Question 1:
Deva Darshan, your question is much more comprehensive and complex than you may have realized. Man is an organic unity. And the moment I say an organic unity, I mean you are love, you are fear, you are anger ... the whole panorama, all the colors of the rainbow.
But it is very rarely realized, because our minds try to dissect things, divide things, arrange things.
They are very clever and intelligent in a way, as far as parts are concerned. The moment the whole arises in your view, the mind freaks out. It cannot understand that even in fear, all the rainbows of your being are involved.
To explain a simple fact, in the schools they use a device. They make a fan with seven wings of all seven different colors. When the fan is not moving you can see what is red and what is blue and what is green. Just two colors you will not find in those seven colors: the black and the white, because they are not really colors. It is just from long usage that we have grown accustomed to calling the white and black also colors.
Then they plug the fan into the electricity, and the wings start moving as fast as possible. A strange phenomenon - you can see that all those different colors disappear. There remains only white.
When you see the white color, it means all the rays that create colors are being reflected back, so you cannot find any color. White is an absence of all colors. Black is just the opposite of white; the black absorbs all the rays of color, not allowing a single ray to go back. Hence you cannot see the color because your eyes can only see reflected rays.
The black became - strangely enough, even before it was discovered by science - the symbol of greed, the symbol of the devil, the symbol of all that has to be avoided. And the white became a symbol, around the world, representing renunciation - because it rejects all the rays. It has also become the symbol of compassion, because it is no longer greed but only sharing. It does not take anything in, but only gives you back everything. White also became the symbol of innocence.
Perhaps poets became aware of it centuries ahead of the scientific research. It has been happening all the time, although nobody gives the credit to the poets because by their own contemporaries they were thought crazy. They could not produce any scientific argument for what they were saying.
But centuries afterwards, science was amazed: without using any instruments, without any scientific facilities, how did these people come to certain conclusions? It is very mystifying....
I have told you about Van Gogh that he always painted his stars as spirals. No other painter in the world has made stars as spirals; naturally even the painters, his own colleagues, told him, "You are not aware of the fact that stars are not spirals."
But Van Gogh said, "What can I do? My innermost intuition is that they are, and I believe more in my intuition than in my physical eyes." A hundred years after Van Gogh, just recently, it has been found by science that he was right and everybody else was wrong. Stars only appear not to be spirals because of the distance. And the distance is vast. But now with more accurate instruments, they can see that the stars are spirals.
A strange question arises: How did Van Gogh, a man who was not only thought to be crazy but was forced to live in a madhouse...? And his best paintings are those which he painted in the insane asylum. Seeing that he was a harmless fellow... it doesn't matter if he paints things which are not according to the common-sense view of things. It harms nobody. You need not agree with him, but to force him to live in a madhouse is going a little too far. He was released from the madhouse - he was only thirty-three - and he committed suicide.
His suicide stands as an indictment of the common humanity and their stubborn insistence that every individual should agree with their conceptions. He wrote a small letter to his brother before committing suicide, saying, "I am not committing suicide out of any depression, I am simply committing suicide because perhaps the society in which I can live as a sane man is yet to come."
Your question makes it clear that in your mind you go on dividing things into categories: this is love, this is fear, this is anger....
Just for a change, don't divide.
Whatever arises in you is part of your total individuality.
The division has come into existence because parts of you have been condemned and parts of you have been praised. Naturally, the condemned parts should be repressed - at least should not be allowed to surface - and only the appreciated, the valued, the respectable parts of your being should become your personality. This has created such a split in you that with this split you can neither love nor can you sing nor can you dance. For all that celebration, your whole being is needed.
Let me tell you the truth, with absolute frankness - because it has not been told to you even by courageous people like Gautam Buddha or Jesus Christ, or even Socrates, Pythagoras, Chuang Tzu. They all went a little beyond the crowd, but not far away. They always remained on the boundary line - any moment they could slip back into the crowd.
The most difficult problem is not that your fear is against your love - your fear is simply an indication that love is going to absorb you and your ego starts trembling. What you are calling fear is not the authentic fear but just a phony American fear. The ego is afraid that again you will fall into an unknown space. Naturally, the mind asks, "Are you aware that you are moving into the unknown? Is it possible for you to find the way back to your own identity?"
Love dissolves identity.
In love, I am not and you are not; only love is.
Love does not happen between two persons. Between two persons what happens is only fight, in different names. It may be in the name of love, it may be in the name of something beautiful, but as long as two persons cling to their identities, to their personalities which they have cultivated their whole lives... Naturally, there is great investment.
Love comes like a wild breeze and takes away all your cultivated identity. You are left just a pure silence, a serenity. You cannot even say that "I am." Even that will be a disturbance.
There is tremendous isness, but there is no identity left.
I will read your question:
"As you glide into Buddha Hall, slowly turning towards where I sit, waiting for your gaze to touch me, a strange overwhelming fear grips me..." On the one hand, your innermost core is waiting for the taste of not being, for the immense joy of merging, melting, dissolving into the whole. But your personality is there, which immediately creates a fear, an unknown fear.
You have to understand that this fear is natural, because you have not been left innocent and natural by your society and culture. They have substituted a personality around you. Your whole religion, your whole education, your whole upbringing is involved in a single effort: to create a personality around you. That personality starts trembling and becoming afraid.
It is this personality which is destroying people's love. Everybody says he loves - husbands say they love their wives, wives say the same thing. Parents say they love their children and force their children also to say that they love their parents. The teachers say they love their students. In every nook and corner of your world... If this were true, that everybody is loved in so many ways by so many people, this world would have been a totally different world. It would not have been a world always preparing for war, it would not have been a world divided into nations....
To divide the earth into nations is to take away freedom of movement. We ordinarily think we are free, but this idea of being free is created because the jail is so big. Your whole nation is your imprisonment. Just try to get out of the boundaries and suddenly you will realize the freedom was fake. You have been deceived. Even birds are more free, because they don't have to carry their passports; more free because they can go thousands of miles, the whole sky is theirs. But unfortunately the whole world is not ours. The structure, the way a personality is created, needs all these discriminations.
The American has his own pride, the Indian has his own pride. The Indian does not think that anybody else in the world is spiritual; only they have the monopoly on being spiritual. And as far as I know, I have rarely come across an Indian who can be said to be spiritual. They are the most materialistic people in the world. But the personality not only deceives others, it finally deceives you too.
The Americans think they are the richest people in the world. But I created a simple joke with ninety- three Rolls Royces and all their pride was gone. Even the president became jealous, the governors became jealous, the bishops became jealous. The bishop of Wasco County, every Sunday, may have forgotten Jesus Christ completely but he could not forget ninety-three Rolls Royces. He would bring up some way to condemn them. And you will be surprised that when I was bailed out of jail, he wrote a letter to me. He asked, "Now you will be going back to your own land - what about donating at least one Rolls Royce to my church? It will be a great act of charity."
Now you can see the mind.... I was teaching meditation to thousands of people; America was not interested in it. Thousands of people were coming to the commune; America was not interested in it. Each festival, there were twenty thousand people coming from all over the world; America was not interested in it. The whole of the news media were continuously talking about ninety-three Rolls Royces.
I used to think, perhaps in a poor country this could be expected... but I destroyed the pride of America! I don't need ninety-three Rolls Royces. It was a practical joke, and not even a single so-called intellectual of America could realize the fact that I cannot use ninety-three Rolls Royces simultaneously. And all were of the same model, the latest model; there was no difference between one car and another. Even the president of the Rolls Royce company came to visit, because this was the first time that in a single individual's garage, there were ninety-three Rolls Royces. But I never went to that garage.
The director of the garage, Avesh, is here. I was telling him, "Soon I will be coming." He wanted me to see - he had made such a beautiful garage, and even the president of Rolls Royce appreciated it and said, "Your cars look in far better condition than our newest cars in our garages." Naturally, Avesh wanted me to come some day. And the garage was not far away, it was in the campus of my own house. I used to pass by the garage every day, but I never went in.
People have been cultivating all kinds of discriminations: the white man thinks he has something more special than the black man, that he carries the burden of the whole earth. But the black man does not agree about it. He has his own ideas.
Marco Polo went to China in his world travels and in his diary he noted that, "I have always suspected that there is some truth in the theory that man is born out of the monkeys. Seeing the Chinese, I am convinced." But you should also remember, when the Chinese emperor gave an audience to Marco Polo, he could not believe that he was a human being. In his biography, it is stated that he thought that there must be subspecies of human beings around the world - of course the Chinese is the highest expression. The same kind of stupidity....
Religions give you the idea that you have the truest religion in the world. But the basic mechanism you are not aware of: all these things are created to nourish your ego and re-place you from your center, which is your authenticity, to a false center which is just an artifact created by all kinds of methods.
Love is a danger to the personality. The personality starts trembling. But the difficulty is, your innermost being is waiting for it. It is imprisoned and it is waiting for a fresh breeze from the outside, fragrant. Perhaps it may bring a few songs of the birds, a few rays of the sun. So you are in a duality:
the personality is afraid but your reality is absolutely inviting, waiting, watching for the moment when it happens.
You have to be very decisive to renounce your personality completely. It is your falseness. Being a Hindu, being a Mohammedan, being a Christian - drop all that nonsense.
Just be a pure consciousness. That is your nature. And then there will not be any conflict.
You are saying, "I say to myself, Darshan, after all these years of being with him, why this fear?" You can be with me for lives - that is not going to change the fear. But a single instant of understanding, just like a flash of lightning, that you are carrying a load of false ideas about yourself, and the transformation will come.
It is a complex thing. Sometimes it happens to people who are very new. And sometimes it becomes more difficult the more you are with me, because the more you start taking me for granted, it becomes an everyday experience. You know: the fear will come, the love will come, and it has become a routine. You will have to get out of this trap.
And when I say you have to get out of this trap, I don't mean you have to make any effort. Because what has to be dropped is false; it has no roots in you. You can do it in a single moment of awareness.
I am giving you these moments of silence for a single purpose. I don't have a teaching, I have only strategies for transformation. I speak to you not to convey anything in particular, I speak to you so that I can give you a few gaps of silence.
Listening to me, there are two possible ways: the way of the scholar - he will listen to my words - and the way of the seeker, who will listen to my silences.
My silences are my communion with you.
My words are only to divide small pieces of silences for you. One word is being used only so that before I utter another word, you can feel a silence sweeping over you. Nobody has used language in this way. Language is just creating possibilities for silence. Alone, your chattering mind does not allow you to be silent. But with me, I am chattering and you are freed at least for a few moments because in those moments you are waiting for what I am going to say. Naturally, a waiting gives you an experience of silence.
As you become more and more aware of the false in you and the real in you, there is no need to make any effort to drop the false. Just being aware that "this is false," the false disappears. But there are stupidities which go on and on....
Just the other day, Anando brought me a news clipping. Perhaps England is the most ghost-haunted country in the world. It is easy to conceive that in a primitive society, a house is haunted by ghosts.
But in England, a ship was found to be haunted, and the ghost was creating continuous trouble.
Something was going wrong again and again in the ship, and the people who worked on the ship finally became afraid, because it was not natural. They abandoned the ship; they said their lives were in danger.
The vicar was called to investigate whether the ship was haunted. And do you think it is the twentieth century? The vicar came and he found that it was haunted, but the ghost was not of a man but of a fish. And there was no need to be worried - he did some ritual with the crucifix and baptized that ship into Christianity.
And the most amazing part is that since then, nothing wrong has been happening. The ship is going perfectly well. Naturally, anybody will conclude logically that whatever the vicar did has helped: the ghost has left the ship. But the reality is that the idea of the ghost was disturbing people. Because they are all believers in Christianity and Jesus Christ, immediately, when they saw that the vicar had done the whole ritual and now their ship was protected with Christianity, by Jesus Christ himself, there was no fear.
Because of false things, religion has existed in the world.
Religion is almost like homeopathy. If you are a hypochondriac - finding this sickness, that sickness - then allopathy cannot help you. On the contrary, it may disturb you because if the disease itself is false, you don't need a real medicine for it. The real medicine will create its own effects in your body which are going to be disturbing. If there were a real disease it would have destroyed the disease.
It is because of false sicknesses that things like naturopathy, homeopathy, continue to exist.
And in a recent survey it was found that seventy percent of sicknesses are just mind fictions. So all these homeopathic sugar pills, if you believe in them... the question is belief. Homeopathy cannot help me, but homeopathy can help you if you believe in it. Then that false pill, which has no effect, will cure you.
Your personality is a false disease.
It does not need actual methods to destroy it; all that it needs is the awareness that it is false. It is enough - to know the false is to finish the false. And the moment the false is gone, the real asserts itself without any effort on your part.
So when I say to you, "You are enlightened," I simply mean that you are believing you are not enlightened and that is creating the trouble. That is giving you a false idea of an unenlightened sinner, an ordinary person. And all the religions have been exploiting you on that point.
If you drop the idea of unenlightenment and you simply accept your natural being....
Relish it, sing it, dance it. You will be surprised that this is what you have been seeking all your life.
And it was prevented because of your seeking.
Jesus says, "Seek and the doors shall be opened for you." I say to you, "The doors are always open.
There is no need to seek, simply enter." Jesus says, "Ask and the answer will be given to you." And I say to you, "You are the answer. Don't ask; otherwise you will get thousands of answers and you will forget the answer that you are."
Jesus says, "Seek and ye shall find it." And I say to you, "Seek and you will never find it. Why start with seeking? Why not start with finding? Find it and there is no need to seek!"
But all the religions, all the priests... and the greatest exploitation and slavery of man has existed with the small idea that you have to seek, that you have to go somewhere else, that you have to be somebody else. They have distracted every human being from his natural self.
Insist, because unless you insist, the crowd is going to push you here and there. Insist that you are what you are, and you are absolutely happy to enjoy yourself. You are not going to waste time in seeking, searching, and reaching your grave. I want to make your this very moment the explosion.
Darshan, you are saying, "Then as your eyes caress me, the fear melts immediately. I melt and something lovely starts dancing within me." If you have been experiencing it, then why not drop that fear? Because you know already that it melts and you enjoy that melting. Then why go on nourishing the fear again and again? Then it becomes a vicious circle.
Jump out of the circle.
Tomorrow when I come in, you start enjoying even before I have entered the hall. Why should you wait for me? And why create unnecessary diseases, fear - fear of what? What have you got to lose?
There is a Sufi story about Mulla Nasruddin. He is traveling in a train and the ticket checker comes, and he looks into all his pockets - except the pocket on his coat on the left side. He opens all his luggage, looks into every suitcase, perspiring that the ticket is lost. And it is an obvious fact - all the other passengers are waiting - the ticket checker says, "You have looked everywhere. Why are you not looking in your left coat pocket? Because I see that is the only place you have not looked."
Mulla said, "Don't mention it."
The ticket checker said, "What do you mean?" He said, "That is my only hope, that perhaps the ticket may be there. I cannot look into it."
You are searching, you are seeking, you are opening all kinds of luggage. Why don't you look into yourself? That is the only hope. You don't want to destroy even that hope. And I say to you, it is not just a hope, it is a reality.
The ticket is there.
Now a few moments for prayer....
An Englishman, an American and a Polack go on safari to Africa together. On the first day, they decide to hunt alone and go off in different directions. That night they meet again back at the camp and exchange hunting stories.
"I had a great day," says the Englishman. "I shot a lion, two elephants and a hippo."
"That's nothing," says the American. "I shot two lions, three rhinos and a giraffe."
"I did better than both of you," says the Polack. "I shot seventy-five no-nos."
The two other men look at each other and then ask the Polack what a no-no looks like.
"Well," says the Polack, "they walk on two legs, have black skin and curly hair and when you point a gun at them, they shout No-no! No-no!"
Hamish and Maggie MacTavish are queuing for a movie called "The Miracle." The girl selling the tickets tells Hamish that there are no cheap seats left anymore, only a few of the ones costing six dollars each. Hamish hesitates and consults with Maggie and at length produces two five dollar bills and a handful of loose change. Hymie Goldberg steps out from the queue and says to Becky, "We can go home now, I have just seen the miracle!"
One night, after their owner is asleep, the parts of the body are arguing about which has the toughest job. "I've really got it rough," moan the feet. "He puts me in these smelly sneakers, makes me jog until I have blisters... it's awful!"
"You've got no reason to complain," says the stomach. "Just last night, I got nothing but beer, spaghetti and aspirin. It's a miracle I kept it together."
"Ah, quit bitching, you two," moans the prick. "Every night, he sticks me up a dark tunnel and makes me do push-ups until I throw up!"
Okay, Maneesha?
Yes, Beloved Master.