such ordinary situations that one cannot believe it. Great trust is needed. It happens in such ordinary situations that it shatters all your ideas that it can happen only in the Himalayas or it can happen only in a sacred place or it can happen only somewhere where the world is almost non-existential or it can happen only when you are alone in a cave in Tibet.

No, it happens everywhere, it happens all the time. It happens walking on the street, it happens talking to a man. It happens sitting silently in your room, it happens taking your bath. It can happen any moment, it can happen any place. But one thing has to be remembered: it can be seen by you only when there are no thoughts. Otherwise you are engrossed so much in your thoughts. you go on missing it.