Relationship is a thing:
You cling to it. Relating is a flow, a movement, and a process. You meet a person, you are loving because you have so much love to give—and the more you give, the more you have. Once you have understood this strange arithmetic of love—that the more you give, the more you have … this is just against the economic laws that operate in the outside world. Once you have known that, if you want to have more love and more joy, you give and share, then you simply share. And whosoever allows you to share your joy with him or with her, you feel grateful to him or her. But it is not a relationship; it is river like flow.
The river passes by the side of a tree, saying hello, nourishing the tree, giving water to the tree … and it moves on, dances on. It does not cling to the tree. And the tree does not say, “Where are you going? We are married! And before you can leave me you will need a divorce—at least a separation! Where are you going? And if you were going to leave me, why did you dance so beautifully around me? Why did you nourish me in the first place?” No, the tree showers its flowers onto the river in deep gratefulness, and the river moves on. The wind comes and dances around the tree and moves on. And the tree gives its fragrance to the wind.
This is relating. If humanity is ever going to become grown-up, mature, this will be the way of love: people meeting, sharing, moving, a nonpossessive quality, and a nondominating quality. Otherwise love becomes a power trip.
Freud in his last days wrote in a letter to a friend that as far as he had observed through his life—and he really observed deeply; nobody has observed so deeply, so penetratingly, so persistently and so scientifically—one conclusion seems absolutely certain: that people cannot live without lies. Truth is dangerous. Lies are very sweet but unreal. Delicious! You go on saying sweet nothings to your lover, and he goes on whispering in your ear sweet (but) nothings. And meanwhile life goes on slipping out of your hands, and everybody is coming closer and closer to death.
A reaction is out of the past; a response is out of the present. You react out of the past old patterns. Somebody insults you, suddenly the old mechanism starts functioning. In the past people have insulted you, and you have behaved in a certain way; you behave in the same way again. You are not responding to this insult and this person, you are simply repeating an old habit. You have not looked at this person and this new insult—it has a different flavor—you are just functioning like a robot. You have a certain mechanism inside you, you push the button, you say, “This man has insulted me,” and you react. The reaction is not to the real situation, it is something projected. You have seen the past in this man.
Reaction is out of the past. If you react out of old habits, out of mind, then you are not responding. To be responsive is to be totally alive in this moment, here now. Response is a beautiful phenomenon, it is life. Reaction is dead, ugly, and rotten; it is a corpse. Ninety-nine per cent of the time you react and you call it response. Rarely it happens in your life that you respond; but whenever it happens, you have a glimpse. Whenever it happens, the door to the unknown opens.
Everything goes on flowing, nothing is frozen. But the mind is a dead thing, it is a frozen phenomenon. If you act from the frozen mind, you live a dead life. You don’t live really—you are already in the grave.
Drop reactions. And allow more and more responses. To be responsive is to be responsible. To be responsive, to be responding, is to be sensitive. But sensitive to here and now.
Secure Me
Life is uncertain. No one can make it certain. There is no way to make it certain. And it is good that nobody can make it certain; otherwise, it would be dead. Life is fragile, delicate, always moving into the unknown; that’s its beauty. One needs to be courageous, adventurous. One needs to be a gambler to move with life. So be a gambler. Live this moment, and live it totally. When the next moment comes, we will see. You will be there to tackle it—as you have been able to tackle the past, you will be able to tackle the future also—and you will be more capable because you will be more experienced.
Every man creates a certain psychological security, unaware of the fact that his security is his prison. People are surrounded by all kinds of insecurities; hence the natural desire is to create a protection. This protection becomes bigger and bigger as you become more alert to the dangers you are living through. Your prison cell becomes smaller; you start living so well protected that life itself becomes impossible.
Life is possible only in insecurity. This is something very fundamental to be understood: Life in its very essence is insecurity. While you are protecting yourself, you are destroying your very life. Protection is death because only those who are dead in their graves are absolutely protected. Nobody can harm them, nothing can go wrong for them. There is no longer any death for them, all that has happened. Nothing more is going to happen.
There is a difference between survival and living. Survival is only a dragging—dragging from the cradle to the grave, wondering when the grave is going to come. In the space between the cradle and the grave, why be afraid? Death is certain … and you don’t have anything to lose. You come without anything. Your fears are just projections. You don’t have anything to lose, and one day what you have is bound to disappear. If death were uncertain, there would be some substance in the idea of creating security. If you could avoid death, then naturally it would be perfectly right to create barriers between you and death. But you cannot avoid it. Death is there—once accepted it loses all power, nothing can be done about it. When nothing can be done about it, then why be bothered?
Rather than crying and weeping and complaining and dragging yourself toward the grave, why not dance? Why not live every moment to such totality that if the next moment never comes, there is no complaint
But very few people have understood the inner working of their own psychology. Rather than living, they start protecting. The same energy that could have become a song and a dance becomes involved in creating more money, more power, more ambition, and more security. The same energy that could have been a tremendously beautiful flower of love becomes just an imprisonment in a marriage.
Marriage really secured me, I thought!!!!!!
Marriage is secure—by law, by social convention, by your own idea of respectability and what people will say. Everybody is afraid of everybody else, so people go on pretending. Love disappears—it is not in your hands. It comes just like the breeze comes, and it goes just like the breeze goes. Those who are alert and aware dance with the breeze, relish it to its deepest potential, enjoy its coolness and fragrance. And when it is gone, they are not sorry and sad. It was a gift from the unknown. It may come again. They wait—and it comes again and again. They learn, slowly, a deep patience and waiting. But most human beings down the centuries have done the very opposite. Afraid that the breeze may escape, they close all the doors, all the windows, and all possible cracks from where it can escape. This is their arrangement for security; this is called marriage. But now they are shocked—when all the windows and the doors are closed, and they have plugged even small cracks, instead of having a great, cool, fragrant breeze they have only a stale,dead air! Everybody feels it, but it needs courage to recognize that they have destroyed the beauty of the breeze by capturing it.
Marriage is secure—by law, by social convention, by your own idea of respectability and what people will say. Everybody is afraid of everybody else, so people go on pretending. Love disappears—it is not in your hands. It comes just like the breeze comes, and it goes just like the breeze goes. Those who are alert and aware dance with the breeze, relish it to its deepest potential, enjoy its coolness and fragrance. And when it is gone, they are not sorry and sad. It was a gift from the unknown. It may come again. They wait—and it comes again and again. They learn, slowly, a deep patience and waiting. But most human beings down the centuries have done the very opposite. Afraid that the breeze may escape, they close all the doors, all the windows, and all possible cracks from where it can escape. This is their arrangement for security; this is called marriage. But now they are shocked – when all the windows and the doors are closed, and they have plugged even small cracks, instead of having a great, cool, fragrant breeze they have only a stale,dead air! Everybody feels it, but it needs courage to recognize that they have destroyed the beauty of the breeze by capturing it.
In life, nothing can be captured and imprisoned. One has to live in openness, allowing all kinds of experiences to happen, being fully grateful as long as they last. Thankful, but not afraid of tomorrow. If today has brought a beautiful morning, a beautiful sunrise, songs of birds, great flowers, why be worried about tomorrow? Because tomorrow will be another today. Maybe the sunrise will have different colors. Maybe the birds will change their songs a little, maybe there will be rain clouds and the dance of the rain. But that has its own beauty that has its own nourishment.
An authentic person simply drops the idea of security and starts living in utter insecurity because that is the nature of life. You cannot change it. Those, which you cannot change, accept—and accept it with joy. Don’t unnecessarily hit your head against the wall, just pass through the door.
Man creates his own confusion just because he goes on rejecting himself, condemning himself, not accepting himself. Then a chain of confusion, inner chaos, and misery is created. Why don’t you accept yourself as you are? What is wrong? The whole of existence accepts you as you are, but you don’t.
You have some ideal to achieve. That ideal is always in the future—it has to be; no ideal can be in the present. And the future is nowhere; it is not yet born. But because of the ideal, you live in the future—which is nothing but a dream. Because of the ideal, you cannot live here and now. Because of the ideal, you condemn yourself.
All ideologies, all ideals, are condemnatory because they create an image in the mind. And when you go on comparing yourself with that image, you will always feel that something is lacking, something is missing. Nothing is lacking, and nothing is missing. You are perfect as far as there is any possibility of perfection.
This is how the ideal is created, and because of the ideal you become condemned. Compare yourself with the ideal, and you will never be perfect. It is impossible. If you say, “if,” then bliss is impossible because that “if” is the greatest disturbance.
If you say, “If those conditions are fulfilled, then I will be blissful,” then these conditions are never going to be fulfilled. And secondly, even if these conditions are fulfilled, by that time you will have lost the very capacity to celebrate and enjoy. And moreover, when these conditions are fulfilled—if ever, because they cannot be fulfilled—your mind will create further ideals.
Just as your thumb makes a print, unique and individual—that type of thumb has never existed before and will never exist again, it belongs only to you, there will never be another like it—the same is the case with your being. You have a being unique and individual, incomparable; it has never been before, it will never be again, only you have it. Celebrate it! Something unique has happened to everyone, God has given a unique gift to everyone, and you condemn it. You want something better! You try to be wiser than the existence, then you go wrong.
Remember, the part can never be wiser than the whole, and whatsoever the whole is doing is the final thing, you cannot change. You can make an effort to do so and waste your life, but nothing will be achieved through it.
Shadow & Shade
You remain on the periphery that is the problem. There you are in the light of the outside world, and shadow is created. Close your eyes, move into the shade. The moment you close your eyes, the sun is no longer there. Hence all meditations are done with closed eyes—you are moving into your own shade. Inside there is no sun and no shadow. Outside is society, and outside are all types of shadows. Have you ever realized that your anger, your sex, your greed, your ambition, are all part of society? If you really move in and leave society out, where is anger? Where is sex? But remember, in the beginning when you close your eyes they are not really closed. You carry images from the outside inside, and you will find the same society reflected. But if you continue simply moving, moving, moving inside, sooner or later society will be left out. You are in, society is out—you have moved from the periphery to the center.
In this center there is a silence: no anger and no ant anger, no sex and no celibacy, no greed and no nongreed no violence, no nonviolence—because those are all outside. Remember, the opposites are also outside—inside you are neither this nor that. You are simply a being, pure. This is what I mean, being like a god—a pure being with no opposites hanging around, fighting or flighting. No, simply being. You have moved into the shade.
It was really so easy to be in shade. But that which is easy is so difficult for the mind because the mind always finds it easier to run, to fight, because then there is something to do. If you say to the mind, “Don’t do anything,” that is the most difficult thing. The mind will ask, “Give me a mantra at least, so that with closed eyes I can say Aum, Aum … Ram, Ram. Something to do because how can we remain without doing anything, without something to run after, to chase?”
Love——loyalty
One very fundamental thing has to be remembered: Man is very clever in creating false values. The real values demand your totality, demand your whole being; the false values are very cheap. They look like the real, but they don’t demand your totality—just a superficial formality.
For example, in place of love, trust, we have created a false value, “loyalty.” The loyal person is only superficially concerned with love. He goes through all the gestures of love, but he means nothing by them; his heart stays out of his formal gestures.
A slave is loyal—but do you think anybody who is a slave, who has been reduced in his humanity, whose whole pride and dignity have been taken away, can love the person who has harmed him so deeply? He hates him, and if the chance arises,
he will kill him! But on the surface he will remain loyal—he has to. It is not out of joy, it is out of fear. It is not out of love, it is out of a conditioned mind that says you have to be loyal to your master. It is the loyalty of the dog to his master.
Love needs a more total response. It comes not out of duty but out of your own heartbeats, out of your own experience of joy, out of the desire to share it. Loyalty is something ugly. But for thousands of years it has been a very respectable value because society has enslaved people in different ways. The wife is supposed to be loyal to the husband—to the point that in India millions of women have died with their husband’s death, jumping onto the funeral pyre and burning to death. It was so respectable that any woman who would not do it had to live a very condemned life. She became almost an outcast; she was treated only as a servant in her own family. It was concluded that because she could not die with her husband, she was not loyal to him.
In fact, just think of it the other way around: Not a single man has jumped onto his wife’s funeral pyre! Nobody has raised the question, “Does that mean that no husband has ever been loyal to his wife?” But it is a society of double standards. One standard is for the master, the owner, the possessor, and the other standard is for the slave.
Love is a dangerous experience because you are possessed by something that is bigger than you. And it is not controllable; you cannot produce it on order. Once it is gone, there is no way to bring it back. All that you can do is to pretend, be a hypocrite.
Slaves are possessed by choice or by ignorance or cowardliness.
Loyalty is just a man made adjective to love, and freedom has no obligation to be part of decorating love. Freedom itself has its beauty.
Loyalty is a totally different matter. It is manufactured by your own mind, it is not something beyond you. It is a training in a particular culture, just like any other training. You start acting, and by and by you start believing your own acting
Give me the way
This is one of the hardest truths to recognize, that one remains the same—that whatsoever we do, we remain the same. There is no “improvement.” The whole ego is shattered because the ego lives through improvement, the idea of improvement, the idea of reaching somewhere someday. Maybe not today but tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow To recognize the fact that there is no improvement in the world, that life is just a celebration, it has nothing like business in it—once you understand this, the whole ego trip stops, and suddenly you are thrown back to this moment.
If you accept yourself, that is the beginning of accepting all. If you reject yourself, you are basically rejecting the universe; if you reject yourself, you are rejecting existence. If you accept yourself, you have accepted existence; then there is nothing else to do but to enjoy, to celebrate. There is no complaint left, there is no grudge; you feel grateful. Then life is good and death is good, then joy is good and sadness is good, then to be with your beloved is good and to be alone is good. Then whatsoever happens is good because it happens out of the whole.
But you have been conditioned for centuries not to accept yourself. All the cultures of the world have been poisoning the human mind because they all depend on one thing: Improve yourself. They all create anxiety in you—anxiety is the tense state between that which you are and that which you should be. People are bound to remain anxious if there is a “should” in life. If there is an ideal that has to be fulfilled, how can you be at ease? How can you be at home? It is impossible to live anything totally because the mind is hankering for the future. And that future never comes—it cannot come. By the very nature of your desire it is impossible. When it comes you will start imagining other things, you will start desiring other things. You can always imagine a better state of affairs. And you can always remain in anxiety, tense, worried—that’s how humanity has been living for centuries.
You cannot improve yourself. When you stop improving yourself, life improves you. In that relaxation, in that acceptance, life starts caressing you, life starts flowing through you. And when you don’t have any grudge, any complaint, you bloom, you flower.
Accept yourself as you are. And that is the most difficult thing in the world because it goes against your training, your education, and your culture. From the very beginning you have been told how you should be. Nobody has ever told you that you are good as you are; they have all put programs in your mind.
Parents, by priests, politicians, teachers, have programmed you—you have been programmed for only one thing: Just go on improving upon yourself. Wherever you are, go on rushing for something else. Never rest. Work unto death.
Let this be your color: acceptance. Let this be your characteristic: acceptance, utter acceptance. And then you will be surprised: Life is always ready to shower its gifts on you. Life is not a miser, existence always gives abundantly—but we cannot receive it because we don’t feel that we are worthy to receive it.
Accept yourself, love yourself, you are God’s creation. God’s signature is on you, and you are special, unique. Nobody else has ever been like you, and nobody else will ever be like you—you are simply unique, incomparable. Accept this, love this, celebrate this—and in that very celebration you will start seeing the uniqueness of the others, the incomparable beauty of the others. Love is possible only when there is a deep acceptance of oneself, the other, the world. Acceptance creates the milieu in which love grows, the soil in which love blooms.
Watch a small baby, just born. He has no crust around him. He is vulnerable, open, soft—life in its purity. It will not be so for long, soon personalities will start growing around him, he will be encaged, imprisoned by society, parents, schools, universities; soon life will become a distant phenomenon. He will be more like a prisoner. Life will go on beating somewhere deep inside him, but even he will not be able to hear the beat of it.
But when a child is born, watch it. Again and again the miracle happens. Again and again life goes on showing you the way, how to be, again and again life goes on saying that life is renewed every day. Old men die, new small babies are born. What is the point in it? It is very clear that life does not believe in oldness. In fact, if life were run by economists, this would seem to be very uneconomical, a wastage. An old man—trained, experienced in the ways of life and world—when he is ready, when he thinks he has become wise, death takes over and replaces the old man with a small baby with no knowledge, no wisdom at all, absolutely fresh, a tabula rasa; everything has to be written again. If you ask the economists, they will say this is foolish! God should consult economists first. What is he doing? It is a waste, sheer waste! A trained man of eighty dies, and an untrained babe is replacing him—this should be just the opposite; then it will be more economical.
But life does not believe in economics. And it is good that it doesn’t believe, otherwise the whole world would have become a big cemetery. It believes in life, not in economics. It goes on replacing old people with the new, dead people with the young, hard people with the soft.
The indication is clear: Life loves softness because through a soft being life can flow easily.
Soft is flexible like existen
“Blessed are the meek!”
Weakness—the very word seems to be condemnatory. But what is weakness? A flower is weak. A rock by the side of the flower is very strong. Would you like to be like a rock, or would you like to be like a flower? A flower is weak, remember, very weak—just a small wind and the flower will be gone. The petals will fall to the earth. A flower is a miracle; it is a miracle how the flower exists. So weak, so soft! Seems to be impossible—how is it possible? Rocks seem to be okay; they exist, they have their arithmetic to exist. But the flower? It seems to be completely unsupported—but still a flower exists; that’s the miracle.
Would you like to be like a flower? If you ask, deep down your ego will say, “Be like a rock.” And even if you insist, because a rock looks ugly, then the ego will say, “If you want to be a flower, be at least a plastic flower. Be at least strong! Winds won’t disturb you, rains won’t destroy you, and you can remain forever and ever.” A real flower comes in the morning, laughs for a moment, spreads its fragrance, and is gone. An unreal flower, a plastic flower, can remain forever and ever. But it is unreal, and it is strong because it is unreal. Reality is soft and weak. And the higher the reality is, the softer.
You cannot understand God because your mind understands the logic of rocks. You don’t understand the logic of a flower. Your mind can understand mathematics. You don’t have that aesthetic sense to feel for flowers. Only a poetic mind can understand the possibility of God, because God is the weakest and the softest. That’s why it is the highest, it is the ultimate flower. It flowers, but it flowers only in a split second. That split second is known as “the present.” And it is such a small moment that you need to be intensely attentive. Only then will you be able to see it; otherwise you will miss it. It is always flowering—every moment it flowers, but you cannot see because your mind is cluttered with the past and the future. And the present is such a narrow phenomenon, just a flicker of the eyelids and it is gone. In that narrow moment God flowers.
It is the highest, the ultimate. But it is very weak, very soft—it has to be. It is the pinnacle, the last crescendo beyond which nothing exists. You will be able to understand God only when you understand the logic of softness and weakness. If you are trying to be strong—conquerors, fighters, and warriors—then you will live in the world surrounded by rocks, not flowers, and God will be a faraway phenomenon. It will not be possible for you to detect God anywhere in life.
Weakness is not identical to get intimidated, it just represents your acceptance to existence, and rest is your quality to live.
Soft are not weak, they are just more compatible to existence and existence is all available to them
Why do I feel self-conscious?
Freedom is the goal of life. Without freedom, life has no meaning at all. By freedom is not meant any political, social, or economic freedom. By freedom, it is meant freedom from time, freedom from a mind, freedom from desire. The moment the mind is no more, you are one with the universe; you are as vast as the universe itself.
It is the mind that is the barrier between you and the reality, and because of this barrier, you remain confined in a dark cell where no light ever reaches and where no joy can ever penetrate. You live in misery because you are not meant to live in such a small, confined space. Your being wants to expand to the very ultimate source of existence. Your being longs to be oceanic, and you have become a dewdrop. How can you be happy? How can you be blissful? Man lives in misery because man lives imprisoned.
And Gautama the Buddha says that tanha—desire—is the root cause of all our misery because desire creates the mind. Desire means creating future, projecting you in the future, bringing tomorrow in. Bring the tomorrow in, and the today disappears, you cannot see it any longer, your eyes are clouded by the tomorrow. Bring the tomorrow in, and you will have to carry a load of all your yesterdays because the tomorrow can only be there if the yesterdays go on nourishing it.
Each desire is born out of the past, and each desire is projected in the future. The past and the future, they constitute your whole mind. Analyze the mind, dissect it, and you will find only two things: the past and the future. You will not find even an iota of the present, not even a single atom. And the present is the only reality, the only existence, the only dance there is.
The present can be found only when the mind has ceased utterly—when the past no longer overpowers you and the future no more possess you, when you are disconnected from the memories and the imaginations. In that moment where are you? Who are you? In that moment you are a nobody. And nobody can hurt you when you are a nobody. You cannot be wounded because the ego is very ready to receive wounds. The ego is almost seeking and searching to be wounded; it exists through wounds. Its whole existence depends on misery, pain.
When you are a nobody, anguish is impossible, anxiety is simply unbelievable. When you are a nobody, there is great silence, stillness, and no noise inside. Past gone, future disappeared—what is there to create noise? And the silence that is heard is celestial, sacred. For the first time, in those spaces of no-mind, you become aware of the eternal celebration that goes on and on. That’s what the existence is made of.
Except man, the whole existence is blissful. Only man has fallen out of it, has gone astray. Only man can do it because only man has consciousness.
Now, consciousness has two possibilities: It can become a bright light in you, so bright that even the sun will look pale compared to it—Buddha says if a thousand suns have risen suddenly, when you look within with no mind it is all light, eternal light. It is all joy, pure, uncontaminated, and unpolluted. It is simple bliss, innocent. It is wonder. Its majesty is indescribable, its beauty inexpressible, and its benediction inexhaustible.
If you can only put your mind aside, you will become aware of the cosmic play. Then you are only energy, and the energy is always here now, it never leaves the “herenow.” That is one possibility; you can become pure consciousness.
The other possibility is you can become self-consciousness. Then you fall. Then you become a separate entity from the world. Then you become an island, defined, and well defined. Then you are confined because all definitions confine. Then you are in a prison cell, and the prison cell is dark, utterly dark. There is no light, no possibility of light. And the prison cell cripples you, paralyzes you.
Self-consciousness becomes a bondage; the self is the bondage. And consciousness becomes freedom.
Drop the self and be conscious! That is the whole message, the message of all the Buddhas of all the ages, past, present, future. The essential core of the message is very simple: Drop the self, the ego, the mind, and be.
Just this moment when this silence pervades, who are you? A nobody, a nonentity. You don’t have a name, you don’t have a form. You are neither man nor woman, neither Hindu nor Mohammedan. You don’t belong to any country, to any nation, to any race. You are not the body, and you are not the mind.
Then what are you? In this silence, what is your taste? How does it taste to be? Just a peace, just a silence … and out of that peace and silence a great joy starts surfacing, welling up, for no reason at all. It is your spontaneous nature.
The art of putting the mind aside is the whole secret of religiousness because as you put the mind aside, your being explodes into a thousand and one colors. You become a rainbow, a lotus, and a one-thousand-petaled lotus. Suddenly you open up, and then the whole beauty of existence—which is infinite—is yours. Then all the stars in the sky are within you. Then even the sky is not your limit; you no longer have any limits.
Silence gives you a chance to melt, merge, disappear, and evaporate. And when you are not, you are; for the first time you are. When you are not, God is, nirvana is, enlightenment is. When you are not, all is found. When you are, all is lost.
Man has become a self-consciousness; that is his going astray, that is the original fall. All the religions talk about the original fall in some way or other, but the best story is contained in Christianity. The original fall is because man eats from the tree of knowledge. When you eat of the tree of knowledge, the fruits of knowledge, it creates self-consciousness.
The more knowledgeable you are, the more egoistic you are … hence the ego of the scholars, pundits, maulvis. The ego becomes decorated with great knowledge, scriptures, and systems of thought. But they don’t make you innocent; they don’t bring you the childlike quality of openness, of trust, of love, of playfulness. Trust, love, playfulness, wonder all disappear when you become very knowledgeable.
And we are being taught to become knowledgeable. We are not taught to be innocent, we are not taught how to feel the wonder of existence. We are told the names of the flowers, but we are not taught how to dance around the flowers. We are told the names of the mountains, but we are not taught how to commune with the mountains, how to commune with the stars, how
to commune with the trees, how to be in tune with existence.
Out of tune, how can you be happy? Out of tune, you are bound to remain in anguish, in great misery, in pain. You can be happy only when you are dancing with the dance of the whole, when you are just a part of the dance, when you are just a part of this great orchestra, when you are not singing your song separately. Only then, in that melting, is man free.
Knowledge limits the infinite potential of human life and we all carry burden of knowledge through out. This ego trip is the scandal to human mankind
How can I stay myself?
I feel I lose myself when I get really close to people.
Everybody wants to become extraordinary. That is the search of the ego: to be someone who is special, to be someone who is unique, incomparable. And this is the paradox: The more you try to be exceptional, the more ordinary you look because everybody is after extraordinariness. It is such an ordinary desire. If you become ordinary, the very search to be ordinary is extraordinary because rarely does somebody want to be just nobody, rarely does somebody want to be just a hollow, empty space.
This is really extraordinary in a way because nobody wants it. And when you become ordinary, you become extraordinary, and, of course, suddenly you discover that without searching you have become unique.
In fact, everybody is unique. If you can stop constantly running after goals for even a single moment, you will realize that you are unique. It is nothing to be discovered; it is already there. It is already the case: To be is to be unique. There is no other way of being. Every leaf on a tree is unique, every pebble on the shore is unique; there is no other way of being. You cannot find a similar pebble anywhere on the whole of the earth.
Two similar things do not exist at all, so there is no need to be somebody. You just be yourself, and suddenly you are unique, incomparable. That’s why I say that this is a paradox: Those who search fail, and those who don’t bother, suddenly attain.
But don’t get confused in words. Let me repeat: The desire to be extraordinary is very ordinary because everybody has it. And to have the understanding to be ordinary is very extraordinary because it rarely happens. A Buddha, a Lao Tzu, a Jesus have it. To try to be unique is on everybody’s mind and all these people fail and fail utterly.
How can you be more unique than you are already? Uniqueness is already there; you have to discover it. You are not to invent it; it is hidden within you. You have to expose it to existence, that’s all. This uniqueness is not to be cultivated. It is your treasure. You have been carrying it forever and ever. It is your very being, your very core of being. You just have to close your eyes and look at yourself. You have just to stop for a while and rest and look. But you are running so fast, you are in such great haste to achieve it, that you will miss it.
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