Then Rabia is no longer sitting on the road searching for a needle that is lost in the home.
Don’t be a reformer, and don’t try to teach others, and don’t try to change others. If you change, that’s enough of a message.
Remember; be true to your inner voice. It may lead you into danger; then go in danger, but remain true to the inner voice. Then there is a possibility that one day you will come to a state where you can dance with inner fulfillment.
Always look: The first thing is your being. Don’t allow others to manipulate and control you—and they are many; everybody is ready to control you, everybody is ready to change you, everybody is ready to give you a direction you have not asked for. Everybody is giving you a guide for your life. The guide exists within you and you carry the blueprint.
To be authentic means to be true to one. It is a very, very dangerous phenomenon; rare people can do that. But whenever people do it, they achieve. They achieve such beauty, such grace, and such contentment that you cannot imagine.
Truthfulness means authenticity—to be true, not to be false, not to use masks. Whatsoever is your real face, show it at whatever the cost.
Remember, that doesn’t mean that you have to unmask others; if they are happy with their lies, it is for them to decide. Don’t go and unmask anybody because this is how people think—they say they have to be truthful, authentic; they mean they have to go and make everybody nude because “Why are you hiding your body? These clothes are not needed.” No. Please remember: Be truthful to yourself. You are not needed to reform anybody else in the world. If you can grow yourself,
Cleanse yourself. And meditation is nothing but a cleaning of all the rubbish that has gathered in your mind. When the mind is silent and the heart is singing, you will be ready—without any fear but with great joy—to be intimate. And without intimacy, you are alone here among strangers. With intimacy, friends, by people who love you, surround you. Intimacy is a great experience. One should not miss it.
People are searching for meditation, prayer, and new ways of being. But the deeper search, and the more basic search is how to get rooted in existence again. Call it meditation, call it prayer, or whatever you will, but the essential thing is how to get rooted in existence again. We have become trees that are uprooted—and nobody else is responsible except us, with our own stupid idea of conquering nature.
We are part of nature—how can the part conquer the whole? Befriend it, love it, trust it, and slowly, slowly in that friendship, in that love, in that trust, intimacy arises; you come closer. Nature comes closer to you, and nature starts revealing its secrets. Its ultimate secret is godliness. It is revealed only to those who are really friends of existence.
Can intimacy exists?
Intimacy simply means that the doors of the heart are open for you; you are welcome to come in and be a guest. But that is possible only if you have a heart that is not stinking with repressed sexuality that is not boiling with all kinds of perversions, a heart that is natural. As natural as trees, as innocent as children—then there is no fear of intimacy.
That’s what I am trying to do: to help you unburden your unconscious, unburden your mind, to become ordinary. There is nothing more beautiful than to be just simple and ordinary. Then you can have as many intimate friends, as many intimate relationships, as possible because you are not afraid of anything. You become an open book that anybody can read. There is nothing to hide.
Nobody knows anything about the future. Your heaven and your hell and your God are most probably all hypotheses, unproven. The only thing that is in your hands in your life—make it as rich as possible.
By intimacy, by love, by opening yourself to many people, you become richer. And if you can live in deep love, in deep friendship, in deep intimacy, with many people, you have lived rightly. And wherever you happen to be, you have learned the art, and you will be living happily there, too.
If you are simple, loving, open, intimate, you create a paradise around you. If you are closed, constantly on the defensive, always worried that somebody may come to know your thoughts, your dreams, your perversions, you are living in hell. Hell is within you—and so is paradise. They are not geographical places; they are your spiritual spaces.
Know yourself!!
Let’s go onto the concept of “aura” or “hum”!
If there is something to seek, you are a worldly man. If there is nothing to seek, and the question “Who is this seeker?” has become important to you, and then you are a religious man. This is the way I define the worldly and the religious. If you are still seeking something—maybe in the other life, on the other shore, in heaven, in paradise, it makes no difference—you are still a worldly man. If all seeking has stopped and you have suddenly become aware that now there is only one thing to know—“That is this seeker in me? What is this energy that wants to seek? Who am I?”—Then there is a transformation. All values change suddenly. You start moving inward.
But because you depend on others, you are afraid to go into aloneness—because the moment you start going into aloneness, you start becoming very afraid of losing yourself. You don’t have yourself in the first place, but whatever self you have created out of others’ opinions will have to be left behind. Hence, it is very scary to go in. The deeper you go, the less you know who you are. So in fact when you are moving toward self-knowledge, before it happens you will have to drop all ideas about the self. There will be a gap; there will be a kind of nothingness. You will become a nonentity. You will be utterly lost because all that you know is no longer relevant, and that which is relevant you don’t know yet.
Christian mystics call this “the dark night of the soul.” It has to be passed, and once you have passed it, there is the dawn. The sun rises, and one comes to know oneself for the first time. The first ray of the sun, and all is fulfilled. The first songs of the birds in the morning
The inner bath
First thing—-Everybody is a salesman. If you listen to too many salesmen, you will become mad. Don’t listen to anybody. Just close your eyes and listen to the inner voice. Your whole mechanism is topsy-turvy because when you wanted to be angry you weren’t; when you wanted to hate you didn’t. Now you want to love; suddenly you find that the mechanism doesn’t function.
Then the second thing – only if you have done the first thing does the second become possible—never wear a mask. If you are angry, be angry. It is risky, but don’t smile because that is being untrue. You have been taught that when you are angry, smile, but then your smile becomes false, a mask—just an exercise of the lips and nothing else. The heart full of anger, poison, and the lips smiling; you become a false phenomenon.
When you want to be angry, be angry. Nothing is wrong in being angry. If you want to laugh, laugh. Nothing is wrong in laughing loudly. By and by you will see that your whole system is functioning. When it functions, really, it has a hum around it. Just like a car hums when everything is going well – the driver who loves the car knows that now everything is functioning well. There is an organic unity; the mechanism is functioning well.
You can see it – whenever a person’s mechanism is functioning well you can sense the hum around him. He walks, but his step has a dance in it. He talks, but his words carry a subtle poetry in them. He looks at you, and he really looks; it is not just lukewarm, it is really warm. When he touches you, he really touches you; you can feel his energy moving into your body, a current of life being transferred … because his mechanism is functioning well.
I have a suspicion that wherever anger is suppressed too much, people have teeth trouble. Their teeth go wrong because too much energy is there and never released. And anybody who suppresses anger will eat more—angry people will always eat more because the teeth need some exercise. Angry people will smoke more. Angry people will talk more – they can become obsessive talkers because somehow the jaw needs exercise so that the energy is released a little bit. And angry people’s hands will become knotted, ugly. If the energy had been released, they could have become beautiful hands.
If you suppress anything, there is some corresponding part in the body to the emotion. If you don’t want to cry, your eyes will lose their luster because tears are needed; they are a very alive phenomenon. When once in a while you weep and cry—really you go into it, you become it, and tears start flowing from your eyes—your eyes are cleansed, your eyes become fresh again, young and virgin.
And the third thing – about authenticity: Always remain in the present because all falseness enters either from the past or from the future. That which has passed has passed. Don’t bother about it and don’t carry it as a burden; otherwise, it will not allow you to be authentic to the present. And all that has not come has not come yet. Don’t unnecessarily be bothered about the future, otherwise that will come into the present and destroy it. Be true to the present, and then you will be authentic. To be here now is to be authentic.
When you are angry, you don’t show your anger—you are afraid it may destroy your image because people think you are so compassionate, and people say that you are never angry. They appreciate it, and it is so gratifying to the ego. Now, being angry will destroy your beautiful image, so rather than destroying the image, you repress the anger. It is boiling within, but on the surface you remain compassionate, kind, polite, sweet. Now the division is being practiced. People are practicing it through their whole lives; then the division becomes absolutely settled. Even when you are sitting alone and there is nobody, and there is no need to pretend, you go on pretending; it has become second nature. People are not true even in their bathrooms; even when they are utterly alone, they are untrue. Now it is not a question
If you have an ideal, you cannot be true to the moment because the ideal is always there and you have to imitate the ideal. The true man has no ideals.
Whenever you trust somebody, it becomes impossible for him to cheat you, to deceive you. Sitting on the platform in a railway station, you don’t know the person who is sitting by your side—he is a stranger, a complete stranger—and you say to him, “Please watch my luggage. I have to go to purchase a ticket.” And you go. You trust an absolute stranger. But it almost never happens that the stranger deceives you. He could have deceived you if you had not trusted him.
Trust has a magic in it. How can he deceive you now that you have trusted him? How can he fall so low? He will never be able to forgive himself if he deceives you.
There is an intrinsic quality in human consciousness to trust and to be trusted. Everybody enjoys being trusted. It is respect from the other person—and when you trust a stranger it is more so. There is no reason to trust him, and still you trust him. You raise the man to such a high pedestal, you value the man so much, and it is almost impossible for him to fall from that height. And if he falls, he will never be able to forgive himself, he will have to carry the weight of guilt his whole life.
A man who trusts himself comes to know the beauty of it—comes to know that the more you trust yourself, the more you bloom; the more you are in a state of let-go and relaxation, the more you are settled and serene, the more you are calm, cool, and quiet. And it is so beautiful that you start trusting more and more people because the more you trust, the more your calmness deepens; your coolness goes deeper and deeper to the very core of your being. And the more you trust, the more you soar high. A man who can trust will sooner or later know the logic of trust. And then one day he is bound to try to trust the unknown.
Start trusting yourself – hat is the fundamental lesson, the first lesson. Start loving yourself. If you don’t love yourself, who else is going to love you? But remember, if you only love yourself, your love will be very poor.
What is the real answer to living in intimacy?
To know existence, you have to be existential. You are not existential, you live in thoughts. You live in the past, in the future, but never here and now. And existence is right here now. You are not here, hence the question arises. The question arises because of you not meeting with existence. You think you live, but you don’t live. You think you love, but you don’t love. You only think about love, you think about life, you think about existence, and that very thinking is the question, that thinking is a barrier. Drop all thoughts and see. You will not find a single question; only the answer exists.
That’s why I insist again and again that the search is not really for the answer, the search is not really so that your questions can be answered. No, the search is only about how to drop the questions, how to see life and existence with a nonquestioning mind. That is the meaning of Shraddha, trust. This is the deepest dimension of shraddha or trust—you look at existence with a nonquestioning mind.
You simply look. You have no idea how to look at it, you don’t impose any form on it, you don’t have any prejudice; you simply look with naked eyes, absolutely uncovered by any thoughts, any philosophies, any religions. You look at existence with eyes like a small child, and then suddenly there is only the answer.
There are no questions in existence. Questions come from you. And they will go on coming, and you can go on accumulating as many answers as you like; those answers won’t help. You have to attain to the answer—and to attain the answer, you have to drop all questioning. When there is no question in the mind, the vision is clear, you have a clarity of perception; the doors of perception are clean and open, and everything suddenly becomes transparent. You can go to the very depth. Wherever you look, your look penetrates to the deepest core—and there suddenly you find yourself.
You find yourself everywhere. You will find yourself in a rock if you look deep, deep enough. Then the looker, the observer, becomes the observed, the seer becomes the seen, and the knower becomes the known. If you look deep enough in a rock, in a tree, or in a man or in a woman, if you go on looking deep, that look is a circle. It starts from you, then passes through the other and comes back to you. Everything is so transparent. Nothing hinders. The ray goes, becomes a circle, and falls back on you.
The circle is complete. Now the devotee is one with God. Now the seeker is one with the sought. Now the inquirer himself becomes the answer.
In existence, there is no question. I have lived in it long enough now, and I haven’t come across a single question—not even a fragment of a question. One simply lives it.
Then life has a beauty of its own. No doubt arises in the mind, no suspicion surrounds you, no question exists within your being—you are undivided, whole.
