Question 1:
Shunyam Kaveen, it is an intellectual question, nothing to do with your experience; because if you have experienced even a glimpse of no-mind, all questions including this will simply disappear.
Questions belong to the territory of the mind. No-mind means absolute silence - no question, no answer, no thought at all. Hence we call it no-mind.
First you have to understand the mind, because that's where you are, that's from where the question is arising. Unless you understand your space - the point from where you are raising the question - you will not be able, even intellectually, to comprehend some difference between no-mind and being present. There is no difference in experience, just two names for the same experience from two different aspects, two different angles.
No-mind is experienced within you. Nobody else can see it; it is purely subjective. With no-mind comes tremendous presence. When you are in the mind you are almost absent. The quantity of your presence or absence has to be measured by your consciousness. You have such a small layer of consciousness - that's your only presence. Otherwise, ninety percent you are absent.
But the man of no-mind is one hundred percent present. You can feel his presence from the outside.
You cannot see his no-mind. The presence of his being is a radiation of a silent state within. That is beyond you, but if you are available, receptive, you can experience something of the tremendous presence of his being. In each of his gestures, in each of his looks, in each of his words, or even in his silence, you can be touched by his presence of being.
The presence of being comes into existence only when the person as such disappears. It is the melted state of the person - the presence - as if the flower has disappeared and only the fragrance has remained. You cannot catch hold of it, but you can be surrounded by it. Such people who have their being absolutely present - one hundred percent alert - are known in the world of language as having charisma. There is no other charisma. There is only one charisma and one charismatic aura and that aura comes from no-mind. But no-mind is the center within and the aura is the circumference of that mind, that no-mind.
When inside you everything becomes silent, you are no more as you used to be - a person. Now you are just a fragrance, a presence ... But your presence has deepened. It has become a solid pillar of light.
Anybody who is intelligent is bound to feel something new that he has never experienced before. So these are two viewpoints: one is the inner experience of no-mind, and the other is from outside. It is the by-product of no-mind, the presence of being.
But first you have to understand the mind, because that's where you are and that's from where the journey has to start towards no-mind, culminating finally into a beautiful fragrance - awareness - a magic aura around you.
People have named it in different ways, because people are different. Somebody will say, "It is a hypnotic force." Somebody will say, "It is something like magnetism." Somebody will say, "It is mesmerism." Somebody will say, "It is charisma." Somebody will say, "We don't know exactly what it is." One thing is certain: it has a tremendous gravity, it pulls you towards itself. And if you are courageous you can be drowned in it and you can be transformed in that drowning. It will be your death and your resurrection, both. As you are, you will die, as you should be, you will be born.
But mind is a very dark place. To comprehend light from there is almost like a blind man trying to comprehend light.
A young English gentleman returns from a stay at a stately home.
"How was your weekend?" asks a friend.
"Well," he replies, "if the soup had been as warm as the wine, and the wine had been as old as the chicken, and the chicken had been as tender as the maid, and the maid had been as willing as the duchess, it would have been a perfect weekend."
This is how the mind functions. If you look into your mind you will start laughing at your own mind. It is never in the present. It can't have presence because the basic quality is missing. It is never in the present. Either it is in the past, which is no more - just a memory, a faded memory, a faraway echo; perhaps a dream that you had seen sometime, but not more than that - signatures on the water.
You have not even completed your signature and it has disappeared. That's how the past goes on disappearing. You have not even lived it and it slips out of your hands. And then the mind goes on thinking about it.
So either the mind is past-oriented or it is future-oriented. Because it has missed the past, out of sheer necessity a projection arises about the future. The past is no more in your hands, it is gone, and gone for ever. There is no way to bring it back. All that you can do is to project into the future whatever you wanted to do, however you wanted to live ... Naturally, while you are thinking about the future, making it fuller than your yesterdays, you are missing the present moment. Your mind moves like a pendulum from the past to the future, from the future to the past. It never stops just in the middle, where reality is.
You are always real, but your mind is always unreal. You are always in the present, you cannot be anywhere else. But your mind is never here, it is all over the world. It will not be just at the point where you are. Except for that place, it can roam all over the world. It can go to the moon, it can go to Everest ... Everything is possible for it, whether it is memory or imagination, but the mind has no contact with the present. Your body is far more present, it is totally different from your mind.
And very strangely, all the religions have condemned the body, not the mind; because they themselves were using the mind for the faraway future, farther away than ordinary people think about. You think about tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, or the next year at the most. But all the religions were thinking about a future beyond death. Their heaven and their hell and their God are all so far away from the present moment.
And remember: you will always be in the present moment. And the distance between you and those imaginary spaces in the future will remain the same. It won't change.
Because all the religions were using mind as their foundation, they had to deny the body. It is very unfortunate, but nothing can be done about it. It has happened.
Your consciousness is exactly in the present, just like your body. So I am in favor of your body, because it shares one thing in common with your being: your being is in the present, your body is also in the present. Only the mind is continuously moving here and there, never coming home.
There is a reason for it not to come home: in the present the mind has no function. What can the mind do in the present? The mind's capacities consist of memory, which is the past, or imagination, which is the future. That is the whole capacity of your mind. There is no place for the present moment. The mind will not know what to do.
In the present you cannot remember, you cannot imagine; in the present you can be! But in the present you can be only when mind is no longer functioning. Hence, my approach is totally different from all religions: I want you to respect your body, because it is in the present, and that will give you the clue - a direct root to your being; because the being is also in the present.
Just leave the mind aside ... But we are against the body, we are very condemnatory of the body, not knowing at all that this condemnation of the body is breaking the bridge to your being. A man of authentic spirituality is deeply in love with his body, because he knows body shares many things with being. Mind shares nothing, either with body or with being. It is an absolute stranger that has been forcibly put into you by the culture, the religion, the society. They are using the mind to enslave you.
And because you are in the mind you continuously go on asking about things of which you have no experience. You don't know what no-mind is, except a word. You don't know what presence of being is, except that you have heard about it. Just words won't do.
Move away from the mind ... And when I say to move away from the mind, I am saying to move away from the inner chattering. That is the only disturbance that is preventing you from knowing yourself and this beautiful existence. Because your body is in the present, you are in the present, existence is in the present ... They are all herenow. Only the mind is a strange phenomenon. But you have been manipulated by others so much ... Your educational systems, your friends, your family - everybody is trying to make you a great mind. In other words, everybody is trying to pull you away from the present moment.
I am reminded of a great German philosopher, Immanuel Kant. He is a specimen of those people who are absolutely in the mind. He lived according to mind so totally that people used to set their watches, whenever they saw Immanuel Kant going to the university.
Never - it may rain, it may rain fire, it may rain cats and dogs, it may be utterly cold, snow falling ... Whatever the situation, Kant will reach the university at exactly the same time all the year round, even on holidays. Such a fixed, almost mechanical ... He would go on holiday at exactly the same time, remain in the university library, which was specially kept open for him, because otherwise what would he do there the whole day? And he was a very prominent, well-known philosopher, and he would leave the university at exactly the same time every day.
One day it happened ... It had rained and there was too much mud on the way - one of his shoes got stuck in the mud. He did not stop to take the shoe out because that would make him reach the university a few seconds later, and that was impossible. He left the shoe there. He just arrived with one shoe. The students could not believe it. Somebody asked, "What happened to the other shoe?"
He said, "It got stuck in the mud, so I left it there, knowing perfectly well nobody is going to steal one shoe. When I return in the evening, then I will pick it up. But I could not have been late."
A woman proposed to him: "I want to be married to you" - a beautiful young woman. Perhaps no woman has ever received such an answer, before or after Immanuel Kant. Either you say, "Yes," or you say, "No. Excuse me." Immanuel Kant said, "I will have to do a great deal of research."
The woman asked, "About what?"
He said, "I will have to look in all the marriage manuals, all the books concerning marriage, and find out all the pros and cons - whether to marry or not to marry."
The woman could not imagine that this kind of answer had ever been given to any woman before.
Even no is acceptable, even yes, although you are getting into a misery, but it is acceptable. But this kind of indifferent attitude towards the woman - he did not say a single sweet word to her. He did not say anything about her beauty, his whole concern was his mind. He had to convince his mind whether or not marriage is logically the right thing.
It took him three years. It was really a long search. Day and night he was working on it, and he had found three hundred reasons against marriage and three hundred reasons for marriage. So the problem even after three years was the same.
One friend suggested out of compassion, "You wasted three years on this stupid research. In three years you would have experienced all these six hundred, without any research. You should have just said yes to that woman. There was no need to do so much hard work. Three years would have given you all the pros and cons - existentially, experientially."
But Kant said, "I am in a fix. Both are equal, parallel, balanced. There is no way to choose."
The friend suggested, "Of the pros you have forgotten one thing: that whenever there is a chance, it is better to say yes and go through the experience. That is one thing more in favor of the pros. The cons cannot give you any experience, and only experience has any validity."
He understood, it was intellectually right. He immediately went to the woman's house, knocked on her door. Her old father opened the door and said, "Young man, you are too late. You took too long in your research. My girl is married and has two children."
That was the last thing that was ever heard about his marriage. From then on no woman ever asked him, and he was not the kind of man to ask anybody. He remained unmarried.
The mind is very impotent in a way. It cannot give you any existential juice, any existential experience, and that is the only thing that matters. So please move away from mind. Don't ask the difference, because there is no difference between no-mind and being present. No-mind is the inner subjective experience and being present is available for everybody. It is the circumference and no-mind is the center. But they are both together. Neither the circumference can be without the center nor the center can be without the circumference.
But the circumference can be experienced, and that's what has attracted millions of people to a man like Gautam Buddha or Chuang Tzu or Jesus or Moses ... It was their integrity, their individuality, their solidity. In comparison to them, people felt hollow. They had immense presence. Other people looked just like shadows, without any souls.
George Gurdjieff started saying to his disciples for the first time in the whole of history - he just died in the year nineteen hundred and fifty ... He started saying a very strange thing, and although it is not right, he is not wrong. He started saying to people, "You don't have souls." What he meant was: "You don't have any presence, your being is hollow. Inside you there is nothing but darkness, unconsciousness, absence. Everything is absent."
You have been told for centuries that you are born with a soul. It is absolutely wrong according to Gurdjieff. I know and he knows that what he is saying is not the truth, but it is a device. He is making you aware of your hollowness, of your emptiness, and he has chosen the best way to hit the nail on the head. He is saying, "You don't have souls! Forget all that nonsense that tradition has been telling you. That was a deception, but you accepted the tradition that, 'We have souls already, there is no need to seek and search.'"
He said, "You will have to create the soul, you cannot have it just through birth! Through birth you get only the body. Through your upbringing you get your mind. And through a conscious effort to transcend into the beyond, you will achieve the soul."
He said definitively that only a very few people have lived with souls. And without a soul, what are you? A cabbage, a cauliflower? I have heard there is some difference between cabbages and cauliflowers. And the difference is that the cabbage is uneducated and the cauliflower has college degrees. But that does not make much difference - both are vegetables. Your life is a vegetation.
Of course I cannot agree with Gurdjieff as far as the truth is concerned. But I agree with him and his compassion - that he did not bother about the truth, he bothered more about you. He wanted to make you aware that unless you do something, you are not going to create a soul. Soul is your own creation. But he went too far. I am not ready to deny you the soul, I only deny you the awareness of it. You are born with the soul as you are born with the body. Mind is a social product. You are not born with the mind. That's why a Mohammedan has a different mind and a Hindu has a different mind and a Christian has a different mind. You can see their differences of mind.
Since India's freedom, for forty years Hindus have been fighting for only one thing, as if that is going to solve all human problems ...
The greatest rich man of India, Jugal Kishore Birla - he is dead now - had been hearing about me.
Finally, he could not resist the temptation, and he invited me to his palatial house in New Delhi.
The man who had brought me the invitation - I was staying with him - was the M.P. from my constituency, and I could not say no to him. He was an old man, seventy-five years old. And he was the only man other than Winston Churchill who had remained a member of parliament for sixty years continuously without any gap. He was called 'the Father of Parliament'. He entered parliament when he was only fifteen. He belonged to one of the richest families himself and they belonged to the same caste, Jugal Kishore Birla and he himself.
He persisted. I was reluctant. I said, "What purpose is going to be served by my meeting that old man? I know about him ... Perhaps he does not know as well about me."
But he insisted, "He is not far away, and he has been very interested in you and he wants to talk to you."
So I went, and what was the first thing he asked me? He said, "I can give you a blank checkbook.
You can use as much money as you want. All that has to be done is somehow to create a movement in the country so that cow slaughter is stopped."
I said, "What is going to happen if cow slaughter is stopped?"
"All problems of the world will be solved."
Only a Hindu mind can think that: that by not killing cows all problems will be solved. This is such a stupid idea. But the Hindu has been so much influenced for centuries, continuously conditioned that the cow is the mother - although they don't accept the bull as their father, which is a logical and rational approach.
I asked Jugal Kishore Birla, "Do you accept the bull as your father?"
He said, "What are you talking about?" He became angry.
I said, "Don't become angry. If the cow is your mother, then some bull is bound to be your father."
He looked at the M.P. who had brought me and I said, "You can keep your checkbook. Perhaps you will find some idiot who can do this work. I cannot say to anybody that the cow is my mother."
He said to the M.P., "What is the matter? Is he not a Hindu?" Because a Hindu cannot think that anybody can deny that the cow is the mother.
I would have no objection if they were accepting all animals as mothers, as fathers, as brothers, as sisters, at least as faraway cousins. It would have been acceptable; it would have been a beautiful world if people accepted animals as their brothers and sisters. But just choosing the cow - that is the Hindu conditioning, that is the Hindu mind.
Every person gets a mind ready-made, and that mind is being forced into him by all methods and means. That is the only part that has not been given to you by existence. Existence has given you the body: love the body, rejoice in the body, let the body dance without any guilt and without any fear of these religions, and you will be coming closer to your being through the body.
Nobody has come closer to the being through the mind. Mind is the most arbitrary, artificial creation by the society to subdue the individual, to destroy his individuality, and to destroy the discovery of his own being.
You are born with the soul, but you are absolutely unaware of it - because of the mind. The mind never allows you to be in the present. That's the reason my insistence on meditation is so strong - because meditation simply means a method to get rid of the mind.
The moment the mind is not there, suddenly you are in a new space: so fresh, so beautiful, so blissful. That is your soul, that is your no-mind. And once you have entered that space, that space starts growing around you and creates a certain energy field. That becomes your presence of being.
Question 2:
Prem Pankaja, you are saying, "I suspected you of stealing my creativity." That's absolutely wrong.
In the first place, what was your creativity? Third-rate, trashy novels? You know it perfectly well. You thought it to be creativity? I have not stolen your creativity.
Just by being here you became aware what kind of rubbish you were writing. Yes, those novels were selling - because there are people hungry for trash, just waiting for something third-class, because they cannot comprehend anything better. I have not stolen your creativity, because my whole purpose is to give you creativity. And if your old creativity is gone it is because you are now more understanding, more alert, more conscious, and you cannot go on creating that trash.
I have cleaned you of all rubbish. You had come to me with a mind full of bullshit! It has been a tremendous work to clean your mind. And you tell me that I have stolen your creativity? Now there is the possibility of your being creative. Now you can create something really beautiful, something that remains even when you are gone, which has a longer life than your life.
Even today the absurd stories of Chuang Tzu are as beautiful, as enchanting as they would have been to his contemporaries. Twenty-five centuries have passed, but those stories of Chuang Tzu still retain the freshness of this morning's roses. And he wrote nothing but absurd stories - absurd for the simple reason that the whole humanity is absurd - to make you aware how absurd you are.
One morning he woke up very sad. That was very strange, because he was a man who was continuously blissful, an enlightened being. His disciples said, "This is a very strange experience.
We never expected that you could ever be sad."
He said, "But something happened. I was also not expecting it, but it happened. Things go on happening without your expectations. And I am in such a dilemma."
They said, "Just tell us, perhaps we can be of some use, of some help."
He said, "I will tell you, knowing that nobody can help me, neither you nor anybody else. But I will tell you, just to give you some idea of how much I am in a dilemma.
"Last night when I went to sleep, I knew perfectly well that I was Chuang Tzu. And in the night I had a dream that I had become a butterfly."
All the disciples laughed. They said, "You are too much. A dream is a dream, don't be bothered about it."
Chuang Tzu said, "You have not heard the whole story. Then in the morning when I woke up, I found that I am Chuang Tzu again."
So they said, "The problem is solved. What is the problem? It was just a dream, it has passed away.
You are again Chuang Tzu."
He said, "You idiots, you don't understand the problem. The problem is: if Chuang Tzu can become a butterfly, then what is the guarantee that it is not now the butterfly who has become Chuang Tzu?
And do you want me to be a butterfly? My problem is that a great doubt has arisen in me. I think perhaps the butterfly has gone to sleep now and is dreaming that she is Chuang Tzu. If Chuang Tzu can dream that he is a butterfly, what is wrong with vice versa? The butterfly can dream. And I have lost my identity. Who am I, I ask you?"
They were all silent. He had been telling absurd stories: now he has created an absurd situation.
What to say to this man? And he was their master, so they could not be rude to him. They said, "We should go and meditate over it. What else can we do?"
Then his chief disciple, Lieh Tzu, came and all the disciples said, "Perhaps you can do something.
The master is very sad. He is sitting in his bed, not coming out."
Lieh Tzu listened to everything, then went to the well, pulled out a bucket of water, carried in the bucket of water, and poured it on Chuang Tzu.
He said, "You idiot, what are you doing?" And he jumped out of bed.
Lieh Tzu said, "I am bringing you to your senses. Now tell me who you are, a butterfly or Chuang Tzu?"
Chuang Tzu laughed. He said, "My son, if you had been here before, you could have saved me from so much sadness. The whole morning I was waiting for you, hoping that perhaps you would find some solution."
Lieh Tzu said, "Should I bring another bucket?"
Chuang Tzu said, "No, this is enough. I have found my identity. The water was too cold and you have spoiled my bed too."
Now the story is still fresh, it will never be old. It will always remain fresh, as if it has just happened now. You can see the whole thing: Chuang Tzu jumping out of the bed and saying, "If you had been here before, you could have saved me from so much sadness."
Creativity is a very rare phenomenon. For example, Kahlil Gibran, when he was only twenty-one years old, wrote his first book: THE PROPHET. And then his whole life he tried to write something better than THE PROPHET, and he failed. There are at least thirty books written by a more mature, more experienced, more educated man, but even the last book he wrote before he died is nothing compared with THE PROPHET.
If you ask me, only THE PROPHET is the creative expression of his being. Everything else is just mind trying to be creative. THE PROPHET came out of his being without any effort. He was so young, and he was not thinking that he was going to produce a masterpiece which would remain significant for centuries. And once he had produced it and the whole world had responded with such great respect - it has been translated into all the languages; people find it holier than any BIBLE or any KORAN or any BHAGAVADGITA.
But he himself got into trouble not knowing that THE PROPHET came out of no-mind. He was just playing; he had no idea that he could become a great writer. He was not writing for anybody. He was filled with insights and he was putting them on paper.
His friends persuaded him, saying, "This is a great work, you should publish it." He was reluctant, hesitant, thinking, "I was only twenty-one years old when I wrote this. People will laugh."
But finally they succeeded in persuading him, and the book was published. After that he tried thirty other books along the same lines. But they looked like carbon copies, faraway echoes of THE PROPHET - but not that solidity, not that intuitiveness, not that beauty, not that grandeur.
And it is not only with Kahlil Gibran; it is so with many creative people. All that they have produced is not creative. It is production, composition, it may even be good, but it is not something that is going to be eternally fresh and young. Unless something remains eternally fresh and young you have not created anything.
Michael Naimy has written one book, THE BOOK OF MIRDAD, which in quality goes even higher than Kahlil Gibran's THE PROPHET. But Mikhail Naimy is again in the same trap. He must have thought that if he could write THE BOOK OF MIRDAD - which should remain as long as man is on this planet, one of the greatest creations of man ... He struggled his whole life, but he could not surpass it. THE BOOK OF MIRDAD had happened to him.
Creativity is not something that you do, you simply allow the universal force to function through you.
You become just a medium. You give your hands, your body, your heart, your being to existence and then existence sings a song and it becomes eternal, as eternal as existence itself. Only that is creativity. Other than that, I cannot conceive of anything creative.
I have not stolen your creativity, Pankaja; I want you to be creative! You have the possibility, the potentiality, but you are wasting your potential on absolutely meaningless novels. Yes, they were giving you money, they were being sold. But nobody will read your novels twice; once is enough, more than enough. And anybody who reads your novel will read it and then throw it out of the train window. It is of no use after that. It is just ordinary trash, and you know it.
But you don't know one thing: that you have the possibility of becoming a creator. I have taken away your so-called creativity to give you an authentic relationship with existence, so something great can be born out of you. And that is the greatest bliss and benediction any man can experience:
when existence uses you as a medium. That means existence has loved you enough, accepted you deeply - your worth, your value. Existence needed you.
And this is one of the things to be remembered: that the greatest need of man is to be needed. If nobody needs you, you will commit suicide. And if existence itself needs you, you will be raised to such heights that you have never dreamed of.
I would like you to be a creator. And it is good that you are finished with your old so-called creativity.
And you are saying, " ... and in my unconsciousness made a secret bargain with you: Okay, take it.
And in exchange give me love and meditation and bliss and myself."
You are asking too much. I am an old Jew. For all your trash you have made a secret bargain with me to give you "love, meditation, bliss and myself"! There is no need to make a bargain with me. I am not a businessman. Once upon a time I was a Jew, but no more.
You can have all - love, meditation, bliss and yourself - for nothing. You don't have to pay for them, but you will have to work for them. You will have to work upon yourself.
I am showering love, but you are protecting yourself with an open umbrella. Now if I take the umbrella you will say, "You are stealing again." And I don't want to interfere in your freedom. It is your umbrella and if you want to open it, it is your decision. But you can close it - it is not raining. Just keep it by your side.
You are from England ... These two places are strange: England and Bengal in India. No psychoanalyst has ever tried to figure out why these people are umbrella-fixated. They talk about father-fixation, mother-fixation, what about umbrella-fixation?
And again you are wrong, Pankaja: "You gave me glimpses ..." I have never given you any glimpses.
Whenever you closed your umbrella you got them. And this is beautiful, first you think that I gave you glimpses, then naturally I know the second thing is going to happen: " ... and then they too disappeared, and I was angry at you." Now don't pull me unnecessarily into your mess! Just look at your umbrella. Whenever you close it you have glimpses; whenever you open it, glimpses disappear.
It has nothing to do with me.
Just watch your mind. Whenever your mind comes in, glimpses disappear. You allow the mind in spite of me: whenever your mind is absent in spite of you, you have the glimpses. Don't throw the responsibility on me in any way. I can neither give you glimpses nor can I take them away. I never interfere in anybody's freedom. To me it is sacrilegious; your freedom is such a sacred thing to me.
I want you to be dignified in your freedom.
These words that you write take you in the wrong direction. You start looking for me to give you something. You have everything you need: you just need to discover it within yourself. I can show you the way, I can show you the methods ... That's what I am doing every day. Somehow - from some angle, from some aspect - perhaps you may discover how to find your treasure. It is your treasure, and if you have lost it, it is your own blindness.
Mind is utterly blind. Put the mind aside and you will regain your insight. The Hindus in this country have called it the third eye: when you move beyond mind you have a strange experience, an eye opening inwards. You start seeing your own splendor. You are as full of bliss, splendor, glory as any Gautam Buddha.
Existence is very communist. It gives you the inner treasures equally. Differences arise because you discover the treasures slowly.
But the last thing you are saying is right. You are saying, "Beloved thief - I love calling you 'beloved thief' - beloved thief, will you steal me?"
Perhaps only in this country ... God has been given many names - the Sufis have given one hundred names: ninety-nine can be pronounced, the hundredth can be experienced but cannot be pronounced - but in India there are thousands of names given to God. The most beautiful is hari.
And hari means 'the great thief'. Really courageous are the people who call God 'the great thief', because he steals your heart!
So you can say - although I have not stolen anything - I take away only that which does not belong to you! And I give you only that which you have got already! So my work is very simple. But if you love the word 'thief' - it is an ancient name of God - you can use that name, whether I steal anything from you or not.
Sometimes I think of stealing your umbrella. What will I do with the umbrella? Thinking about it, I don't need it. I have never had an umbrella in my whole life. So once in a while I become attracted - why not have Pankaja's umbrella? That is the only experience I'm missing. But then it is unnecessary - because I never go anywhere. If I keep the umbrella open inside my room, you will start thinking, "Now he has really gone crazy."
But it will be great if you can simply make a gift of your umbrella to me. In that way I cannot say no to you - I never say no to anyone. You will enjoy giving a gift, although I know the umbrella is very old. I will not even touch it, my doctors don't allow me. They go on insisting, "You should not touch old rotten things." They say, "You are allergic, you should not touch such things."
But still I will accept your umbrella, just so that you can get rid of it. I will throw it away; there is no other way. It cannot enter into my house, but just to help you to get rid of it ... as a gift. And once you are vulnerable, open, and receptive, all my love is yours. Meditation will grow on its own accord with your trust.
And as far as the last thing is concerned: "Will you steal me?" I have done that already; otherwise you would not have been here. The people who are with me are the people I have already stolen. I have to do strange things, steal people from different countries.
Every country is angry. The German government is angry that every German who goes to Poona simply disappears, never comes back! Now the Japanese are trying to compete with the Germans.
Wives come and they forget all about their husbands. Husbands come and they write to me, "I don't want to go back home, although I have a wife and children. What do you suggest?"
What can I suggest? You have got a good opportunity to escape. Just be here. If your wife really hates you, she will come! It all depends on how much she hates! She may even become a sannyasin, just to harass you.
Pankaja, you need not be worried about that. Pankaja goes back and forth. She goes to England and then within a few days she is back. I can understand her problems, but once you are my people, then you don't belong to any family, to any race, to any nation, to any religion. You belong to the whole universe.
Mrs. Grumblebum is always calling on the doctor for medicine for her aches and pains. One day the cures fail. She dies and is buried in the local cemetery.
Two weeks later, the doctor himself dies and is buried in the plot next to Mrs. Grumblebum. The mourners are just leaving the cemetery, when the doctor hears a tapping noise on the side of his coffin.
"Well, Mrs. Grumblebum," he asks, "what is it now?"
"Please, doctor," she says, "can you give me something for worms?"
Just old habits, although they have died. Pankaja, it is just old habit that you think you are separate from me and my people. Drop that old habit. That which you used to be is dead; there is now someone absolutely new.
Paddy gets a little high at the party and starts to make a play for the luscious babe playing the piano.
But in his drunken fog he trips, and the piano cover closes on his fingers.
His wife, Maureen, goes over and picks him off the floor. "Remind me to put a piece of ice on your black eye when we get home," she says soothingly.
"But I haven't got a black eye," says Paddy.
"I know," replies Maureen, "but you're not home yet."
Pankaja, you are a long-time, old sannyasin, but you have never been totally here. And it happens to people who have been working with their mind and intellect. They cannot be in this silence, in this presence. They become fidgety, their mind starts dreaming about going here and going there.
And for years you have been repeating the same cycle. You cannot go away from me, you cannot go away from this silence. Wherever you go I am going to haunt you. So you go on coming back, but this split situation of going and coming disturbs your getting in touch with your being.
For a few days you try, and as you come closer to experiencing something, that is the moment when the mind makes much trouble and it starts dreaming of going somewhere. Always remember: mind creates trouble only on the boundary line. It is an indication that this is the moment to remain in your meditations. Perhaps only one step more and you will be out of the fog of the drunken mind. But before reaching the boundary line, you go away.
So you have been coming and going for years. Many things that would have happened to you, you yourself have managed not to let them happen to you. It is time enough. And I am not going to be here forever! I don't want you to repent when I am gone, because then you will think you have missed an opportunity - perhaps for many lives.
It will be easy to find another Gautam Buddha sometime in the future, because he is a traditional saint. It will be possible to find a Jesus Christ - it is almost certain you will find him someday, because he was not enlightened. He has to come back to the earth.
But you will not find me again, for two reasons: I am not going to come back to any body again; and for the second reason - you will not find even a similar person again. I have been so eccentric, crazy, so different from the traditional saint, that I don't think anybody else after me is going to dare copy me. It is impossible. You will repent.
There is still time - your spring can come. There is still time for you to achieve your ultimate potential.
But don't waste it in wavering. If you go on taking the plant from one place to another place to another place, it will never grow roots. You have to leave it in one place so that it can grow roots.
And without roots there are no flowers. You are longing for the flowers, but you are not taking care of the roots.
Okay, Maneesha?
Yes, Osho.