Gadarwara

    1939-1951

    PART III

    Contents

    Osho settles in Gadarwara with Nani, and his parents

    And after my Nana's death, my Nani never went back to the village of Kuchwada; she was so heartbroken. I have seen thousands of couples very intimately because I have been staying with so many families, wandering around India, but I could never find anybody who could be compared with those two old people: they really loved each other.

    When my Nana died, my Nani--my maternal grandmother--wanted to die with him. It was a difficult task to prevent her. She wanted to sit on the funeral pyre with her husband. She said, "My life is gone--now what is the point of being alive?" Everybody tried, and by that time.... This is an ancient tradition in India called sati.

    The word sati means the woman who dies sits on the funeral pyre, alive, with her dead husband. The word sati means truthfulness. Sat means "truth," also "being"; sati means "who has a true being--whose being is of truthfulness." She has loved the person so deeply that she has become identified with his life; there is no point in her living. But after the British Raj the sati tradition was declared illegal.

    To the Western eye it looked almost like committing suicide; literally it was so. And for almost ninety-nine percent of women who became satis it was nothing but suicide. But for one percent I cannot say it was suicide. For one percent, to live without the person whom they had loved totally and from whom they had never thought for a single moment to be separated, living was suicide.

    But law is blind and cannot make such fine distinctions. What Britishers saw was certainly ugly and had to be stopped. The one percent went on the funeral pyre of their own accord. But it became such a respectable thing that any woman who was not willing to do it...and it was really a very dangerous, torturous way of dying--just entering the funeral pyre alive!

    Ninety-nine percent were not willing to do it but their families, their relatives felt awkward because this meant the woman never loved the man totally. It would be a condemnation of the whole family: the honor of the family was at stake. So what these people did was they forced the woman; and a certain climate was created in which you would not be able to discover that the woman was being forced. She was of course in a terrible state, in a great shock.

    She was taken to the funeral pyre and on the funeral pyre so much ghee, purified butter, was poured that there was a cloud of smoke all over the place; you could not see what is happening. Around that cloud there were hundreds of brahmins loudly chanting Sanskrit sutras, and behind the brahmins there was a big band with all kinds of instruments making as much noise as possible--so to hear the woman screaming or crying or trying to get out of the funeral pyre was impossible. Around the funeral pyre the brahmins were standing with burning torches to push the woman back in.

    When Britishers saw this--this was certainly not only suicide but murder too. In fact, it was murder; the woman was not willing. The whole atmosphere was created so that you could not hear her screams, you could not see that she was trying to escape--everybody else was out of the circles of brahmins.

    When Britishers found out that this was something criminal and ugly, they made it illegal: if any woman tried it and was found out and caught alive, she would be sentenced for her whole life. And anybody who persuaded her--the family, the priests, the neighbors--they were also partners in the crime and they would also be punished according to whatsoever part they had played in it.

    So the institution slowly slowly disappeared; it had to disappear. But once in a while those one percent of women were always there for whom it didn't matter, because their lives were now a sentence unto death. Why not take the chance of finishing it with your loved one?

    So they all tried, everybody, to persuade my Nani not to do it, but she said, "I have nothing to live for. I cannot go back to my village because in that same house where we both lived our whole life for sixty years, I cannot live alone. He will be too much there. I have not eaten a single meal before he did; it will be impossible for me to eat. In the first place, impossible to

    cook because I used to cook for him; he loved delicious foods and I enjoyed cooking for him. Just to see him delighted was my delight. Now for whom am I going to cook?

    "And I have never taken my meal before him. Even if it was very late if he had gone to some other village for some work, or to the court in a faraway town--l had to wait the whole day, but it was a joy to wait for him. In sixty years of married life I have not eaten a single meal before him."

    That has been a tradition in India: how can you eat unless the person you love and for whom you have cooked and prepared has eaten?...

    For almost ten or twelve days my grandmother didn't eat. First it was difficult to prevent her from going on the funeral pyre. Finally they all, my whole family, told me, "Only you can persuade her; you have been with her for seven years." And certainly I succeeded. All that I had to do--l said to her, "You are saying constantly, 'For what do I have to live?' Not for me? Just tell me you don't want to live for me. Then I will tell the whole family that we both are going on the funeral pyre."

    She said, "What!"

    I said, "Then why am I going to be here? For what? It is good we both go."

    She said, "Stop this nonsense. Who has ever heard of a boy, seven years old...? It is not for you, it is for a woman whose husband has died."

    I said, "Your husband has died, my Nana has died, and my Nani is going to die--it is enough reason for me. And anyway, any day I will have to die, so why wait so long? Finish it quickly."

    She said, "I know you are mischievous and even though your Nana is dead you are playing a trick on me."

    I said, "Then stop harassing the whole family, otherwise I am coming with you." She agreed that she wouldn't go to the funeral, she would live for me.

    She stayed in my father's town, but she was a very independent woman: she did not like the big joint family; my father's brothers, their wives, their children--it was a huge caravan. She said, "This is not the place for me. I have lived my whole life with my husband, in silence. Only for seven years were you there, otherwise there has not been much conversation either, because there was nothing to say. We had talked about all those things before, so there was nothing to say--we just sat silently."

    And it was a beautiful place where they lived, facing a very big lake, so they would sit looking at the lake and the water birds flying, coming in thousands in certain seasons.

    She said, "I would like to live alone." So a house was found for her near the river where she would find some similarity; in this town we had no lake but we had a beautiful river.

    The whole day I was in school or roaming around the town or doing a thousand and one things, and at night I always stayed with my Nani. Many times she said, "Your parents may feel bad. We took you from them for seven years, for which they cannot forgive us. We thought that we should return you as clean as we had got you, not trying to impose anything on you. But they are angry; they don't say so but I can feel it and I hear from other people that we spoiled you. And now you don't go to sleep with your father and mother and your family; you come here every night. They will think that the spoiling is continuing--the old man is gone but the old woman is still here."

    I said to her, "But if I don't come can you really sleep? For whom do you prepare the second bed every night before I come?--because I do not tell you that tomorrow I will be coming. About tomorrow, from the very beginning I have been uncertain because who knows what will happen tomorrow? Why do you prepare the second bed? And not only the second bed...."

    I had a long habit which my physician somehow had to manage to finish; it took him almost two or three years. I had, from my very childhood, as long as I remember, needed sweets before going to bed, otherwise I could not sleep. So she was not only preparing my bed, she used to go out and buy sweets, the sweets that I liked, and she would keep the sweets by my bed so that I could eat; even in the middle of the night if I felt like it again, I could eat. She would put enough so that if you ate the whole night there would be no problem.

    I asked her, "For whom do you bring these sweets?--you don't eat them; since Nana died you have not tasted sweets." My Nana loved sweets. In fact it seems he gave me this idea of sweets; he also used to eat before going to sleep. That is not done in any Jaina family. Jainas don't eat in the night; they don't even drink water or milk or anything. But he lived in a village where he was the only Jaina, so there was no problem. And it is perhaps from him that I got the habit. I don't remember even how I started it: it must have been he, eating and calling me also to join him. I must have joined him, and by and by it became a routine thing. For seven years he trained me!

    I could not go to my parents' house for two reasons. One reason was those sweets--because in my mother's place it was not possible: there were so many children that if you allowed one child, then all the children would ask. And anyway it was against the religion--you simply could not even ask. But my difficulty was this, that I could not go to sleep without them.

    Secondly, I felt, "My Nani must be feeling to be alone, and here it is difficult to be alone--so many people, it is always a marketplace. Nobody will be missing me if I am not here." Nobody ever missed me. They just made certain that I was sleeping with my Nani, then there was no problem.

    So even after those seven years I was not under the influence of my parents. It was just accidental that from the very beginning I was on my own. Doing right or wrong--that was not the important thing, but doing on my own. And slowly slowly, that became my style of life, about everything--for example, about clothes. misery01

    I wanted to go back to the village of Kuchwada but nobody was ready to support me. I could not conceive how I could exist there alone, without my grandfather, my grandmother, or Bhoora. No, it was not possible, so I reluctantly said, "Okay, I will stay in my father's village." But my mother naturally wanted me to stay with her and not with my grandmother, who from the very beginning had made it clear that she would stay in the same village, but separately. A little house was found for her in a very beautiful place near the river.

    My mother insisted that I stay with her. For over seven years I had not been living with my family. But my family was not a small affair, it was a whole jumbo-jet--so many people, all kinds of people: my uncles, my aunts, their children and my uncle's relatives, and so on and so forth.

    In India the family is not the same as in the West. In the West it is just singular: the husband, the wife, one, two or three children. At the most there may be five people in the family. In India people would laugh--five? Only five? In India the family is uncountable. There are hundreds of people. Guests come and visit and never leave, and nobody says to them, "Please, it is time for you to go," because in fact nobody knows whose guests they are.

    The father thinks, "Perhaps they are my wife's relatives so it is better to keep quiet." The mother thinks, "Perhaps they are my husband's relatives...." In India it is possible to enter a home where you are not related at all, and if you keep your mouth shut, you can live there forever. Nobody will tell you to get out; everybody will think somebody else invited you. You have only to keep quiet and keep smiling....

    I did not want to enter this family, and I told my mother, "Either I will go back to the village alone--the bullock cart is ready, and I know the way; I will get there somehow. And I know the villagers: they will help support a child. And it is only a question of a few years, then I will repay them as much as I can. But I cannot live in this family. This is not a family, it's a bazaar."

    And it was a bazaar, continuously buzzing with so many people, no space at all, no silence. Even if an elephant had jumped into that ancient pond, nobody would have heard the plop; there was too much going on. I simply refused, saying, "If I have to stay then the only alternative is for me to live with my Nani."

    My mother was, of course, hurt. I am sorry, because since then I have been hurting her again and again. I could not help it. In fact I was not responsible; the situation was such that I could not live in that family after so many years of absolute freedom, silence, space. In fact, in my Nana's house I was the only one who was ever heard. My Nana was mostly silently chanting his mantra, and of course my grandmother had no one else to talk to.

    I was the only one who was ever heard; otherwise there was silence. After years of such beautitude, then to live in that so-called family, full of unfamiliar faces, uncles, and their fathers-in-law, cousins--what a lot! One could not even figure out who was who! Later I used to think somebody ought to publish a small booklet about my family, a Who's Who....

    I wanted to return to the village but could not. I had to come to a compromise just not to hurt my mother. But I know I have been hurting her, really wounding her. Whatsoever she wanted I have never done; in fact, just the opposite. Naturally, slowly slowly she accepted me as one who was lost to her....

    I could not manage to live in the family according to them. Everybody was giving birth; every woman was almost always pregnant. Whenever I remember my family I suddenly think of freaking out--although I cannot freak out; I just enjoy the idea of freaking out. All the women were always with big bellies. One pregnancy over, another starts--and so many children....

    "No," I said to my mother, "I know it hurts you, and I am sorry, but I will live with my grandmother. She is the only one who can understand me and allow me not only love but freedom too." glimps19

    Everybody is born in a family. I was born in a family. And in India there are joint families, big families. In my family there must have been fifty to sixty people--all the cousins, uncles, aunts, living together. I have seen the whole mess of it. In fact, those sixty people helped me not to create my own family. That experience was enough.

    If you are intelligent enough, you learn even from other people's mistakes. If you are not intelligent, then you don't learn even from your own mistakes. So I learned from my father's mistake, my mother's mistake, my uncles', my aunts'. It was a big family, and I saw the whole circus, the misery, the continuous conflict, fights about small things, meaningless. From my very childhood one thing became decisive in me, that I was not going to create a family of my own.

    I was surprised that everybody is born in a family.... And why does he still go on creating a family? Seeing the whole scene, he again repeats it. socrat05

    Osho’s paternal grandfather, Baba

    My paternal grandfather loved very much. He was old, very old, but he remained active to the very last breath. He loved nature almost too much. He lived in a faraway farm. Once in a while he would come to the city, but he never liked it. He always liked the wild world, where he lived.

    Once in a while I used to go to him and he always liked somebody to massage his feet. He was becoming so old and he was working so hard, so I would massage his feet. But I told him, "Remember, I am not fulfilling any responsibility. I don't have any responsibility towards anyone in the world. I love you, and I will massage your feet but only up to the point where it is not troublesome to me. So when I stop, never ask me to do a little more. I will not. I am

    doing it out of my joy, not because you are my grandfather. I could have done the same to any beggar, any stranger, just out of love."

    He understood the point. He said, "I never thought that responsibility and love are two things. But you are right. When I am working on the field, I always feel I am doing it for my children and their children, as a duty. It is heavy on my heart. But I will try to change this attitude of responsibility. I may be too old to change--it has become a fixation in my mind--but I will try to change."

    I said to him, "There is no need. If you feel it is becoming a burden on you, you have done enough. You rest. There is no need to continue working, unless you enjoy the open sky and the green field and love these trees and the birds. If you are doing it out of joy and you love your children and you want to do something for them, only then continue. Otherwise stop."

    Although he was old, something synchronized between me and him. That never happened with any other member of my family. We were great friends. I was the youngest in the family and he was the oldest, just two polarities. And everybody in the house laughed, "What kind of friendship is this? You laugh together, you joke with each other, you play with each other, you run after each other. And he is so old and you are so young. And you don't communicate the same way with anybody else, nor does he communicate the same way with anybody else."

    I said, "Something has happened between us. He loves me and I love him. Now it is no more a question of any relationship; neither am I his grandchild nor is he my grandfather. We are just two friends: one is old, one is young." chit30

    My grandfather was not a religious man, not at all. He was closer to Zorba the Greek: eat, drink and be merry; there is no other world, it is all nonsense. My father was a very religious man; perhaps it was because of my grandfather--the reaction, the generation gap. But it was just upside down in my family: my grandfather was an atheist and perhaps because of his atheism my father turned out to be a theist. And whenever my father would go to the temple, my grandfather would laugh and he would say, "Again! Go on, waste your life in front of those stupid statues!"

    I love Zorba for many reasons; one of the reasons was that in Zorba I found my grandfather again. He loved food so much that he used to not trust anybody; he would prepare it himself. In my life I have been a guest in thousands of families in India, but I have never tasted anything so delicious as my grandfather's cooking. And he loved it so much that every week it was a feast for all his friends--and he would prepare the whole day.

    My mother and my aunts and the servants and cooks--everybody was thrown out of the kitchen. When my grandfather was cooking, nobody was to disturb him. But he was very friendly to me; he allowed me to watch and he said, "Learn, don't depend on other people. Only you know your taste. Who else can know it?"

    I said, "That is beyond me; I am too lazy, but I can watch. The whole day cooking?--l cannot do it." So I have not learned anything, but just watching was a joy--the way he worked, almost

    like a sculptor or a musician or a painter. Cooking was not just cooking, it was art to him. And if anything went just a little below his standard, he would throw it away immediately. He would cook it again, and I would say, "It is perfectly okay."

    He would say, "You know it is not perfectly okay, it is just okay; but I am a perfectionist. Until it comes up to my standard, I am not going to offer it to anybody. I love my food."

    He used to make many kinds of drinks...and whatsoever he did the whole family was against him: they said that he was just a nuisance. He wouldn't allow anybody in the kitchen, and in the evening he gathered all the atheists of the town. And just to defy Jainism, he would wait till the sun set. He would not eat before because Jainism says: eat before sunset; after sunset eating is not allowed. He used to send me again and again to see whether the sun had set or not.

    He annoyed the whole family. And they could not be angry with him--he was the head of the family, the oldest man--but they were angry at me. That was easier. They said, "Why do you go on coming again and again to see whether the sun has set or not? That old man is getting you also lost, utterly lost."

    I was very sad because I only came across the book Zorba the Greek, when my grandfather was dying*. The only thing that I felt at his funeral pyre was that he would have loved it if I had translated it for him and read it for him. I had read many books to him. He was uneducated. He could only write his signature, that was all. He could neither read nor write--

    but he was very proud of it.

    He used to say, "It is good that my father did not force me to go to school, otherwise he would have spoiled me. These books spoil people so much." He would say to me, "Remember, your father is spoiled, your uncles are spoiled; they are continually reading religious books, scriptures, and it is all rubbish. While they are reading, I am living; and it is good to know through living."

    He used to tell me, "They will send you to the university--they won't listen to me. And I cannot be much help, because if your father and your mother insist, they will send you to the university. But beware: don't get lost in books."

    He enjoyed small things. I asked him, "Everybody believes in God, why don't you believe, baba?" I called him baba; that is the word for (paternal) grandfather in India.

    He said, "Because I am not afraid."

    A very simple answer: "Why should I be afraid? There is no need to be afraid; I have not done any wrong, I have not harmed anybody. I have just lived my life joyously. If there is any God, and I meet Him sometime, He cannot be angry at me. I will be angry at Him:'Why have You created this world?--this kind of world?' I am not afraid." ignor16

    *Note: grandfather dies after Osho became a professor, see Part V

    Look at the East: in the villages still, a businessman is not just a profit maker, and the customer has not come just to purchase something. They enjoy it. I remember my old grandfather. He was a cloth merchant, and I and my whole family were puzzled because he enjoyed it so much. For hours together it was a game with the customers. If something was worth ten rupees, he would ask fifty rupees for it--and he knew this was absurd, and his customers knew it too. They knew that it must be worth nearabout ten rupees, and they would start from two rupees. Then a long haggling would follow--hours together. My father and my uncles would get angry. "What is going on? Why don't you simply say what the price is?" But he had his own customers. When they came, they would ask, "Where is Dada, where is grandfather? because with him it is a game, a play. Whether we lose one rupee or two, whether it is more or less, that is not the point!"

    They enjoyed it. The very activity in itself was something worth pursuing. Two persons were communicating through it. Two persons were playing a game and both knew it was a game-- because of course a fixed price was possible.

    In the West now they have fixed prices, because people are more calculating and more profit motivated. They cannot conceive of wasting time. Why waste time? The thing can be settled within minutes. There is no need. You can just write the exact price. Why fight for hours together? But then the game is lost and the whole thing becomes a routine. Even machines can do it. The businessman is not needed; the customer is not needed....

    Even now in villages in India the haggling goes on. It is a game and worth enjoying. You are playing. It is a match between two intelligences, and two persons come in deep contact. But it is not time-saving. Games can never be time-saving. And in games you don't worry about the time. You are carefree, and whatsoever is going on, you enjoy it right in that moment. vbt79

    Osho and his father

    But the first seven years are the most important in life; never again will you have that much opportunity. Those seven years decide your seventy years, all the foundation stones are laid in those seven years. So by a strange coincidence I was saved from my parents--and by the time I reached them, I was almost on my own, I was already flying. I knew I had wings. I knew that I didn't need anybody's help to make me fly. I knew that the whole sky is mine.

    I never asked for their guidance, and if any guidance was given to me I always retorted, "This is insulting. Do you think I cannot manage it myself? I do understand that there is no bad intention in giving guidance--for that I am thankful--but you do not understand one thing, that I am capable of doing it on my own. Just give me a chance to prove my mettle. Don't interfere."

    In those seven years I became really a strong individualist: hard-core. Now it was impossible to put any trip on me.

    I used to pass through my father's shop, because the shop was in front--at the back was the house where the family lived. That's how it happens in India: house and shop are together so it is easily manageable. I used to pass through my father's shop with closed eyes.

    He asked me, "This is strange. Whenever you pass through the shop into the house, or from the house"-- it was just a twelve foot space to pass--"you always keep your eyes closed. What ritual are you practising?"

    I said, "I am simply practicing so that this shop does not destroy me as it has destroyed you. I don't want to see it at all; I am absolutely uninterested, totally uninterested." And it was one of the most beautiful cloth shops in that city--the best materials were available there--but I never looked to the side, I simply closed my eyes and passed by!

    He said, "But in opening your eyes there is no harm."

    I said, "One never knows--one can be distracted. I don't want to be distracted by anything." misery01

    When I was very small I had long hair like a girl. In India boys don't have that long hair--at least at that time it was not allowed. I used to have very long hair, and whenever I used to enter, and the entrance was from the shop.... The house was behind the shop, so to enter I had to pass through the shop. My father was there, his customers were there, and they would say, "Whose girl is this?"

    My father would look at me and say, "What to do? He does not listen." And he felt offended.

    I said, "You need not feel offended. I don't see any problem. If somebody calls me a girl or a boy, that is his business; what difference does it make to me?"

    But he was offended that his boy was being called a girl. Just the idea of a boy and girl.... In India when a boy is born, there are gongs and bands and songs, and sweets are distributed in the whole neighborhood. And when a girl is born, nothing happens--nothing. You immediately know that a girl is born because no gongs, no bells, no band, no singing--nothing is happening, no distribution of sweets--that means a girl is born. Nobody will come to ask because it will be offending you: you will have to answer that a girl is born. The father is sitting with his face down...a girl is born.

    So he said, "This is strange. I have a boy, and I am suffering from having a girl." So one day he really became angry because the man who had asked was a very important man; he was the collector of the district. He was sitting in the shop, and he asked, "Whose girl is this? It is strange, the clothes seem to be a boy's--and with so many pockets and all full of stones?"

    My father said, "What to do? He is a boy, he is not a girl. But today I am going to cut his hair-- this is enough!" So he came with his scissors and cut my hair. I didn't say anything to him. I went to the barber's shop which was just in front of my house and I told him.... He was an opium addict, a very beautiful man, but sometimes he would cut half your mustache and

    would forget the other half. You would be sitting in his chair, with his cloth around your neck and he was gone, so you would search--where had he gone? It was difficult; nobody knew where he had gone. And with a half mustache, where would you go to search for him? But he was the only one I liked, because it took hours.

    He would tell you a thousand and one things, unrelated to anything in the world. I enjoyed it. It is from that man, Nathur--Nathur, that was his name--that I learned how the human mind is. My first acquaintance with the human mind came from him, because he was not a hypocrite. He would say anything that came to his mind; in fact, between his mind and his mouth there was no difference!--he simply spoke whatsoever was in his mind. If he was fighting with somebody in his mind, he would start fighting loudly--and nobody was there. I was the only one who would not ask, "With whom are you fighting?" So he was very happy with me, so happy that he would never charge me for cutting my nails or anything.

    That day I went there and I told him--we used to call him "Kaka", kaka means uncle--"Kaka, if you are in your senses, just shave my whole head."

    He said, "Great." He was not in his senses. If he had been, he would have refused because in India you shave your head only when your father dies; otherwise it is not shaved. So he had taken a good dose of opium and he shaved my head completely.

    I said, "That's good."

    I went back. My father looked at me and said, "What happened?"

    I said, "What is the point? You cut my hair with the scissors; it will grow again. I am finished with that. And Kaka is willing, I have asked him. He said he is willing: 'Whenever there is no customer you can come and I will shave your head completely, and no question of money.' So you need not be worried. I am his free customer because nobody listens to him; I am the only person who listens."

    My father said, "But you know perfectly well that now this will create more trouble."

    And immediately one man came and asked, "What happened? Has this boy's father died?" Without that, nobody....

    Then my father said, "Look! It was better that you were a girl. Now I am dead! You grow your hair as fast as you can. Go to your Kaka, that opium addict, and ask him if he can help somehow; otherwise this is going to create more trouble for me. The whole town will go on coming. You will be moving around the whole city and everybody will think that your father is dead. They will start coming."

    And they did start coming. That was the last time he did anything to me. After that he said, "I am not going to do anything because it leads into more trouble."

    I said, "I had not asked--l simply go on doing my thing. You interfered unnecessarily." ignor13

    One day I was playing--I must have been five or six years old... A man used to come to see my father, an utterly boring man. And my father was growing tired of him. So he called me and told me, "I see that man is coming; he will waste my time unnecessarily and it is very difficult to get rid of him. I always have to go out, and say to him, `Now I have some appointment'--unnecessarily I have to go out, just to get rid of him. And sometimes it happens that he says, `I am coming with you. So on the way we can have a good talk.' And there is no talk, it is a monologue. He talks, and tortures people."

    So my father said, "I am going inside. You just remain playing outside. And when he comes, you simply say to him that your father is out."

    And my father used to teach me continuously, "Never speak an untruth." So I was shocked. This was contradictory.

    So when the man came and asked me, "Where is your father?" I said, "He is in, but he says that he is out."

    My father heard this from inside, and the man entered with me, so he could not say anything in front of him. When the man had gone, after two or three hours my father was really angry with me, not with the man.

    He said, "I told you to tell him, `My father is out.'"

    I said, "Exactly, I repeated the same thing. I told him the same thing: `My father says to tell you that he is out. But he is in, the truth is he is in.' You have been teaching me to be true whatever the consequence. So I am ready for the consequence. Any punishment, if you want to give me, give. But remember, if truth is punished, truth is destroyed. Truth has to be rewarded. Give me some reward, so I can go on speaking the truth whatever happens."

    He looked at me and he said, "You are clever."

    I said, "That you know already. Just give me some reward. I have spoken the truth."

    And he had to give me some reward; he gave me a one rupee note. At that time one rupee was almost equal to twenty-five rupees today. You could live with a one rupee note for almost half a month. And he said, "Go and enjoy whatever you want to purchase."

    I said, "You have to remember it. If you tell me to speak a lie, I am going to tell the person that you have told me to. I am not telling a lie. And each time you contradict yourself, you will have to reward me. So stop lying. If you don't want that man, you should tell him directly that you don't have any time and don't like his boring talk because he says the same things again and again. Why are you afraid? Why do you have to tell a lie?"

    He said, "The difficulty is, he is my best customer."

    My father had a very beautiful cloth shop, and this man was rich. He used to purchase a huge lot for his family, relatives, friends. He was a very generous man--just being boring was his problem.

    So my father said, "I have to suffer all the boredom because he is my best customer and I cannot lose him."

    I said, "That is your problem, that is not my problem. So you are lying because he is your best customer, and I am going to say this to him."

    He said, "Wait!"

    I said, "I cannot wait because he must be told immediately that you go on suffering all his boring talk just because he is a good customer--and you will have to give me some reward."

    He said, "You are so difficult. You are destroying my best customer. And I will have to give you a reward too. But just don't do that."

    But I did it. And I got two rewards, one from that boring man because I told him, "Truth should always be rewarded, so give me some reward because I am destroying one of the best customers of my father."

    He hugged me and he gave me two rupees. And I said, "Remember, don't stop buying from my father's shop, but don't bore him either. If you want to talk, you can talk to the walls, to the trees. The whole world is available. You can just close your room and talk to yourself. And then you will be bored."

    And I told my father, "Don't be worried. Look, one rupee I have got from you, two rupees I have got from your customer. Now one more rupee I am owed; you have to give it me, because I have told the truth. But don't be worried. I have made him a better customer and he will never bore you again. He has promised me."

    My father said, "You have done a miracle!" Since that day that man never came, or even if he did come he would stay just for one or two minutes to say hello and he would go away. And he continued to purchase from my father's shop.

    And he said to my father, "It is because of your son that I continue. Otherwise I would have felt wounded, but that little boy managed both things. He stopped me boring you and he asked me, requested me, `Don't stop shopping from my father's shop. He depends on you.' And he got two rupees from me and he was saying such a shocking thing to me. Nobody has ever dared tell me that I am a boring man."

    He was the richest man in the village. Everybody was in some way connected with him. People borrowed money from him, people have borrowed lands from him to work on. He was the richest man and the biggest landowner in that village. Everybody was somehow or other obliged to him, so nobody was able to say to him that he was boring.

    So he said, "It was a very great shock, but it was true. I know I am boring. I bore myself with my thoughts. That's why I go to others to bore them, just to get rid of my thoughts. If I am bored with my thoughts, I know perfectly well the other person will be bored, but everybody is under an obligation to me. Only this boy has no obligation and is not afraid of the consequences. And he is daring. He asked for the reward. He said to me, `If you don't reward truth, you are rewarding lies.'"

    This is why this society is in such a mad space. Everybody is teaching you to be truthful, and nobody is rewarding you for being truthful, so they create a schizophrenia. gdead07

    Living two or three blocks away from my family was a brahmin family, very orthodox brahmins. Brahmins cut all their hair and just leave a small part on the seventh chakra on the head uncut so that part goes on growing. They go on tying it and keeping it inside their cap or inside their turban. And what I had done was, I had cut the father's hair. In summertime in India, people sleep outside the house, on the street. They bring their beds, cots, on the streets. The whole town sleeps on the streets in the night, it is so hot inside.

    So this brahmin was sleeping--and it was not my fault...he had such a long choti; it is called choti, that bunch of hair. I had never seen it because it was always hidden inside his turban. While he was sleeping, it was hanging down and touching the street. From his cot it was so long that I was tempted, I could not resist; I rushed home, brought the scissors, cut it off completely and took it and kept it in my room.

    In the morning he must have found that it was gone. he could not believe it because his whole purity was in it, his whole religion was in it--his whole spirituality was destroyed. But everybody in the neighborhood knew that if anything goes wrong...first they would rush to me. And he came immediately. I was sitting outside knowing well that he would come in the morning. He looked at me. I also looked at him. He said to me, "What are you looking at?"

    I said, "What are you looking at? Same thing."

    He said, "Same thing?"

    I said, "Yes. The same thing. You name it.

    He asked, "Where is your father? I don't want to talk to you at all."

    He went in. He brought my father out and my father said, "Have you done anything to this man?"

    I said, "I have not done anything to this man, but I have cut a choti which certainly cannot belong to this man, because when I was cutting it, what was he doing? He could have prevented it."

    The man said, "I was asleep."

    I said, "If I had cut your finger while you were asleep, would you have remained asleep?" He said, "How could I remain asleep if somebody was cutting my finger?"

    I said, "That certainly shows that hairs are dead. You can cut them but a person is not hurt, no blood comes out. So what is the fuss about? A dead thing was hanging there...and I thought that you are unnecessarily carrying this dead thing inside your turban for your whole life--why not relieve you? It is in my room. And with my father I have the contract to be true."

    So I brought out his choti and said, "If you are so interested in it, you can take it back. If it is your spirituality, your brahminism, you can keep it tied and put it inside your turban. It is dead anyway; it was dead when it was attached to you, it was dead when I detached it. You can keep it inside your turban."

    And I asked my father, "My reward?"--in front of that man.

    That man said, "What reward is he asking for?"

    My father said, "This is the trouble. Yesterday he proposed a contract that if he speaks the truth, and sincerely... He is not only speaking the truth, he is even giving the proof. He has told the whole story--and even has logic behind it, that it was a dead thing so why be bothered with a dead thing? And he is not hiding anything."

    He rewarded me with five rupees. In those days, in that small village, five rupees was a great reward. The man was mad at my father. He said, "You will spoil this child. You should beat him rather than giving him five rupees. Now he will cut other people's chotis. If he gets five rupees per choti, all the brahmins of the town are finished, because they are all sleeping outside in the night; and when you are sleeping you cannot go on holding your choti in your hand. And what are you doing?--this will become a precedent."

    My father said, "But this is my contract. If you want to punish him, that is your business; I will not come into it. I am not rewarding him for his mischief, I am rewarding him for his truth--and for my whole life I will go on rewarding him for his truth. As far as mischief is concerned, you are free to do anything with him." ignor14

    My father only punished me once because I had gone to a fair which used to happen a few miles away from the city every year. There flows one of the holy rivers of the Hindus, the Narmada, and on the bank of the Narmada there used to be a big fair for one month. So I simply went there without asking him.

    There was so much going on in the fair....I had gone only for one day and I was thinking I would be back by the night, but there were so many things: magicians, a circus, drama. It was not possible to come back in one day, so three days.... The whole family was in a panic: where had I gone?

    It had never happened before. At the most I had come back late in the night but I had never been away for three days continuously...and with no message. They enquired at every friend's house. Nobody knew about me and the fourth day when I came home my father was really angry. Before asking me anything, he slapped me. I didn't say anything.

    I said, "Do you want to slap me more? You can, because I have enjoyed enough in three days. You cannot slap me more than I have enjoyed, so you can do a few more slaps. It will cool you down, and to me it is just balancing. I have enjoyed myself."

    He said, "You are really impossible. Slapping you is meaningless. You are not hurt by it; you are asking for more. Can't you make a distinction between punishment and reward?"

    I said, "No, to me everything is a reward of some kind. There are different kinds of reward, but everything is a reward of some kind."

    He asked me, "Where have you been for these three days?"

    I said, "This you should have asked before you slapped me. Now you have lost the right to ask me. I have been slapped without even being asked. It is a full stop--close the chapter. If you wanted to know, you should have asked before, but you don't have any patience. Just a minute would have been enough. But I will not keep you continually worrying where I have been, so I will tell you that I went to the fair."

    He asked, "Why didn't you ask me?"

    I said, "Because I wanted to go. Be truthful: if I had asked, would you have allowed me? Be truthful."

    He said,"No."

    I said, "That explains everything, why I did not ask you--because I wanted to go, and then it would have been more difficult for you. If I had asked you and you had said no, I still would have gone, and that would have been more difficult for you. Just to make it easier for you, I didn't ask, and I am rewarded for it. And I am ready to take any more reward you want to give me. But I have enjoyed the fair so much that I am going there every year. So you can...whenever I disappear, you know where I am. Don't be worried."

    He said, "This is the last time that I punish you; the first and last time. Perhaps you are right: if you really wanted to go then this was the only way, because I was not going to allow you. In that fair every kind of thing happens: prostitutes are there, intoxicants are available, drugs are sold there"--and at that time in India there was no illegality about drugs, every drug was freely available. And in a fair all kinds of monks gather, and Hindu monks all use drugs "--so I would not have allowed you to go. And if you really wanted to go then perhaps you were right not to ask."

    I told him, "But I did not bother about the prostitutes or the monks or the drugs. You know me: if I am interested in drugs, then in this very city...." Just by the side of my house there was a shop where all drugs were available: "and the man is so friendly to me that he will not take any money if I want any drug. So there is no problem. Prostitutes are available in the town; if I am interested in seeing their dances I can go there. Who can prevent me? Monks come continually in the city. But I was interested in the magicians."...

    So I told my father, "I was interested only in the magic, because in the fair all kinds of magicians gather together, and I have seen some really great things. My interest is that I want to reduce miracles into magic. Magic is only about tricks--there is nothing spiritual in it-- but if you don't know the trick, then certainly it appears to be a miracle."

    I have been punished, but I have enjoyed every mischief so much that I don't count those punishments at all. They are nothing.

    I have a certain rapport with women, perhaps that's why mischief--if it was Mister Chief or Master Chief, perhaps I would have avoided it, but Miss Chief!--the temptation was so much that I could not avoid it. In spite of all the punishment I continued it. And I still continue it! ignor25

    I was in constant trouble in my childhood. Anybody who was older, a distant relative--in India you don't know all your relatives--my father would tell me, "Touch his feet, he is a distant relative."

    I would say, "I will not touch his feet unless I find something respectable in him."

    So whenever any relative was to come, they would persuade me to go out, "because it is very embarrassing. We are saying to you, `Respect the old man,' and you ask, `Let us wait. Let me see something respectable. I will touch his feet--but without knowing, how do you expect me to be honest and truthful?'"

    But these are not the qualities society respects. Smile, honor, obey--whether it is right or wrong does not matter. You will have respectability. 1seed04

    In my childhood...there were many children in my family. I had ten brothers and sisters myself, then there were one uncle's children, and another uncle's children...and I saw this happening: whoever was obedient was respected. I had to decide one thing for my whole life- -not only for being in my family or for my childhood--that if I in any way desire respect, respectability, then I cannot blossom as an individual. From my very childhood I dropped the idea of respectability.

    I told my father, "I have to make a certain statement to you."

    He was always worried whenever I would go to him, because he knew that there would be some trouble. He said, "This is not the way a child speaks to his father--`I am going to make a statement to you.'"

    I said, "It is a statement through you to the whole world. Right now the whole world is not available to me; to me you represent the whole world. It is not just an issue between son and father; it is an issue between an individual and the collectivity, the mass. The statement is that I have renounced the idea of respectability, so in the name of respectability never ask anything from me; otherwise I will do just the opposite.

    "I cannot be obedient. That does not mean I will always be disobedient, it simply means it will be my choice to obey or not to obey. You can request, but the decision is going to be mine. If I feel my intelligence supports it, I will do it; but it is not obedience to you, it is obedience to my own intelligence. If I feel it is not right, I am going to refuse it. I am sorry, but you have to understand one thing clearly: unless I am able to say no, my yes is meaningless."

    And that's what obedience does: it cripples you--you cannot say no, you have to say yes. But when a man has become incapable of saying no, his yes is just meaningless; he is functioning like a machine. You have turned a man into a robot. So I said to him, "This is my statement. Whether you agree or not, that is up to you; but I have decided, and whatever the consequences, I am going to follow it."

    It is such a world...In this world to remain free, to think on your own, to decide with your own consciousness, to act out of your own conscience has been made almost impossible. Everywhere--in the church, in the temple, in the mosque, in the school, in the university, in the family--everywhere you are expected to be obedient. psycho04

    Trust is simply a very purified love. Love without sex, that is trust. They loved me. I was their eldest son, and in India it is traditional that the eldest son is going to inherit the whole family's property, money, everything. So the eldest son has to be trained, prepared for all the responsibilities that will be his sooner or later. He will be the head of the family, a joint family, and he will have to manage it.

    Naturally they loved me. They tried their best to make me as capable, as intelligent as possible. I loved them because it was not only love from their side, but respect too--respect for my individuality. Soon they understood that nothing can be imposed on me. It took a little time for them to understand that they have a different kind of child; they cannot impose anything on me. At the most they can persuade, they can argue, and if they can convince me about something, I will do it. But they cannot just order and say, "Do it because I am your father."

    I had made it clear to them that I am not going to accept anybody's order. "You may be my father, but that does not mean that you are going to be my intelligence, my individuality, my life. You have given birth to me, but that does not mean that you possess me. I am not a thing. So if you want me to do something, be prepared. Do your homework well. I am going to argue to the very end, til I feel convinced."

    So on each small thing soon they recognized the fact that it is better to propose a thing and leave him to decide whether he wants to do it or not. Don't waste unnecessary time and don't

    unnecessarily harass him and be harassed by him. And because they gave me every freedom, my love became trust.

    Love becomes trust when it is non-possessive. It does not reduce you into a thing. It accepts your individuality, your freedom, and it has every respect for you although you are just a child. Their respect towards me became my trust towards them. I knew that they are people who can be trusted, who cannot deceive me in anything.

    And because I trusted so much--this is just a circle--because I trusted so much, they could not do anything or say anything which would disturb my trust in them. They never took me to the temple, they never gave me any religion. I have grown up on my own, and they allowed it. They protected me in every possible way. They helped me in every possible way, but they never interfered with me. And that's what every parent should do.

    If these three things are the guidelines, we will have a totally new world and a new man. We will have individuals, not crowds, not mobs. And every individual is so unique that to force him to become part of a crowd is to destroy him, his uniqueness. He could have contributed immensely to the world, but that was possible only if he was left alone--supported, helped, but not directed.

    Everywhere now there is a vast generation gap. The parents are responsible for it, because they have been trying to impose their ideologies, political, social, religious, philosophical--all kinds of things they are trying to impose on their children. last212

    My father.... Yes, he was a simple man, just like anybody else. So was Buddha and so was Mahavira and so was Jesus--simple people, innocent people. He was not in any way extraordinary; that was his extraordinariness. I have known him from my very childhood--so simple, so innocent, anybody could deceive him.

    He used to believe anybody. I have seen many people cheating him, but his trust was immense; he never distrusted human beings although he was cheated many times. It was so simple to see that people were cheating him that even when I was a small child I used to say to him, "What are you doing? This man is simply cheating you!"

    Once he built a house and a contractor was cheating him. I told him, "This house is not going to stand, it will fall, because the cement is not in the right proportion and the wood that is being used is too heavy." But he wouldn't listen; he said, "He is a good man, he cannot cheat us."

    And that's what actually happened; the house could not stand the first rains. He was not there, he was in Bombay. I sent him a telegram telling him, "What I have been telling you has happened: the house has fallen." He did not even answer. He came when he was supposed to come, after seven days, and he said, "Why did you unnecessarily waste money on the telegram? The house had fallen, so it had fallen! Now what can I do? That contractor wasted ten thousand rupees and you wasted almost ten rupees unnecessarily--those could have been saved.

    And the first thing that he did was to celebrate that we had not moved--because we had been going to move within two or three weeks. He celebrated: "God is gracious, he saved us. He made the house fall before we had moved into it." So he invited the whole village. Everybody was just unable to understand: "Is this a moment to celebrate?" Even the contractor was called invited, because he had done a good job: before we moved, the house fell.

    He was a simple man. And if you look deep down, everybody is simple. The society makes you complex, but you are born simple and innocent. Everybody is born a Buddha; the society corrupts you. bestil10

    Swimming in the river,

    and early spiritual experiences

    The first thing my own father taught me--and the only thing that he ever taught me--was a love for the small river that flows by the side of my town. He taught me just this--swimming in the river. That's all that he ever taught me, but I am tremendously grateful to him because that brought so many changes in my life. Exactly like Siddhartha, I fell in love with the river. Whenever I think of my birthplace I don't remember anything except the river.

    The day my father died I only remembered the first day he brought me to the riverbank to teach me swimming. My whole childhood was spent in a close love affair with the river. It was my daily routine to be with the river for at least five to eight hours. From three o'clock in the morning I would be with the river; the sky would be full of stars and the stars reflecting in the river. And it is a beautiful river; its water is so sweet that people have named it Shakkar--

    shakkar means sugar. It is a beautiful phenomenon.

    I have seen it in the darkness of the night with the stars, dancing its course towards the ocean. I have seen it with the early rising sun. I have seen it in the full moon. I have seen it with the sunset. I have seen it sitting by its bank alone or with friends, playing on the flute, dancing on its bank, meditating on its bank, rowing a boat in it or swimming across it. In the rains, in the winter, in the summer....

    I can understand Herman Hesse's Siddhartha and his experience with the river. It happened with me: so much transpired, because slowly slowly, the whole existence became a river to me. It lost its solidity; it became liquid, fluid.

    And I am immensely grateful to my father. He never taught me mathematics, language, grammar, geography, history. He was never much concerned about my education. He had ten children...and I had seen it happen many times: people would ask, "In what class is your son studying?"--and he would have to ask somebody because he would not know. He was never concerned with any other education. The only education that he gave to me was a communion with the river. He himself was in deep love with the river.

    Whenever you are in love with flowing things, moving things, you have a different vision of life. Modern man lives with asphalt roads, cement and concrete buildings. These are nouns, remember, these are not verbs. The skyscrapers don't go on growing; the road remains the same whether it is night or day, whether it is a full-moon night or a night absolutely dark. It doesn't matter to the asphalt road, it does not matter to the cement and concrete buildings.

    Man has created a world of nouns and he has become encaged in his own world. He has forgotten the world of the trees, the world of the rivers, the world of the mountains and the stars. There they don't know of any nouns, they have not heard about nouns; they know only verbs. Everything is a process.

    God is not a thing but a process. dh0503

    In my childhood I used to go early in the morning to the river. It is a small village. The river is very very lazy, as if not flowing at all. And in the morning when the sun is not yet arisen, you cannot see whether it is flowing, it is so lazy and silent. And in the morning when there is nobody, the bathers have not come yet, it is tremendously silent. Even the birds are not singing in the morning--early, no sound, just a soundlessness pervades. And the smell of the mango trees hangs all over the river.

    I used to go there, to the furthest corner of the river, just to sit, just to be there. There was no need to do anything, just being there was enough, it was such a beautiful experience to be there. I will take a bath, I will swim, and when the sun will arise I will go to the other shore, to the vast expanse of sand, and dry myself there under the sun, and lie there, and sometimes even go to sleep.

    When I came back my mother used to ask, "What have you been doing the whole morning?" I will say, "Nothing," because, actually, I had not been doing anything. And she will say, "How is it possible? Four hours you have not been here, how is it possible that you have not been doing anything? You must have been doing something." And she was right, but I was also not wrong.

    I was not doing anything at all. I was just being there with the river, not doing anything, allowing things to happen. If it felt like swimming, remember, if it felt like swimming, I would swim, but that was not a doing on my part, I was not forcing anything. If I felt like going into sleep, I would go. Things were happening, but there was no doer. And my first experiences of satori started near that river: not doing anything, simply being there, millions of things happened.

    But she would insist: "You must have been doing something." So I would say, "Okay, I took a bath and I dried myself in the sun," and then she was satisfied. But I was not, because what happened there in the river is not expressed by words: "I took a bath"--it looks so poor and pale. Playing with the river, floating in the river, swimming in the river, was such a deep experience. To say simply, "I took a bath," makes no sense about it; or to just say, "I went there, had a walk on the bank, sat there," conveys nothing.

    Even in ordinary life you feel the futility of words. And if you don't feel the futility of words, that shows that you have not been alive at all; that shows that you have lived very superficially. If whatsoever you have been living can be conveyed by words, that means you have not lived at all.

    When for the first time something starts happening which is beyond words, life has happened to you, life has knocked at your door. And when the ultimate knocks at your door, you are simply gone beyond words--you become dumb, you cannot say; not even a single word is formed inside. And whatsoever you say looks so pale, so dead, so meaningless, without any significance, that it seems that you are doing injustice to the experience that has happened to you. Remember this, because Mahamudra is the last, the ultimate experience.

    Mahamudra means a total orgasm with the universe. suprem01

    My own experience in childhood was...the flooded river of my town--nobody used to cross it by swimming when it was flooded. It was a mountainous river. Ordinarily, it was a small river, but in rainy times it was at least one mile wide. The current of the water was tremendous; you could not stand in it. And the water was deep, so there was no way to stand anyway.

    I loved it. I waited for the rainy season because it always helped...there would come a moment when I would feel that I was dying, because I was tired and I could not see the other shore, and the waves were high and the current was strong...and there was no way to go back, because now the other shore was as far away. Perhaps I was in the middle; it was the same either way. I would feel so completely tired and the water would take me down with such a force that there would come a time when I would see, "Now there is no possibility of living any more." And that was the moment when I would suddenly see myself above the water and my body in the water. When it happened the first time, it was a very frightening experience. I thought I must have died. I had heard that when you die, the soul goes out of the body: "So I have gone out of the body and I am dead." But I could see the body was still trying to reach the other shore, so I followed the body.

    That was the first time I became aware of a connection between your essential being and the body. It is connected just below the navel--two inches below the navel--by something like a silver cord, a silver rope. It is not material, but it shines like silver. Each time I reached the other shore, the moment I reached the other shore my being would enter into the body. The first time it was frightening; then it became a great entertainment.

    When I told my parents, they said, "Someday you are going to die in that river. This is enough of a sign. Stop going into the river when it is flooded."

    But I said, "I am enjoying it so much...the freedom, no force of gravitation, and seeing one's own body completely away."...

    The same experience had happened in the river many times, so there was no fear....

    It used to happen automatically that when the body reached the shore, my being would enter into the body. I had no idea how to enter the body; it had always happened of its own accord. transm03

    In my childhood days I used to take my friends to the river. There was a small path by the side of the river. To walk on that edge was very dangerous; just one step taken in unconsciousness and you will fall into the river, and that was the place where the river was the deepest. Nobody used to go there, but that was my most loved spot. And I will take all my friends to come along with me to move on that narrow edge. Very few were ever ready to go along with me, but those few had really a beautiful experience. They will all report, "This is strange, how the mind stops!"

    I will take my friends to the railway bridge to jump from the bridge into the river. It was dangerous, certainly dangerous; it was prohibited. There was always a policeman standing on the railway bridge because that was the place from where people used to commit suicide. We had to bribe the policeman, that "We are not committing suicide, we have just come to enjoy the jump!" And slowly slowly he became aware that these are the same people--they don't die or anything, they come again, they come again and they are not interested in suicide. In fact, he started loving us and stopped taking bribes. He said, "You can jump--I will not look at that side. Whenever you want you can come."

    It was dangerous. The bridge was very high and to jump from there...And before you will reach the river there was a time between--the gap between the bridge and the river--when the mind will suddenly stop.

    Those were my first glimpses of meditation; that's how I became more and more interested in meditation. I started inquiring how these moments can be made available without going to the mountains, to the river, to the bridges; how one can allow oneself to move into these spaces without going anywhere, just by closing one's eyes. Once you have tasted, it is not difficult. ggate208

    You are asking me: Although you were born almost enlightened, when I listen to your stories of your early life, I never get the impression that you saw yourself as a spiritual seeker. Were you looking for enlightenment, or was enlightenment a by-product of an impeccable resolve to never compromise what you felt to be true?

    There are things which cannot be sought directly. The more valuable a thing is, the more indirectly you have to go into it. In fact you have to do something else that simply prepares the situation around you--in which things like enlightenment, truth, can happen.

    You cannot go seeking and searching for truth. Where will you go? Kabul? Kulu-Manali? Kathmandu? Goa?...and then back home. All seekers of truth go this route and come back home looking more foolish than before. They have not found anything.

    Where will you go to seek the truth? You don't know the way, there is no map, there is no direction available. Nobody knows what, where, when it is possible to realize truth.

    The real seeker of truth never seeks truth. On the contrary, he tries to clean himself of all that is untrue, unauthentic, insincere--and when his heart is ready, purified, the guest comes. You cannot find the guest, you cannot go after him. He comes to you; you just have to be prepared. You have to be in a right attitude.

    I have never been spiritual in the sense that you understand the word. I have never gone to the temples or the churches, or read scriptures, or followed certain practices to find truth, or worshipped God or prayed to God. That has not been my way at all. So certainly you can say that I was not doing anything spiritual. But to me spirituality has a totally different connotation. It needs an honest individuality. It does not allow any kind of dependence. It creates a freedom for itself, whatever the cost. It is never in the crowd but alone, because the crowd has never found any truth. The truth has been found only in people's aloneness.

    So my spirituality has a different meaning from your idea of spirituality. My childhood stories-- if you can understand them--will point to all these qualities in some way or other. Nobody can call them spiritual. I call them spiritual, because to me they have given all that man can aspire to.

    While listening to my childhood stories you should try to look for some quality in it--not just the story but some intrinsic quality that runs like a thin thread through all of my memoirs. And that thin thread is spiritual.

    Spiritual, to me, simply means finding oneself. I never allowed anybody to do this work on my behalf--because nobody can do this work on your behalf; you have to do it yourself. And you cannot do it directly either, you have to create a certain milieu in which it happens. It is a happening; enlightenment, liberation, awakening, realization--all these words point towards absolutely one thing and that is a happening.

    That creates a kind of fear in many people: "If it is happening, then what are we supposed to do? Whenever it will happen, it will happen." That is not so. It is a happening, but you can do much to prepare the ground for it to happen.

    Preparing the ground may not look spiritual to those who do not understand. But it must be spiritual because the enlightenment has happened.

    The end proves that whatever means were used were substantially right. It is the goal that proves that the way that was followed was right. transm10

    I was from my very childhood in love with silence. As long as I could manage I would just sit silently. Naturally my family used to think that I was going to be good for nothing--and they were right. I certainly proved good for nothing, but I don't repent it.

    It came to such a point that sometimes I would be sitting and my mother would come to me and say something like, "There seems to be nobody in the whole house. I need somebody to go to the market to fetch some vegetables." I was sitting in front of her, and I would say, "If I see somebody I will tell.... "

    It was accepted that my presence meant nothing; whether I was there or not, it did not matter. Once or twice they tried and then they found that "it is better to leave him out, and not take any notice of him"--because in the morning they would send me to fetch vegetables, and in the evening I would come to ask, "I have forgotten for what you had sent me, and now the market is closed..." In villages the vegetable markets close by the evening, and the villagers go back to their villages.

    My mother said, "It is not your fault, it is our fault. The whole day we have been waiting, but in the first place we should not have asked you. Where have you been?"

    I said, "As I went out of the house, just close by there was a very beautiful bodhi tree"--the kind of tree under which Gautam Buddha became awakened. The tree got the name bodhi tree--or in English, bo tree--because of Gautam Buddha. One does not know what it used to be called before Gautam Buddha; it must have had some name, but after Buddha it became associated with his name.

    There was a beautiful bodhi tree, and it was so tempting for me. There used to be always such silence, such coolness underneath it, nobody to disturb me, that I could not pass it without sitting under it for some time. And those moments of peace, I think sometimes may have stretched the whole day.

    After just a few disappointments they thought, "It is better not to bother him." And I was immensely happy that they had accepted the fact that I am almost non-existent. It gave me tremendous freedom. Nobody expected anything from me. When nobody expects anything from you, you fall into a silence...The world has accepted you; now there is no expectation from you.

    When sometimes I was late coming home, they used to search for me in two places. One was the bodhi tree--and because they started searching for me under the bodhi tree, I started climbing the tree and sitting in the top of it. They would come and they would look around and say, "He does not seem to be here."

    And I myself would nod; I said, "Yes, that's true. I'm not here."

    But I was soon discovered, because somebody saw me climbing and told them, "He has been deceiving you. He is always here, most of the time sitting in the tree"--so I had to go a little further. tahui28

    Osho’s first day at school, and Shambhu Dube

    In India in those days, the educational structure began with four years of primary education--it was a separate phenomenon, under the local authorities--then three years more if you wanted to continue in the same direction. That is seven years; and then you would get a certificate....

    But there was another way too, and that is what actually happened. After four years you could either continue in the same line or change: you could go to the middle school. If you continued in the same line you never learned English. Primary education ended after seven years, and you were fully educated in only the local language--and in India there are thirty recognized languages. But after the fourth year there was an opening and you could change gear. You could go to the English school; you could join the middle school as it was called.

    Again it was a four-year course, and if you continued in that line then after another three years later you became a matriculate. My God! What a wastage of life! All those beautiful days wasted so mercilessly, crushed! And by the time you were a matriculate, you were then capable of going to university. Again it was a six-year course! In all, I had to waste four years in primary school, four years in middle school, three years in high school, and six years in university--seventeen years of my life!

    I think, if I can make any sense out of it, the only word that comes to me, in spite of Beelzebub and his disciples doing great work--ex-disciples, I mean--the only word that comes to me is 'nonsense'. Seventeen years! And I was eight or nine when I started this whole nonsense, so the day I left the university I was twenty-six, and so happy--not because I was a gold medalist but because I was free at last. Free again. glimps21

    I remained in my father's village for eleven years, and I was forced almost violently to go to school. And it was not a one-day affair, it was an everyday routine. Every morning I had to be forced to go to school. One of my uncles, or whosoever, would take me there, would wait outside until the master had taken possession of me--as if I was a piece of property to be passed from one hand to another, or a prisoner passed from one hand to another. But that's what education is still: a forced and violent phenomenon.

    Each generation tries to corrupt the new generation. It is certainly a kind of rape, a spiritual rape--and naturally the more powerful, stronger and bigger father and mother can force the small child. I was a rebel from the very first day that I was taken to school. The moment I saw the gates I asked my father, "Is it a jail or a school?"

    My father said, "What a question! It is a school. Don't be afraid."

    I said, "I am not afraid, I am simply inquiring about what attitude I should take. What is the need for this big gate?"

    The gate was closed when all the children, the prisoners, were inside. It was only opened again in the evening when the children were released for the night. I can still see that gate. I can still see myself standing with my father ready to register at that ugly school.

    The school was ugly, but the gate was even uglier. It was big, and it was called "The Elephant Gate," Hathi Dwar. An elephant could have passed through it, it was so large. Perhaps it would have been good for elephants from a circus--and it was a circus--but for small children it was too big.

    I will have to tell you many things about these nine years.... glimps19

    I am standing before the Elephant Gate of my primary school...and that gate started many things in my life. I was not standing alone of course; my father was standing with me. He had come to enroll me at the school. I looked at the tall gates and said to him, "No."

    I can still hear that word. A small child who has lost everything.... I can see on the child's face a question mark as he wonders what is going to happen.

    I stood looking at the gates, and my father just asked me, "Are you impressed by this great gate?"

    Now I take the story into my own hands:

    I said to my father, "No." That was my first word before entering primary school, and you will be surprised, it was also my last word on leaving the university. In the first case, my own father was standing with me. He was not very old but to me, a small child, he was old. In the second case, a really old man was standing by my side, and we were again standing at an even larger gate....

    The first gate was the Elephant Gate, and I was standing with my father not wanting to enter. And the last gate was also an Elephant Gate, and I was standing with my old professor*, not wanting to enter again. Once was enough; twice would have been too much.

    The argument that had begun at the first gate lasted up till the second gate. The no that I had said to my father was the same no that I had said to my professor, who was really a father to me....

    That 'no' became my tone, the very stuff of my whole existence. I said to my father, "No, I don't want to enter this gate. This is not a school, it's a prison." The very gate, and the color of the building.... It is strange, particularly in India, the jails and the schools are painted the same color, and they are both made of red brick. It is very difficult to know whether the building is a prison or a school. Perhaps once a practical joker had managed to play a joke, but he did it perfectly.

    I said, "Look at this school--you call it a school? Look at this gate! And you are here to force me to enter for at least four years." That was the beginning of a dialogue that lasted for many years; and you will come across it many times, because it runs criss-cross through the story.

    My father said, "I was always afraid..." and we were standing at the gate, on the outside of course, because I had not yet allowed him to take me in. He went on "...I was always afraid

    that your grandfather, and particularly this woman, your grandmother, were going to spoil you."

    I said, "Your suspicion, or fear, was right, but the work has been done and nobody can undo it now, so please let us go home."

    He said, "What! You have to be educated."

    I said, "What kind of a beginning is this? I am not even free to say yes or no. You call it education? But if you want it, please don't ask me: here is my hand, drag me in. At least I will have the satisfaction that I never entered this ugly institution on my own. Please, at least do me this favor."

    Of course, my father was getting very upset, so he dragged me in. Although he was a very simple man he immediately understood that it was not right. He said to me, "Although I am your father it does not feel right for me to drag you in."

    I said, "Don't feel guilty at all. What you have done is perfectly right, because unless someone drags me in I am not going to go of my own decision. My decision is 'no.' You can impose your decision on me because I have to depend on you for food, clothes, shelter and everything. Naturally you are in a privileged position."

    What an entry!--being dragged into school. My father never forgave himself. The day he took sannyas, do you know the first thing he said to me? "Forgive me, because I have done so many wrong things to you. There are so many I cannot count, and there must be more which I don't know at all. Just forgive me."...

    A great dialogue started with my father on that day, and it continued on and off, and ended only when he became a sannyasin. After that there was no question of any argument, he had surrendered. The day he took sannyas, he was crying and holding my feet. I was standing, and can you believe it...like a flash, the old school, the Elephant Gate, the small child resisting, not ready to go in, and my father pulling him--it all flashed by. I smiled.

    My father asked, "Why are you smiling?"

    I said, "I am just happy that a conflict has ended at last."

    But that is what was happening. My father dragged me; I never went to school willingly....

    I am happy that I was dragged in, that I never went on my own, willingly. The school was really ugly--all schools are ugly, in fact. It is good to create a situation where children learn, but it is not good to educate them. Education is bound to be ugly.

    And what did I see as the first thing in the school? The first thing was an encounter with the teacher of my first class. I have seen beautiful people and ugly people, but I have never seen something like that again!--and underline something; I cannot call that something someone.

    He did not look like a man. I looked at my father and said, "This is what you have dragged me into?"

    My father said, "Shut up!" Very quietly, so that the "thing" did not hear. He was the master, and he was going to teach me. I could not even look at the man. God must have created his face in a tremendous hurry. Perhaps his bladder was full, and just to finish the job he did this man and then rushed to the bathroom. What a man he created! He had only one eye, and a crooked nose. That one eye was enough! But the crooked nose really added great ugliness to the face. And he was huge!--seven feet in height--and he must have weighed at least four hundred pounds, not less than that.

    How do these people defy medical research? Four hundred pounds, and he was always healthy. He never took a single day off, he never went to a doctor. All over the town it was said that this man was made of steel. Perhaps he was, but not very good steel--more like barbed wire! He was so ugly that I don't want to say anything about him, although I will have to say a few things, but at least not about him directly.

    He was my first master, I mean teacher. Because in India schoolteachers are called "masters"; that's why I said he was my first master. Even now if I saw that man I would certainly start trembling. He was not a man at all, he was a horse!

    I said to my father, "First look at this man before you sign."

    He said, "What is wrong with him? He taught me, he taught my father--he has been teaching here for generations."

    Yes, that was true. That's why nobody could complain about him. If you complained your father would say, "I cannot do anything, he was my teacher too. If I go to him to complain, he could even punish me."

    So my father said, "Nothing is wrong with him, he is okay." Then he signed the papers. I then told my father, "You are signing your own troubles, so don't blame me." He said, "You are a strange boy."

    I said, "Certainly we are strangers to each other. I have lived away from you for many years, and I have been friends with the mango trees and the pines and the mountains, the oceans and the rivers. I am not a businessman, and you are. Money means everything to you; I cannot even count it."...

    I told my father, "You understand money, and I don't. Our languages are different; and remember, you have stopped me from going back to the village, so now if there is a conflict, don't blame me. I understand something you don't, and you understand something that I neither understand nor want to. We are incompatible. Dada, we are not made for each other."

    And it took nearly his whole life to cover the distance between us, but of course, it was him who had to travel. That's what I mean when I say that I am stubborn. I could not budge even a single inch, and everything started at that Elephant Gate.

    The first teacher--I don't know his real name, and nobody in the school knew it either, particularly the children; they just called him Kantar Master. Kantar means "one-eyed"; that was enough for the children, and also it was a condemnation of the man. In Hindi kantar not only means "one-eyed," it is also used as a curse. It cannot be translated in that way because the nuance is lost in the translation. So we all called him Kantar Master in his presence, and when he was not there we called him just Kantar--that one-eyed fellow.

    He was not only ugly; everything he did was ugly. And of course on my very first day something was bound to happen. He used to punish the children mercilessly. I have never seen or heard of anybody else doing such things to children. I knew of many people who had left school because of this fellow, and they remained uneducated. He was too much. You would not believe what he used to do, or that any man could do that. I will explain to you what happened to me on that very first day--and much more was to follow.

    He was teaching arithmetic. I knew a little because my grandmother used to teach me a little at home--particularly a little language and some arithmetic. So I was looking out of the window at the beautiful pipal tree shining in the sun. There is no other tree which shines so beautifully in the sun, because each leaf dances separately, and the whole tree becomes almost a chorus--thousands of shining dancers and singers together, but also independent.

    The pipal tree is a very strange tree because all other trees inhale carbon dioxide, and exhale oxygen during the day.... Whatever it is you can put it right, because you know that I am not a tree, nor am I a chemist or a scientist. But the pipal tree exhales oxygen twenty-four hours a day. You can sleep under a pipal tree, and not any other because they are dangerous to health. I looked at the tree with its leaves dancing in the breeze, and the sun shining on each leaf, and hundreds of parrots just jumping from one branch to another, enjoying, for no reason. Alas, they didn't have to go to school.

    I was looking out of the window and Kantar Master jumped on me.

    He said, "It is better to get things right from the very beginning."

    I said, "I absolutely agree about that. I also want to put everything as it should be from the very beginning."

    He said, "Why were you looking out of the window when I was teaching arithmetic?"

    I said, "Arithmetic has to be heard, not seen. I don't have to see your beautiful face. I was looking out of the window to avoid it. As far as the arithmetic is concerned, you can ask me; I heard it and I know it."

    He asked me, and that was the beginning of a very long trouble--not for me but for him. The trouble was that I answered correctly. He could not believe it and said, "Whether you are right or wrong I am still going to punish you, because it is not right to look out of the window when the teacher is teaching."

    I was called in front of him. I had heard about his punishment techniques--he was a man like the Marquis de Sade. From his desk he took out a box of pencils. I had heard of these famous pencils. He used to put one of those pencils between each of your fingers, and then squeeze your hands tight, asking, "Do you want a little more? Do you need more?"--to small children! He was certainly a fascist. I am making this statement so it is at least on record: people who choose to be teachers have something wrong with them. Perhaps it is the desire to dominate or a lust for power; perhaps they are all a little bit fascist.

    I looked at the pencils and said, "I have heard of these pencils, but before you put them between my fingers, remember, it will cost you very dearly, perhaps even your job."

    He laughed. I can tell you it was like a monster in a nightmare laughing at you. He said, "Who can prevent me?"

    I said, "That is not the point. I want to ask: is it illegal to look out of the window when arithmetic is being taught? And if I am able to answer the questions on what was being taught and am ready to repeat it word for word, then is it wrong in any way to look out of the window? Then why has the window been created in this classroom? For what purpose?--

    because for the whole day somebody is teaching something, and a window is not needed during the night when there is nobody to look out of it."

    He said, "You are a troublemaker."

    I said, "That's exactly true, and I am going to the headmaster to find out whether it is legitimate for you to punish me when I have answered you correctly."

    He became a little more mellow. I was surprised because I had heard that he was not a man who could be subdued in any way.

    I then said, "And then I am going to the president of the municipal committee who runs this school. Tomorrow I will come with a police commissioner so that he can see with his own eyes what kind of practices are going on here."

    He trembled. It was not visible to others, but I can see such things which other people may miss. I may not see walls but I cannot miss small things, almost microscopic. I told him, "You are trembling, although you will not be able to accept it. But we will see. First let me go to the headmaster."

    I went and the headmaster said, "I know this man tortures children. It is illegal, but I cannot say anything about it because he is the oldest schoolteacher in the town, and almost

    everybody's father and grandfather has been his pupil once at least. So no one can raise a finger against him."

    I said, "I don't care. My father has been his student and also my grandfather. I don't care about either my father or my grandfather; in fact I don't really belong to that family. I have been living away from them. I am a foreigner here."

    The headmaster said, "I could see immediately that you must be a stranger, but, my boy, don't get into unnecessary trouble. He will torture you."

    I said, "It is not easy. Let this be the beginning of my struggle against all torture. I will fight."

    And I hit with my fist--of course just a small child's fist--on his table, and told him, "I don't care about education or anything, but I must care about my freedom. Nobody can harass me unnecessarily. You have to show me the educational code. I cannot read, and you will have to show me whether it is unlawful to look out of the window even though I could answer all the questions correctly."

    He said, "If you answered correctly then there is no question at all about where you were looking."

    I said, "Come along with me."

    He came with his educational code, an ancient book that he always carried. I don't think anybody had ever read it. The headmaster told Kantar Master, "It is better not to harass this child because it seems that it may bounce back on you. He won't give up easily."

    But Kantar Master was not that type of man. Afraid, he became even more aggressive and violent. He said, "I will show this child--you need not worry. And who cares about that code? I have been a teacher here my whole life, and is this child going to teach me the code?"

    I said, "Tomorrow, either I will be in this building or you, but we cannot both exist here together. Just wait until tomorrow."

    I rushed home and told my father. He said, "I was worried whether I had entered you in school just to bring trouble upon others and upon yourself, and to also drag me into it."

    I said, "No, I am simply reporting so that later you don't say you were kept in the dark."

    I went to the police commissioner. He was a lovely man; I had not expected that a policeman could be so nice. He said, "I have heard about this man. In fact my own son has been tortured by him. But nobody complained. It is illegal to torture, but unless you complain nothing can be done, and I cannot complain myself because I am worried that he may fail my child. So it is better to let him go on torturing. It is only a question of a few months, then my child will go into another class."

    I said, "I am here to complain, and I am not concerned about going into another class at all. I am ready to stay in this class my whole life."

    He looked at me, patted me on the back and said, "I appreciate what you are doing. I will come tomorrow."

    I then rushed to see the president of the municipal committee, who proved to be just cow dung. Yes, just cow dung, and not even dry--so ugly! He said to me, "I know. Nothing can be done about it. You have to live with it, you will have to learn how to tolerate it."

    I said to him, and I remember my words exactly, "I am not going to tolerate anything that is wrong to my conscience."

    He said, "If that is the case, I cannot take it in hand. Go to the vice president, perhaps he may be more helpful."

    And for that I must thank that cow dung, because the vice president of that village, Shambhu Dube, proved to be the only man of any worth in that whole village, in my experience. When I knocked on his door--I was only eight or nine years old, and he was the vice president--he called, "Yes, come in." He was expecting to see some gentleman, and on seeing me he looked a little embarrassed.

    I said, "I am sorry that I am not a little older--please excuse me. Moreover, I am not educated at all, but I have to complain about this man, Kantar Master."*

    The moment he heard my story--that this man tortures little children in the first grade by putting pencils between their fingers and then squeezing, and that he has pins which he forces under the nails, and he is a man seven feet tall, weighing four hundred pounds--he could not believe it.

    He said, "I have heard rumors, but why has nobody complained?"

    I said, "Because people are afraid that their children will be tortured even more." He said, "Are you not afraid?"

    I said, "No, because I am ready to fail. That's all he can do." I said I was ready to fail and I was not insisting on success, but I would fight to the last: "It is either this man or me--we both cannot be there in the same building."

    Shambhu Dube called me close to him. Holding my hand he said, "I always love rebellious people, but I never thought a child of your age could be a rebel. I congratulate you."

    We became friends, and this friendship lasted until he died. That village had a population of twenty thousand people, but in India it is still a village. In India, unless the town has one hundred thousand people it is not considered a town. When there are more than fifteen

    hundred thousand people then it is a city. In my whole life I never came across another in that village of the same caliber, quality or talent as Shambhu Dube. If you ask me, it will look like an exaggeration, but in fact, in the whole of India I never found another Shambhu Dube. He was just rare....

    He just loved me, and this love started at that meeting, on that day when I had gone to protest against Kantar Master.

    Shambhu Dube was the vice president of the municipal committee, and he said to me, "Don't be worried. That fellow should be punished. In fact, his service is finished. He has applied for an extension but we will not give it to him. From tomorrow you will not see him in that school again."

    I said, "Is that a promise?"

    We looked into each other's eyes. He laughed and said, "Yes, it is a promise."

    The next day Kantar Master was gone. He was never able to look at me after that. I tried to contact him, knocked at his door many times just to say goodbye, but he was really a coward, a sheep under a lion's skin. But that first day in school turned out to be the beginning of many, many things. glimps20

    *Note: Professor Saxena, at Sagar University, see Part IV

    Kantar Master was never seen at the school again. He was immediately sent on leave, because there was only one month before his retirement, and his application for an extension had been canceled. This created a great celebration in the village. Kantar Master had been a great man in that village, yet I had had him thrown out in just a single day. That was something. People started respecting me. I would say, "What nonsense is this? I have not done anything--I simply brought the man and his wrongdoing to the light."

    I am surprised how he continued torturing small children his whole life. But that is what was thought to be education. It was thought then, and many Indians still think, that unless you torture a child he cannot be taught--although they may not say so clearly. glimps21

    The second day was my real entry into the school, because Kantar Master had been thrown out and everybody was joyous. Almost all the children were dancing. I could not believe it, but they told me, "You did not know Kantar Master. If he dies we will distribute sweets for the whole town, and burn thousands of candles in our houses." I was received as if I had done a great deed....

    The second day at school was as if I had done something great. I could not believe that people had been so oppressed by Kantar Master. It was not that they were rejoicing for me; even then I could see the distinction clearly. Today too, I can remember perfectly that they were rejoicing because Kantar Master was no longer on their backs.

    They had nothing to do with me, although they were acting as if they were rejoicing for me. But I had come to school the day before and nobody had even said, "Hello." Yet now the whole school had gathered at the Elephant Gate to receive me. I had become almost a hero on just my second day.

    But I told them then and there, "Please disperse. If you want to rejoice go to Kantar Master. Dance in front of his house, rejoice there. Or go to Shambhu Babu, who is the real cause of his removal. I am nobody. I did not go with any expectation, but things happen in life that you had never expected, nor deserved. This is one of those things, so please forget about it."

    But it was never forgotten in my whole school life. I was never accepted as just another child. Of course, I was not very concerned with school at all. Ninety percent of the time I was absent. I would appear only once in a while for my own reason, but not to attend school. glimps46

    The man I was talking about, his full name was Pandit Shambhuratan Dube. We all used to call him Shambhu Babu. He was a poet, and rare in that he was not eager to be published. That is very rare in a poet. I have come across hundreds of the tribe, and they are all so eager to be published that poetry becomes secondary. I call any ambitious person a politician, and Shambhu Dube was not ambitious.

    He was not an elected vice president either, because to be elected you have to at least stand for election. He was nominated by the president, who was just holy cow dung as I have said before, and he wanted some men with intelligence to do his work. The president was an absolute cow dung, and he had been in office for years. Again and again he had been chosen by other cow dungs.

    In India, to be a holy cow dung is a great thing--you become a mahatma. This president was almost a mahatma, and as bogus as they all are, otherwise they would not be mahatmas in the first place. Why should a man of creativity and intelligence choose to be a cow dung? Why should he be at all interested in being worshipped? I will not even mention the name of the holy cow dung; it is filthy. He had nominated Shambhu Babu as his vice president, and I think that was the only good thing that he did in his whole life. Perhaps he did not know what he was doing--cow dungs are not conscious people.

    The moment Shambhu Babu and I saw each other, something happened: what Carl Gustav Jung calls "synchronicity." I was just a child; not only that, wild too. I was fresh from the woods, uneducated and undisciplined. We had nothing in common. He was a man of power and very respected by the people, not because he was a cow dung but because he was such a strong man, and if you were not respectful to him, some day you might suffer for it. And his memory was very very good. Everybody was really afraid of him and so they were all respectful, and I was just a child.

    Apparently there was nothing in common between us. He was the vice president of the whole village, the president of the lawyers' association, the president of the Rotary Club, and so on and so forth. He was either the president or the vice president of many committees. He was

    everywhere, and he was a well-educated man. He had the highest degrees in law, but he did not practice law in that village....

    He never published his poetry while he was still alive. He was a great story writer too, and by chance a famous film director became acquainted with him and his stories. Now Shambhu Babu is dead but a great film has been made using one of his stories, Jhansi ki rani--"The Queen of Jhansi." It won many awards, both national and international. Alas he is no more. He was my only friend in that place. glimps21

    He was a great poet. He was also great because he never bothered to publish his work. He never bothered to read at any gathering of poets. It looked strange that he would read his poetry to a nine-year-old child, and he would ask me, "Is it of any worth, or just worthless?"

    Now his poetry is published, but he is no more. It was published in his memory. It does not contain his best work because the people who chose it, none of them were even poets, and it needs a mystic to choose from Shambhu Babu's poetry. I know everything he wrote. There was not much--a few articles, and very few poems, and a few stories, but in a strange way they all connect with a single theme.

    The theme is life, not as a philosophical concept but as it is lived moment to moment. Life with a small 'l' will do, because he would never forgive me if you wrote life with a capital 'L'. He was against capital letters. He never wrote any word with capitals. Even the beginning of a sentence would always be written with small letters. He would even write his own name in small letters. I asked him, "What is wrong with capital letters? Why are you so against them, Shambhu Babu?"

    He said, "I am not against them, but I am in love with the immediate, not the faraway. I am in love with small things: a cup of tea, a swim in the river, a sunbath.... I am in love with little things, and they cannot be written with capital letters."glimpse21

    Shambhu Babu was well-educated, I was uneducated, when the friendship began. He had a glorious past; I had none. The whole town was shocked by our friendship, but he was not even embarrassed. I respect that quality. We used to walk hand in hand. He was my father's age, and his children were older than me. He died ten years before my father. I think he must have been about fifty at that time. This would have been the right time for us to be friends. But he was the only man to recognize me. He was a man of authority in the village, and his recognition was of immense help to me....

    My father used to ask Shambhu Babu, "Why are you so friendly to that troublesome boy?"

    And Shambhu Babu would laugh and say, "One day you will understand why. I cannot tell you now." I was always amazed at the beauty of the man. It was part of his beauty that he could answer by saying, "I cannot answer. One day you will understand."

    One day he said to my father, "Perhaps I should not be friendly to him, but respectful."

    It shocked me too. When we were alone, I said to him, "Shambhu Babu, what nonsense were you telling to my father? What do you mean by saying that you should respect me?"

    He said, "I do respect you because I can see, but not very clearly, as if hidden behind a smokescreen, what you are going to be one day."

    Even I had to shrug my shoulders. I said, "You are just talking rubbish. What can I be? I am already it."

    He said, "There! That's what amazes me in you. You are a child; the whole village laughs at our friendship and they wonder what we talk about together, but they don't know what they are all missing. I know"--he emphasized it--"I know what I am missing. I can feel it a little, but I can't see it clearly. Perhaps one day when you are really grown up, I may be able to see you."glimps21

    I was talking to you about my strange friendship with Shambhu Babu. It was strange on many counts. First, he was older than my father, or perhaps the same age--but as far as I remember, he looked older--and I was only nine years old. Now, what kind of friendship is possible? He was a successful legal expert, not only in that small place, but he practiced in the high court and in the supreme court. He was one of the topmost legal authorities. And he was a friend of a wild, unruly, undisciplined, illiterate child. When he said, on that first meeting, "Please be seated," I was amazed.

    I had not hoped that the vice president would stand to receive me and would say, "Please be seated."

    I said to him, "First, you be seated. I feel a little embarrassed to sit before you do. You are old, perhaps even older than my father."

    He said, "Don't be worried. I am a friend of your father. But relax and tell me what you have come for."

    I said, "I will tell you later on why I have come here. First..." He looked at me, I looked at him; and what transpired in that small fragment of a moment became my first question. I asked him, "First, tell me what happened just now, between your eyes and mine."

    He closed his eyes. I think perhaps ten minutes must have passed before he opened them again. He said, "Forgive me, I cannot figure it out--but something happened."

    We became friends; that was sometime in 1940. Only later on, years afterwards, just one year before he died--he died in 1960, after twenty years of friendship, strange friendship--only then was I able to tell him that the word he had been searching for had been invented by Carl Gustav Jung. That word is 'synchronicity'; that is what was happening between us. He knew it, I knew it, but the word was missing.

    Synchronicity can mean many things all together, it is multidimensional. It can mean a certain rhythmic feeling; it can mean what people have always called love; it can mean friendship; it can simply mean two hearts beating together without rhyme or reason it is a mystery. Only once in a while one finds someone with whom things fit; the jigsaw just disappears. All the pieces that were not fitting suddenly fit on their own accord. glimps22

    I was telling you about a certain relationship that happened between a child of about nine years of age and an old man of perhaps fifty. The difference in age was great, but love can transcend all barriers. If it can happen even between a man and a woman, then what other barrier could be bigger? But it was not, and cannot be described as just love. He could have loved me like a son, or like his grandson, but that was not it.

    What happened was friendliness--and let it be on record: I value friendliness higher than love. There is nothing higher than friendliness. I know you must have noticed that I have not used the word 'friendship'. I was using it, but now is the time to tell you of something greater than friendship--friendliness.

    Friendship can also be binding, in its own way, like love. It can also be jealous, possessive, afraid that it may be lost, and because of that fear, so much agony and so much struggle. In fact people are continuously fighting those whom they love--strange, just strange...unbelievably strange.

    Friendliness rises higher, to all that man knows and feels. It is more a fragrance of being, or you can say a flowering of being. Something transpires between two souls, and suddenly there are two bodies, but one being--that is what I call flowering. Friendliness is freedom from all that is small and mediocre, from all that we are acquainted with--in fact, too acquainted with. glimps23

    Osho’s early love of books

    I really did not attend primary school much, because the river was so attractive and its call was irresistible. So I was always at the river--not alone of course, but with many other students. Then there was the forest beyond the river. And there was so much real geography to explore--who bothered about the dirty map that they had in the school? I was not concerned where Constantinople was, I was exploring on my own: the jungle, the river--there were so many other things to do.

    For example, as my grandmother had slowly taught me to read, I started reading books. I don't think anybody before or after me had ever been so involved in the library of that town. Now they show everybody the place where I used to sit, and the place where I used to read

    and write notes. But in fact they should show people that this was the place from where they wanted to throw me out. They threatened me again and again.

    But once I started reading, a new dimension opened. I swallowed the whole library, and I started reading the books that I love most to my grandmother at night. You will not believe it, but the first book I read to her was The Book of Mirdad. That began a long series.

    Of course once in a while, she used to ask, in the middle of a book, the meaning of a certain sentence, or passage, or a whole chapter--just the gist of it. I would say to her, "Nani, I have been reading it to you, and you have not heard it?"

    She said, "You know, when you read I become so interested in your voice that I completely forget what you are reading. To me, you are my Mirdad. Unless you explain it to me, Mirdad will remain absolutely unknown as far as I am concerned."

    So I had to explain to her, but that was a great discipline to me. To explain, to help the other person who is willing to go a little deeper than he could go on his own, to hold him by the hand, slowly slowly, that became my whole life. I have not chosen it...

    I am an unplanned man, that is why I stay still wild. Sometimes I wonder what I am doing here, teaching people to be enlightened. And once they become enlightened, I immediately start teaching them how to become unenlightened again. What am I doing? glimps26

    I have loved many books, thousands of books, but none like Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. I used to force my poor father to read it. He is dead, otherwise I would have asked him to forgive me. Why did I force him to read the book? That was the only way for him to understand the gap between himself and me. But he was really a wonderful man, he used to read the book again and again, just because I said. It wasn't once he read it, but many times. And not only did he read the book, but at least between him and me the gap was bridged. We were no longer father and son. That ugly relationship of father and son, mother and daughter, and so on... at least with me my father dropped it, we became friends. It is difficult to be friends with your own father, or your own son; the whole credit goes to him, not to me. Books13

    Leo Tolstoy's Resurrection: for his whole life, Leo Tolstoy was concerned, immensely concerned with Jesus, hence the title, Resurrection. And Leo Tolstoy has really created a tremendous work of art. It has been a bible to me. I can still see myself, when I was young, continuously carrying Tolstoy's Resurrection with me. Even my father became worried. "It is okay to read a book," he said to me one day, "but why do you go on carrying this book the whole day? You have read it."

    I said, "Yes, I have read it, not only once but many times. But I am going to carry it with me." My whole village knew about it, that I was continuously carrying a certain book called Resurrection. They all thought I was mad and a madman can do anything. But why was I carrying Resurrection the whole day?--and not only during the day, but during the night too.

    The book was with me by my bed. I loved it...the way Leo Tolstoy reflects the whole message of Jesus. He succeeds far more than any of the apostles, except Thomas... books13

    I don't like Gorky. He is a communist, and I hate communists. When I hate I simply hate, but the book The Mother, even though written by Maxim Gorky, I love it. I have loved it my whole life. I had so many copies of that book that my father used to say, "Are you mad? One copy of a book is enough, and you go on ordering more! Again and again I see a postal package and it is nothing but another copy of The Mother by Maxim Gorky. Are you mad or something?"

    I said to him, "Yes, as far as Gorky's The Mother is concerned, I am mad, utterly mad." When I see my own mother I remember Gorky. Books13

    Osho’s early experiences with orthodox religions

    It was a problem for me also in my childhood. My whole family was going to the temple and I was resistant. I was willing--if they could explain what this whole thing was all about. They had no explanation except, "It has been done always, and it is good to follow your elders, to follow your old generations, to follow the ancient heritage...it is good." This is not an explanation.

    I told them, "I am not asking whether it is good or bad; I am asking what it is. I don't see any God, I see only a stone statue. And you know perfectly well that it is a stone statue--you know better than me, because you have purchased it from the market. So God is being sold in the market? You have installed it with your own hands in the temple; at what point did it become God?--because in the shop of the sculptor it is not worshipped. People are haggling for its price; nobody is praying to it! Nobody thinks that these are gods, because there are so many statues. And you can choose according to your liking.

    "You haggled for the price, you purchased the statue, and I have been an observer all the time, waiting to see at what moment the stone statue becomes God, at what moment it is not a commodity to be purchased and sold, but a divinity to be worshipped."

    They had no explanation. There is no explanation, because in fact it never became God; it is still a statue. It is just no longer in the shop, it is in the temple. And what is the temple?-- another house.

    I was asking them, "I want to participate with you in your prayers, in your worship; I don't want to remain an outsider. But I cannot do it against myself. First I have to be satisfied, and you don't give any answer that is satisfying. And what are you saying in your prayers?

    "`Give us this,' `Give us that'--and do you see the whole hilarious scene? You have purchased a stone statue, installed it in a house, and now you are begging from the statue,

    which is purchased by you, `Give us this,' `Give us that...prosperity to our family, health to our family.' You are behaving very strangely, in a weird way, and I cannot participate in it.

    "I don't want to disobey for disobedience's sake. And this is not disobedience; I am ready to follow your order, but you are not prepared to give it to me. You never asked your own parents. They lived in ignorance, you are living in ignorance, and you want me also to live in ignorance."

    They thought that I would cool down by and by. They used to take me to the temple. They would all bow down, and I would stand by the side. And my father would say to me, "Just for our sake...it doesn't look good. It looks odd that you stand by the side when everybody is bowing down with so much religiousness."

    I said, "I don't see any religiousness; I simply see a certain kind of exercise. And if these people are so much interested in exercise, they can go to a gymnasium, which will really give them health.

    "Here they are asking, `Give us health,' and `Give us wealth.' Go to the gymnasium and there you will get health, and you will have real exercises. This is not much! And you are right that it looks odd--not my standing here but you all doing all kinds of stupid rituals. You are odd. I may be in the minority, but I am not odd.

    "And you say for your sake I should participate. Why are you not participating with me for my sake? You all should stand in a line in the corner--That will show that you really want to participate."

    Finally he told me, "It is better you don't come to the temple, because other people come and they see you, and you are always doing something nasty."

    I said, "What?"...because I was always sitting with my back towards God, which is not allowed--that is "nasty."

    I said, "If God is omnipotent, he can change his position. Why should I be bothered about it? But he goes on sitting in the same position. If he does not want to see my back, he can move; he can start looking at the other side. I am more alive than your God, that's why you tell me to change my position; you don't tell your God. You know that he is dead."

    And they said, "Don't say such things!"

    I said, "What can I do? He does not breathe, he does not speak, and I don't think he hears, because a man who is not breathing, who is not seeing, who cannot move, cannot hear--all these things happen in an organic unity, and the organism has to be alive. So to whom are you praying?"

    And slowly, slowly I persuaded my family to get rid of the temple. It was made by my family, but then they gave it to the community; they stopped going there. I told them, "Unless you explain it to me, your going shows that you are not behaving intelligently." psycho12

    In India, if somebody has smallpox it is not thought to be a physical disease. Smallpox is called in India, mata; mata means mother goddess. And in every town there is a temple for the mother goddess, or many temples...the mother goddess is angry, that's why poor little children are suffering from smallpox.

    People like Mahatma Gandhi were against vaccination because it was unnatural. Smallpox is natural. It destroys so many beautiful children's faces, their eyes, and it kills many. And the prophet of non-violence was against vaccination because he was against anything scientific-- and moreover it was thought the disease is not a physiological disease, it is a spiritual anger.

    One of my sisters died of smallpox, and I was very angry because I loved that sister more than any of my brothers or my sisters. I told them, "You have killed her. I have been telling you that she needs vaccination.

    "I have suffered from smallpox, but at that time I could not say anything to you; I don't even remember it, it happened just in my first year. And every child suffers. When this girl was born I was insisting that she should be vaccinated. But you are all followers of Mahatma Gandhi: Vaccination is against nature. And to prevent...the anger of the mother goddess will be dangerous. It will come in some other form."

    And when the girl became sick with smallpox they were doing both things: they were taking medicine from the doctor and they were continuously going to worship the mother goddess.

    I said, "Then please do one thing at least; either take the medicine, or go and worship your mother. But you are being cunning; you are even deceiving the mother goddess. I am honest, I spit on your mother goddess every day"--because I used to go to the river and the temple was just on the way so there was no harm; coming and going I would spit.

    And I said, "Whatsoever you do...but it is strange--I am spitting, I should suffer. Why should she suffer? And I cannot understand that the mother goddess becomes angry and small children suffer--who have not committed any crime, who have just arrived, who have not had time enough to do anything, nor are capable of doing anything. Others should suffer, but they are not suffering.

    "And mother goddess you call her! You should call her a witch, because what kind of mother is she who makes small children suffer? And then you are cunning. You are also not certain; otherwise don't take the medicine. Throw all the medicines; depend completely on your mother goddess. There too you are afraid. You are trying to ride on two horses. This is sheer stupidity. Either depend on the mother and let the girl die, or depend on the medicine, and forget about that mother."

    They would say, "We can understand that there is a contradiction, but please don't bring it to our notice, because it hurts."

    I said, "Do you think it hurts only you, and it does not hurt me seeing my parents being stupid, silly? It does not hurt me? It hurts me more. There is still time, you can change; but on the contrary, you are trying to change me, and you call it help. You think without your help I am going to be lost. Please let me be lost. At least I will have one satisfaction, that nobody else is responsible for my being lost; it is my own doing. I will be proud of it."

    Up to seven years, if a child can be left innocent, uncorrupted by the ideas of others, then to distract him from his potential growth becomes impossible. The child's first seven years are the most vulnerable. And they are in the hands of parents, teachers, priests.... dark01

    Religions could exploit humanity for a simple reason: man feels a kind of inner unease when there are questions and there is no way to find the answer. Questions are there--man is born with questions, with a big question mark in his heart--and it is good.

    It is fortunate that man is born with a question mark, otherwise he would be just another species of animal....

    I am reminded of my own childhood and so many things that will help you to understand the beauty of the question mark. And unless you understand the question mark as something intrinsic to your humanity, to your dignity, you will not understand what mysticism is.

    Mystifying is not mysticism.

    Mystifying is what the priests have been doing.

    They have taken your question mark....

    This is what I was going to tell you. In my childhood they started giving me answers...because there was a special class for Jainism in the Jaina temple and every child had to attend it, one hour every evening. I refused.

    I told my father, "In the first place I don't have those questions for which they are supplying answers. This is stupid. When I have questions I will go and learn their answers and try to find out whether they are correct or not. Right now I am not even interested in the question. Who created the world? My foot!--I am not interested. I know one thing for certain: I have not created it.

    My father said, "You are a strange child. All the children from the family are going, from the neighborhood, everybody is going."

    Jainas tend to live in a neighborhood, a close-knit neighborhood. Minorities are afraid of the majority so they remain close to each other; it is more protective. So all the children of the neighborhood go and their temple is in the middle of the neighborhood. That too is for

    protection, otherwise it will be burned any day if it is in a Hindu neighborhood or in a Mohammedan neighborhood.

    And it will become difficult: if there is a riot you cannot go to your own temple. And there are people who will not eat without going to the temple. First they have to go to the temple and worship, then only can they eat. So Jainas live in small sections of the town, city, village, with their temple in the middle, and surrounding it is their whole community.

    "Everybody is going," my father said.

    I said, "They may have questions, or they are idiots. I am not an idiot, and I don't have those questions, so I simply refuse to go. And I know what the teacher goes on teaching the children is absolute rubbish."

    My father said, "How can you prove that? You always ask me to prove things; now I ask you, how can you prove what he says is rubbish?"

    I said, "Come with me."

    He had to go many times to many places; it was just that the arguments had to be concluded. And when we reached the school, the teacher was teaching that Mahavira had these three qualities: omnipotence, all-powerful; omniscient, all-knowing; omnipresent, everywhere present. I said, "You have listened, now come with me to the temple." The class was just by the side of the temple, a room attached to the temple. I said, "Now come into the temple."

    He said, "But what for?"

    I said, "Come, I will give you the proof."

    What I had done was on Mahavira's statue I had just put a laddoo--that is an Indian sweet, a round sweet, just like a ball--I had put a laddoo on Mahavira's head, so naturally two rats were sitting on Mahavira's head eating the laddoo. I said, This is your omnipotent Mahavira. And I have seen these rats pissing on his head."

    My father said, "You are just impossible. Just to prove this you did all that!"

    I said, "What else to do? How else to prove it? Because I cannot find where Mahavira is. This is a statue. This is the only Mahavira I know and you know and the teacher knows. And he is omnipresent so he must be present here seeing the rats and what they are doing to him. He could have driven those rats away and thrown away my laddoo. I was not here. I had gone to pick you up--I had all the arrangements to make. Now prove to me that this man is omnipresent. And I'm not bothered at all--he may be. Why do I care?"

    But before a child even asks a question, you stuff his head with an answer. That is a basic and major crime of all the religions.

    This is what programming is, conditioning is. person01

    One of my father's friends--he was a very good ayurvedic physician--wanted to give me a certain ancient medicine made of a very rare kind of root. It is only found in the Himalayas and even there only in very rare places. It is called brahmaboti. The very name means that if you go through the whole ritual of taking that medicine...It is not just a pill you can swallow, it is a whole ritual. With that root juice they write OM on your tongue. It is so bitter that one almost feels like vomiting, and you have to stand naked in the river or in the lake, water up to your neck. Then the word OM will be written, while mantras are being chanted around you by three Sanskrit scholars.

    He loved me and he was sincere. It is said that if brahmaboti is used for any child before the age of twelve then he will certainly realize God in his life. Brahma means the ultimate, God. So he wanted to do the ritual on me.

    I said, "I am surprised that you have three sons and you have not tried the ritual on them. Don't you want them to realize God? I know those three scholars who will be chanting around me have their own children. Nobody has tried it on them, so why do you want me?"

    He said, "Because I love you, and I feel you may realize God."

    I said, "If you feel that, then I will realize without your brahmaboti. If brahmaboti helps people to realize God, you would have given it to your children. Just out of curiosity I am willing to go through the ritual, but I absolutely doubt that it has any value. If God could be realized by such a simple method that others do to you...I don't have to do anything--just stand in the water, maybe a little shivering, for as long as your mantras are being chanted...and just a little bitter taste, perhaps some vomiting, but these are not big things to achieve God. So I want it to be clearly understood: I am skeptical of it, but out of curiosity I am ready. Just I want to know, how much time will it take me to realize God?"

    He said, "The scriptures don't say anything about it."

    I said, "In this life at least?"

    He said, "Yes, in the same life."

    So the ritual was arranged and I went through the whole torture. For almost one hour I was standing shivering in the water. And I used to think that neem, one of the trees in India, has the bitterest leaves, but this brahmaboti surpassed everything. I don't think anything can make you feel so bad. They wrote Om on my tongue; it was almost impossible to keep down because my whole stomach was upturned, and I felt like throwing up, but I did not want to disturb their ritual. And that was one of the parts of it, that you should not throw up; otherwise the whole ritual has gone wrong, nothing will happen.

    After one hour I was released from that ritual. I asked the old physician, "Do you really believe this kind of nonsense can help anything, that it has any relevance to the experience

    of God? Then why do people go on doing ascetic practices their whole life, self-torture, all kinds of disciplines?--this one hour torture is enough!"

    He said, "That creates a question in my mind too. I have been worshipping God my whole life, and when I was writing OM on your tongue I thought, `My God! Perhaps he will realize, and I have been worshipping God my whole life--morning and evening. I am tired of it but I go on, because unless I realize I am not going to stop.' "

    I said to him, "It is absolutely absurd. I don't see any logic in it except torturing small children for no reason at all." And I was not the only one, because when they arranged this whole ritual a few other rich people became aware and they had brought their sons.

    There were at least nine boys standing in a row in the river because whatever is done for one, is done for nine; it takes the same time. And I said, "I know these boys; most of them are idiots. If they can realize God, then I don't want to realize, because I don't want to be in heaven with these boys. They are so idiotic that even in school if they are in my class I change the class, I go to another subject. I have never been with those people. This is for the first time--in a great effort for God-realization--that I have been standing with them."

    Later a few of them dropped out before the middle school because they could not pass, and I asked the physician, "What is the matter? The people who are going to realize God could not pass a small examination! They have proved perfectly well that your ritual was an exercise in futility."

    He used to be angry but he was also considerate. He said, "You have a point there, but what can I do?" One of the boys is in jail; he murdered somebody. The three who failed just have small businesses. The remaining have disappeared in the big world.

    I went on asking him again and again, "What about those nine who were prepared for God realization? Are you still thinking that they will realize God?"

    Finally he said, "You are so persistent that I have to tell you, I don't believe in this ritual; it is just that it is written in the scriptures. And seeing the failure of all these people...but don't tell it to anybody."

    I asked, "Why?"

    He said, "Be wise."

    I said, "You call it being wise?"

    "Don't tell it to anybody, because everybody believes in the scriptures. Why create enemies? Keep it to yourself."

    I said, "That is a way of lying."

    He said, "That's true, it is a way of lying."

    And I said, "All those scriptures continuously say `Be truthful.' So should I follow the scriptures or should I follow the masses?"

    He said, "You create dilemmas for me. I am old and tired, and I don't want to get into any trouble. Now this is a real dilemma for me. I cannot tell you to be untrue and I cannot tell you to be truthful. I cannot tell you to be untrue because it will go against the scriptures. I cannot tell you to be true because it will endanger your life. I can simply say, `Be wise.'"

    I said, "I used to think wisdom consists of being truthful, but here it seems that to be wise means to be political; to be wise means deceitful, uncaring about the truth, just thinking about your own comfort and respectability." mystic16

    In Jainism a beautiful incident happened.

    A woman named Mallibai asked the contemporary tirthankara, the contemporary Jaina master, "Why is a woman prevented?"

    He said, "For the simple reason that unless you are naked and live like we live, you cannot become enlightened." And a woman certainly feels shy to be naked, particularly amongst so called celibates.

    But Mallibai was a lioness! She immediately dropped her clothes, and she said, "If nakedness is the only problem, I am naked."

    And she rose to deep meditations, to such a height that Jainism had to accept her as one of the tirthankaras. But such cunningness, such callousness...they changed her name so that posterity would never know that a woman had become equal to Mahavira! They changed her name from Mallibai--bai means a woman--to Mallinath--nath means a man.

    I used to harass my father, that "I want to see which one of the twenty-four statues in the temple is Mallibai."

    He said, "I don't know. Don't harass me. They all are men!"

    Even the statue has been made that of a man! The name has been changed, the statue is made of a man, just so that the fact that a woman has become enlightened is erased from the memory of man. poetry04

    My sister was being married and I told my father, "If the word kanyadan, donation of the daughter, is being used, I will never come back to this family again. Then you can think I am dead."

    He said, "But this is strange. That word has been used for centuries."

    I said, "I don't care about the centuries, I care about the meaning of the word. You can donate things, you can donate money--you cannot donate people! And I will not allow it, even if the marriage party goes back. Let them go to hell!"

    He said, "I was worried that you might create some trouble, but I had not thought about this kind of trouble. The marriage party is coming--you can hear the band, and the people are coming closer--and you ask me not to use the word `kanyadan'...! But what about the brahmin priest who will say, `Where is the father? He has to come and do kanyadan.'"

    I said, "I have made arrangements with the priest before I talked to you."

    The priest used to live just behind my house. There used to be a big neem tree in the middle- -and it was a very narrow street--and I had spread the gossip around the town that the tree was full of ghosts. And the brahmin was very much afraid, because he had to pass through that street. He was the only person who lived behind our house, the only person who had to go through that street. And he used to ask me, "Is it true?"

    I said, "Do you want to experience? I have some acquaintance with those people because I live in the house..."

    And one day I managed to give him some experience....

    He used to almost run in the street. From the main street he would start running saying, "Hare Krishna, Hare Rama, Hare Krishna, Hare Rama..." just to avoid the ghosts which were there. And he had just begun with, "Hare Krishna, Hare Rama..." when I gave him the experience.

    I had just done a simple thing. As he was coming from his work in the town--some worship, some marriage or whatever--it must have been ten o'clock in the night, it was a dark night...I had a drum with me and a big blanket. As he came under the tree, I threw the blanket over him so he could not see what was happening, and I just banged the drum and threw the drum also over him. He got so confused at what was happening, he ran away, back down the street. And by chance, the drum fell over his head. I had not thought that it would go that way--that his head was completely covered by the drum, and underneath the drum was the blanket covering his whole body. So by the time he reached the road, people started running, thinking that the ghost had come onto the road!

    He had to shout and struggle, "I am the brahmin who lives behind! I am not the ghost! It is the work of the ghost that I am in such a situation." But there was no other way. So he was always very polite and respectful of me after the experience. Whatever I said he always said, "Yes, I will do it."

    I told him, "My sister is going to be married. You are not to use the word `kanyadan', because no person can be donated. It is not a gift--a human being given as a donation? If you use `kanyadan', then remember, from this day you will never be able to reach your home...every day those ghosts will trouble you."

    He said, "I will do everything, but please no more blankets, no more drums." So I told my father, "He is willing." sword22

    In my childhood, one of my father's friends was a great physician in that area, and also a very learned scholar. So saints, mahatmas, scholars used to stay in his home. And because of my father's friendship with him, I was allowed in his home, there was no barrier for me--although whenever there was any guest he wanted me not to come. He used to say, "This is a strange coincidence, that whenever I want you not to come you immediately appear"--because I was constantly watching from my house so that if some saint arrived, then the second person to arrive would be me. And I found out from my very childhood...these people were almost all Vedantins, the philosophy that teaches all is illusory.

    One of the famous Hindu saints, Karpatri, used to stay there. One day he was sitting; behind him was a door going inside the house. I simply dropped a book on his head. Now, a clean shaved head...and the book was not just dropping, it was really hitting. And he said, "What are you doing?"

    I said, "Nothing, it is all illusory."

    The physician was not present.

    He said, "Let the physician come. You should be barred from entering into this house."

    I said, "Strange, you believe in the house? You believe in the physician? He is sitting there just in front of you."

    He looked. He said, "There is nobody there."

    I said, "It is illusory, how can you see illusions? I can see him perfectly well; he is sitting in his seat surrounded by his medicines."

    He looked again.

    I said, "It must be that you are getting old and you need glasses."

    He said, "I can see everything else perfectly--tables, chairs, the walls--it is just the physician I cannot see." And at that very time the physician came out, and he said, "Here is the physician!"

    I said, "The whole day you are talking about illusion, illusion, illusion, but in your life I don't see any impact of your philosophy. And what is the point of having a philosophy of life which is just verbal, intellectual?"

    Avoid these people.

    In my childhood, when these people would be giving discourses in the temple, I used to stand up--and this was one of the points I would make to them: "Don't mention that things are illusory. If you mention it, I will prove that they are not. And you know me perfectly well, because we have met at the physician's place in the morning. I have already proved it.

    It started happening that they would avoid coming to my village. The physician told my father, "Saints used to come to my house. Your son is such trouble that when I go to the railway station to receive them they say, `We are not coming, because it becomes such an embarrassing situation: before thousands of people he stands up and he says he can prove...And he can prove, and we cannot prove, that is true. It is only a philosophy that the world is illusory.'"

    Always remember that philosophies are worthless unless they can give you an insight, unless they can give you a new vision of life, unless they can transform you, unless they are alchemical. upan31

    From my very childhood I have been continuously questioning knowledgeable people. My (parents') house was a guest house of many Jaina saints, Hindu monks, Sufi mystics, because my grandfather was interested in all of these people. But he was not a follower of anybody. He, rather, enjoyed me bothering these saints.

    Once I asked him, "Are you really interested in these people? You invite them to stay in the house and then you tell me to harass them. In what are you really interested?"

    He said, "To tell you the truth I enjoy their being harassed, because these guys go on pretending that they know--and they know nothing. But anywhere else it would be difficult to harass them because people would stop you. People would tell me, `Your grandson is a nuisance here--take him away.' So I invite them, and then in our own house you can do whatever you want. And you have all my support: you can ask any questions you want."

    And I enquired of these people, just simple questions: "Be true and just simply tell me, do you know God? Is it your own experience or have you just heard? You are learned, you can quote scriptures, but I am not asking about scriptures: I am asking about you. Can you quote yourself, your experience?"

    And I was surprised that not a single man had any experience of God, or of himself. And these were great saints in India, worshiped by thousands of people. They were deceiving themselves and they were deceiving thousands of others. That's why I say that knowledge has done much harm. Ignorance has done no harm. dark09

    There was one man in India...

    There were only two persons who were called Mahatma: one was Mahatma Gandhi, another was Mahatma Bhagwandin. I never agreed with Mahatma Gandhi, but with Mahatma Bhagwandin I had a great friendship. He was very old and I was so young, but we both felt some synchronicity. So whenever Mahatma Bhagwandin used to come to my city, he used to

    stay in our house. He was a great scholar and immensely informed. I have never come across anybody who is so informed about so much rubbish. You ask him anything and he will function almost like the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

    I used to go for a morning walk with him, and he would tell me about every tree: its name, its Greek name, its Latin name, its ayurvedic qualities, its medicinal purposes, its age...The first time I tolerated it; the next day when he started again I said, "Please! Because of your knowledge you cannot enjoy the walk. These beautiful trees become covered with Latin words, Greek words, Sanskrit roots, and I am not interested to know. It is enough for me that the tree is dancing in the wind, and I can hear the song and the joy. And I certainly can say that you cannot hear, you are deaf. You are a great encyclopedia, but you are not a conscious human being."

    He was surprised, shocked. For half an hour he remained silent; and then he started again. As he came across a tree he said, "Look, this is the only tree that exhales oxygen in the night and inhales oxygen in the day."

    I said, "My God, I have told you that I am not interested. It is enough for me that the tree is green, full of flowers and looking so beautiful in the morning sun...the dewdrops are still on the leaves. You destroy the whole beauty, you don't have any aesthetic sense! And you are an old man--you are my grandfather's friend, you are not my friend; the distance of age between me and you is half a century as far as years are concerned. But if you think of consciousness, the difference between me and you is many, many centuries!"

    He said, "You are strange; I wanted to make you more informed. In life one needs knowledge, information about everything."

    I said, "Who is going into that life where knowledge is a commodity, where knowledge is sold, purchased? Who is going? My interest is not in the world of names. My interest is in the hidden splendor which you are completely forgetting because of your knowledge. You are covered with your knowledge--so thick that you cannot see the light, the joy of anything. Your knowledge becomes a China Wall."

    I thought he must be angry, but on the contrary--he was a very sincere man--he reported to my grandfather, "Although he has insulted me again and again on my morning walk I am not angry. I am simply happy that his interest is not in the names but in the nameless. In seventy years nobody has told me"--and he was respected all over India as a great saint--"nobody has told me, `You are wasting your life in accumulating knowledge.' This child has made me aware that I have wasted seventy years. If I live a little longer I will start learning again so that I can have some acquaintance with the nameless, with the formless, with that which is."

    It happened by chance, that the day he died I was present. He died in Nagpur; I was passing from Chanda to Jabalpur. Nagpur was just in the middle, so I asked the driver to take me to Mahatma Bhagwandin, "just for half an hour and you can take a rest."

    I could not believe it when I saw him. He had become an absolute skeleton. I had not seen him for almost five years.

    He was dying but his eyes were showing a tremendous light. He had become only eyes; everything else had become dead, just a skeleton.

    Looking at me he said, "It cannot be coincidence that you have come at the right time. I was waiting, because I wanted to thank you before I leave the body. These years have been difficult in dropping knowledge, information, and finding that which is hidden behind names. But you have put me on the right track, and now I can say all names are false, and all knowledge may be useful but is not existential, is not true. I am dying with absolute peace, the silence which you have been talking about again and again."

    I had to delay because it seemed that he was going to die within a few minutes, or maybe a few hours at the most. Within five or six hours he died, but he died with such peace, with such joy. His face was so blissful, although his whole body was suffering from many diseases. But he had already got disentangled from the body; he had found himself. livzen11

    In my neighborhood there was a temple, a temple of Krishna, just a few houses away from my house. The temple was on the other side of the road, my house was on this side of the road. In front of the temple lived the man who had made the temple; he was a great devotee.

    The temple was of Krishna in his childhood--because when Krishna becomes a young man he creates many troubles and many questions, so there are many people who worship Krishna as a child--hence the temple was called the temple of Balaji. Balaji means...bal means child, and Balaji has become the name for Krishna. And then everything is simple because about his childhood you cannot raise all those questions which would be raised later on....

    He becomes a politician, a warrior, manages the whole war and collects all those women-- anything that you can imagine, he has done it. So in India there are many temples which are of the child Krishna....

    And in India many temples are called Balaji's temple, which means Krishna in his childhood.

    This Balaji's mandir was just in front of the house of the man who had made it. Because of the temple and the man's devotion, continuous devotion.... He would take a bath--just in front of the temple was a well--he would take a bath there first thing. Then he would do his prayers for hours; and he was thought to be very religious. By and by people started also calling him Balaji. It became so associated that I don't remember his real name myself because by the time I had any idea that he existed, I only heard his name as Balaji. But that cannot be his name; that name must have come because he made the temple.

    I used to go to the temple because the temple was very beautiful and very silent--except for this Balaji who was a disturbance there. And for hours--he was a rich man so there was no need for him to be worried about time--three hours in the morning, three hours in the evening,

    he was constantly torturing the god of the temple. Nobody used to go there, although the temple was so beautiful that many people would have gone there; they would go to a temple further away because this Balaji was too much. And his noise--it can only be called noise, it was not music--his singing was such that it would make you an enemy of singing for your whole life.

    But I used to go there and we became friendly. He was an old man. I said, "Balaji, three hours in the morning, three hours in the evening--what are you asking for? And everyday?-- and he has not given it to you?"

    He said, "I am not asking for any material things. I ask for spiritual things. And it is not a matter of one day; you have to continue your whole life and they will be given after death. But it is certain they will be given: I have made the temple, I serve the lord, I pray; you can see even in winter, with wet clothes...." It is thought to be a special quality of devotion, to be shivering with wet clothes. My own idea is that with shivering, singing comes easier. You start shouting to forget the shivering.

    I said, "My idea about it is different but I will not tell you. Just one thing I want because my grandfather goes on saying, 'These are only cowards; this Balaji is a coward. Six hours a day he is wasting, and it is such a small life; and he is a coward.'"

    He said, "Your grandfather said that I am a coward?"

    I said, "I can bring him."

    He said, "No, don't bring him to the temple because it will be an unnecessary trouble--but I am not a coward."

    I said, "Okay, we will see whether you are a coward or not."

    Behind his temple there was what in India is called an akhara, where people learn to wrestle, do exercises, and the Indian type of wrestling. I used to go there--it was just behind the temple, by the side of the temple--so I had all the wrestlers there as my friends. I asked three of them, "Tonight you have to help me."

    They said, "What has to be done?"

    I said, "We have to take Balaji's cot--he sleeps outside his house--we have just to take his cot and put it over the well."

    They said, "If he jumps or something happens he may fall into the well."

    I said, "Don't worry, the well is not that deep. I have jumped into it many times--it is not that deep nor is it that dangerous. And as far as I know Balaji is not going to jump. He will shout from the cot; sitting in the cot, he will call to his Balaji, 'Save me!"'

    With difficulty I could convince three persons: "You have nothing really to do with it. Just alone I cannot carry his cot, and I am asking you because you are all strong people. If he wakes up in the middle it will be difficult to reach to the well. I will wait for you. He goes to sleep at nine o'clock, by ten the street is empty and eleven is the right time not to take any chances. At eleven we can move him."

    Only two persons turned up; one didn't turn up, so we were only three. I said, "This is difficult. One side of the cot... and if Balaji wakes up....I said, "Just wait, I will have to call my grandfather."

    And I told my grandfather, "This is what we are going to do. You have to give us a little help."

    He said, "This is a little too much. You have some nerve to ask your own grandfather to do this to that poor man who does no harm to anybody except that he shouts six hours a day...but we have become accustomed to it."

    I said, "I have not come to argue about it. You just come, and anything that you want, anytime, I will owe it to you; you just say, and I will do it. But you have to come for this thing, and it is not much--just a twelve-foot road has to be crossed without waking up Balaji."

    So he came. That's why I say he was a very rare man--he was seventy-five! He came. He said, "Okay, let us have this experience also and see what happens."

    The two wrestlers started escaping, seeing my grandfather. I said, "Wait, where are you going?"

    They said, "Your grandfather is coming."

    I said, "I am bringing him. He is the fourth person. If you escape then I will be at a loss. My grandfather and I will not be able to manage. We can carry him, but he will wake up. You need not be worried."

    They said, "Are you sure of your grandfather?--because they are almost of the same age; they may be friends and some trouble may arise. He may tell on us."

    I said, "I am there, he cannot get me into any trouble. So don't you be afraid, you will not be in any trouble, and he does not know your names or anything."

    We carried Balaji and put his cot over his small well. Only he used to take a bath there, and once in a while I used to jump into it, which he was very much against--but what can you do? Once I had jumped in, he had to arrange to take me out. I said, "What can you do now? The only thing is to take me out. And if you harass me, I will jump in every day. And if you talk about it to my family, then you know I will start bringing my friends to jump into it. So right now, keep it a secret between us. You take your bath outside, I take my bath inside; there is no harm."

    It was a very small well, so the cot could completely fit over it. Then I told my grandfather, "You go away because if you are caught then the whole city will think that this is going too far."

    And then, from far away we started throwing stones to wake him up...because if he did not wake up the whole night, he might turn and fall into the well, and something would go wrong. The moment he woke up he gave such a scream! We had heard his voice, but this...! The whole neighborhood gathered. He was sitting in his cot and he said, "Who has done it?" He was trembling and shaking and afraid.

    People said, "Please get out of the cot at least. Then we will find out what has happened." I was there in the crowd, and I said,"What is the matter? You could have called your Balaji. But you didn't call him, you gave a scream and you forgot all about Balaji. Six hours training every day for your whole life...."

    He looked at me and he said, "Is that too a secret?"

    I said, "Now there are two secrets you have to keep. One you have already kept for many years. This is now the second."

    But from that day he stopped that three hours shouting in the temple. I was puzzled. Everybody was puzzled. He stopped taking a bath in that well, and those three hours evening and morning he just forgot. He arranged a servant priest to come every morning to do a little worship and that was all.

    I asked him, "Balaji, what has happened?"

    He said, "I had told you a lie that I am not afraid. But that night, waking up over the well--that shriek was not mine." You can call it the primal scream. It was not his, that is certainly true. It must have come from his deepest unconscious. He said, "That scream made me aware that I am really an afraid man, and all my prayers are nothing but trying to persuade God to save me, to help me, to protect me.

    "But you have destroyed all that, and what you have done was good for me. I am finished with all that nonsense. I tortured the whole neighborhood my whole life, and if you had not done that, I may have continued. I am aware now that I am afraid. And I feel that it is better to accept my fear because my whole life has been meaningless and my fear is the same."

    Only in 1970, I went for the last time to my city. I had a promise with my mother's mother that when she dies--she had taken it as a promise--that I would come. So I had gone. I just went around the town to meet people and I saw Balaji. He was looking a totally different man. I asked him, "What has happened?"

    He said, "That scream changed me completely. I started to live the fear. Okay, if I am a coward, then I am a coward; I am not responsible for it. If there is fear, there is fear; I was

    born with it. But slowly, slowly as my acceptance grew deeper, that fear has disappeared, that cowardliness has disappeared.

    "In fact I have disposed of the servant from the temple, because if my prayers have not been heard, then how is a servant's prayer going to be heard...a servant who goes to thirty temples the whole day?"because he gets two rupees from each temple. "He is praying for two rupees. So I have disposed of him. And I am perfectly at ease, and I don't bother a bit whether God exists or not. That is His problem, why should I be bothered?

    "But I am feeling very fresh and very young in my old age. I wanted to see you, but I could not come, I am too old. I wanted to thank you that you did that mischief; otherwise, I would have continually prayed and died, and it was all just meaningless, useless. Now I will be dying more like a man freed, completely freed." He took me into his house. I had been there before; all the religious books were removed. He said, "I am no longer interested in all that." ignor17

    I have come across many priests, and it was, in the beginning, a great shock to me that they are people who know nothing about religion; they are the people who know nothing of prayer; they are the people who have never meditated. They worship, but their worship is superficial- -it is not of the heart--and they worship on behalf of someone else. They are servants, not really priests.

    In India, every rich man has a small temple in his house. But the rich man has no time for God. Why waste time for God? In that much time, he can earn much. A priest can be purchased--and he will pray on behalf of you.

    Man is so deceptive that he can deceive even himself. The god is dead; he has purchased it from the market. It is nothing but stone, carved into the shape of some unknown god who has never been seen by anyone. The god is just a thing. Of course, the richer the man, the costlier will be the god. But whether costly or not, it is a commodity. And on top of that, even the priest is a salaried servant. He has nothing to do with God--he has something to do with money. I have seen priests running from one temple to another. If a priest can manage to pray in twenty temples, then he is a rich priest.

    The whole idea is so absurd and unbelievable. It is just as if you have a paid servant to love your beloved on your behalf. Perhaps one day it is going to happen--because the time you waste in loving your beloved can produce much money, much power. This game of love can be done by an ordinary servant. Why waste your time? And if the woman is also intelligent, there is no need for her to be there; she can also afford a woman servant. They both can love each other. Why waste time unnecessarily? mess212

    I have been sitting, hiding in temples, and listening to what people are asking. I was puzzled. There is not a single thing in the world that you will not hear being asked. Somebody is after some woman, and the woman is not paying any attention to him. Offer a coconut, and God will take care of it.

    In India, it is impossible to destroy baksheesh....

    You should go to a temple--just stand by the side so nobody observes you, and watch the people who come to pray. If there is a crowd, they pray long, because so many people are seeing them--they will spread the rumor in the city that this man is very religious. If there is nobody to observe them, their prayer is a shortcut. They finish it quickly and...gone. What is the point?--nobody is watching.

    I have seen the same person praying before the crowd--then he goes long--and the same person alone in the temple, unaware that I am hiding there--he quickly finishes the prayer. If there is nobody seeing him, what is the point? mess212

    I have met thousands of people who are known as great religious masters and teachers. India is so full of sages and saints you can meet them anywhere. There is no need to seek and search. They are seeking and searching for you, and fighting: "You belong to me, not to yourself"--whosoever catches hold of you first. But they are all parts of a certain cult, repeating parrot-like--exactly parrot-like or you can say computer-like--scriptures, great words. But words only mean that which the person has.

    The search for truth is basically the search for a living master. It is very rare that you can find the way without a master. But I allow the exception. I allow the exception because I myself never had any master.

    I have met with many so-called masters, but they all wanted to get rid of me, because my presence was such a danger to their respectability. I raised questions that they could not answer. Other disciples started disappearing, and they would say, "Please, you go on and find somebody else; don't disturb our disciples. They never asked such questions before you came; now they have started asking strange questions about which we know nothing."

    There are around the world many who pretend that they know. But you can see in their eyes, in their gestures, in their silences, in their words, whether they know or they are just tape recorders, quoting scriptures. ignor18

    For example, the law of the Hindu society that divides it into four castes is absolutely unlawful, unjust. It has no reasonable support for it--I have seen idiots who are born in a brahmin family. Just because you are born in a brahmin family, you cannot claim superiority.

    I have seen people who are born in the lowest category of Hindu law, the sudras, the untouchables, so intelligent: when India became independent, the man who made the constitution of India, Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar, was a sudra. There was no equal to his intelligence as far as law is concerned--he was a world-famous authority. mess202

    The sudra is not allowed to have any education, he's not allowed to read any religious scripture. Obviously, he cannot read because he has never been in a school.

    It was the British government who made a law that sudras can and should be allowed in the schools. When I was a child and I first entered school, I was surprised that a few children

    were sitting outside the class. I asked, "What is the matter? Why are these children sitting out of the class?"

    And the teacher told me, "They are sudras. Although the law has been enforced, we cannot drop our culture. They have to sit outside."

    Even if some sudra somehow manages to learn to read, he cannot read any religious scripture. The penalty and the punishment is death. Forget all about reading religious scriptures--he cannot even listen. If somewhere brahmins are reciting the Vedas, the sudra is not allowed to listen.

    This is the respect that you have given to labor. The parasites, the brahmins, are the highest caste; you have to touch their feet. mess113

    Jainism in India, on its sacred days, ten days per year, you have to fast and you cannot eat in the night. According to Jainism you cannot eat in the night any day of the year; eating in the night is sin. When the sun sets, Jainas cannot eat. Not only that, those who are very orthodox will not drink water.

    It was such a trouble in my childhood, because I was born in a Jaina family, that I simply refused. In India it is so hot, and summer nights are so hot, and you cannot even drink water. I said, "I am willing to go to hell--that will happen after death. There is time...I will do something...but right now I am going to drink. I don't want to suffer this night in hell."

    In those ten days you cannot eat at all for ten days continuously. And I know that in those ten days Jainas think only of food, nothing else. Day and night, their dreams are full of food. last209

    From my childhood I was taught a very very strict vegetarianism. I was born in a Jaina family, absolutely dogmatic about vegetarianism. Not even tomatoes were allowed in my house, because tomatoes look a little like red meat. Poor innocent tomatoes, they were not allowed. Nobody has ever heard of anybody eating in the night; the sunset was the last limit. For eighteen years I had not eaten anything in the night, it was a great sin.

    Then for the first time I went on a picnic with a few friends to the mountains. And they were all Hindus and I was the only Jaina. And they were not worried to cook in the day. Mm? The mountains were so beautiful and there was so much to explore--so they didn't bother about cooking at all, they cooked in the night. Now it was a great problem for me to eat or not to eat? And I was feeling really hungry. The whole day moving in the mountains, it had been arduous. And I was really feeling hungry--for the first time so hungry in my life.

    And then they started cooking. And the aroma and the food smell. And I was just sitting there, a Jaina. Now it was too difficult for me--what to do? The idea of eating in the night was impossible--the whole conditioning of eighteen years. And to sleep in that kind of hunger was impossible. And then they all started persuading me. And they said, 'There is nobody here to know that you have eaten, and we will not tell your family at all. Don't be worried.' And I was

    ready to be seduced, so they seduced me and I ate. But then I could not sleep--I had to vomit two or three times in the night, the whole night became nightmarish. It would have been better if I had not eaten.

    Conditioning for eighteen years that to eat in the night is sin. Now nobody else was vomiting, they were all fast asleep and snoring. They have all committed sin and they are all sleeping perfectly well. And they have been committing the sin for eighteen years, and I have committed it for the first time and I am being punished. This seems unjust! body04

    One Jaina monk was in the town. Jaina monks sit on a very high pedestal, so that even standing you can touch their feet with your head...at least a five-foot, six-foot-high pedestal-- and they sit on it. Jaina monks move in a group, they are not allowed to move alone; five Jaina monks should move together. That is a strategy so that the four keep an eye on the fifth to see that nobody tries to get a Coca-Cola--unless they all conspire. And I have seen them conspiring and getting Coca-Cola, that's why I remember it.

    They are not allowed even to drink in the night and I have seen them drinking Coca-Cola in the night. In fact, in the day it was dangerous to drink Coca-Cola--what if somebody saw it!-- so only in the night.... I had supplied it myself so there was no problem about it. Who else would supply them? No Jaina would be ready to do it, but they knew me, and they knew that any outrageous thing, and I would be ready to do it.

    So five pedestals were there. But one monk was sick, so when I went there with my father, I went to the fifth pedestal and sat on it. I can still remember my father and the way he looked at me...he could not even find words: "What to say to you?" And he could not interfere with me, because I had not done any wrong to anybody. Just sitting on a pedestal, a wooden pedestal, I was not hurting anybody or anything....

    And those four monks were in such uneasiness and they also could not say anything--what to say? One of them finally said, "This is not right. Nobody who is not a monk should sit on an equal level." So they told my father, "You bring him down."

    I said, "You think twice. Remember the bottle!" because I had supplied the Coca-Cola.

    They said, "Yes, that's right, we remember the bottle. You sit on the pedestal as long as you please."

    My father said, "What bottle?"

    I said, "You ask these people. I have a double contract: one with you and one with them, and nobody can prevent me. You all four agree that I can sit here, or I will start telling the name of the bottle."

    They said, "We are perfectly satisfied. You can sit here, there is no harm--but please keep silent about the bottle."

    Now, many people were there, and they all became interested...what bottle? When I came out of the temple everybody gathered; they all said, "What is this bottle?"

    I said, "This is a secret. And this is my power over these fools whose feet you go on touching. If I want, I can manage to tell them to touch my feet, otherwise--the bottle...." These fools!

    My father, on the way home, asked me, "You can just tell me. I will not tell anybody: what is this bottle? Do they drink wine?"

    I said, "No. Things have not gone that far, but if they remain here a few days more, I will manage that too. I can force them to drink wine...otherwise I will name the bottle."

    The whole town was discussing the bottle, what the bottle was, and why they had become afraid: "We have always thought that they were such spiritual sages, and this boy made them afraid. And they all agreed that he could sit there, which is against the scriptures." Everybody was after me. They were ready to bribe me: "Ask whatsoever--you just tell us what is the secret of the bottle."

    I said, "It is a very great secret, and I am not going to tell you anything about it. Why don't you go and ask your monks what the bottle is? I can be there, so they cannot lie--and then you will know what kind of people you are worshipping. And these are the people who are conditioning your mind!" ignor04

    In India many religions teach how to destroy the taste of the food before you eat it. There are many traditions in India where the monk will beg and put all kinds of things in one begging bowl, because he is not allowed to beg from just one house. And even if he begs from just one house, then in one begging bowl sweet things are there, salty things are there, all kinds of spices are there, rice is there, all kinds of dahls are there; and they all get mixed up. But that is not enough! First the monk should go to the river and dip the whole begging bowl in the river--they don't take any chances--and then mix everything...and then enjoy it! Have a nice lunch, dinner, or whatever you call it.

    In fact, once it happened: I was sitting on the bank of my village river, and a monk whom I knew--he used to beg from my house too, and he was very friendly with my father, and they used to chitchat--was doing this horrible thing of dipping his begging bowl.

    I said to him, "Have you ever thought of one thing? The way you enjoy your food, even a buffalo would refuse it, a donkey would refuse it."

    He said, "What?"

    I said, "Yes." And in India if you want to find donkeys, you will find them near the river because the washermen use donkeys to carry their clothes to the river. Only the washermen use the donkey. Nobody else even touches the donkey because the washerman is untouchable and his donkey is untouchable too. So while they are washing clothes their

    donkeys are just standing on the bank of the river waiting for the washermen to load them again, and then they will start moving home.

    So I said, "There is a donkey. Just give me your begging bowl; and don't be worried--if he eats it I will bring you a full bowl again from my house. If he does not eat it, you have to eat it.

    He said, "I take the challenge."

    I put the begging bowl in front of the donkey and the donkey simply escaped. He escaped for two reasons: one was the food, the other was me. That was not known to the monk--that any donkey would have escaped. All the donkeys of my town were afraid of me because whenever I got a chance I would ride on them--just to harass my whole village. I would go to the marketplace sitting on a donkey. The whole village used to say, "this is too much!" And I would say, "The donkey is a creation of God, and God cannot create anything bad. And I don't see what is wrong. He is a poor fellow, and nice."

    So all the donkeys knew me perfectly well. It became so that even from far away, even at night, if a donkey was standing there and I was coming towards him, he would just escape. They started recognizing me. The monk was not aware that there were two reasons for the donkey running away, but he certainly saw that the donkey refused the food.

    I said, "This is what your religion has been teaching you, to fall below the donkey. Even a donkey can sense that this is not food, not worth eating." person12

    In my town there was only one church. There were very few Christians, perhaps four or five families, and I was the only non-Christian who used to visit the church. But that was not special; I used to visit the mosques, the Gurudwara, Hindu temples, Jaina temples. I always had the idea that everything belongs to me. I don't belong to any church, I don't belong to any temple, but any temple and any church that exists on the earth belongs to me.

    Seeing a non-Christian boy coming continually every Sunday, the priest became interested in me. He said to me, "You seem to be very interested. In fact, in my whole congregation--it is such a small congregation--you seem to be the most interested. Others are sleeping, snoring, but you are so alert and listening and watching everything. Would you like to become like Jesus Christ?" and he showed me Jesus Christ's picture, of course of him hanging on the cross.

    I said, "No, absolutely no. I have no desire to be crucified. And a man who is crucified must have something wrong with him; otherwise who cares to crucify anybody? If his whole country, his people, decided to crucify him, then that man must be carrying something wrong with him. He may be a nice man, he may be a good man, but something must have led him to crucifixion. Perhaps he had a suicidal instinct.

    "The people who have suicidal instincts are not generally so courageous as to commit suicide, but they can manage to get others to murder them. And then you will never find that

    they had a suicidal instinct, that they prompted you to kill them so that the responsibility falls on you."

    I said, "I don't have any suicidal instinct in me. Perhaps he was not a suicidal man but certainly he was some kind of masochist. Just looking at his face--and I have seen many of his pictures--I see him looking so miserable, so deadly miserable, that I have tried standing before a mirror and looking as miserable as he looks, but I have failed. I have tried hard, but I cannot even make his face; how can I become Jesus Christ? That seems to be impossible. And why should I become Jesus Christ?"

    He was shocked. He said, "I thought you were interested in Jesus."

    I said, "I am certainly interested, more interested than you are, because you are a mere preacher, salaried. If you don't get a salary for three months you will be gone, and all your teaching will disappear." And that's what finally happened, because those Christian families were not permanent residents of the town--they were all railway employees, so sooner or later they got transferred. He was left alone with a small church that they had made. Now there was nobody to give money, to support him, nobody to listen to him except me.

    On Sundays he used to say, "Dear friends--"

    I would say, "Wait! Don't use the plural. There are no friends, just 'dear friend' will do. It is almost like two lovers talking; it is not a congregation. You can sit down--nobody is there. We can have a good chitchat. Why unnecessarily go on standing for one hour, and shout and...?"

    And that's how it happened. Within three months he was gone, because if you don't pay him.... Although Jesus says, "Man cannot live by bread alone," man cannot live without bread either. He needs the bread. It may not be enough, he needs many more things, but many more things come only later on; first comes the bread.

    Man certainly can live by bread alone. He will not be much of a man--but who is much of a man? But nobody can live without bread, not even Jesus.

    I was going into the mosque, and they allowed me, because Christians, Mohammedans-- these are converting religions; they want people from other folds to come to their fold: They were very happy seeing me there--but the same question: "Would you like to become like Hazrat Mohammed?" I was surprised to know that nobody was interested in my just being myself, helping me to be myself.

    Everybody was interested in somebody else, the ideal, their ideal, and I have only to be a carbon copy? God has not given me any original face? I have to live with a borrowed face, with a mask, knowing that I don't have any face at all? Then how can life be a joy? Even your face is not yours.

    If you are not yourself, how can you be happy?

    The whole existence is blissful because the rock is rock, the tree is tree, the river is river, the ocean is ocean. Nobody is bothering to become somebody else; otherwise they would all go nuts. And that's what has happened to man.

    You are being taught from the very childhood not to be yourself, but the way it is said is very clever, cunning. They say, "You have to become like Krishna, like Buddha," and they paint Buddha and Krishna in such a way that a great desire arises in you to be a Buddha, to be a Jesus, to be a Krishna. This desire is the root cause of your misery.

    I was also told the same things that you have been told, but from my very childhood I made it a point that whatsoever the consequence I was not going to be deviated from myself. Right or wrong I am going to remain myself. Even if I end up in hell I will have at least the satisfaction that I followed my own course of life. If it leads to hell, then it leads to hell. Following others' advice and ideals and disciplines, even if I end up in paradise I will not be happy there, because I will have been forced against my will.

    Try to understand the point. If it is against your will, even in paradise you will be in hell. But following your natural course of being, even in hell you will be in paradise.

    Paradise is where your real being flowers.

    Hell is where you are crushed and something else is imposed on you. misery15

    Hajj is the Mohammedan's holy pilgrimage, and Mohammed has said at least once in a life every Mohammedan has to do hajj. If you miss hajj you will not be allowed into paradise. So truth is not important, love is not important, compassion is not important; what is important is a pilgrimage to Mecca. And you can do everything else you want, but you should do hajj. Once a person does hajj he is called hajji. And that is a title that makes his paradise a certainty; all hajjis go to paradise. So even poor Mohammedans....

    In my village I have seen such poor Mohammedans collecting money, eating only one time a day so that at least once in their whole life...because it will need their life's savings. And I have seen people selling their houses, their land, borrowing money and remaining always in debt because they could not even pay the interest--there was no question of paying the original money. And they have taken it at such high interest; nobody is going to give it to them at a low interest because everybody knows the money is never coming back. And there is every possibility that this man may die because hajj, in the old days, was almost a suicidal pilgrimage. Now it is a little better, but not much better.

    So at such a high interest, perhaps twenty-five percent per month, they have sold themselves for their whole lives, they have become slaves. Their house is gone, their land is gone, and whatsoever they earn they have to give in interest; but people will take this risk because without becoming a hajji there is no hope. person19

    There are Mohammedans in India...You will be surprised to know that India is not a Mohammedan country, but India has the largest population of Mohammedans in the whole

    world; no other country has a bigger population of Mohammedans. They have a certain festival every year in which they believe that the saints can be called back in a trance-like state in people. So in every place where there is a grave of a saint, many people will go into trance. And sometimes a few people will start speaking in trance. You can ask questions and they will answer, and it is thought that those answers are being given by the spirit of the saint.

    I never believed it for the simple reason...in the first place whatever I had heard about the saint did not convince me that he was a saint. Simple qualities which are needed just to be human, even those were not there. For example, Mohammedans are all meat eaters. And they become saints if they convert many Hindus--even at the point of the sword, even if they kill to convert people. They have many wives, and most are Hindu women forcibly brought to their house--and Hindus are in a totally different world. If a woman has spent the night in a Mohammedan's house, she cannot be accepted back; she has fallen. So there is no way for her other than to become a Mohammedan or commit suicide. Her family's door is closed.

    So whatever I had heard about a saint in my birthplace, I didn't feel that there was anything saintly in it. And moreover, Mohammedans, just like Christians and Jews, believe only in one life, and I cannot accept that because it is my own experience that lives are continuously coming one after another. You don't have one life; you have many, hundreds, thousands. So when a person dies, whether he believes in one life or not doesn't matter, he will have to be born into another life. So after three hundred years, who is going to come?

    I was very young. I must have been ten years old when I became interested in this phenomenon of trance, in the people who were going into trance and answering. And people were worshipping them, bringing fruits and sweets, and rupees and clothes. I would just sit by their side with a long needle and go on jabbing the needle, and they would go on trying hard to keep me from doing that--and they are in trance! They are replying and in the middle of the reply they will just...because my needle was there!

    They have a certain...They bring the coffin of the saint out of the grave and the one who goes the deepest in trance, he takes it on his waist--they have certain arrangements--he holds it. There are ropes, four ropes; four other people are holding those four ropes and he dances. And I would go on doing my work, because it is a crowd thing. And certainly he would dance more; he would jump higher than anybody else. He would be angry with me, but he would get more sweets and more rupees and more clothes, and more people would be worshipping him. In fact he would become the topmost person, the one who has gone deepest into the trance.

    And afterwards he would meet me and he would say, "It hurts, but no harm. You can come..."

    I said, "In fact you should share. Those things have come to you because of my needle, not because of your trance. And if you don't share, I can change people; I can go to any other. There are fifteen people dancing."

    "No, no," he would say. "Don't go. You can take your share. Without you I cannot manage."

    It became...others became also aware, what is the point? Wherever this boy is, only there the spirit comes. So others asked me, "What is the reason that wherever you are the spirit comes?"

    I said, "I am a spiritual person. If you want to have a taste, I can give it in your side. People will come. But don't get angry at me."

    None of them was in trance. I tried all of them. None of them was in trance; they were all pretending. But thousands of people believe.

    One can go into trance but it is really a kind of deep hypnosis. It can't do any harm to you, but it has nothing spiritual in it. And it is never a superconscious state.

    I became so much known to these people that one day before the festival they would start coming to me: "Please help me. Don't go to anybody else. I promise, half and half we will share. But you have to promise to come to me."

    I said, "Don't be worried. I will see, because I have many other clients. Who is going to give me more and who is strong enough because this needle...for one or two hours I have to go on giving injections. An ordinary man may break down and may simply shout, `I don't want all this. Stop! This needle is too much.' "

    A few of them came to me and said, "Can't you bring a smaller needle?" I said, "No, this is a special needle. Without it I cannot work."

    My father said, "Why do these Mohammedans come to you?--and just before their festival?" That day he had been watching. He said, "I have seen almost ten persons come to you and I don't see the point. Why?"

    I said, "You don't know." I showed him the needle.

    He said, "I cannot connect."

    I said, "This is their trance."

    He said, "My God, so you are doing this business!"

    I said, "They are doing business. I am just a partner. And my work is very simple. I just have to keep the person dancing higher than others, giving him more and more energy with the needle. Naturally more people are attracted towards him. Others by and by slow down, seeing that nobody is coming to them. He becomes the center of the whole festival. And if they offer me half of their share...?"

    He said, "You are strange. I have been telling you to come to the temple. You won't come, and you have started going to the mosque to do this business. And this business...if

    somebody comes to know about it, it can create a riot in the town--that you are disturbing their people who are in trance."

    I said, "You don't be worried. Nobody can say this, because I know all of them, and they are all dependent on me. Their trance is dependent on my needle. Before I entered into this business, they were just jumping slowly because the dead body is too much of a weight. They need some energy."

    My father said, "I don't understand you. You call this needle energy?"

    I said, "You should come and see"--and he came. He saw me, and he saw that it was true that the person I was with had the most presents and he was jumping high, higher. He could see on his face...each time I had to use the needle his face would go--because it was a big needle. But it was a question of competition, too. Those fifteen people...and nobody said anything to anybody else, because then they would be exposing themselves--that they were all fake, nobody was true.

    In all the Mohammedan countries around the world this goes on happening every year, and millions of people are befooled--there is no trance.

    Trance is possible but for that you need a certain training in auto-hypnosis. Or, you may have a natural tendency of falling unconscious. mystic13

    Village entertainment

    One of the greatest losses to India happened when India became divided from Pakistan, and that was the last thing the politicians ever thought about.

    In my childhood I encountered it almost every day, because all over the country the streets were full of magicians.

    I have seen with my own eyes things which even today I cannot figure out how they were managing. Of course there were tricks behind them; there was no miracle, neither were they claiming that they were performing miracles. They were simple people, poor people, not arrogant, but what they were doing was almost a miracle.

    I have seen magicians in my childhood putting a small plant of a mango tree, just six inches high at the most.... In front of everybody they would dig the hole, put in the plant, then cover the plant and then chant in gibberish so you cannot understand what they are saying. The pretension is that there is some communication between them and the hidden plant.

    The moment they remove the cover, that six inch mango plant has ripe mangoes. And they would invite people--you could come close, you could see that those mangoes were not in any way tied on. People would come and see and they would say that they are grown, not attached.

    The magician would offer those mangoes to a few people so that they could taste that they were not false or illusory--and people would taste them and say, "We have never tasted such sweet mangoes in our whole life!" And there was no claim for any miracle.

    I have seen magicians bringing from their bellies big round balls of solid steel. They would be so big it was difficult to take them out of their mouths--people were needed to pull them out of their mouths--and they were so heavy that when they were thrown on the earth they would make a dent.

    The magician would go on bringing bigger and bigger balls.... It was a trick--but how were they managing it? And they would throw those big balls, almost the size of a football--they would throw them in the air and they would fall and create such a big dent in the earth. They would tell people, "You can try"--and people would try, but they were so heavy that it was difficult to pick them up. And they all have come--a dozen or more, all around--from the belly of the magician.

    He would show, half naked, the upper part of his body naked--he would show that the ball was moving upwards. You could see that the ball was moving upwards, that it was stuck in his throat, and you could see and you could go and touch and feel that the ball was inside. Then, with great difficulty, he would bring it into his mouth and he would cry, tears coming, and ask people somehow to take it out, because he is not able. They would destroy all his teeth to help him--and the miracle was that as they were taking it out, the ball was becoming bigger. By the time it was completely out, it was so big that that man's belly could not contain even a single ball, to say nothing of one dozen balls.

    But all these magicians were Mohammedans, because it was not a very creditable job. These were street people. Because of the division of Pakistan, all those Mohammedan magicians have moved to Pakistan. They were coming from faraway Pakhtoonistan, Afghanistan. But now the roads are closed; now you don't see the magicians anywhere.

    Otherwise it was almost an everyday affair--in this marketplace, in that street, near the school, anywhere where they thought they could gather a crowd.

    I have seen with my own eyes something which sometimes I wonder whether I have seen it or dreamed it. I have not dreamed for thirty-five years...but the thing is such that it is absolutely unbelievable that it really happened.

    A magician came to our school. The school was a very big school, with almost one thousand students and nearabout fifty teachers. Even the principal of the school, who was a postgraduate in science, first rejected the man: "We don't want any nonsense here."

    But I had seen that man doing impossible things, and I told him, "You wait." I went into the office of the principal and said, "You are missing a tremendous opportunity. You are a scientist.... I know this man; I have seen him performing. I can ask him to do the best that he can, and what is the harm? After school time, those who want to see can stay."

    Those magicians were so poor that if you could give them five rupees, that was too much. I told the magician that I had convinced the principal, he was ready to allow it after school--"but you have to do the greatest trick that you know. On your behalf I have promised--and he is a man of scientific mind, so be careful. There will be fifty graduates, postgraduates, so you have to be very alert. You should not be caught, because it is also a question of my prestige."

    He said, "My boy, don't you be worried."

    And he did such a thing that my principal called me and said, "You should not associate with such people. It is dangerous."

    I said, "Have you any idea what he did?"

    He said, "I don't have any idea, and I can't even believe that this has happened."

    The magician threw up a rope which stood in the air just like a pillar--a rope which has no bones, nothing, it was just coiled and he had carried it on his shoulder--ordinary rope. He went on uncoiling it and throwing it out, and soon we could not see the other end. What happened to the other end?

    All magicians used to have a child who was their helper. He called the boy, "Are you ready to go up the rope?"

    The boy said, "Yes, master"--and he started climbing the rope. And just as the other end of the rope had disappeared, at a certain point the boy also disappeared. Then the magician said to the crowd, "I will bring the boy down, piece by piece."

    I was sitting by the side of the principal. He said, "Are you going to create some trouble for me? If the police come here and see that a boy is cut into pieces...."

    I said, "Don't be worried, he is just performing a magic trick. Nothing is going to be wrong. I have been watching him in many shows--but this I have never seen."

    The magician threw a knife up and one leg of the boy came down, and everybody was almost breathless. He went on throwing knives...another leg...one hand...another hand...and they were lying there on the ground in front of us, not bleeding at all, as if the boy was made of plastic or something. But he was speaking...he was doing all the things the magician was saying. Finally came his body, and just the head remained.

    My principal said, "Don't cut his head!"

    I said, "Don't be worried. If he has cut him...what does it mean? If the police come, you will be caught."

    He said, "I was saying from the very beginning, no nonsense here, and now you are talking about police. I have always been suspicious of you; perhaps you may have informed the police beforehand to come at the right time."

    I said, "Don't be worried."

    And then the magician shouted into the sky, "Boy, only your head is there; let it drop." The head came rolling down, and he started putting the boy together again. He joined him perfectly well, and the boy started collecting his things and said, "What about the rope? Should I start pulling it back?" The magician said, "Yes"--and the boy started pulling the rope back and coiling it.

    I had only heard about the rope trick, which is world famous. Akbar mentions in his Akbar Nama, his autobiography. Since Akbar it has been a rumor in the air that there are magicians who can perform it, but no authoritative account is available. One British viceroy, Curzon, mentions in his memoirs that he saw the rope trick in New Delhi before his whole court.

    I was making every effort to find some magician--so many magicians were passing through my village, and I would ask them, "Can you perform the rope trick?"

    They said, "It is the ultimate, and only very rare masters in magic can do it."

    But this man--I had not asked him particularly for the rope trick, but he did it. Even today I cannot believe it. I can see the whole scene, I can see the principal freaking out--and all the magician got was five rupees.

    Magic simply means something unbelievable, so absurd, so irrational that you cannot find a way to figure it out. satyam18

    Call it meditation, call it awareness, call it watchfulness--it all comes to the same: that you become more alert, first about your conscious mind, what goes on in your conscious mind.... And it is a beautiful experience. It is really hilarious, a great panorama.

    In my childhood in my town there were no movies, talkies. There was no cinema hall. Now there is, but in my childhood there was not. The only thing that was available was that once in a while a wandering man would come with a big box. I don't know what it is called. There is a small window in it. He opens the window, you just put your eyes to it and he goes on moving a handle and a film inside moves. And he goes on telling the story of what is happening.

    Everything else I have forgotten but one thing I cannot forget for a certain reason. The reason, I know, was because it was in all those boxes that came through my village. I had seen every one, because the fee was just one paise. Also the show was not long, just five minutes. In every box there were different films, but one picture was always there: the naked

    washerwoman of Bombay. Why did it used to be in every one?--a very fat naked woman, the naked washerwoman of Bombay. That used to be always there...perhaps that was a great attraction, or people were fans of that naked washerwoman; and she was really ugly. And why from Bombay?

    If you start looking...just whenever you have time, just sit silently and look at what is passing in your mind. There is no need to judge, because if you judge, the mind immediately changes its scenes according to you. The mind is very sensitive, touchy. If it feels that you are judging, then it starts showing things that are good. Then it won't show you the naked washerwoman of Bombay, that picture will be missed out. So don't judge, then that picture is bound to come. ignor26

    When films were shown for the first time in small villages people started throwing money, as is the custom in villages. If there is a drama company or something, someone dancing, they throw money. They started throwing money at films in small villages. I have seen people in small villages throwing money--at the screen--a dancing girl dances, they start throwing money. When a dancing girl dances and her petticoat begins to rise up in the dance, they bend down and start looking from below. There is nothing there, just a play of light and shadow. But people, people just like other people. This is how their whole life is. death05

    Have you ever gone to see a drama, not from the audience, but backstage where actors and actresses dress themselves up and prepare themselves? Then you will be surprised.

    That was one of my hobbies in my childhood, to somehow get backstage. In my village every year they used to play Ramleela, the great story of Rama. And it is far more beautiful if you see what happens at the back. I have seen Sita, the wife of Rama... In India she is worshipped as the greatest woman ever born, absolutely virtuous, pure. It is impossible to conceive of a purer woman or a purer love. It is absolutely impossible to conceive of a more religious, more pious, more holy woman. But at the back of the stage I have seen Sita before she goes on the stage--smoking beedies!...

    Just to prepare herself, just to give herself a shot of nicotine, Sita was smoking beedies. It was so absurd. I enjoyed it so much!

    And Ravana, the man who is the criminal in the drama of Rama's life, who steals Sita and who represents evil in India, was telling Rama, 'You be aware! Last night you were continuously looking at my wife in the audience, and if I see you doing that again I will teach you a lesson!'

    Now, Rama is the incarnation of God, but in the drama he was just a schoolboy--and schoolboys are schoolboys. And Ravana teaching him, evil incarnate teaching God...'Don't look at my wife--that is not right!'

    I enjoyed being backstage so much that what happened on the stage looked very ordinary.

    When you become a witness you enter the backstage of life--and there things are really absurd--you start seeing things as they are. Everything is illogical, nothing makes sense. But that is the beauty of life: that nothing makes sense. If everything made sense, life would be a boredom. Because nothing makes sense, life is always a constant joy, a constant surprise. lotus04

    In my village, as happens all over the East, every year Ramleela was played--the life of Rama.

    The man who used to play the part of Ramana, the enemy of Rama who steals Rama's wife, was a great wrestler. He was the champion of the whole district, and the next year he was going to stand for the championship of the whole state. We used to take a bath in the river almost simultaneously in the morning, so we became friends. I told him, "Every year you become Ramana, every year you are being deceived. Just the moment that you are going to break Shiva's bow so that you can get married to Sita, the daughter of Janaka, a messenger comes running in and informs you that your capital of Sri Lanka is on fire. So you have to go, rush back to your country. And meanwhile, Rama manages to break the bow and marry the girl. Don't you get bored every year with the same thing?"

    He said, "But this is how the story goes."

    I said, "The story is in our hands if you listen to my suggestion. You must have seen that most of the people are asleep because they have seen the same thing year after year, generation after generation--make it a little juicy."

    He said, "What do you mean?"

    I said, "This time you do one thing I say."

    And he did it!

    When the messenger came with the message: "Your capital, the golden Sri Lanka, is on fire, you have to get there soon," he said, "You shut up, idiot"--he spoke in English!

    That's what I had told him! All the people who were asleep woke up: "Who is speaking English in the Ramleela?"

    And Ramana said, "You go away. I don't care. You have deceived me every year. This time I am going to marry Sita."

    And he went and broke the bow of Shiva to pieces, and threw it into the mountains--it was just a bamboo bow. And he asked Janaka, "Bring...where is your daughter? My jumbo-jet is waiting!"

    It was so hilarious. Even after forty years, whenever I meet somebody from my village, they remember that Ramleela. They said, "Nothing like that has ever happened."

    The manager had to drop the curtains. And the man was a great wrestler, and at least twelve people had to carry him out.

    That day the Ramleela could not be played. And next day they had to change Ramana; they found another person.

    By the river, Ramana met me. He said, "You disturbed my whole thing."

    I said, "But did you see the people clapping, enjoying, laughing? For years you have been playing the part and nobody has clapped, nobody has laughed. It was worth it!"

    Religion needs a religious quality. A few qualities are missing. One of the most important is a sense of humor.

    They stopped me meeting their actors. They made it clear to every actor that if anybody listened to me or met me, he would not be allowed to act. But they forgot to tell one man who was not an actor....

    He was a carpenter. He used to come to do some work in my house also. So I said to him, "I cannot approach the actors this year. Last year was enough! Although I did no harm to anybody--everybody loved it, the whole city appreciated it. But now they are guarding every actor and they don't allow me close to them. But you are not an actor. Your function is some other work. But you can help me."

    He said, "Whatever I can do, I will do, because last year it was really great. Can I be of some help?"

    I said, "Certainly."

    And he did it!

    In the war, Lakshmana, Rama's younger brother, gets wounded by a poisonous arrow. It is fatal. The physicians say that unless a certain herbal plant from the mountain Arunachal is brought, he cannot be saved, by the morning he will be dead. He is lying down on the stage unconscious. Rama is crying.

    Hanuman, his most devoted follower, says, "Don't be worried. I will go immediately to Arunachal, find the herb, bring it before the morning. I just want some indications from the physician how to find it, how it looks. There may be so many herbs on the Arunachal, and the time is short, soon it is night."

    The physician said, "There is no difficulty. That special herb has a unique quality. In the night it radiates and is full of light so you can see it. So anywhere you see a luminous herb you can bring it."

    Hanuman goes to Sri Arunachal, but he is puzzled because the whole of Arunachal is full of luminous herbs. It is not the only herb that has that special quality. There are many other herbs which have the same quality of being luminous in the night.

    Now the poor Hanuman--he is just a monkey--is at a loss what to do. So he decides to take the whole mountain, and put the mountain there in front of the physician to find the herb.

    The carpenter was on top of the roof. He had to pull the rope on which Hanuman comes with a cardboard mountain with lighted candles. And I had told him, "Stop exactly in the middle. Let him hang there, with the mountain and everything!"

    And he managed it!

    The manager rushed out. The whole crowd was agog with excitement at what was happening. And Hanuman was perspiring, because he was hanging on the ropes with the mountain also in the other hand. Something had got stuck in the wheel on which the rope was going to be rolled. The manager rushed up. He asked the carpenter...and the carpenter said, "I don't know what has gone wrong. The rope has got stuck somewhere."

    In a hurry, finding nothing, the manager cut the ropes, and Hanuman with his mountain fell on the stage. And naturally he was angry. But the thousands of people were immensely happy. That made him even more angry.

    Rama continued repeating the lines he had been told to say. He said, "Hanuman, my devoted friend..."

    And Hanuman said, "To hell with your friends! Perhaps I have fractures." Rama went on saying, "My brother is dying."

    Hanuman said, "He can die any moment. What I want to know is, who cut the rope? I will kill him."

    Again the curtain had to be dropped, the Ramleela postponed. And the manager and the people who were organizing all approached my father saying, "Your son is destroying everything. He's making a mockery of our religion."

    I said, "I'm not making a mockery of your religion. I'm simply giving it a little sense of humor."

    I would like people to laugh. What is the point of repeating an old story every year? Then everybody is asleep because they know the story, they know every word of it. It is absolutely pointless.

    But it is very difficult for the old traditionalists, the orthodox people to accept laughter. You cannot laugh in a church. sword04

    I was learning, but not in school, and I never repented for it. I learned from all kinds of strange people. You cannot find them working in schools as teachers; that is not possible. I was with Jaina monks, Hindu sadhus, Buddhist bhikkhus, and all kinds of people one is not expected to associate with.

    The moment I became aware that I was not supposed to associate with somebody, that was enough for me to associate with that person, because he must be an outsider. Because he was an outsider, hence the prohibition--and I am a lover of outsiders.

    I hate the insiders. They have done so much harm that it is time to call the game off. The outsiders I have always found a little crazy, but beautiful--crazy yet intelligent. Not the intelligence of Mahatma Gandhi--he was a perfect insider--nor is it the intelligence of the so called intellectuals: Jean-Paul Sartre, Bertrand Russell, Karl Marx, Hugh Bach...the list is endless. glimps46

    Other villagers

    Just nearby is sitting Narendra. His father had a strange disease: six months he used to be mad and six months he used to be sane--a great balance of enjoying both worlds. Whenever he was sane he was always sick, always grumpy. He would lose weight, and he would fall victim to all kinds of infection; all his resistance to disease would be lost. And in the six months when he was mad, he was the healthiest person you could find--no disease, no infection--and he was always happy.

    The family was in trouble. Whenever he was happy the family was in trouble, because his happiness was a certain indication that he was mad. If he was not going to the doctors, if he was enjoying his health--he was mad.

    While he was insane, he would get up early in the morning, four o'clock, and wake up the whole neighborhood saying, "What are you doing? Just go for a morning walk, go to the river, enjoy swimming. What are you doing here in bed?"

    The whole neighborhood was tortured...but he enjoyed it. He would purchase fruits and sweets and say, "You can come to my shop and get your money." Naturally--Narendra was very small, his other brothers were even smaller--even the smallest children were watching him, that he does not steal the money. But whether they watched or not, he would go on distributing fruits and sweets to people and saying to them, "Rejoice! Why are you sitting so sad?" Naturally, they had to pay money to all kinds of people.

    It was a very strange situation. Children steal money, and fathers, grandfathers, prevent them. In Narendra's house, the situation was just the opposite: the father used to steal money, and the small children would shout for the mother: "He is taking money again!"

    And by the time the mother was there, he was gone--gone to the market to purchase sweets, fruits, or anything whatsoever, wholesale! He was not concerned with small things--just wholesale purchase and distributing. And everybody loved it, but everybody was tortured, also.

    Once it happened that he escaped while he was insane. He had just gone to the station, and the train was there, so he sat in the train. One thing just led to another...and he reached Agra.

    In India there is a sweet; its name is such that it can create trouble, and it created trouble for him. He was feeling hungry, so he went to a shop and he asked what it was, and the man said, "Khaja." Khaja in Hindi means two things: it is the name of that sweet, and it also means, "Eat it"...so he ate it.

    The man could not believe it. He said, "What are you doing?"

    He said, "What you said."

    He was dragged to the court because, "This man seems to be strange. First he asked the name, and when I said 'khaja,' he started eating it!"

    Even the magistrate laughed. He said, "The word has both meanings. But this man seems to be insane--because he seems so happy, so healthy." Even in the court he was enjoying everything--no fear, no sign of fear. He was sent to a madhouse for six months, and he asked happily, "Only six months?"

    He was sent to Lahore--in those days Lahore was part of India--and just by coincidence.... There was some cleaning stuff for bathrooms; after four months in the Lahore madhouse he drank the whole drum of that cleaning stuff and it gave him vomits and motions. For fifteen days he could not eat anything...but it cleaned his whole system--so he became sane!

    And then began a great period of difficulty. He went to the superintendent and said, "Just because of drinking that stuff, for fifteen days I could not eat anything, and my whole system has been cleaned. I have become sane."

    The superintendent said, "Don't bother me, because every mad person thinks he is sane."

    He tried his best to convince him, but the superintendent said, "This is the whole business here every day--every madman thinks he is sane."

    He was telling me that those two months were really very troublesome. Those first four months were perfectly beautiful: "Somebody was pulling my leg, or somebody was cutting my hair--it was all okay. Who cares?--somebody was sitting on my chest...so what?

    "But when I became sane, and the same things continued--now I could not tolerate it if somebody was sitting on my chest, somebody was cutting my hair, somebody has cut half my mustache.... "

    They were all mad people. Amongst those mad people he was the only one who was sane. No mad person ever accepts that he is mad. The moment he accepts he is mad, sanity has started coming. spirit07

    But superstitions....

    You go for a morning walk and you meet a man with only one eye--finished, your whole day is finished. Now nothing can be right. Strange...what does that poor fellow have to do with your whole day? But a superstition, centuries old....

    I had a small boy in my neighborhood with only one eye. Whomsoever I wanted to torture...early in the morning I would take the boy and just give him chocolates, and he was ready. I would watch from far away: "You just stand in front of the door. Let the fool open the door.... " And the moment he would open the door and see the one-eyed boy, he would say, "My God! Again? But why do you come here in the morning?"

    One day he became so angry that he wanted to beat him. I had to come from my hiding place, and I said, "You cannot beat him. It is a public road, and it is his right to stand here every morning. We used to come once in a while; now we will come every day. It is up to you to open your door or not to open your door."

    He said, "But if I don't open my door, how will I go to my shop?"

    I said, "That is your problem, not our problem. But this boy is going to stand here."

    He said, "This is strange. But why this boy...? Can't you take him to somebody else? Just...my neighbor is a competitor in my business, and I am getting defeated continually because of this boy."

    I said, "It is up to you. _Baksheesh!--_if you give one rupee to this boy, he will stand at the other gate."

    He said, "One rupee?" In those days one rupee was very valuable, but he said, "I will give."

    I said, "Remember, if the other man gives two rupees, then this boy will still be standing here. It is a sheer question of business."

    He said, "I am going to report to the police. I can.... "

    I said, "You can go. Even the police inspector is afraid of this boy. You can get him to write the report, but he will not call him into his office. Everybody is afraid--even the teachers are afraid. And this boy is so precious...so whoever creates any trouble in the city, I take this boy. Nothing has to be done--he simply stands there in front of the door."

    Problems are all around you. So even if you somehow get finished with one problem, another problem arises. And you cannot prevent problems arising. Problems will continue to arise till

    you come to a deep understanding of witnessing. That is the only golden key, discovered by centuries of inward search in the East: that there is no need to solve any problem. You simply observe it, and the very observation is enough; the problem evaporates. spirit06

    In my village there is one man, Sunderlal. I have been surprised...sunder means beauty, sunderlal means beautiful diamond; and he is anything other than a beauty. He is not even homely. I have been surprised again and again that names are given to people which are just the opposite of their qualities....

    This Sunderlal was really ugly. To talk to him meant that you had to look this way and that way; to look at him made one feel a little sick--something went berserk in the stomach. His front two teeth were out, and he had such crossed eyes that to look at him for a little while meant a certain headache--and he was Sunderlal! He was the son of a rich man, and he was a little nuts too.

    I used to call him Doctor Sunderlal although he was never able to pass matriculation. He failed so many times that the school authorities asked his father to remove him because he brought their average low every year--and he was not going to pass.

    How they managed to get him up to matriculation, that is a miracle. But it is understandable, because up to matriculation all examinations are local, so you can bribe the teachers. This was difficult to do in the matriculation examination because it is not local, it is state-wide. So it is very difficult to find out who is setting the papers, who is examining the papers. It is almost impossible; unless you happen to be the education minister or some relative of the education minister, it is very difficult to find out.

    But I started calling him Doctor Sunderlal. He said, "Doctor? But I am not a doctor." I said, "Not an ordinary doctor like these physicians: you are an honorary doctor." But he said, "Nobody has given me an honorary doctorate either."

    I said, "I am giving you an honorary doctorate. It does not matter who gives it--you get the doctorate, that's the point."

    He said, "That is true, " and by and by I convinced him that he was an honorary doctor. He started introducing himself to people as Doctor Sunderlal. When I heard this, that he introduces himself as Doctor Sunderlal.... He was a relative of our sannyasin, Narendra.

    One day I saw a letterhead with "Doctor Sunderlal, D.Litt., Honorary," printed on it in golden letters, embossed. I said, "This is great!" And as time passed by people completely forgot: he is now known as Doctor Sunderlal, D.Litt. Nobody suspects, nobody even enquires who gave him a doctorate, from what university? But the whole town knows him. And because he is an honorary doctorate he inaugurates social gatherings in the school, in the college--now the town has a college--and he is the most literary figure.

    Just now* my mother was saying that Doctor Sunderlal has become a member of parliament. The new government...after Indira's assassination, Rajiv Gandhi chose him. He is rich and certainly respected in the town because he is the only doctor--an honorary doctor! People get...and perhaps he believes it. Now you cannot tell him that he is not. He will drag you to the court.

    Now, for almost thirty years he has been a doctor; that is enough. Nobody has objected, nobody has raised a question. In his election campaign his name was Doctor Sunderlal, D.Litt.--"Vote for Doctor Sunderlal, D.Litt." Perhaps--and he is a little nuts--he believes that he is. I know that even I cannot persuade him that "this doctorate I gave to you." He will laugh and say, "What are you saying? I have been a doctor for thirty years. You were just a little kid when I became a doctor!"

    He will not agree so easily to drop his doctorate. But even if you get a doctorate from a university, what does it mean? There is not much difference. dark06

    *Note: 1985

    One of the richest men of his time, in 1940...I was a small child and my father was sick, so I was with my father in the hospital. This rich man, Sir Seth Hukumchand, had created a really great hospital in Indore. He used to come, and by chance we became friends. He was an old man but he used to come every day and I used to wait for him at the gate. I asked him, "You have so much..." Almost three-fourths of the houses of Indore were his property. And Indore is the next most beautiful and rich place to Bombay.

    He said, "You are asking a strange question. Nobody ever asked me."

    I had asked him, "Why are you still creating new industries, creating new palaces? And you are becoming old. How is all this going to be of any help at the time of death?"

    He said, "I know, everything will remain here and I will be gone. But just a desire to be the most successful, rich man in the country keeps driving me. For no other reason, just that everything I have must be the best."

    He has the only Rolls Royce in the whole world made of solid gold. It was never driven, it was just for show, standing in front of his beautiful palace. He has the best horses in the world that you can imagine. I have never seen such beautiful horses. He had a whole palace filled with all kinds of exotic things. And the reason was that he wanted to be the only owner of a certain thing. It was his absolute condition: whenever he purchases a thing, that thing should not be produced again; he should be the only owner. And he was ready to pay any money for it.

    His only desire was--because Indore in those days was a state--to purchase all the houses in the state, even the palace of the king. And he almost succeeded--seventy-five percent of the houses of Indore belonged to him. Even the king had to borrow money from him, and he was

    giving to him very generously in order to finally settle that the whole of Indore..."He may be the king but it is my property."

    I asked him, "What will it do to you? What peace will it bring? You are always anxious, tense, coming to the hospital, asking the psychiatrist about your troubles. These houses cannot solve your troubles and this money cannot solve your troubles."

    And finally a time came when he captured all the gold of India, he became the gold king of India. He purchased all the gold, wherever it was possible. And once you have all the gold in your hands, you have the whole country in your hands. If you start selling it, the prices will go down. He kept the whole market dependent on him just because he was holding the gold.

    And I asked him, "What enjoyment are you getting out of it?"

    He said, "I don't know, just there is a tremendous desire to be the richest, to be the most powerful."

    The inward journey begins only when you understand it clearly that anything outside is not going to give you contentment. exist03

    I used to have a friend who was condemned in the whole city--he was a thief, and you can say he was a master thief. For almost six months he would be in jail, and six months outside. Nobody in the city even wanted to talk to him.

    From the jail he used to come directly to my house. He was a very lovable man. And whenever he would come from the jail to my house, naturally everybody in the family was disturbed. My father again and again insisted to me that this friendship was not good. I said, "Why do you believe in him and not in me? Am I your son, or is he your son?"

    And he said, "What kind of argument are you giving me?"

    I said, "I am saying exactly the right thing. You don't believe in me, you believe in him. You are afraid I will be affected by him--you are not giving even a single thought that I may affect him. Why do you think I am so weak?"

    He said, "I have never thought from this angle--perhaps you are right."

    Slowly, slowly that man became accepted by my family. It took a little time; there were many reasons for them to reject him. The first reason was that he was a Mohammedan; second, he was a thief.

    I had to sit outside the dining room because they would not allow him in the dining room. In a Jaina family, no Mohammedan can be allowed in the dining room. Even for guests or customers, separate plates, glasses, saucers, cups--everything is kept, but it is kept separate; it is used only for them. And I insisted that when I invited him for food, I was going to eat with him--I could not insult him. He may be a thief, he may be a Mohammedan, it

    doesn't matter; I respect his humanity. So the only way was that I would also have to sit outside the dining room. And my friend used to say, "Why do you unnecessarily continue to fight with your family?"

    And slowly, slowly my respect towards him changed him. He was angry with me, saying, "Your respect prevents me from being a thief, and I don't know anything else. I am uneducated."

    He was an orphan, and there was no other way for him except either to beg or to steal, and certainly stealing is better than begging. Begging degrades you very badly; by stealing, at least you are using your intelligence, your courage.

    He was angry and said, "Now my life has become really a problem, and you are the cause. I cannot steal because I cannot betray your trust, your love and your respect. And nobody is ready to give me employment."

    So I took him to my father and I said to him, "Now my friend wants employment. You are against his stealing, now give him employment; otherwise you will be responsible for his stealing. The poor fellow is ready to do any work, but nobody in the whole city is ready to give him work because he is a thief. People say to him, `Bring certificates from where you have been working. Who has ever employed you ever in your whole life?' And he has no certificates."

    I told my father, "Listen, somebody has to give him work the first time; otherwise, how can he get a certificate? You give him employment, and then you can give him a certificate. And I guarantee that he will not steal and he will not do anything wrong."

    On my guarantee my father employed him. All other friends of my father said, "What are you doing, giving a job to a thief? He will deceive you." But my father said, "My son has given his guarantee, and I have to give the man an opportunity because my son's reasoning is right: If nobody gives him an opportunity, then everybody is pushing him towards the jail. And the whole society is responsible for pushing him towards the jail. He wants to work, but if nobody is willing to give him work.... What do you want--that he should commit suicide or what?"

    Once a person goes into jail, then it becomes his only place, his home. Then within a few days he is back, because there is nobody outside to give him any protection, any dignity, any respect, any love. It is better to be in the jail.

    He proved tremendously trustworthy, and finally my father had to accept. He said, "You are right. I was thinking that I was taking an unnecessary risk. I had not thought that your reasoning was going to work. He is a professional thief--his whole life has been just going in and out of the jail. But you were right."

    My father was a very sincere man and very truthful; he was always willing to accept his mistakes, even in front of his own son. He said, "You were right, that I trusted more in him--I thought he would spoil your life. I did not trust that you might transform his life." invita25

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