Question 1:
Anand Candida, the new is always scary, for the simple reason that it is new; you don't know how to face it. All your knowledge is suddenly found to be absolutely meaningless, because there is no answer in your experience and knowledge that can be an authentic response to the new.
You suddenly find yourself ignorant, helpless, not knowing what to do; hence the scariness.
Otherwise, instead of being afraid you would have a totally different experience with the new. You will explode with joy. If you are an explorer, an adventurer, then the new will fill you with tremendous ecstasy, and you will see in this new a possibility for your intelligence to function.
With the old, the intelligence has no need to function. Your memory functions. You know the answer already; the answer is part of your memory system. But memory is not intelligence, remember.
Intelligence is the capacity to rejoice in the new with openhearted welcome, with intense clarity. Just by watching the new, from your very innermost core will arise the response. That is the way of the meditator. The meditator is continuously confronted with the new. In fact, he is in search of the ultimate new, which will never become old, which will always be fresh.
That is the quality of satyam, shivam, sundram. Truth is never old; neither is the godliness that surrounds you from all dimensions, nor the experience of beauty. The roses may come and go, the expressions of beauty may come and disappear, but the experience of beauty is always there exactly the same.
You are asking, Candida, "Why is the new so scary?" ... Because you are still in the mind and you don't know what meditation is.
Mind loves the old. With the old the mind is very at ease because it knows all the answers. It does not feel helpless, it does not feel that it has to choose this way or that way. It knows exactly what is the right answer. The mind never wants you to come in contact with the new; it keeps you going round and round with the old.
Meditation is just the opposite of mind. As mind is confined to the old, meditation is an exploration of the expansion of the whole universe. The meditator wants to come each moment to the new, because only with the new does his intelligence become more sharp; only with the new does he himself become new. Only with the new is the way towards the ultimate.
The old is dead. Of course the old seems to be very comfortable. It seems comfortable because you don't have to do anything. You don't even have to be intelligent. You can remain retarded and yet pretend to the world that you are a great intellectual because your memory is filled with all kinds of information.
The memory is not part of your consciousness; the memory is part of your body. The memory is just a mechanism like any computer: you feed it with information and whatever you feed it, it is perfectly comfortable with. It knows it. And knowledge gives you a certain power. You are within the territory where you are the ruler, you know everything.
The unknown, the new, suddenly exposes your ignorance, and that hurts. You don't want to know your ignorance; that's why the new is scary. But your ignorance is enormous, your knowledge is just a dewdrop. If you don't want to remain a dewdrop, closed, absolutely nonreceptive and insensitive to the tremendous existence that is available to be yours any moment, gather courage and come out of your smallness. The moment the dewdrop takes a jump into the ocean... that's exactly the situation of a man who takes a jump from the mind into meditation.
Mind is so small. Existence, life, is so vast, so infinite that unless you come out of the mind you will live the life of a prisoner and a slave. A slave cannot know what dance is, a slave cannot know what freedom is and the joy of freedom and the blissfulness and the ecstasy of being vast, oceanic.
My work with you is to persuade you to come out of your caves, which are dark, although they look very cozy to you because you are acquainted with them.
It happened in the French Revolution... France had the greatest prison, the Bastille, where only prisoners were sent who were going to be there for their whole life. They could only enter there, they could never come out. Once a person entered there... it had only a door to enter, it had no exit.
There are only two places like this in the world, and strangely, both are prisons. One is a Catholic monastery in Europe where whoever enters, enters forever. There are still almost ten thousand monks in that monastery. They cannot come out again - at least not while they are alive. Dead, they are free to go out; in fact others will throw them out.
And the other place, where prisoners were thrown in, was the Bastille. The Bastille had small caves for prisoners, thousands of caves, dark caves with no light. The prisoners were handcuffed, chained, and the keys of their chains and handcuffs were thrown into a well that was in the middle of the prison. They were never going to be opened, so what was the point of collecting thousands of keys unnecessarily? There was no point; those people would die, then their chains would be cut, not opened, so there was no need.
In the French Revolution, the revolutionaries immediately thought as a priority, to open the doors of the Bastille and allow thousands of prisoners their freedom. They were thinking that they were doing something great. They could not have expected the response of the prisoners - the prisoners refused. They said, "We have lived here, somebody twenty years, somebody else thirty years...."
There were a few people who had lived there fifty, sixty, seventy years.
Now a man who has lived there for seventy years must be nearabout a hundred years old. His whole life experience is confined to a small cave. He cannot come out of it; he is chained and tethered to the cave wall. He cannot even move out of the cave just to see the sky or the stars or the moon.
Naturally, such a person will be afraid to go back into the world after seventy years.
Almost everybody he used to know must either be dead by now... or else, where is he going to find them? Their names have faded away, their faces have faded away; a faraway seventy long years...
And who knows if they will recognize him? If he cannot remember them, who is going to recognize him? - a man condemned to be in prison for life. And what will he do? From where will he get his food and his clothes, and where will he be sleeping? He will need a shelter too.
Now it is almost a forgotten language to work, to earn, and at this age, old, sick, tattered, who is going to give him work or employment? Anyway, even ordinary prisoners who have been in prison for a few months don't easily get any employment; who is going to trust a man who has been in jail seventy years? It is too risky.
Here everything is comfortable. It may look uncomfortable to an outsider, but for the man who has lived in the cave for seventy years... It may have been uncomfortable in the beginning for a few days, a few months, but man has a tremendous capacity of adaptability. In any situation, if you force him, he will start adapting to the situation.
And seventy years - or even fifty years is a long time, half a century. Now he has started feeling perfectly cozy, comfortable, no worry about bread, no worry about tomorrow, no worry about anything. He has forgotten the names of his children, he has forgotten who used to be his wife, and what happened to all those people. No, he does not want to go out.
The revolutionaries could not believe it. "We are giving you freedom and you are as scared as if we are going to kill you."
And those prisoners said, "That's exactly what we are feeling - that you are going to kill us. We are perfectly happy here. Just excuse us; we cannot fulfill your expectations, it is too late."
But revolutionaries are stubborn people. They did not listen to the prisoners; they cut their chains, they cut their handcuffs, they forced them out with the same violence with which they had one day been forced in. Against their will they had been brought in; against their will they were brought out.
Many of them could not even open their eyes because the light was too much. Their eyes had become too weak, too delicate, living in darkness; their eyes were no longer capable of opening in the sunlight. Many of them had forgotten how to walk. But the revolutionaries were adamant; they did not listen to their cries, their tears. Revolutionaries are revolutionaries; they forced them - almost three thousand prisoners - out of the Bastille.
There was nobody to receive them, and they moved around the city like dead people, almost like ghosts. They could not recognize anything. Seventy years before, things had been totally different.
Nor they could see anybody who was contemporary to them. By the evening almost all of them had returned back to the prison. They fought the revolutionaries who were preventing them from getting into the prison.
They said, "We cannot live outside. Who is going to give us food? And who is going to take care of us, medical care, shelter, clothes? Who is going to be responsible for all this? - you?"
And the most amazing thing they said was, "We cannot sleep without chains and without handcuffs.
We have become so accustomed to them, it feels that something is missing. We cannot sleep - we tried in the day under some trees, but unless we feel the load, the weight of the chains on the feet, on the hands, we cannot sleep. So please don't harass us. Life has harassed us enough; now at the end we don't want to change our lifestyle."
Finally the revolutionaries also recognized their problem. They had not thought about this, that man becomes adapted to a certain situation, and then it is his territory. In that territory he is perfectly comfortable and cozy.
My own experience is... I have talked with beggars who had bank balances. I don't have a bank balance; I never did. It just happened by chance that because I was continuously traveling I used to come to the railway station in Jabalpur at least ten or fifteen times a month, either going or coming.
There used to be an old beggar outside the railway station. Because the first day I had given him one rupee, he would not accept less than that, and he never asked more than that. So he had become adapted, I had become adapted; that one rupee I had to give him. In fact, if sometimes I came and I did not find the beggar, I would miss him. I would enquire, "Where is the old man?" We had become very friendly, and if sometimes I could not find him the next time I would give him two rupees - one for the time when I missed him, because it had been very heavy on me.
One day just as I was passing the station I saw him. I was not going out of town, but I was just driving by the railway station, going to meet the doctor of the railway employees at the railway hospital. There I suddenly saw in the corner the old man talking to a young boy, and that young boy was my student. I stopped my car and waited. When they were finished they were both shocked.
The father was shocked... but I could not understand why. I said, "Why do you look so shocked?"
The father said, "I have been hiding it from everybody, but I cannot hide it from you. He is my son and he is your student, and I am preparing him to become at least a doctor."
I asked the boy, "You never told me that you are the son of a beggar."
He said, "My father never allows me. He never meets me anywhere where people can see, because if people come to know I am the son of a beggar it will be difficult - difficult in the college, difficult for getting further admission into new colleges. It will become impossible, and my father will be exposed: he can educate his son to become a medical doctor and still he is continuing to beg. He brings me the best of clothes...." I used to see him: of the whole class, he had the best clothes, the best shoes, everything the best.
That day I asked the old man, "How much bank balance do you have?"
He said, "Now I cannot hide it from you, and I trust that you will not expose the fact that he is my son. I have thirty thousand rupees in the bank."
I said, "With thirty thousand rupees you can start a shop, a small factory. Why do you go on begging in your old age?" He said, "Begging is so comfortable. Everything else can make me bankrupt, but begging can never make me bankrupt. And my earning is more than any shopkeeper or small factory owner. I earn nearabout fifty rupees per day" - even a doctor in India does not earn that much, nor a professor. And he said, "I have my customers, and why should I unnecessarily go into something new about which I don't know anything? Begging is my heritage; my father was a beggar, my father's father was a beggar, and they were all rich men."
For the first time I became aware of a new dimension of human mind: it does not matter what condition you are in; slowly, slowly you settle down. And once you have settled down you don't want even to budge, because then again you will have to start from ABC. Again you will have to start learning, again you will have to start facing problems. Right now there are no problems: you know all the answers to all the questions that can arise in a certain situation in which you have become completely enclosed.
It is cozy and it is comfortable to live in the old, but it will not bring the flowers of freedom and it will not open the whole sky for you to open your wings and fly. It will not allow you to have aspirations for the stars; it will not allow you to move in any direction or dimension. You will remain just like a dead grave where nothing moves.
Candida, the new is scary, but the new is what I teach you. You will have to drop your fears, you will have to drop your ugly coziness, you will have to drop your small comforts. These are the things you have to pay for the greater joys, the higher realms of being, tremendous possibilities of ecstasies.
You will not be a loser, but in the beginning you have to risk something.
It is good you are aware that the new makes you scared. For centuries man, animals, everybody has been living with the old. Only man has risen once in a while to have a glimpse of the new. Think about buffaloes... can you conceive that at any time in the millions of years of evolution, buffaloes have eaten any other grass than they eat today? The same grass... can you conceive that one day buffaloes will be different? They are so settled, so utterly settled and so contented.
You cannot make a buffalo a buddha.
They are perfectly at ease.
Why should they bother?
The whole animal kingdom is lower than man only for one reason, which is that man is an explorer; he has somewhere hidden in him the adventurer. His mind may be afraid, scared, but his consciousness wants to have communion with the universe, to touch the stars, to open up to all the beauties and the truth and the godliness of existence.
You will have to shift your emphasis from mind to meditation, and all fear will disappear. You will have to shift your attention from your comfortable, cozy, but old and dirty and rotten state towards something new, fresh, young - from the body to the consciousness, from mind to no-mind. Then every moment you are confronting the new.
And one is thrilled with the new. Once you have learned that the new is not your enemy the fear simply disappears; on the contrary, you start searching for the new. The day you start searching for the new with joy and a dancing heart, you have become a sannyasin.
That is my definition of a sannyasin.
I define my sannyasins from many dimensions; I want to give you the idea of sannyas from as many aspects as possible. The search for the new is one of the aspects of a seeker.
You are saying, "My wanting and need for recognition are gone, along with the doing. Even though deep inside I am tremendously thankful and happy, I find part of myself feeling guilty. I see as well that laziness is not one of my qualities. I can't find the new way for me to be total in my work. It is becoming very painful."
Candida, all your problems are your creations. First, you should be immensely happy that the need for recognition is gone. That is a great achievement. You are no more dependent on others' opinions; for the first time you are just yourself and you don't need anybody to approve.
This is the beginning of the birth of individuality. Otherwise people are only cogs in the wheel; whatever others say they believe, even about themselves. All that they know about themselves is what others have said. They go on collecting all kinds of opinions and that's what their self- knowledge consists of. It is a great experience that the need for recognition is gone. You should be happy with it rather than making some problem out of it.
Mind is very clever and very cunning. Even if you are feeling very ecstatic, mind will say beware, you may be just having a hallucination. And it will destroy your blissfulness - "My God! It is possible it may be just a hallucination!" When you are having pain the mind never says that - not in the whole history of mankind. When you are having a migraine the mind never says that it may be just illusory.
But if you are having a beautiful space within you, as if a rose is flowering, the mind is going to jump on it immediately: "You are daydreaming, this is all hallucination, illusion. You are being hypnotized."
And you immediately listen to the mind, because you have listened to it for centuries. It is just a habit.
Along with the recognition, you are saying, your doing has also gone. That's an even greater achievement than the first. If the doing is gone, the doer must have gone also - but I suspect that's where the problem is. Doing is gone but the doer is there: that is creating the tension. That is making you feel a part of yourself as guilty.
Who is this part?
If doing is gone, nothing is wrong. In fact it is one of the basic fundamentals for enlightenment to happen that your doing should go. That does not mean that you will not do things; you will do things but they will not be fulfillments of your ego or projections of your mind. They will be spontaneous and you will rejoice in doing them, or vice versa: because you rejoice you do them.
But it seems the doer is still hiding somewhere within you. So a part has disappeared, but the other part is still there creating a feeling of guilt: to be lazy, not to do anything - this is not good. You should do something, you should not become a parasite. That doer goes on creating problems for you, anxiety for you.
If you have been able to let the recognition go, the doing go, release the doer also. But remember, that does not mean that you will become lazy. That is a wrong interpretation by the mind. Mind always interprets wrongly anything that is going to become a step leading beyond mind. When you feel let-go, mind will say, "This is laziness." Mind is a great condemnor. It enjoys condemning others, it enjoys condemning you; its only joy is to condemn.
You are saying, "Even though deep inside I am tremendously thankful and happy, I find part of myself feeling guilty." That part you have to become aware of and drop it.
If you can just drop so much, why carry this small part of being guilty? You have not done any wrong to anyone. You are just feeling guilty because the society brings you up with the idea to do something, be somebody; don't remain a nobody, don't become a good-for-nothing. Leave your footprints on the pages of history.
What kind of stupidity is this? Why should I leave my footprints on the pages of history? - to torture the future children? And why should I be somebody special? Those are ego trips.
Much has disappeared, but something of the ego has remained which is making you guilty and which is calling you lazy. But this is not laziness; this is relaxation, let-go. And out of this let-go, out of this relaxation will grow new flowers. The difference is that laziness is barren, nothing grows out of it, it is a desert. So soon you will see the difference; just don't cling to the word laziness. Drop it, it is a very negative and destructive word.
I have never done anything in the eyes of the world. My family from the very beginning used to say to me, "You are going to be good for nothing" - and they proved right. I am good only for nothing. They were very much concerned, "How are you going to live your life? How are you going to manage?"
And I always told them, "Don't you be worried. If I am not worried, why should you be worried?
Something or other will happen, don't be worried."
But they remained concerned, and they continually told me, "This is laziness, this is not good."
And I told them, "This is not laziness, it is my meditativeness. I am just simply being silent. And you will see: if it is laziness, you will find my life a desert where nothing grows. And if I am right and it is a let-go, then you will see that although it may not be visible to ordinary people, those who have eyes can see. Those who have ears can hear that my life has become a song, a dance, a celebration, so many flowers, and that I am so contented and so fulfilled."
I have not known for a single moment any feeling of guilt. Just learn the right language on the path of meditation. Your language belongs to the mind; when you change the track from mind to meditation you will have to change many words which mind uses but which are not applicable in the world of meditation. Call it let-go and suddenly you will feel a tremendous relaxation. Call it laziness and immediately some condemnation, some anxiety, something painful... Learn the new language, because you have chosen to be on the path in search of the new and the unknown.
I am also against laziness. Laziness is simply dullness, it is stupidity. But let-go is the greatest quality a man can achieve. Relaxation is one of the most beautiful experiences, which can bring you so many gifts from the beyond that you are absolutely unaware of. Change the language.
If laziness is not one of your qualities, good. Let relaxation be one of your qualities. Relaxation, non- doing don't disturb at all; just your life becomes more creative, rather than being more productive.
Again, those two words make the difference.
Mind calls productivity activeness, and creativity is not counted. It takes time for authentic creativity to be realized. Just the other day, one of van Gogh's paintings was sold for forty million dollars. A few months before, one of his paintings was sold for fourteen million dollars, and at that time it was said that was is the most one could imagine; no painting had fetched fourteen million - now what to say about forty?
This man lived in poverty, hungry, starving, because he could not sell a single painting. And he was not demanding forty million dollars; sometimes he was ready to give one painting just for one meal.
Sometimes just for one cup of tea he was ready to give one of his paintings. But people were not willing, even for just a cup of tea: "We don't have space, where will we put it? You just find someone else." To them it was a problem, "Where to put it? - we don't have space."
It was when he was no more there, one hundred years after his death, that slowly, slowly the time for his recognition came. This is the case with almost every genius. Every genius comes, for absolutely unknown reasons, before his time. Why can't these people wait a little? It is just that they arrive when their contemporaries are not here; by the time their contemporaries are here, they are gone, so they never know.
Do you think Jesus will ever know how many Christians there are in the world now? Do you think Socrates will ever know that now his name is something for Greece to be proud of? - otherwise, without his name, Greece is nothing. It is his teachings and his disciples, Plato and Aristotle, that kept Greece at a peak of intelligence, because I don't think anybody else in the whole of Europe has been able to transcend the sharpness of intelligence that Socrates had. Perhaps his contemporaries have not yet arrived, although twenty-five centuries have passed.
When van Gogh's paintings were recognized people started searching them out. He must have painted thousands of paintings and just went on giving them away - to friends, as gifts, or for a cup of tea or for a meal. People accepted his paintings just not to look crude, not to look uncivilized.
They thought, "Once he is gone then we can put the painting in the basement. Nobody was hanging his paintings in their sitting rooms, because anybody looking at the paintings would think that this man had gone crazy: why is he putting up this painting?
Van Gogh's ideas looked crazy at the time, but his time came later. His whole family condemned him, saying, "You have not done a single thing and you are a parasite on your younger brother" - because his younger brother went on supporting him just enough so that he could survive.
Van Gogh could not eat every day of the week; four days he was eating and three days he was fasting - one day eating, one day fasting, one day eating, one day fasting - because with whatever he could save from those three days, he would purchase colors, paints, canvasses, brushes for his painting. There was no other way.
Nobody has painted with such love and with such joy, with his own life and his own blood. He destroyed himself in painting. Now there is so much search going on in the basements of Holland and Italy where he lived; his paintings have been found in people's basements, and now the prices of those paintings are unbelievable.
The last one was sold the day before yesterday for forty million dollars. When the painting was sold a few months ago the critics were saying, "This is the end; nobody can purchase any painting for a higher price than this." He had set a record - fourteen million dollars. Before this, the record had been only three million dollars for somebody else's painting. But this was a big jump, to fourteen million, and within three or four months another of his paintings went for forty million dollars - and I can conceive that the price of his paintings may go still higher.
Just now two hundred more paintings have been found and those, too, not in good condition. Now, this man was one of the greatest creators the world has known, but he was not a doer, he was not a producer. If he had even had any skill - carpentry or shoemaking or tailoring - he would have earned enough and everybody would have respected him as a man who earns his living. But he was continuously condemned for being absolutely lazy, and nobody knew what he was doing.
The whole day would pass and he would forget completely about eating or even drinking water, he was so absorbed in his painting. Only when the night would descend and it would become difficult to see, then he would recognize that the day was gone. He was so poor he could not even manage to purchase a few candles; he used to paint outside his house sometimes in the night under the street lamp.
His brother must have been sensitive. He was young and certainly he understood something about paintings because he was working as a salesman in a shop where paintings and other pieces of art were sold. So he had a certain understanding, and he loved his brother, but what could he do? He himself was a poor man, somehow surviving, and more than that was not possible for him.
But one gift certainly he wanted to give to his brother - that he should not die before seeing at least one of his paintings sold. So somehow he collected some money and asked a friend, "Go and purchase a painting from my brother. I just want to give him the consolation that his life has not been absolutely futile; at least he sold one painting."
But the man he had chosen had no sensitivity for paintings, so he simply went to van Gogh and said, "I would like to purchase a painting."
So joyful, van Gogh said, "Come! I don't have a big place, but I have many paintings."
The man said, "Any will do" - and that hurt van Gogh very much.
He said, "Any will do? You don't want to see my paintings? You don't want to choose?"
He said, "It doesn't matter, don't waste my time. Any will do."
He said, "Then I am not going to sell, and it is absolutely certain you have been sent by my brother.
Just get out and get lost! - and tell my brother that this is not the way to console me. Now I am feeling more hurt and wounded than ever."
Then even his brother never tried again.
Creativity happens in a state of let-go; productivity needs tension, anxiety, a doer, ego, recognition.
Creativity needs no recognition, no ego, no doer - just the sheer joy of creating it.
At least van Gogh could show his paintings. I cannot even show my paintings.
But you are my paintings.
I have been creating in my own way something very invisible and subtle which cannot be shown and which cannot be sold, and nobody will ever know about it. It will not be recorded anywhere how many people were transformed, how many people changed their lives from the lowest to the highest peak of illumination. But nobody can say that I have been uncreative. Day and night I am working - but I am not a doer.
One of my friends had come from the Soviet Union and he shook hands with me and he said, "You should never go to the Soviet Union."
I said, "Why?"
"Because anybody touching your hands will immediately shrink back."
I said, "But why?"
He said, "Because your hands are bourgeois, you have never done anything, and in the Soviet Union to be bourgeois is the worst condemnation. You need the proletariat's hand, the laborer's hand, rough."
I said, "My God, then first I will try - if I have to go to the Soviet Union - to make my hands as rough as I can."
This is true that I have never done anything. But I am not lazy; I have never thought for a moment that I am lazy, although I have never done anything. Even if I am thirsty I trust somebody is going to appear; and somebody always has appeared, so there is no need to distrust in the future.
In America, when my bail was set at five hundred thousand dollars - that's near about seventy-five lakh rupees - even the jailer who was taking me back to jail was worried. He said, "From where will it come? The figure is too big. In my whole life I have never seen or heard of anybody's bail being set at five hundred thousand dollars. How are you going to manage? - and you look so relaxed and so cool...."
I said, "I don't bother about such things. Something will happen."
He said, "But how will it happen?"
I said, "That I don't know. How is not part of my language. It will happen!"
He looked surprised; he could not believe it. But within ten minutes it happened, and he came running to me and said, "You were right, your bail has been deposited!" He said, "It is unprecedented that for a person against whom no crime has yet been proved, there is no evidence against him - and yet such a large amount for bail. But you are stranger than the judge, because you remain so cool and so silent."
When I went into the jail I had gone immediately to take my shower, because it was my shower time.
The jailer was standing there and he said, "You cannot miss your shower even today? If nobody pays your bail, then you will be in jail for at least twenty years."
I said, "That is not the concern right now; right now the concern is to take a good shower. I have always trusted. After my shower you come to see me."
And after my shower he was standing outside the bathroom. He said, "Somebody has given the bail" - he could not believe it. "How are you managing things?
I said, "I have never managed. In my whole life I have never done anything deliberately - but things go on happening."
Once you are in a let-go existence takes care of you. Then you are relaxed. If existence wants you to be in jail for twenty years, that's perfectly good; if it wants you to be out to prepare other people for jail, that too is good. It depends on existence, whether it is satisfied with one or many.
Now I am out, preparing many; sooner or later, in every country my people will be in jails - and that too, to convert the prisoners into sannyasins. I have new sannyasins in almost every jail, and they go on asking for guidance. Now I have to send a few sannyasins to them.
From here, it is difficult for me to guide people all over the world. They are in jails and they want guidance for meditation, and they have problems. The best way will be for my people to start visiting just once in a while, as a holiday.
And finally you are asking, Candida, for some guidance from me. That is a very dangerous thing. I rarely give guidance, and whenever I give guidance something goes wrong. It is my experience that many times people have got married and come for my blessings. Nirvano would say, "Don't ask for his blessings, because once he has blessed you, you are finished." And she was right, because she had been watching: whoever gets my blessings, within a few days they are separated, something goes wrong.
Now, yesterday I had given some advice to Vimal. Vimal seems to be clever; he did not take it. But poor Rafia picked it up, and now do you see what has happened to Rafia? He writes:
I DID WHAT YOU SUGGESTED.... I had not suggested it to him! I WENT TO SLEEP SAYING, VIMAL... VIMAL... VIMAL... I was not suggesting this to him ... AND SURE ENOUGH, I WOKE UP SAYING, VIMAL... VIMAL... VIMAL... EVERYTHING WAS GOING GREAT UNTIL I STARTED HUGGING A BEAUTIFUL INDIAN GIRL, SHOWED UP FOR THE WRONG JOB, AND STARTED SPEAKING WITH A PRONOUNCED ENGLISH ACCENT. NOW I AM CONFUSED. BELOVED MASTER, WHO AM I?
Because the girl he hugged was Vimal's girlfriend and the job he reached was Vimal's job, not his job... But the whole night repeating "Vimal... Vimal... Vimal..." certainly he became confused - "Who am I?"
So when you ask for guidance, be very intelligent in applying it. The best is first to see if somebody else applies it and what happens to him.
This beautiful silence... this is my creation.
Thousands of lotuses suddenly start flowering.
Thousands of hearts suddenly become a tremendous harmony, a song, a blissfulness.
Just the other day I said a few words about Veeresh, one of the most sincere, honest and authentic therapists. And just now as I entered I saw him again. He was crying just like a child, with utter joy.
These tears are my creation.
They will not be recorded in any history book, but they will transform many who will come in contact with him. With his tears he has bridged his heart with my heart, his being with my being. He is one of the silent workers who go on doing, without bragging about anything.
This joke is for Veeresh, not to have any more tears but to have great laughter.
A frustrated spinster was a menace to the police. She kept phoning up to say that there was a man under her bed. Before long she was sent to the mental hospital where she was treated with the latest drugs until one day she declared that she was cured.
"You mean, Miss Rustavian," asked one of the panel of shrinks, "that you can no longer see a man under you bed?"
"No, I can't," she replied, "I can see two."
The doctors consulted and diagnosed her complaint as malignant virginity, for which there was only one kind of injection that would cure her. They decided to shut her up in her bedroom with Big Don, the hospital handyman. Big Don was told of her complaint and that he would be locked up with her for an hour. He said that it would not take so long.
As the bedroom door closed an anxious group gathered outside. From inside was heard, "No, stop it, Don! Mother would never forgive you."
"Stop yelling! It has got to be done sometime! It should have been done years ago."
"Have it your way by force then, you brute!"
"It is only what your husband would have done if you had married."
The medics could not wait. They burst into the room.
"I have cured her!" cried Don.
"He's cured me!" called out Miss Rustavian. "He has chopped the legs off the bed!"
Okay, Maneesha?