The first question:

Question 1

ONE DAY YOU EMPHASIZE BEING MATURE, ANOTHER DAY YOU SAY "BE LIKE A CHILD." IF I ADOPT A MATURE ATTITUDE, I FEEL MY CHILD IS REPRESSED AND STARVED FOR EXPRESSION. IF I LET MY CHILD DANCE, SING, THEN ALSO CHILDISH ATTITUDES COME UP, LIKE CLINGING TO A LOVE-OBJECT. WHAT TO DO?

Prabhu Maya, being mature does not mean adopting a mature attitude. In fact, adopting a mature attitude will be one of the greatest barriers to becoming mature.

Adoption means something imposed. Adoption means something cultivated, practiced. It is not arising out of you. It is a mask, a painted face; it is not your real being. That's what everybody has been doing. That's why on the earth people only appear to be mature -- they are not, they are utterly immature -- deep down, the adopted attitudes. They remain childish. Their maturity is only skin-deep, or not even that much. Scratch any man a little bit and you will find a childishness arising out of him. And not only the so-called ordinary people -- scratch your saints and you will find immaturity arising. Or, scratch your politicians and your leaders, go and just watch any parliament of the world, and you will never see any other gathering of so many immature and childish people together.

Man has been deceiving himself and others. If you adopt, you will be false, pseudo. I have not been telling you to adopt anything. Be! Adoption is a barrier to being. And the only way to be is to start from the very beginning. Because your parents have not allowed you in your childhood, so you are stuck somewhere. The mental age of the so-called normal people is not more than between ten and thirteen years -- not even fourteen! And you may be seventy or eighty, but your mental age remains stuck somewhere before you became sexually mature. The moment a person becomes sexually mature, at thirteen or fourteen, he is sealed forever. Then he goes on becoming false, and more false. One falsity has to be protected by other falsities, one lie has to be defended by other lies. And then there is no end to it. You become just a heap of rubbish; that's what personality is. Personality has to be dropped, only then does individuality arise. They don't mean the same thing. Personality is just a showcase thing; it is exhibition, it is not reality.

Individuality is your reality, it is not a show-thing. One can dig as deeply as one wants into you and he will find the same taste. Buddha is reported to have said, "You taste me from anywhere and you will find the same taste, just as you taste the ocean from ANYWHERE and you will find it salty." Individuality is one whole. It is organic. Personality is schizophrenic: the center is something and the circumference is something else, and they never meet, and they are not together. Not only do they never meet, not only are they different, they are diametrically opposed to each other, they are in constant fight.

So the first thing to understand: never adopt a mature attitude. Either BE mature or BE immature. If you are immature then be immature. By being immature you will be allowing growth. Then let the immaturity be there; don't be false, don't be insincere about it. If you are childish, so you are childish. So what? Be childish. Accept it, go with it. Don't create a division in your being, otherwise you are creating the fundamental madness. You just be yourself.

Nothing is wrong with being childish. Because you have been taught that something is wrong in being childish you have started adopting attitudes. From your very childhood you have been trying to be mature, and how can a child be mature? A child is a child; he has to be childish.

But it is not allowed, so small children become diplomats -- they start pretending, they start behaving in false ways, they become lies from their very beginnings. And the lie also goes on growing. And then one day you start searching for truth; then you have to go into the scriptures, and scriptures contain no truth at all. The truth is contained in your being, that is the real scripture. The Veda, the Koran, the Bible -- they are in your consciousness! You are carrying all that is needed by you, it is a gift from God. Everybody is born with truth in his being; life IS truth. But you started learning lies.

Being with me, drop all lies. Be courageous. And of course you will feel a great fear arising in you, because whenever you drop the personality, your childishness, which has never been allowed, will surface. And you will feel afraid: "What! Am I going to be childish, at this point? When everybody knows that I am a great professor -- or a doctor or an engineer -- and I have a Ph.D. degree, and I am going to be childish?" The fear arises -- the fear of public opinion, of what people will think.

That same fear has destroyed you from the very beginning. The same fear has been the poison: "What will my mother think? What will my father think? What will people think, the teachers and the society?" And the small child starts becoming cunning -- he will not show his heart, he knows that will not be accepted by others. So he will create a face, a camouflage. He will show that which people WANT to see. This is diplomacy, this is being political. This is poison!

Everybody is political. You smile because it pays to smile, you cry because it is expected of you to cry. You say a certain thing because that makes things easy. You say to your wife "I love you" because that keeps her quiet. You say to your husband, "I will die without you, you are the only person in my world, you are my life" -- because he expects you to say it, not because you are feeling it. If you are feeling it, then it has beauty, then it is a real rose. If you are simply pretending, massaging his male ego, buttressing him because you have some ends to fulfill through him, then it is an artificial flower, a plastic flower.

And you are burdened with so much plastic: that is the problem. The world is not the problem. The so-called religious people go on saying, "Renounce the world." I say to you that the world is not the problem at all. Renounce the falsity -- that is the problem; renounce the artificial -- that is the problem. There is no need to renounce your family, but renounce all that pseudo-family that you have created there. Be true, authentic. Sometimes it will be very painful to be true and to be authentic. It is not cheap. To be untrue and inauthentic is cheap, convenient, comfortable. It is a trick, a strategy to protect yourself; it is an armor. But then you will miss the truth that you have been carrying in your soul. Then you will never know what God is, because God can only be known within you: first within, then without; first in, then out -- because that is the closest thing to you, your own being. If you miss God there how can you see God in Krishna, Christ, Buddha? All nonsense. You cannot see God in Krishna if you cannot see God in yourself. And how can you see a God in yourself if you are continuously creating lies around you? The lies are so much that you have almost forgotten the way to your being. You are lost in the jungle of lies.

So the first thing to remember....

You ask, "ONE DAY YOU EMPHASIZE BEING MATURE, ANOTHER DAY YOU SAY 'BE LIKE A CHILD'."

There is no contradiction in it. Just by being like a child you will become mature; that is the beginning of maturity. You were not allowed by your parents and by your society.

Sannyas is just an effort to undo the wrong that has been done to you by the society, to erase, to annihilate all that has been created around you by your society. Sannyas is a revolution. It is rebellion, rebellion against the so-called pseudo-life. It is risky, it is dangerous, because you will start falling apart from the pseudo-people around you. You will become a misfit. You will have troubles. Lies are very convenient.

Frederick Nietzsche has said that man cannot live without lies; and for about ninety-nine percent of people he is right. Why cannot man live without lies? -- because lies function as buffers, shock absorbers. Lies function like a lubrication; you don't go on colliding with people. You smile and the other smiles -- this is lubrication. You may be feeling angry inside, you may be full of rage, but you go on saying to your wife "I love you". To express the rage is to get into trouble.

But remember, unless you can express your rage you will never know how to express your love. A man who cannot be angry cannot be loving either, because he has to repress his anger SO much that he becomes incapable of expressing anything else -- because all things are joined together inside your being, they are not separate. There are no watertight compartments between anger and love; they are all together, mixed with each other. It is the same energy. If you repress anger you will have to repress love too. If you express love, you will be surprised -- anger is arising with it. Either suppress all or all will have to be expressed. You have to understand this arithmetic of your inner organic unity. Either be expressive or be repressive. The choice is not that you can repress anger and express love; then your love will be false because it won't have any heat, it won't have the quality of warmth. It will just be a mannerism, a MILD phenomenon, and you will always be afraid in moving deeper into it.

People only pretend to love because they are expected to love. They love their children, they love their wife or husband, their spouses, their friends, because they are expected to do certain things. They fulfill these things as if they are duties. There is no celebration in them. You come home and you pat your child's head just because that is expected, just because that is the thing to do, but there is no joy in it -- it is cold, it is dead. And the child will never be able to forgive you, because a cold pat on the head is ugly. And the child feels embarrassed, you feel embarrassed.

You make love to your woman but you never go far into it. It can take you really far out, it can take you to the ultimate bliss, you can dissolve into it. But if you have never allowed your anger and you have never been dissolved in your anger, how can you allow love to dissolve you? And it has happened many times -- you will be surprised -- that a lover has killed the woman because he allowed his love and then suddenly the anger came. It is a well known fact that many times a lover has simply killed the woman, suffocated her. And he was not a murderer; the society is responsible. He simply dared too much and went too deeply into love. When you go too deep you become wild, because your civilization is on the surface. Then anger arises, then all that is hidden inside you arises, and then you are almost mad.

To avoid that madness you make love in a very superficial way. It is never a tremendous phenomenon. Yes, people are right when they say that it is just like a sneeze: it relaxes tensions, it relieves you of a certain energy that was getting heavy on you. But this is not the real picture of love. Love has to be ecstasy -- not like a sneeze, not just a release but a realization, a liberation. Unless you know love as a liberation, as ecstasy, as SAMADHI, YOU have not known love. But that is possible only if you are not pseudo, if you have been authentic in everything -- if you have allowed anger, if you have allowed laughter, if you have allowed tears, if you have allowed all; you have never been a preventive force, you have never been holding anything, you have never been controlling; if you have lived a life of uncontrol. And remember, by uncontrol I do not mean a life of licentiousness. The life of uncontrol can be of great discipline, but the discipline is not imposed from the outside. It is not an adopted attitude. The discipline comes from your own inner experiences. It comes from the encounter with all the possibilities of your being. It comes by experiencing all the aspects, it comes by exploring all the dimensions. It comes out of understanding. You have been in anger and you have understood something in it: that understanding brings discipline. It is not control. Control is ugly, discipline is beautiful.

The word 'discipline' basically means capacity to learn, hence the word 'disciple'. It does not mean control; it means to be capable of learning, to be open to learn. A disciplined man is one who goes on learning through life experiences, who goes into everything, unafraid, who risks, who explores and adventures, who is always ready to go into the dark night of the unknown, who does not cling to the known and who is always ready to commit mistakes, who is always ready to fall in a ditch and who is always ready to be laughed at by others. Only people who are courageous enough to be called fools are able to live and love and know and be.

Maturity comes through more and more, deeper and deeper experiences of life, not by avoiding life. By avoiding life you remain childish.

One thing more: when I say be like a child I don't mean be childish. A child has to be childish, otherwise he will miss that great experience of childhood. But whether you are young or old, childishness simply shows that you have not been growing. But to be like a child is a totally different phenomenon.What does it mean?

Jesus says again and again, "Unless you are like a child you will not enter into my kingdom of God." And so I say to you: You will not enter into my kingdom of God if you are not like a child. What does he mean by 'like a child'? He means many things. One, the child is always total. Whatsoever the child is doing, he becomes absorbed in it, he is never partial. If he is collecting sea-shells on the beach, then ALL else simply disappears from his consciousness, then all that concerns him are the seashells and the beach. He is absorbed in it, utterly lost in it. That quality of being total is one of the fundamentals of being like a child. That is concentration, that is intensity, that is wholeness.

And the second thing: a child is innocent. He functions from a state of not-knowing. He never functions out of knowledge because he has none.

You always function out of knowledge. Knowledge means the past, knowledge means the old and the told, knowledge means that which you have gathered; and every new situation is NEW, no knowledge is applicable to it. I'm not talking about engineering or technology: there the past is applicable because a machine is a machine. But when you are behaving in a human atmosphere, when you are communicating with alive beings, no situation is a repetition of any other. Each situation is unique. If you want to function rightly in it you will have to function through a state of ignorance, like a child. Don't bring your knowledge into it, forget all knowledge. Respond to the new as new, don't respond to the new from the old. If you respond from the old you will miss: there will be no bridge between you and what is happening around you. You will always be late, you will always go on missing the train.

Anand Maitreya goes on dreaming again and again of a train, and he always misses it. He's rushing and running and reaches the station, and by the time he reaches, the train has left. And this is not only Maitreya's dream, this is the dream of millions of people. This is one of the commonest dreams. Why does this dream come again and again to millions of people on the earth? They ARE missing life. They are always late. There is always a gap. They try, but the bridge is never made. They cannot commune, they cannot get into anything, something hinders. What is it? It is knowledge that hinders.

I teach you ignorance.

And when I say be like a child I mean always remain learning, never become knowledgeable. Go on learning; learning is totally different. Knowledge is a dead phenomenon, learning is an alive process. And the learner has to remember this: he cannot function from the standpoint of knowledge.

Have you not watched and observed it? -- little children learn so fast. If a child lives in a multi-lingual atmosphere he learns all the languages. He learns the language that the mother speaks, the father speaks, the neighbors speak -- he may Learn three, four, five languages very easily, with no problem. Once you have learned a language then it becomes very difficult to learn another language because now you be childish. A child has to be childish, otherwise he will miss that great experience of childhood. But whether you are young or old, childishness simply shows that you have not been growing. But to be like a child is a totally different phenomenon.What does it mean?

Jesus says again and again, "Unless you are like a child you will not enter into my kingdom of God." And so I say to you: You will not enter into my kingdom of God if you are not like a child. What does he mean by 'like a child'? He means many things. One, the child is always total. Whatsoever the child is doing, he becomes absorbed in it, he is never partial. If he is collecting seashells on the beach, then ALL else simply disappears from his consciousness, then all that concerns him are the seashells and the beach. He is absorbed in it, utterly lost in it. That quality of being total is one of the fundamentals of being like a child. That is concentration, that is intensity, that is wholeness.

And the second thing: a child is innocent. He functions from a state of not-knowing. He never functions out of knowledge because he has none.

You always function out of knowledge. Knowledge means the past, knowledge means the old and the told, knowledge means that which you have gathered; and every new situation is NEW, no knowledge is applicable to it. I'm not talking about engineering or technology: there the past is applicable because a machine is a machine. But when you are behaving in a human atmosphere, when you are communicating with alive beings, no situation is a repetition of any other. Each situation is unique. If you want to function rightly in it you will have to function through a state of ignorance, like a child. Don't bring your knowledge into it, forget all knowledge. Respond to the new as new, don't respond to the new from the old. If you respond from the old you will miss: there will be no bridge between you and what is happening around you. You will always be late, you will always go on missing the train.

Anand Maitreya goes on dreaming again and again of a train, and he always misses it. He's rushing and running and reaches the station, and by the time he reaches, the train has left. And this is not only Maitreya's dream, this is the dream of millions of people. This is one of the commonest dreams. Why does this dream come again and again to millions of people on the earth? They ARE missing life. They are always late. There is always a gap. They try, but the bridge is never made. They cannot commune, they cannot get into anything, something hinders. What is it? It is knowledge that hinders.

I teach you ignorance.

And when I say be like a child I mean always remain learning, never become knowledgeable. Go on learning; learning is totally different. Knowledge is a dead phenomenon, learning is an alive process. And the learner has to remember this: he cannot function from the standpoint of knowledge.

Have you not watched and observed it? -- little children learn so fast. If a child lives in a multi-lingual atmosphere he learns all the languages. He learns the language that the mother speaks, the father speaks, the neighbors speak -- he may Learn three, four, five languages very easily, with no problem. Once you have learned a language then it becomes very difficult to learn another language because now you start functioning from the standpoint of knowledgeability. It is said you cannot teach the old dog new tricks. It is true. But what makes a dog old? -- not physical age, because a Socrates goes on learning to the very end, even while he is dying. A buddha goes on learning to the very end. What makes a dog old? -- knowledge makes a dog old.

Buddha remains young, Krishna remains young. We have not a single statue of Buddha which depicts him as old, or of Krishna which depicts him as old. Not that they never became old! Krishna lived up to the age of eighty, became very old, but something in him remained always young, childlike. He continued to function from the state of not-knowing.

So first, when I say be like a child I mean be total.

And the second thing is remain a learner, function from the state of not-knowing. That's what innocence is: to function from not-knowing is innocence.

And the third thing, and the last: a child has a natural quality of trust, otherwise he cannot survive. When the child is born he trusts the mother, trusts the milk, trusts that the milk will be nourishing him, trusts that everything is okay. His trust is absolute, there is no doubt about anything. He's not afraid of anything. His trust is so much that the mother is afraid because the child can go and start playing with a snake. His trust is so much that a child can go and poke his hand into the fire. His trust is so much; he knows no fear, he knows no doubting: that is the third quality.

If you can know what trust is, if you can learn again the ways of trust, then only will you know what God is, then only will you come to realize what truth is. This has to be understood.

Science depends on doubt. That's why the whole of education has become the education of doubt. Science DEPENDS on doubt, it cannot grow without doubt. Religion depends on trust, it cannot happen without trust. These are diametrically opposite directions.

Remember, if you bring trust into a scientific work you will miss the whole point. You will not be able to get ANYTHING, YOU will not be able to discover anything. Doubt is the methodology there. You have to doubt and doubt and doubt; you have to go on doubting until you stumble upon something which cannot be doubted, which is indubitable. Then only, in helplessness, you have to accept it, but still with a grain of doubt that tomorrow new facts may be arising and the whole thing will have to be dropped. So only for the time being.... Science never comes to any ultimate truth but only tentative truth, approximate truth. Only for the time being is it accepted as truth because who knows? -- tomorrow researchers will find new facts, new data. So science comes only to hypotheses, tentative, arbitrary. What Newton had discovered has been thrown down the drain by Albert Einstein, and what he has discovered will be thrown by somebody else. In science, doubt is the methodology. Trust is not needed. You have to trust only when there is NO possibility to doubt, and that too, only tentatively, for the time being, in a kind of helplessness. What can you do? -- because no doubt is possible. You have looked from all sides and all doubts are dissolved and a kind of certainty has arisen.

Religion is a diametrically opposite dimension. Just as in science doubt is the method, in religion trust is the method.

What does trust mean? It means that we are not separate from existence, that we are part of it, that this is our home, that we belong to it, that it belongs to us, that we are not homeless, that the universe is a mothering universe! We can be children with the universe just as the child trusts that whenever the need arises the mother will come and take care -- when he is hungry she will come and feed him, when he feels cold the mother will come and hug him and give warmth, love, care. The child trusts. All that he needs to do is whenever he is in some need he has to scream, cry so that the mother's attention is attracted towards him, that's all.

Religion says this universe is our mother or our father, hence these expressions. Jesus called God 'abba', which is far better than father. 'Father' is a formal word, 'abba' is informal. If you have to translate 'abba' rightly, it will be closer to daddy than to father. But to call God daddy looks a little absurd; the church won't allow. The church will say this is not right. But Jesus used to call him 'abba', which is daddy.

In fact, a prayer has to be informal Father looks so far away. It is no wonder that by calling God 'the Father' we have put Him far away, distant somewhere, in heaven. Daddy feels closer -- you can touch Him, He is almost tangible, you can talk to Him.With a God-Father sitting somewhere high in the heavens, you can go on shouting and still you cannot trust whether you will be able to reach Him.

Religion is a childlike approach towards existence: the world becomes a mother or a father. You are not against nature, you are not fighting with nature. There is no fight, there is great cooperation. The fight seems to be stupid and absurd.

Doubt does not work in religious experience, just as trust does not work in scientific exploration. Science means exploring the without and religion means exploring the within. Science is the religion' of things, religion is the science of being. Just as you cannot see a flower through the ear; howsoever sensitive an ear you have, howsoever musical an ear you have, you cannot see a flower through the ear. The ear can only catch sounds; it has its limitations. If you want to see the color, the light, the form, you will have to look through the eyes. The eyes are so beautiful but they have their limitations -- you cannot hear music through the eyes. Even the greatest music -- Beethoven or Mozart -- even the greatest music will not be able to penetrate the eyes. The eyes are deaf, you will have to hear through the ears.

Doubt is the door to things. Trust is the door to being. Only through trust is God known.

And remember, you can commit the fallacy in two ways. The so-called religious people have been fighting science, the church has been fighting science. That was a foolish fight because the church wanted that science should depend on trust. And now science is taking revenge: now science wants that religion should also depend on doubt, on skepticism, on logic.

Man is so foolish that he goes on repeating the same mistakes again and again. The church in the Middle Ages was stupid, now people who think they are scientists are doing the same stupidity again.

The man of understanding will say that doubt has its own world. You can use doubt as a method, but it has its limitations. And so has trust its own world, but it also has its limitations. There is no need to use trust to know about things, there is no need to doubt about the inner; then you are creating a mess. If trust were used for scientific exploration, science would not have been born at all. That's why in the East science has remained very primitive.

I have come across Indian scientists: even a scientist in India who may have all the education that is possible in the West, who may have won awards, or maybe even if he is a Nobel laureate, remains somewhere, deep down, unscientific, superstitious. He goes on trying in some ways -- known or unknown to him, aware or unawares -- to impose trust on the outside world. And the very very religious person from the West remains somewhere, deep down, doubtful. The West has explored the possibilities of doubt, and the East has explored the possibilities of trust. Both are different dimensions, they don't meet anywhere; the inner and the outer don't meet anywhere. You have to use both.

And I call that man a man of understanding who can use both: when working in a scientific lab he uses doubt, skepticism, logic; when praying in his temple, meditating, he uses trust. And he is free -- he is neither bound by trust nor bound by doubt.

This is my approach for my sannyasins. Don't be bound by your ears or by your eyes, otherwise you will remain poor. You have got both! -- so when you want to see use eyes, and when you want to listen close your eyes. It is not accidental that when listening to music people close their eyes. If you know how to listen to music you WILL close your eyes, because eyes are no longer needed.

So is it with doubt and trust. Trust is the quality of the child, these three qualities; the quality of being total, the quality of remaining ignorant in spite of knowledge, and the quality of trust. This is the meaning.

Childishness is a kind of sentimental emotional state. That is not needed for you. Every child has to be allowed to be childish, as every adult has to be allowed to be adultish, but an adult can also have the qualities of being a child. Childishness is not needed, that tantrum quality is not needed, that sentimentality is not needed. But maturity can cope perfectly well with the qualities of being like a child. There is no contradiction between them. In fact, you can become mature only if you ARE like a child.

"ONE DAY YOU EMPHASIZE BEING MATURE, ANOTHER DAY YOU SAY 'BE LIKE A CHILD.' IF I ADOPT A MATURE ATTITUDE, I FEEL MY CHILD IS REPRESSED AND STARVED FOR EXPRESSION. IF I LET MY CHILD DANCE, SING, THEN ALSO CHILDISH ATTITUDES COME UP, LIKE CLINGING TO A LOVE-OBJECT. WHAT TO DO?"

You allow it. Your childishness has remained unfulfilled. Let it come and let it be fulfilled -- the sooner the better -- otherwise it will go on clinging to you to your very end. Allow it expression and it will be gone. You simply pour it; and this is the place where you can do it easily and nobody will interfere with you.

Just a few days ago there was an old woman sannyasin, Shefali -- she must be seventy -- and she started feeling like a child, and she was very worried. And when I told her "You need not be worried, you be childish", she started playing with small children. Even the children were a little embarrassed: "What is the matter?" But soon they accepted. Children are very accepting: soon they forgot her age, and she enjoyed the trip tremendously. She got so much out of it that she came to me and told me, "My whole life has been a wastage!" She became REALLY a child again, full of wonder and awe, singing and dancing and playing, running after butterflies and collecting flowers and colored stones. It was a beautiful experience to see that old woman. Her face was transformed: it suddenly became luminous, a great grace descended on her.