[Note: This is the final edit of the Hindi translation of Antar Yatra, later published as part of Sadhana Path. This is for reference use only, pending publication.]
My Beloved Ones,
Tonight is the last meeting of the camp, and in this last meeting I want to talk to you about some last sutras.
In the mind of man there is intense tension and this tension has reached a level of near madness.
One has to relax this tension. And along with it, there is much looseness in the heart of man; the strings of the veena of man?s heart are loose. They have to be tightened. I told you a few sutras in the morning about how to tighten these strings of the heart. And now we will talk about the last sutra.
Out of the veena of man?s life, the greatest music possible comes from the heart whose strings are in tune. The society which has lost its heart, the age or century in which all the values of the heart have been weakened - has lost all that is good, truthful and beautiful. If we want that truth, beauty and godliness to enter our lives, there is no other way except to tune the strings of the veena of the heart.
Love is the way to tune the strings of the heart, the way to bring the strings of the heart into the right condition from where music can arise. That is why I call love ?prayer?, I call love the way of attaining god, I call love ?god?. Prayer without love is false, hollow and futile. The words of prayer without love
have no value at all. And nobody who becomes interested in the journey towards god will ever be able to reach god without love. Love is the way to make the veena of the heart musical. We have to understand some things about love itself.
The first illusion is that we all think we know about love. This illusion is tremendously harmful because we will never make any effort to acquire or awaken that which we think we already know.
But we are not aware that the one who knows love has simultaneously acquired the capacity to know the divine. If we know love, then nothing else remains to be known in life. But the way we are, we know nothing. Everything is still to be known.
So the love which we think of as love is probably not love. We have called something else love, and as long as we have this illusion, as long as we have the idea that we know all about love, how can we search and seek it? The first thing to be understood is that we don?t know love at all.
One hot afternoon, Jesus Christ stopped under a tree in a garden. It was very hot and he was tired.
He slept in the shadow of a tree. He did not even know to whom the house, the garden or the tree belonged. It was the garden of Magdalene, a very beautiful prostitute of that time.
Magdalene looked out of the window and saw a very unique person sleeping under the tree. She had never seen such a beautiful person. As there is a beauty of the body, there is a beauty of the soul. One can often see beauty of the body, but beauty of the soul is rarely seen, and when the beauty of the soul appears, then even the ugliest body becomes the most beautiful flower. She had seen many beautiful people because there was always a crowd at her door, it was often difficult even to enter her house. Magdalene was drawn to the tree as if pulled by some magic.
Jesus Christ was about to get up and leave. He had completed his rest. Magdalene said, "Will you do me the favor of coming into my house to rest?"
Christ said, "I have finished resting now - and it was your house, it was your tree. Now it is time for me to leave. But if I happen to pass by here again and I am tired, then I will certainly rest in your house."
Magdalene felt insulted. Great princes were turned away from her door but now when she had invited a beggar from the streets to rest in her house, he refused. This was an insult for Magdalene.
She said, "No, I cannot listen to this. You will have to come inside - won?t you even do this much for my love? Won?t you come and rest in my house for a few moments?"
Christ said, "In your very invitation I have in a way entered your house because, except in the feelings of the heart, where else is your house? And if you ask, ?Can?t you show even this much love?? then I will say to you that you may have seen many people who may have said, ?I love you?, but none of them loved you, because in their innermost core, they loved something else. And I can assure you that, actually, I am one of the few people who can love you and who does love you because only a person in whose heart love has arisen, can love."
None of us can love because within us there is no flow of love. When we say to somebody, "I love you", we are in fact not giving love, we are asking for love. All of us ask for love, and how can one
who is himself asking for love, give love? How can beggars be emperors? How can people who are asking for love, be givers of love?
All of us ask for love from each other. Our beings are beggars asking somebody to give us love. The wife asks for love from the husband; the husband asks for love from the wife. The mother asks from the son, the son asks from the mother. Friends ask friends for love. All of us ask for love from one another without realizing that the friend from whom we are asking for love, is himself asking for love from you. You are like two beggars standing in front of each other holding your begging bowls.
As long as someone is asking for love, he cannot be capable of giving love because the asking for love is an indication that there is no source of love within him - otherwise why should he have to ask for love from the outside? Only a person who has risen above the need of asking for love, can give love. Love is a sharing, it is not begging. Love is an emperor, it is not a beggar. Love knows only giving, it does not know anything about asking.
Do we know love?
The love which is asked for, cannot be love. And remember, the one who asks for love will never get love in this world. One of the essential laws, one of the eternal laws of life, is that one who asks for love never gets it, ever.
Love comes only to the door of the house from where the hankering for love has disappeared. Love starts showering on the house of one who has stopped asking for love, but on the house of one who is still hankering for love, no rains will fall. Love will not flow towards an asking heart. The asking heart does not have the kind of receptivity that makes it possible for love to enter. Only a sharing heart, a giving heart has the kind of receptivity for love to come to his door and say, "Open the door!
I have come."
Has love ever knocked at our doors? No, because as yet we have not been able to give love. And remember also that whatever we give comes back to us. One of the eternal laws of life is that whatever we give comes back to us.
The whole world is not more than an echo. We give hate, and hate comes back to us. We give anger, and anger comes back to us. We abuse others, and abuses return to us. We put out thorns, and thorns return to us. Whatever we have given returns to us, it comes back to us in infinite ways.
And if we share love then love comes back to us in infinite ways. If love has not returned to us in an immeasureable number of ways, then know that we have not given love.
But how can we give love? We do not have it at all to give. If we had love then why would we wander from door to door asking for love? Why would we become beggars wandering from place to place?
Why would we ask for love?
There was a fakir called Farid. The people of his town said to him, "Farid, Akbar respects you very much. Ask Akbar to open a school in our town!"
Farid said, "I have never asked for anything from anybody. I am a fakir, I only know giving!"
The people of the town were very surprised. They said, "We have always thought that a fakir always asks, but you say that a fakir only knows how to give. We do not understand these subtle and serious things. Please just do us a favor and ask Akbar to open a school for us."
The people of the town were persistent, so early in the morning Farid went to meet Akbar. Akbar was praying in his mosque and Farid went and stood behind him. After Akbar finished his prayers he raised both his hands towards the sky and cried, "O God! Increase my wealth, increase my treasure, increase my kingdom."
Hearing this, Farid started to turn away. Akbar got up and saw that Farid was going away. He rushed after him and stopped him and asked, "Why did you come and why are you going away?"
Farid said, "I thought that you were an emperor but I have found that you are also a beggar. I thought that I would ask for a school for the town. I did not know that you also ask God to increase your wealth and your treasure. It does not look right to ask for something from a beggar. I thought that you were an emperor and now I see that you are also a beggar so I am leaving.
We are all beggars and we all go on asking other beggars for that which they do not have. And when we do not get it we become sad; we weep and cry and feel that we are not getting love.
Love is not something to be obtained from the outside. Love is the music of your inner being. Nobody can give you love. Love can arise within you, but it cannot be obtained from the outside. There is no shop, no market, no salesman where you can buy love. Love cannot be bought at any cost.
Love is an inner flowering. It arises from some dormant energy within, yet all of us search for love outside. All of us search for love in the beloved - which is an absolutely false and futile action.
Search for love within yourself. We cannot even imagine how love can be inside ourselves because love is always associated with an idea of a beloved. It gives us the idea of someone else outside.
Because we don?t remember how love can arise within us, the energy of love remains dormant.
We don?t realize that we are always asking for something outside which is already within us. And because we ask for it outside we do not look inside - then that which could arise never does.
Love is the essential treasure with which each individual is born. Man is not born with money - money is social accumulation - but man is born with love. It is man?s birthright, it is his individual wealth, it is in him. It is a companion which was given to him by birth and which can accompany him his whole life. But very few are fortunate enough to look within to see where love is - how it can be found and how it can be developed.
So we are born but our wealth remains unexplored; it is never explored at all. And we go on begging at others? doors, holding out our hands because we want love. All over the world there is only one desire - ?We want love?; and all over the world there is only one complaint - ?We do not get love?. And when we do not get love, we accuse others of being at fault because we do not get love. A wife says to her husband, "There is something wrong with you, that?s why I do not get love." A husband says to his wife, "There is some mistake inside you, hence I am not getting love." And no one wonders if it ever is possible to get love from the outside.
Love is the inner treasure, and love itself is the music of the veena of the heart. The veena of the heart of man has become very disturbed. The music for which it was created does not arise. How can this music be created? What is the obstacle standing in the way of the creation of this music?
What is the hindrance which does not let it happen? Have you ever thought about the hindrance?
Have you ever thought what the hindrance could be?
An actor who was a good dramatist and a good poet, died. Many people gathered at the cremation ground for his funeral. The director of the film company in which he was working was also present and he said a few words of condolence.
The director said, "I made this man an actor. It was me who took him out of the back roads and put him on the highways. It was me who gave him his first role in the cinema. It was me who published his first book. I am the reason he became famous all over the world." He had said this much - I was present at the funeral and some of you may also have been there - the director had said this much when suddenly the corpse which was lying there, got up and said, "Excuse me, sir, who is to be buried here - you or me? Who are you talking about?"
The director was saying, "I am the one who made him famous, I am the one who published his book, I am the one who gave him his first role in the movies.... I am the one...."
Even the corpse could not tolerate this noise of ?I?. It got up and said, "Forgive me, but please tell me one thing: who is to be buried in the grave, you or me? About whom are you talking?" Even corpses cannot tolerate this noise of ?I? - and man goes on making this noise of ?I? continually.
How can alive people tolerate it?
There can be only two voices inside man. There is no voice of love within the person who is filled with the voice of ?I?. And there is no voice of ?I? within the person who is filled with the voice of love.
The two of them can never be found together. It is impossible.
It is the same kind of impossibility as darkness and light existing together.
Once darkness went to god and said, "The sun keeps chasing after me. He is giving me much trouble. He follows me from morning till night and by the evening I am very tired. And when it is night, before I have completed my sleep and my rest, he starts to follow me again. I do not remember doing anything wrong to him; I don?t think that I have ever made him angry. So why is he following me? Why am I continually harassed? What wrong have I done?"
Then god called the sun and asked, "Why are you chasing after that poor darkness? He is always moving, hiding, taking shelter here and there. Why do you follow him for twenty-four hours? What is the need?
The sun said, "Who is this darkness? I have not yet met him. I don?t even know him. Who is darkness? What is darkness? I have not seen him yet, I have not met him yet, but if I have unknowingly committed some mistake then I am ready to ask for forgiveness. And once I recognize him, I will never follow him again."
They say that millions and trillions of years have passed since this event. This case is pending in the files of god. Yet god has not been able to put darkness and the sun together and I tell you that never in the future will he be able to do so howsoever almighty he may be. Even the almighty does not have the ability to bring darkness in front of the sun, because darkness and light cannot exist together.
There is a reason why they cannot exist together. The reason is that darkness has no being of its own, so it cannot exist in front of the sun. Darkness is only the absence of sun - so how can the absence and the presence of the same thing exist together?
Darkness is only the absence of sun. Darkness is nothing in itself. It is just the absence of sun, it is just the absence of light. So how can the absence of light appear? How can both the things exist together? God will not be able to arrange it.
In the same way ego and love also cannot exist together. Ego is like darkness. It is the absence of love, it is not the presence of love. Within us love is absent so within us the voice of ?I? goes on resounding. And with this voice of ?I? we say that ?I? want to love, ?I? want to give love; ?I? want to receive love. Have you gone mad! There has never been any relation between ?I? and love. And this ?I? goes on speaking for love - ?I? want to pray, ?I? want to attain god, ?I? want to be liberated."
This is the same thing as darkness saying, "I want to hug the sun. I want to love the sun. I want to be a guest in the house of the sun." It is inconceivable.
?I? is the absence of love itself. ?I? is the lack of love, and the more we go on strengthening this voice of ?I?, the less possibility there will be of love within us. The more the ego is there, the more love will be absent; when there is total ego, love will die totally.
There can be no love within us, because if we search inside we will find that the voice of ?I? is resounding there for twenty-four hours continuously. We breathe with this ?I?, we drink water with this ?I?, we enter a temple with this ?I?. What else is there in our lives except this ?I??
Our clothes are the clothes of our ?I?. Our positions are the positions of our ?I?. Our knowledge is the knowledge of our ?I?. Our spiritual practice, our helping others, is the helping of our ?I?. Our everything, even our sannyas, is also the sannyas of our ?I?. A strong feeling arises inside that ?I? am a sannyasin; ?I? am not a household man; ?I? am not an ordinary person; ?I? am a sannyasin; "I" am a helper; "I" am a knowledgeable person; ?I? am rich; ?I? am this; ?I? am that....
The house that has been built around this ?I?, will not be acquainted with love. And then that music which could bring the heart to the innermost core, which could make it acquainted with the truth of life, will not arise from the veena of the heart. That door will not open, it will always remain closed.
It has to be very basically understood how strong your ?I? is, how deep it is! And you have to clearly see if you are giving it more strength, if you are making it deeper, making it stronger and stronger every day. If you are making it stronger yourself, then drop the hope that love can arise within you or that the closed knot of love can open or that the treasure of love can be attained. Drop the very idea. There is no way it can happen.
So I do not tell you to start loving because the ego can also say that ?I? am a lover and ?I? love. The love which comes from the ego is absolutely false hence I said that all our love is false - because it comes out of ego, it is the shadow of ego. And remember that the love which comes out of ego is more dangerous than the hate, because hate is clear, direct and simple but love comes with a changed face and it will be difficult to recognize it.
If you are loved with a love that comes out of ego you will feel after a while that you are being held with iron chains instead of loving hands. After a while you will come to know that the love which makes beautiful speeches and sings beautiful songs to you is just tempting you in the beginning.
There is much poison in those sweet songs. And if a love which comes in the form of flowers is a shadow of the ego, then, when you touch the flowers, you will find thorns inside which will pierce you.
When people go to catch fish they put some bait on a hook. The ego wants to become a master of others, it wants to possess them, so it pierces them deeply with the bait of love on a hook. So many people end up in pain and suffering because of their illusions about love; not even in hell do so many people suffer so much. Because of this illusion of love the whole earth, the whole humanity is suffering. But still we do not understand that the love from the ego is false.... This is why this hell has been created.
The love to which ego is attached is a form of jealousy - this is why nobody is as jealous as lovers are. The love which is attached to the ego is a conspiracy and a trick to possess the other. It is a conspiracy - that is why nobody suffocates so many people as those who talk of love. This situation is created because of the ?love? which comes from the ego - there can never be any relation between love and the ego.
Jalaluddin used to sing a song, a very beautiful song. He used to go from town to town singing the song. Whenever people would ask him to tell them something about god, he would sing the song.
The song was very wonderful. In that song he said that a lover went to the door of his beloved and knocked at the door. And the beloved asked, "Who are you?"
The lover said - as all lovers say - "I am your lover!" There was a silence inside. No answer came, no voice was heard from inside. The lover started knocking on the door again, loudly but it seemed that there was no one inside. He started shouting, "Why is there silence inside? Answer me. I am your lover. I have come." But the louder he said "I have come, I am you lover," the more the house became silent like a graveyard. There was no answer from within.
Then he started beating his head on the door and said, "At least answer once."
And one answer came from inside. It was, "There can be no space in this house for two. You say ?I have come, I am your lover? but I am already present here. There can be no space for two here. The door of love can open only for those who have dropped the ?I?. Go now! Come some other time."
The lover left and he prayed and did meditation for years. Many moons passed, many sunrises and sunsets passed, many years passed - and then he returned to the door. When he knocked he again heard the same question, "Who are you?" This time the lover said, "There is no ?I?! There is only you."
Jalaluddin said that at this point the door opened.
I would not have opened the door. Jalaluddin died many years ago, so there is no way for me to tell him that the time was not right for the doors to be opened; he allowed the doors to be opened too soon - because one who says "There is only you", still experiences himself as an ?I?. Only one who does not know a ?you? does not experience himself as an ?I? either.
So although it is wrong to say love does not contain ?two?, it is equally wrong to say that love contains only one. In love neither two nor one exists. If there is an idea of one, know that another is also present because only the other can be aware of one. Where ?you? is present, ?I? is also present.
So I would have sent that lover away again. He said, "There is no ?I?, there is only you." But one who says this, is there, totally there. He has just learned a trick. The first time he had answered, ?I am?, and the doors remained closed, so after years of contemplating he decided to say, "I am not, only you are."
But who will say this? Why will he say this? One who knows ?you?, also knows ?I?.
Remember that ?you? is the shadow of ?I?. For one whose ?I? has disappeared ?you? does not remain either.
So I would have sent the lover away because the beloved said, "There is no space for two." The man did not get it; he started shouting and saying, "Where are the two? Now I?m not, there is only you!"
The beloved had told him to leave because he had only learned a trick. He still saw two people.
The beloved said that if two were no longer there then the lover would not even have tried to open the door - because who is there to ask to open the door, and who does he want to open it? In the house of two there cannot be love.
The lover went away. Years passed, and he did not return - he never returned. Then the beloved went in search of him.
So I say that the day the shadow of our ?I? disappears, the day neither ?I? nor ?you? remains, that day you do not have to search for the divine, the divine will come searching for you.
No man can seek the divine, because he has no capacity for such a search. But when somebody has become ready to disappear, has become ready to be nothing, has become ready to become an emptiness, then the divine will certainly find him. Only the divine can seek for man, man can never seek for the divine, because even in seeking, the ego is present - "I am seeking, I have to attain god. I have attained wealth, I have attained a position in parliament, I have got a big house, now the last goal remains: I want also to attain the divine. How can I let go of the prestige of attaining god! It will be my final victory. I must attain this victory. I must also attain the divine." This is a proclamation, an insistence, a search of the ego itself.
So a religious person is not one who sets out on a search for the divine. A religious person is one who sets out on the search for his ?I? and the more he goes on searching, the more he finds out that his ?I? is not there at all. And the day ?I? does not remain, that day the door which is hiding love opens for him.
So the last thing is: go on a search to find your ?I?, not on a search to find the soul. You do not know anything about your soul at all. Do not go in search of the divine because you do not have even the slightest idea of the divine. How will you seek that about which you do not have any idea at all?
Where will you seek someone for whom you have no address? Where will you seek someone about whom you have no information? Where will you seek for one who has no beginning and no end, one whose location you have no idea of? You will become mad! You will not know where to look.
But we know one thing: we know this ?I? of ours. So first of all we have to seek this ?I? - find out what it is, where it is, and who it is. And as you search for it, you will be surprised to find that this ?I? does not exist; it was an absolutely false notion. It was your imagination that an ?I? exists; it was an illusion nourished by yourself.
When small children are born, we give them a name for the sake of convenience. We call someone Rama, someone Krishna, someone something else. Nobody has any name, all names are for the sake of convenience, but later on, listening and listening to it continuously, the person gets an illusion that this is his name - I am Rama, I am Krishna. And if you say something bad about Rama he will be ready to fight you - you have abused him. And where did he get his name?
Nobody is born with a name. Everyone is born nameless, but the name has social utility. To make a label without a name is difficult, hence we give a name. We give a name so that others can identify you. It is a social utility. And if we use the name to identify ourself then there will be confusion - are we calling ourself or someone else? So, to avoid confusion we call ourself ?I?. ?I? is the title one calls oneself, and the name is the title to call another. Both titles are imaginary, social utilities. And we build the house of our life around these two titles which are simply two blank words and nothing else, behind them there is no truth, behind them there is no substance. There are only names, only titles.
Once such a mistake happened. There was a small girl called Alice. And Alice went wandering in a strange land, a wonderland. When she reached the Queen of Wonderland, the Queen asked Alice a question. She said, "Did you meet somebody on the way here?" Alice replied, "I met nobody."
But the Queen thought that she met someone called "Nobody". And this illusion became stronger because then the Queen?s messenger arrived and the Queen asked him also if he had met anybody.
He also said, "Nobody."
The Queen said, "This is very strange." She thought that a person called "nobody" had met both Alice and the messenger. So she said to the messenger, "It seems that Nobody walks slower than you."
That statement has two meanings. One meaning is that nobody walks slower than the messenger.
The messenger became afraid because a messenger should be able to walk very fast. So he said, "No! Nobody walks faster than me."
The Queen said, "This is a difficult situation! You say that Nobody walks faster than you. But if Nobody walks faster than you, then he should have arrived before you, he should have arrived already." By now the poor messenger realized that some kind of misunderstanding had happened!
He said, "Nobody is nobody."
The Queen said, "I know that Nobody is Nobody. But who is he? Tell me. He must have arrived by now. Where is he?"
With man, the same misunderstanding through language happens. Everyone?s name is ?nobody?.
No name has any more meaning than this. All the idea of ?I? is nobody, not more than that. But through the misunderstanding of language an illusion is created that I am something. I have a name.
Man dies but leaves his name written on stones, hoping that perhaps the stones will remain. We do not know if they will. All the sand on the sea shores was stones at one time. All stones become sand. Whether you write your name on sand or you write it on stone, it is the same thing. In this long story of the world there is no difference between sand and stone. Children write their names on the sand at the sea shore; maybe they think that tomorrow people will pass by and see. But the waves come and wipe the sand clean - and the older people laugh and say, "Are you mad! There is no meaning in names written on sand!"
But the older people write on stones and they do not know that sand is created out of stones. There is no difference between old people and children. In foolishness we are all of equal age.
An emperor became a chakravartin. This happens rarely. A chakravartin means a master of the whole earth. An old story says that chakravartins had a special privilege which was not available to anybody else, which others could not have. They had a chance to sign their name on Mt. Sumeru, the mountain in heaven. Even in infinite time it is rare for someone to become a chakravartin, so signatures on Mt. Sumeru, the eternal mountain, are a rare phenomenon.
When the emperor became a chakravartin, he was very happy. Now he had the privilege of signing his name on Mt. Sumeru. He reached the entrance of heaven with great pomp and show, accompanied by a great army. The doorkeeper said, "You have arrived? You can come in but this crowd cannot come inside, they will have to go home. Have you brought some tools to carve your name with?" The emperor replied, "I have brought the instruments."
The doorkeeper told him, "This Mt. Sumeru is infinite, but there have been so many chakravartins that now there is no space left to sign on it. So first of all you will have to erase someone?s name and then you can sign your name there because no space is left; the whole mountain is covered."
The emperor went through the gate. The mountain was infinite. Many Himalayas could be contained in its smaller ranges, and on its surface not even an inch of space was left. He had thought that someone became a chakravartin in infinite time, but he had no idea that so much time has passed that even with one person becoming a chakravartin in infinite time, the whole mountain would be full, no space would be left.
The emperor became very sad and upset. The doorkeeper said to him, "Don?t be sad. My father and his father and his father also used to do this job - for generations we have known that whenever you want to sign, you have to erase the surface. You never get an empty space."
Then the emperor turned around. He said, "If one can sign only after erasing somebody?s name, then it is madness - because I will sign and go and then somebody else will come tomorrow, erase
my signature and sign theirs. When this mountain is so big and there are so many names, who reads them? And what is the point? Forgive me, I am making a mistake. This is futile."
There are only a few such intelligent people. The others get their names written on stones, on temples; they build memorials and get their names written on them and forget that they were born without names. They have no names of their own. So on one hand stone is wasted, and on the other hand labour is wasted and when they die and say goodbye, they go nameless. We do not have any name of our own. The ?name? is the illusion visible to the outside world and the ?I? is the illusion visible to the inside. ?I? and ?name? are two sides of the same coin. The name is visible from the outer side and the ?I? is visible from the inner side. And as long as this illusion of ?name? and ?I? remains, the space from where love arises does not open.
So the last thing that I want to say is: search a little bit. Go to Mt. Sumeru and see how many signatures have been put there. Do you also want to add your name by erasing the surface? Go a little bit closer to the mountains and watch them turning into sand. Watch the children signing their names on the sea beach. Look all around you at what we are doing. Are we wasting our lives signing names on the sand? And if you feel like that then search a little bit further; enter inside this ?I? and seek. One day you will find that ?I? is nobody. There is nobody there. There is a deep silence and peace there but there is no ?I?. And the day you come to know that there is no ?I? inside you, you come to know the whole, that which really is - the being, the existence, the divine.
That is why I say that love is the door to the divine and ego is the door to ignorance. Love is the door to light and ego is the door to darkness. I had to say this last thing before we depart. Make some explorations into love from this dimension. But this exploration will begin with the ego and it will end with the attainment of love. So explore in this direction: does this shadow of the ego really exist, does this ?I? really exist? The man who sets out on this exploration not only doesn?t find an ?I? but he also attains to the divine. One who is tied to the stake of ?I? is not able to make any voyage into the ocean of the divine. This was the last thing I wanted to say to you. In fact this is the first and last thing to be said.
?I? is the first in a person?s life and ?I? is the last. The person tied up in ?I? experiences pain - and after getting free of ?I?, he attains to bliss. There is no story, no tale except ?I?. There is no dream except ?I?. There is no lie except ?I?.
Find this ?I? and the doors to bliss can open. If the rock of ?I? is shattered the springs of love will start flowing. Then the heart fills with the music of love. When the heart is filled with love, a new journey starts which is difficult to describe in words. That journey will take you to the very center of life.
I wanted to say these few things before leaving.
Now we will sit for the night meditation. For ten minutes we will sit for the night meditation and then we will say goodbye. And I will say goodbye to you with a hope and a prayer to god that that everybody will be blessed enough to attain to love, that everybody will be blessed enough to get rid of the sickness of ?I?, that everybody will be blessed enough to find that which is already within him.
A beggar had died in a very big town - I hope to god that you will not die like that beggar! The beggar had died after begging in the same place for forty years. He had thought that he would
become an emperor while begging, but can anybody become an emperor by begging? The more a person begs, the greater a beggar he becomes.
The day he started he was a small beggar, the day he died he was a great beggar, but he did not become an emperor. He died. So the people in the neighborhood behaved in the same way with him as they did with other dead people - they took away his corpse and burnt it and the rags he had left lying there. Then the people of the neighborhood thought that for forty years this beggar made this very earth dirty and it would be good to dig up some of that earth and throw it away. So they started digging.
Then they got a big surprise - if the beggar had been alive he would have gone mad! After digging up the earth they found a huge treasure buried right under where the beggar used to sit and beg.
He did not know that if he had dug up the earth underneath him he would have become an emperor and there would have been no need to beg.
But what did the poor man know? His eyes were looking outside, his hands were spread out, so he died begging. All the people of the neighborhood stood there quite shocked - what kind of beggar was this! This idiot did not even realize that a treasure was buried in the place where he was sitting.
I went to that area and met the people of the neighborhood and I said to them, "Idiots, don?t be concerned about the beggar. Drop your judgments of the beggar. Sometime you also dig up your earth beneath you - else it may be that when you die other people will laugh at you." When a person dies other people laugh at him saying that he was mad, he could not achieve anything in his life.
And they do not know that other people are just waiting for them to die so that they can also laugh and say that this person was really mad and could not achieve anything.
Living people laugh at somebody when he dies, but if a living person could get the idea of laughing at himself while he is still alive, then his life would change. He would become a different person. If in these three days of the camp you remember to laugh at yourself then the matter is finished. If you remember to dig up the place where you are standing now then the matter is finished. Then all that I have said can certainly come to its fruition in you.
In the end I just pray that you will not die a beggar but an emperor. I pray that you will not give the people of the neighborhood the chance to laugh. For these days you have listened to my talks so silently and so lovingly, I am very grateful. And I bow down to the god present in everybody. Please accept my greetings.
Now we will sit for the night meditation. All of you make some space so that you can lie down. This is the last meditation so use it as totally as you can. Everybody should be at some distance from each other.
Don?t talk. Nobody should talk. Those people sitting there should spread out. Nobody should be touching anybody else. Move away from there, move where there is space. Don?t talk at all because this has nothing to do with talking. Some people should come here in the front and be careful that nobody should be disturbed because of somebody else.
First of all lie down with your body totally relaxed. Allow it to be completely loose and relaxed. Then slowly close your eyes. Close your eyes.
You have closed the eyes and have completely relaxed the body. Now I will give suggestions - go on listening, your body and mind will follow them.
Feel that the body is becoming relaxed, the body is becoming relaxed, the body is getting relaxed, the body is becoming relaxed. Feel that the body is getting relaxed, allow the body to be totally relaxed. And feel in the mind that the body has become totally relaxed, the body has become relaxed, the body has become totally relaxed....
The breath is becoming silent. Feel in the mind that the breath is becoming silent, the breath is becoming silent.... The breath has become silent, the breath has become silent....
The mind is also becoming empty. The mind is becoming silent. Feel that the mind is becoming silent, the mind has become silent....
Now for ten minutes remain awake inside and keep listening silently to all the sounds around. Stay awake inside, don?t go to sleep. Remain conscious inside. Stay awake inside and keep listening silently. Just keep listening. Keep listening to the silence of the night, and while listening, a deep emptiness will arise.
Listen! For ten minutes keep listening silently, just silently listening. The mind is becoming completely empty. The mind is becoming empty. The mind has become empty, the mind has become empty....
The mind has become totally empty. The mind is becoming empty. Drown in the emptiness created all around. The mind is becoming empty. The mind is becoming empty, the mind is becoming empty.
The Inner Journey 114 Osho