The first question:

Question 1

AM I A RESTLESS, CONFUSED BUDDHA AND ONLY NEED TO ACCEPT RIGHT NOW THE PECULIAR NATURE OF MY BUDDHAHOOD, OR IS IT DIFFERENT FROM AND COMES AFTER ALL THIS STUFF HAPPENING NOW?

Sambuddha, you are a Buddha from the very beginning, as everybody else is. Buddhahood is the source and the goal. You are a Buddha from the very beginning, and you will remain a Buddha to the very end. The only question is of recognizing it, not of realizing it. Real, it is already; real it is. Realization is not the question, but recognition, a turning in. That is the meaning of the word 'conversion': turning upon oneself.

Consciousness is continuously engaged by objects. It moves outwards. Its engagement, its commitment, is to the without. When you disengage it from the without and allow it to fall within itself the recognition arises. Then you start tasting your being for the first time. You have been tasting the other for millions of your lives, and the other only keeps you occupied; nothing else ever happens. The other only keeps you engaged with toys. And as you are engaged with the other, the other is engaged with you -- because you are the other for him or her.

To look at the other and forget oneself is ignorance. To remember oneself and forget the other is awakening. And once you have become awakened to yourself, recognized your Buddhahood, then you can look outside too. Then never again is the other to be found. If you have come to know who you are, the other disappears in that very knowledge.

This is the paradoxical nature of self-recognition: when you recognize the self, the self disappears, and with the self, the other. The other cannot exist without the self. I-thou exists as a pair. They are not two words, it is a pair-word. You cannot separate them. You go on looking at the other; in the shadow the I is created. And you remain engaged with the other, and you go on falling into new traps, new games. The other is the world.

Turning in....

But you are too concerned with turning on. You are turned on by the other. You become excited with the other, you want to explore the other; hence you continue moving always in the other and remain unrecognized, remain unremembered, remain unaware. Buddhahood is nothing but becoming engaged with oneself. And once you know who you are the I disappears, and with the disappearance of the I, the you, thou, the other, disappears. Then it is all one. There is nothing in and nothing out. That is what is called enlightenment.

You ask me, "AM I A RESTLESS, CONFUSED BUDDHA AND ONLY NEED TO ACCEPT RIGHT NOW THE PECULIAR NATURE OF MY BUDDHAHOOD...?"

Everybody is restless, everybody is confused. The confusion is coming from your engagement with the other; the other confuses you. The restlessness is there because you are too excited by the other. It will remain, but it does not destroy your Buddhahood. Your potential remains untouched by it. It is only on the surface, on the periphery. These winds blow only on the periphery, they create ripples on the periphery, but in your deepest depth you remain untouched, unmoved. Not even a small ripple arises there... that is the center of the cyclone.

Start looking in. Even for a few moments, just forget the other. Slowly, slowly the knack is found. There is no art to it, otherwise I would have taught it to you. It cannot be taught, you have to grope for it. But groping, one arrives, that's certain -- because many have arrived. I have arrived, you can arrive.

And you cannot follow somebody else because everybody arrives in his own way, because everybody is so unique and different from any other.

Start groping. That groping is meditation. Close your eyes to the other. You have seen the Buddha-statues -- Buddha is sitting with closed eyes. Those closed eyes are simply symbolic, symbolic that he's not engaged with the other, that he is not exploring the other any more. He wants to do first things first. He wants to explore this subjectivity: who is this within me? And unless this is found, all else is futile. If I don't know who I am, I will never know who the other is. If I can't experience myself, how can I experience the other? The other is far away. If I am not sensitive enough to feel my own heartbeat, how am I going to feel the heart-beat of the other? And that's what you have been trying,

and failing, and trying again, and hoping, and being frustrated again and again. It is an old rut; you go on moving in it. It is a vicious circle.

Start groping inwards. Whenever you are alone -- and manage sometimes to be alone, it is not good always to remain crowded -- find your own place sometimes and just close your eyes. That is symbolic: close yourself to the world.

Now this has to be understood, because the contemporary mind is too worried with how to open itself, how to remain open to others. In itself it is a beautiful understanding, but you can go to the extreme very easily -- and that's what the mind always does.

In the past the religions have taught you to become closed; that was one extreme. To come out of it the modern trends are to open up, to become open to others. Now you can forget completely how to close -- and both are dangerous. First you suffered from Christianity, now you can suffer from modern humanistic growth psychologies. One needs a balance, one needs freedom. One needs to be capable of doing whatsoever one wants. Sometimes you need to open -- that is love. Love is opening up to the other. And sometimes you need to close up to the whole world and the whole existence -- that is meditation. And the man is really a grown-up man who can do it at will. Neither does his closing to the world prevent him from opening up to the world, nor does his opening up become a fixed, paralyzed gesture where he cannot close.

You have to be just like your eyes -- they continuously blink. If your eyes become focused and can't blink, that will not be healthy. And if your eyes become closed and can't open, that will not be healthy either. I would like you to remember this balance always, because mind always moves to the extreme. Either it closes completely and becomes a Christian monk, moves to a monastery and forgets the whole world and simply starts shrinking and dying -- it is committing suicide -- or, you become a groupie, you start moving from one group to another, opening up again and again, and your whole effort becomes how to open up, how to remain open. And you become very miserable when you can't open up. If you go on working at that, soon you will become fixed. Your apertures will be open but then you will not be able to close.

The Christian monk became incapable of love. And the people who become too occupied with the modern effort for opening will become incapable of meditation. And both are needed. Both are polarities.

In love, you connect with the other; in meditation, you connect with yourself. Both are enrichening. Unless a love is based in deep meditation, it will be superficial. It will never be intimate, it will not have any profundity. It will not bring bliss to you; it will bring only agonies, it will never bring ecstasy. The love has to be based on meditation. And a meditation that is against love, anti-love, will be a dry desert, a wasteland. No flower will ever bloom there.

And humanity has tried both and failed in both. But they have been tried separately, as antagonistic to each other. Never in the history of man have meditation and love been tried together -- as two wings of a bird, opposite and yet complementary.

That's my basic work here: I would like you to be loving, open, and I would like you also to be meditative and closed. Closing/opening should be like exhalation/inhalation, blinking of the eyes. Closing/opening should be like the beat of the heart: between two beats there is a gap. In that gap the heart stops, again beats, again stops. The beat and the stop -- your life should be a music, the sound and the silence.

Sound alone makes only noise. It has to keep balance with silence. The higher the music is, the more silence it contains. It contains silence through sound. It is paradoxical. All that is great is paradoxical. And if you really want to come to the peak of human consciousness, you will have to be paradoxical.

Meditate/love, breathe in/breathe out, open up/close in -- these things will become slowly, slowly, very natural. And don't be obsessed by anything, and slowly, slowly you will come to recognize who you are. You are a Buddha.

And remember, Buddhas come in all shapes and all sizes. Don't make an image of a Buddha. Gautam the Buddha was only one form of Buddhahood. You are not to be like Gautam the Buddha; you will be a Buddha in your own way. Your Buddhahood will have its own taste, its own form, its own being. You are not going to be a second-hand copy. You are not going to be a carbon, you will be original.

That is the beauty of life -- that everybody here is original. God never duplicates, He creates each human being anew.

You ask, "AM I A RESTLESS, CONFUSED BUDDHA AND ONLY NEED TO ACCEPT RIGHT NOW THE PECULIAR NATURE OF MY BUDDHAHOOD...?"

You have to accept all that is. You have to accept all that you are, because only through acceptance does restlessness disappear. Only through acceptance does one start cooling down. One becomes more collected and centered. When you accept, tensions are dropped. In acceptance is relaxation. In relaxation it is possible to turn in, and in relaxation it is possible to turn out. Both become smooth. Easy is the flow. You can go out and meet the other, and you can come back and meet with yourself. One day you will be surprised to find that the one who is in and the one who is out are not two. And when you go out, you go to your own outside, and when you go in, you go to your own inside. That 'in' and 'out' are sides of you.

This whole existence is a universe -- that is the meaning of the word 'universe': it is unity. It is not a multi-verse, it is a uni-verse. But that universe will be revealed to you only at the very peak of meditation and love.

Accept whosoever you are and wherever you are. That does not mean to get stuck there. Accept, and through acceptance the flow arises and you start moving. But the movement is not through rejection. The movement does not come because there is a goal to be achieved, the movement comes because there is so much energy that the energy moves on its own. Just watch the Ganges coming from the Himalayas -- do you think the Ganges is really searching for the ocean? That is utterly wrong. The Ganges has no idea of the ocean, it is not searching for any ocean. It reaches to the ocean -- that is another matter -- but it is not motivated to search for the ocean. Then what is happening? Why is it moving? It is not moving TOWARDS the ocean, it is simply moving because so much energy can't be contained. It is moving out of so much overflowing energy.

See the difference, the difference is great. A man can move in two ways. One is through motivation: something has to be achieved THERE, in future. There is a goal. Then you pull yourself together and you start dragging yourself towards the goal. Your life will be a life of misery. There is another kind of movement -- the true movement -- which has no motive in it, but you are so full of energy that you have to move.

"Energy is movement, and energy is delight," says William Blake. Yes, it is, because movement is delight, movement is dance. You start moving because there is so much energy and the energy starts flowing. One day you arrive, but that arrival has not been a goal. That arrival has never been pre-planned, you had never thought about it. The Ganges reaches to the ocean, but the Ganges was not trying to reach to the ocean. The Ganges was simply delighting in its energy. And out of that delight, the movement, out of that overflowing energy... the movement.

Accept yourself. In that acceptance you start conserving energy. This is the mechanism: when you accept yourself you don't fight. In fight, energy is dissipated. When you accept yourself totally as you are, all fight, all friction dissolves; energy is preserved. You start becoming a great reservoir. You start becoming a great streaming, flowing energy. And soon you will see you are moving, and that movement has beauty, because you are not moving to any particular goal -- God, nirvana, enlightenment, Buddhahood, no. You are simply moving because you cannot contain yourself; it is too much, it can't be contained. You have to move! In fact, you are not doing anything in moving, the movement is happening to you. Out of sheer energy, the movement is growing in you.

Meditate over the difference between these two. In the first there is tension, desire, planning, future. The present is missed, the present is rejected. There is choice, because there are so many possibilities and you have to choose one possibility. There is anxiety and anguish -- who knows whether you have chosen the right thing or the wrong? Who knows whether God exists or not? And there is doubt and suspicion and fear. And because of that goal you go on missing the whole journey. You can't enjoy the birds singing, you can't enjoy the trees by the side of the road; you are focused on the goal. You don't have energy enough to waste. You become a miser, you don't look at anything. You simply go on rushing -- and with great fear and trembling inside: you may be moving in the wrong direction, you may be following a wrong person, you may be following just a fiction; it may not exist at all. And you are staking your whole life! That's why your so-called saints look so sad, no song in their lives, no dance, non-celebrating. Crying and weeping, they go on dragging themselves towards something they have heard from others. And they can't be really trusting; it is impossible. Trust arises only out of experience. They can, at the most, believe. And belief is always based in doubt, remains in doubt. Belief is an effort to cover up doubt. And the doubt will arise again and again, and many times your saints will go astray.

There is no devil to tempt them; no devil exists. All those temptations that have been felt by your so-called saints come from their own innermost core -- the repressed being, the suppressed doubt, the suppressed desire. They are fearful people. You have heard about saints who are so wise that they can talk with the trees and the birds, but they are so afraid to commune with human beings; who go in search of lepers to kiss them but can't touch a beautiful woman. You see the stupidity of it? They are ready to kiss the leper. Why are they afraid of a woman? And what kind of saintlihood is this, what kind of holiness? It is not whole.

There is fear with the woman; they have repressed that part. In fact, to repress that part they go and kiss the leper. They are afraid of beauty, they search for ugliness. They are afraid of the attraction of the body, they search for the repulsive body. It is not out of love that your saints have been kissing the lepers. It is just to feel repulsed by the body so that they can repress their desire for the beautiful body. This is sheer nonsense. And these people CAN'T arrive. They have not even started, how can they arrive? The journey has not even begun.

I teach you another kind of journey -- not the journey motivated by any goal, but the journey emerging out of too much energy, a journey in which each moment will be joyful because you are not worried about any goal. And the beauty and the paradox is: when you are not worried about the goal and you enjoy each moment that you live, you arrive at the goal. And when you can't enjoy the journey you never arrive at the goal, because all those moments that you lived on the Way and enjoyed, gathered together.... Those moments gathered together make you capable of the ultimate joy of seeing the truth revealed.

Accept yourself, relax with yourself, enjoy yourself, love yourself. You are good, you are beautiful. Let this feeling arise in you and you will find all friction has disappeared. Conflict is no longer there, you are not fighting. And the energy that is saved is too much. Soon you will find you have become a great reservoir, you are ready to move. In fact, you CAN'T stay any longer, the energy starts moving on its own accord. It reaches to the ocean, it CERTAINLY reaches to the ocean, but it reaches because of too much, of overflowing being.

You are a Buddha. Respect yourself, and the Buddhahood will start changing. You are a restless Buddha? Soon you will become a restful Buddha. But Buddhahood is there whether you are restless or restful. Right now you are a confused Buddha, then you will be a clear Buddha, but Buddhahood remains there. Buddhahood is such that it cannot be taken away by your restlessness or your confusion. Right now you may be an ignorant Buddha, then you will be a wise Buddha, but Buddhahood remains the same.

So I declare you Buddhas right now! Through this declaration you will arrive, and your Buddhahood will become more and more serene, calm and quiet. More and more beauty will arise within your being, more and more splendor.

Yes, you are an imprisoned splendor that has to be released, freed.