The fourth question:

Question 4

I LOVE VERY MUCH THIS MAXIM BY AN AMERICAN HUMORIST: "AN OPEN MIND IS A GREAT IDEA, BUT IF YOU MAKE IT YOUR PRIMARY AIM IN LIFE, WHAT YOU WILL END UP WITH WILL MORE RESEMBLE A CAVE OF WINDS." SOMETIMES I FEEL LIKE THIS HERE, WITH THE DIFFERENT ACTIVITIES BLOWING ME IN SO MANY DIRECTIONS, BUT NO DIRECTION SEEMS TO BE CLEARLY TOWARDS GOD. WHAT TO DO?

Parodha. God is not to be found in any particular direction. God is all over the place. To seek Him in a particular direction is a sure way to miss Him. GOD IS NOT THERE, God is here. God surrounds you, He is your surround. You breathe Him, you eat Him, you drink Him, you make love to Him, and you have not recognized that it is all God. You are asking for a direction? God cannot be in any direction; all directions are in God. God is the totality. How can the totality be in a direction? -- north, east, west, south, up, down? God cannot be in any direction. Just replace the word 'god' with 'totality', and then you will be able to understand what I mean.

And the whole purpose here is to help you drop all directions, all dimensions, so one day you suddenly find yourself utterly directionless. In that moment everything stops. You are not going anywhere because there is nowhere to go. You are simply being herenow. You are a MOJUD -- you are present to the present. You forget all about God in that moment. If you remember God in that moment, you will miss God. The word 'god' is not God, and the images of God are not God, and the definitions of God are all man-made, all manufactured by the human mind. In that moment, when the world stops, when all directions have disappeared and you are suddenly standing herenow with no direction to go in, with nothing to do, with nothing to be -- no past, no future, just utterly herenow -- in that very moment God has happened to you. You will know God; not the God of the philosophers and the theologians, but the God of the mystics -- Eckhart, Boehme, of Rumi, of Hillaj, of Bodhidharma. You will know the God of the mystics.

God cannot be pointed at because whatsoever you point at will be only a part, and God is the whole. You cannot look at God because whatsoever you look at will be a part, remember it.

I can understand your problem. When you start searching for God you are searching for a direction, you are searching for a goal. Before you were searching for money, now you are searching for God. Money was a goal, or power; now God is the goal. You have not changed: money was in the future, God is in the future. Money was in a certain direction, God is in a certain direction. You have not changed much, nothing has changed. You have only changed the object of your desire.

Direction means desiring. Desire creates the direction. First you were going towards the marketplace, you were going to Wall Street; now you are going to the Himalayas -- but still going, going somewhere. Wall Street has been replaced by the Himalayas. First you were going to New Delhi -- you wanted to become the prime minister or the president -- now you are going to a Himalayan cave -- you want to become enlightened, but becoming is there. And becoming is the problem, not what you want to become. You WANT to become! You are not contented with being, you are not contented with what you are. You have a goal, you want to improve, you want to progress, you want to do this and that -- only then will you be satisfied.

The goal is the game of the ego. When you understand this.... And this is what I would like you to understand here. Being with me, if only this can happen to you, the revolution has happened. Drop becoming! Being is enough. You are not to become anybody other than who you are. You are perfect as you are. In all your imperfections, you are perfect. In all your limitations, you are unlimited. God is perfectly happy with you, only you are not happy with yourself; that is the problem. If God were not happy with you, He would have withdrawn you. It is a perfect sign, that He continues to breathe in you -- He is perfectly happy with you. He does not want you to change, to become anybody else. He needs you as you are. You are accepted, welcome.

But you are not happy with yourself. You have greater ideas than God Himself. You are more perfectionist than God is. And God cannot be perfectionist, otherwise He would have turned neurotic. Perfectionists always turn neurotic. A perfectionist cannot remain healthy, whole. He cannot have a psychological well-being, he's always tense. The goal is there, and the goal is far away and distant, and he becomes more and more unhappy. And as days pass by and death comes close by and the goal seems Even far more distant, and seems impossible to attain, the more and more depressed he becomes.

Here I am to take all goals away from you. If you can renounce your goals you have renounced the world. See the point! I'm not saying renounce the world, I'm not saying renounce your wife, I'm not saying renounce your shop, I'm not saying renounce anything. I am saying renounce goals. In renouncing goals you become a sannyasin. This is my vision of a sannyasin.

A sannyasin is one who does not bother about the future, who lives this moment and lives as totally as possible, enjoys this moment -- with no guilt, with no feeling that something is missing. Nothing is missing. Drop the goals; then there is no need for any direction. You must have come in search of a certain goal called God, MOKSHA, NIRVANA, enlightenment.

Drop those ideas. See the futility of them. They are driving you mad, they are keeping you insane. They feed your insanity, they are the root cause of all your neurosis. Seeing it, one forgets all about directions. When there is no goal there is no direction. And when there is no goal there is no path either. When goals disappear, directions disappear: when directions disappear. Paths disappear. Then you are utterly herenow, then there is nothing else that is. This is enlightenment. Enlightenment is not a goal. This is being in God.

Don't rush, don't go on rushing. Sit silently, watch that which is. Don't hanker for that which should be. Just watch that which is. God is hidden in that which is, God is not a direction.

You ask me, "SOMETIMES I FEEL LIKE THIS HERE, WITH THE DIFFERENT ACTIVITIES BLOWING ME IN SO MANY DIRECTIONS..."

They are methods, devices to destroy your goals. You can go only in one direction. I give you so many directions that you will become paralyzed. That is the whole device. I give you so many meditations, I give you so many processes, that sooner or later you will lose all sense of direction. You will be simply confused -- great is that confusion. You will be muddled -- great is that muddledness.

Lao Tzu has said, "Everybody seems to be clever except me. I am confused." And he is the man to be. He says, "Everybody seems to be so clever, only I am a fool." And he's the person to be. He knows. By being a fool he has come to know. By being confused, not knowing where to go, not knowing what to achieve, not knowing what is the right thing, he has stopped. In that stopping is realization.

This place that you are living in, this space that I am making available to you, is to destroy, to take away all that which is driving you crazy -- the very root cause of it. Once the ground underneath your feet has disappeared.... In the beginning you will find yourself very forsaken and frightened, but soon you will start enjoying that fall into the abyss, the bottomless abyss. And once you have started to live without directions, without goals, without props, life will happen in abundance. You need not go in search of God, God will come to you. God is coming to you, He is coming from every direction possible. He's flowing towards you, but you are never at home. You are never MOJUD, you are never present.

There is an ancient Tibetan parable that says a man goes on praying to God, "Come to me," and cries and cries, and God comes. But by the time God reaches there the man is not there; he has moved. And sometimes even if he is there and God comes, only his body is there. Now the body cannot recognize God. He's on spiritual trips, he's never where he is. So it goes on and on, and then he dies. And then he has a real grudge against God. And when he comes to face God, he shouts, screams and he says, "I have been crying and crying and weeping and you never came!What about your promises? In the scriptures you have promised, 'Whenever somebody calls me I will come'!" And God said, "What are you talking about? I am fed-up with you, because I have been coming to you every day. Millions of times I came, but you were never there! You were somewhere else,, some place else. How to find you?! You never allowed me to find you."

That's my message too: allow God to find you, you need not go in search of Him. Where will you search? You don't know His address, you don't know His name. He has none. You don't know His form, how will you recognize? Even if you come across Him, even if you bump into Him in the street.... If you are a gentleman you will say, "Sorry" and you will move on. Or, if you are not such a gentleman, you may be angry and abuse and shout and fight with Him, but how will you recognize Him? You have never seen Him before.

The Egyptian mystics say. "When the disciple is ready, the Master comes. When the devotee is ready God appears." This is a very significant saying, of profound significance. The disciple cannot find the Master. Even if he finds, how will he recognize? It is always the Master who finds the disciple. Whenever the disciple is ready the Master appears, never before it. All directions have to be dropped.

Those directions are the cause of why you have not been Able to disappear into God. Your search is the cause of why you have not been able to find. Stop searching and find! In fact the moment you stop searching God finds you.