EVOLUTION has a logic in it. One thing leads to another, rung by rung, step by step. There is a kind of inevitability. Evolution is mechanical, it is continuous. There are no gaps in it, no leaps in it, nothing new ever happens. Only the old goes on becoming manifest. Evolution moves in one dimension. It is predictable, you could have seen it before. It is very rational, it is sane.
But revolution is more than sanity, it is more than logic. It is not inevitable, it has many surprises in it. It jumps, it leaps, it is a quantum leap. The quantum leap is its basic innermost core.
That's why I say Karl Marx has no understanding about revolution. His revolution is inevitable; his revolution is something that is going to happen on its own accord, without any intention on man's part. It is going to happen out of the past by itself - just as a seed becomes a tree: it HAS to, because the seed already contains the tree. The tree is not really something new, it is contained in the seed - unmanifest, but still it is contained; the seed is the blueprint of it. When the tree arrives it is only a revelation of that which was hidden - it has come into the open. But the tree is not anything really new. There is no revolution between the seed and the tree, there is evolution.
Marx says that the communist revolution is inevitable, it is a natural consequence of capitalism.
If it is so, then it is not revolution. Then it is simply evolution; why call it revolution? Revolution means something new happens - something that was not going to happen on its own accord, something that can happen only through human intention, human consciousness. Something that cannot happen without the help of human consciousness - that is revolution.
Revolution is a surprise, revolution is a miracle. It should not have happened but it has happened. It is mysterious.
Up to man there has been evolution, from the fish to the man there has been evolution. But from man to a Buddha, from man to a Christ, from man to a Kabir, it is not evolution. It is revolution - the revolution I call it, the only revolution. You will not become a Buddha unless you become conscious, unless you prepare the ground for it to happen. It is not like old age - every young man will become old, but every man is not going to become a Buddha. You will have to choose it, you will have to work for it, you will have to look for it. A deliberate conscious effort will be needed on your part - only then is there a possibility.
Evolution is inevitable, it has a kind of inexorable logic about it. Revolution has no logic about it. It is a poetic leap, it is from one dimension into another dimension. Evolution is horizontal, revolution is vertical - it penetrates other realms of being.
Unless one takes possession of one's own being very consciously, the revolution is not going to happen. You will go on growing but your growth will be horizontal. The monkey becomes man, the man may even become a superman - more powerful, technically more equipped, scientifically stronger - but it will not be anything new. It will not be Christ consciousness; man will remain on the same plane.
You can see it, monkeys and man are not very different. The difference can at the most be quantitative but not qualitative. Maybe the monkey is more stupid than man, or man is a little more intelligent than the monkey - but there is no gap. And Charles Darwin is right that man has evolved out of the monkey. It is evolution. Given time, given opportunity, the monkey was going to become man. Given time, given opportunity, the man is going to become superman. Remember, the superman is not equivalent to a Buddha, the superman is not equivalent to Christ. The superman is in the same line where you are, where monkeys are, where fish and other animals are. It is the same line, the same ladder - of course on a higher rung, but the ladder is the same.
Revolution brings another dimension. The old and the new are not joined together; there is a gap, a discontinuity. Evolution is understandable, because it is logical, it is Aristotelian. Revolution is mysterious; it is not understandable, you have to go through it to know it. Revolution is a little crazy - because it is neither mathematical nor mechanical. It is not unconscious either, as the evolutionary process is. It is a conscious grip upon reality, a conscious hold of your being. You don't carry the blueprint for it, you have to create it.
That is the beauty of religion - religion is the science of revolution. All other sciences only describe what evolution is. Religion is the only science of revolution; it prepares you for the jump, the quantum leap.
There can be no reason to jump. Reasoning is remaining - there can only be reasons to remain with all that is old and known and secure underfoot. Logically, when one comes to an empty space, en-counters an abyss, a discontinuity, one ought to halt. All logic will say 'Halt! Stop! Turn back! You have come to a cul-de-sac, now there is no more go - if you take another step you will die. Facing you is an abysmal depth, you will be lost for ever.' Logic will say, reason will say, mind will say, 'Halt!
Stop! Go back! Find another way towards achievement. This is not the way, this way has ended.'
But life is that which leaps. Logic is that which says 'Stop!' And life is that which leaps. That life is religion. And unless you have that life which leaps, you can't have religion, you don't know what religion is. Christianity is not religion, Hinduism is not religion. This leap, this courage, this adventure, this movement from the known into the unknown, from the lighted path into the darkness of the unknown, from the familiar into the unfamiliar, from the comfortable and the convenient into the hazardous - this life is religion.
Kabir sings of this revolution, of this life, of this religion. He is the poet of man's dream of becoming God.
Religion essentially consists only of this desire. You have been told again and again by the theologians that religion consists in knowing who God is. That is not true. The real desire is to become God - not to know God. Theologians are not very courageous, they are cowardly. You cannot be satisfied unless you have become a God. By knowing God nothing will be fulfilled - by knowing God you may even be in more turmoil and discontent, because then you will know that you are not God.
Knowledge cannot satisfy - only being. The East says: Knowing God is not the search. The desire, the dream, that haunts man and goes on haunting him down the ages, life after life, is to become God. Whenever somebody asks 'How to know God?' he is asking a wrong question, a cowardly question. The courageous person will ask 'How to become God?' - because in fact that is the only way to know Him too. By becoming, knowing happens. The real knowing is possible only by becoming.
The Zen masters say: If you want to know a bamboo, if you want to paint a bamboo, become a bamboo. That is the only way to know it. How can you know the bamboo from the outside? From the outside there will be only guesswork, speculation, inference, philosophy - but not knowledge.
You can know the bamboo only when you have become the bamboo - when you know the bamboo from its inside, from its inferiority, when you feel like a bamboo. When you know how it feels when the wind comes and makes the bamboo a dancing girl, how it feels when you become a dancing girl in the wind - only then do you know. You know only when you come to feel from the innermost core of the bamboo AS the bamboo. When you feel how it feels in the morning when the sun rises and knocks on the bamboo, wakes the bamboo. How it feels when a bird comes and sings, how it feels when the sky is full of stars, how it feels to the bamboo - from the outside you can only guess, and that will be a human guess.
No, there is no way to know from the outside. And if you cannot know even a bamboo from the outside, what to say about God? God means the totality of existence. You have to dissolve into this totality. This can be done only by great intention, by a fiery intention. It needs risking. Only those who risk totally, find.
This intention that brings revolution has to be understood. Only then will you be able to follow Kabir.
His sayings are cryptic. He does not expound, he does not explain, he simply declares. His sayings are that of a poet. He is not a systematic philosopher; he says one thing and then another. You will have to link those sayings with each other, you will have to make a garland - when the thread of understanding runs through the flowers, then only will you understand.
The first thing I would like to tell you today is: Revolution becomes possible only through the chemistry of intention. A total intention to become the whole, to fall into the whole, to abandon oneself into the whole.
A recently translated Dead Sea Scroll records a disciple asking Jesus 'Master, how can we get into the Kingdom of Heaven?' Jesus answers 'Follow the birds, the beasts, the fish, and they will lead you in.' A very strange saying. What does Jesus mean by saying 'Follow the birds, the beasts, the fish, and they will lead you in'? He means you have to be lost like the birds are lost - they don't have any self in them. The fish does not know that she is separate from the ocean - she is the ocean. The bird has no idea of any self, of any ego - when flying in the sky he is the sky. When alive he is life, when dead he is death. He does not cling, he does not hoard, he is not worried, he feels no responsibility. He is not: that's what Jesus means. If you want to know God you will have to disappear as you are.
That's what I mean by 'The Revolution': you will have to disappear as you are. You will have to become innocent - so much so that there is no self in you. When there is a self you are always cunning; the self is the root cunningness. With the self you cannot be innocent. If with the self you are innocent, that innocence will be nothing but a cultivated innocence - plastic, synthetic, false, a pretension, nothing but hypocrisy. Yes, you can pretend to be innocent, but that is not going to help you at all. The self can only pretend. When the self disappears you are innocent. Innocence is meditation, innocence is prayer, innocence is all.
Kabir calls his path the path of SAHAJ YOGA, the yoga of spontaneity. He says: Be innocent and spontaneous, and the totality will follow.
The stillness of God is not apart from the dance of our every day, it is at the heart of it. It is not by leaving the world that we come upon the heart of it, but rather by abandoning ourselves to the dance, by living fully and fearlessly at each and every stage of ourselves, that we move to the next stage. Or rather, we find ourselves moved as the bud finds itself a flower or the ungainly caterpillar is suddenly a winged thing, a honey-taster, a wanderer in summer gardens.
These words have to be remembered: innocence, spontaneity. Innocence like the bees and the birds, spontaneity like the fish and the flower. Utter selflessness, and you have arrived.
You have been told that if you seek you shall find. But I say unto you: Don't believe he who claims to have sought and found, but only he who has found without seeking. Seeking is basically the self. If you seek, that means the self is functioning. The journey starts in seeking but ends in a non-seeking mind. The journey starts with intention but ends in spontaneity. You have to learn two things: first you have to learn a great intensity to search, and then, very paradoxically, you will have to learn to drop that intensity and that seeking. Without intense search you will never move. And with that search and that intensity you will remain confined in the self.
So these are the two steps - paradoxical, but immensely valuable. And they have an inner consistency; from the outside it is not visible. First you have to seek and search. Jesus says 'Ask and it shall be given, seek and you shall find, knock and the door shall be opened unto you.'
This is the beginning of the journey - intensity, intention, search. But this is only the beginning.
The second step is, Lao Tzu says 'Seek and you shall not find. Don't seek, and find.' These are not two separate paths, these two steps are on the same path.
So Kabir drives the point deep into your heart that first a great flame-like desire is needed to be God.
But then finally that very desire becomes the last barrier - that has to be dropped too. Once that is dropped and you are innocent, things start happening. The bud opens and becomes a flower, the caterpillar becomes a butterfly. The sutras.
ARE YOU LOOKING FOR ME?
God is asking.
ARE YOU LOOKING FOR ME? I AM IN THE NEXT SEAT:
YOUR SHOULDER IS AGAINST MINE.
YOU WILL NOT FIND ME IN STUPAS, NOR IN INDIAN SHRINE ROOMS, NOR IN THE SYNAGOGUE, NOR IN CATHEDRALS, NOT IN MASSES, NOR KIRTANS, NOT IN LEGS TWISTED AROUND THE NECK, NOR IN EATING NOTHING BUT VEGETABLES.
WHEN YOU LOOK FOR ME, YOU WILL FIND ME INSTANTLY.
YOU WILL FIND ME IN THE TINIEST HOUSE OF TIME.
KABIR SAYS, 'STUDENT, TELL ME, WHAT IS GOD?
HE IS THE BREATH INSIDE THE BREATH.'
Go slowly. Savor each word of this strange man.
ARE YOU LOOKING FOR ME?
GOD asking man. Yes, that has been always so - God is always asking you 'Are you looking for me?' Of course you don't hear, because you are so full of noise. You are so full of your OWN noise, you can't hear this still small voice within your heart. And God has been asking and asking. He asks every moment of your life - day in, day out, year in, year out. He asks when you are happy, He asks when you are not happy. He asks when you are awake, He asks when you are asleep. He goes on asking. In each beat of your heart the question waits for you.
ARE YOU LOOKING FOR ME?
Don't go far away. Don't search for me somewhere else - because, God says, I am here.
I AM IN THE NEXT SEAT:
YOUR SHOULDER IS AGAINST MINE.
This is one of the most profound sayings. Get deep into it, dig it. He is in your wife, He is in your friend, He is in the children playing on the street, He is in your &lend, He is in your foe - because only He IS. He is in these birds singing, and in the trees, in me and in you. Yes, He is in the next seat, He is in your neighbor.
And where are you going to seek Him? People go far away. They travel to the Himalayas, they go to Tibet. For what? For whom? For God? As if God is not here. They look into the scriptures, they search in the past, in the Vedas and in the Bible and in the Koran. As if God has ceased to be. As if God is no more a contemporary, as if for God you always have to go into the past. As if in those days He USED to exist and now He has ceased to exist. Or you imagine God in some afterlife. When you have left this body and this earth then in heaven, in some imagined dreamland, you will find God.
Kabir says: He is here! He is now! The here and the now consist only of Him and nothing else.
To look for Him somewhere else is just a way to avoid Him. That's an escape from God; you are be fooling yourself. Looking for Him somewhere else is just a way of avoiding Him, it is just a way so that you need not look here now. People go to the temples and to the synagogue and to the churches just to avoid Him - because He is there in their houses.
He is in your every breath. You need not go anywhere: come home and you will find Him. Don't go anywhere - that is the sure way of not finding Him. That's why you have not been able to find Him up to now, because you don't look close by. And He is in the corner. He is in the breeze that comes and plays with your hair, and He is in the sun rays dancing on your face, and He is in the lake. Start looking for Him at close quarters. And one day you will be surprised to find that He is your within beyond.
ARE YOU LOOKING FOR ME? I AM IN THE NEXT SEAT:
YOUR SHOULDER IS AGAINST MINE.
Contemplate on this, imbibe this. Just feel the shoulder of your neighbor - for a moment remember it...
I AM IN THE NEXT SEAT:
YOUR SHOULDER IS AGAINST MINE.
No, it looks not possible. In the neighbor? In your wife? In your husband? In your child? Your mind says no. That is bringing God too much down on the earth, and we have become accustomed to keep Him far away. It is safer to keep Him far away, you need not worry about Him. He is happy in His heaven and you are happy here, and there is such a long distance between you two that there is no need to worry about Him. To have Him so close you will feel uncomfortable. To see Him in your child will be difficult, because the child sometimes is naughty and the child sometimes drives you nuts - how can you see God in him? How can you see God in your woman who is constantly nagging YOU? How can you see God in your man who is always angry?
No, God has to be somewhere far away. You don't want Him to become real, you live with an abstract God. But the abstract God is a dead God, it is only a concept. Let Him become flesh. That is the meaning of Kabir when he says:
ARE YOU LOOKING FOR ME? I AM IN THE NEXT SEAT:
YOUR SHOULDER IS AGAINST MINE.
Let God be of bones and flesh and blood. Let Him be real! We have lived with the unreal God too long and we have suffered because of this unreal God. Don't divide the world and the other world.
That is the meaning of Kabir - he is saying that there is only one world. There are two ways to look at it, but the world is one, the world is not two. There is no other world than this, this is the only world there is. This is that; the other world is contained in this world.
But there are two attitudes. You can see this world just from the outside - then it is material, then it is mundane, profane. If you look at it from the inside then it is sacred, holy. Then you don't divide God and His creation; then He is in the creation. Then He IS the creation, He is the creative energy.
This is a great jump into understanding - to conceive of God as real human beings, beasts, birds, trees, rocks. Bring your God to the earth! You have exiled Him in heaven and then you go on crying 'How to find Him?' You have thrown Him away, you have debarred Him, you don't allow Him to enter into your earth and your earthly existence. Open your doors, drop your wrong conceptions that God is somehow other-worldly. Let Him become flesh. That is the meaning of God coming to earth in Krishna, in Christ, in Buddha. Whenever somebody has understood it he has become a symbol of God on the earth - he has become a God-man.
Christians missed the mystery of Christ, they forgot the whole message contained in the metaphor.
Christ is a metaphor: if you KNOW, God walks on the earth, drinks with you, eats with you, holds your hands, hugs you. The people who lived with Jesus, even they were not very accepting of the phenomenon, they were also very doubtful. 'Is Jesus God? Is he really the son of God?' They knew perfectly well that he was the son of Mary and the carpenter Joseph.
That's why it was impossible for Jesus to work in his own village. That's why he had to say 'A prophet is never accepted by his own people.' If Jews could not accept him, that is just part of human nature; it is nothing special to Jews. How could they accept him? They knew perfectly well he was born out of the womb of a woman, an earthly womb. 'How can he be God? He is just like us, not at all different. How can he be the son of God?' They were waiting for a messiah who would come from the clouds. And this man comes from the womb, as everybody else comes.
He will come sitting on the clouds, the real messiah. He will not have the body, this rotten physical body. He will have a spiritual body of light - it will not have any weight; he will not have blood and bones, he will not be flesh. Then they will accept him.
But whenever God comes, He comes in flesh. And He is always rejected. It is not surprising that people rejected Jesus. Even his own disciples were doubtful; they all abandoned him in the last moment.
Once a Christian missionary came to see me and he asked 'What do you think - why was Jesus crucified?' I said 'It is not such a great question or any complicated problem. It is simple: because his disciples did not believe in him.' He was not waiting for that answer. He said 'What do you mean?'
I said 'They could not protect him. They could not die for him, they could not stand for him, they could not be witnesses to the world.'
Just think - a few hundred disciples, if they were ready to die with him on the cross, it would have been a totally different world. They would have been a proof. They would have said 'We trusted this man. We trusted in him in life, we trust in him in death. We celebrated with him, now we are ready to die with him.'
They all escaped. The day Jesus was crucified there was nobody. Only one disciple was lurking behind the crowd - even he said thrice 'I am not a disciple of Jesus.' When he was brought down from the cross only three women were there to take him down. A prostitute was there - Mary Magdalene was there - but where were the disciples, the apostles? They had all escaped; they were afraid. Their doubt surfaced, their trust was not total, their surrender was phony. They could not protect this man.
This has never happened in India; this is a surprise. Jesus was crucified so easily because the disciples could not protect him. In India it has never happened - Buddha was not crucified, nor was Mahavir crucified, nor Krishna. And they were not less dangerous people than Jesus, they were MORE dangerous. Kabir was not crucified - why?
India knows how to protect. When something of the divine comes it is very fragile. It can be destroyed very easily like a flower - you can just throw a stone on a rose and it is gone. It does not prove that the rose was not as significant, as real, as the rock. It simply proves that the rose was very delicate, belonged to some other dimension of life, was alien here amongst rocks.
Buddha was saved. Those ten thousand disciples were continuously around him. They knew perfectly well that what he was saying was dangerous, the society would not tolerate it - the society was not tolerating it - but they created a great wall of protection. Their trust was immense. Buddha was more fortunate than Jesus.
In the East, the tradition of the master and the disciple is so ancient and so many masters have walked on the earth that the East knows how to protect a master. Jesus was not crucified because the Jews were cruel, no. Hindus are just as cruel as Jews, Mohammedans just as cruel; there is not much difference. He was killed because his disciples were impotent. They escaped, they were not ready to sacrifice themselves for him. They were friends only when everything was going well.
When the journey became rough then it was not their cup of tea. Then they escaped; then they simply denied him.
God walks many times on the earth in a very visible form but then too you cannot accept Him, in a very luminous form but then too you cannot accept Him - because He has to take the same form as you. Because you condemn yourself, you cannot accept God in the body. But that is the only way for Him to exist - that is the only way for anything to exist.
Kabir is declaring that God is found in flesh. He is as real as you are...
YOUR SHOULDER IS AGAINST MINE.
YOU WILL NOT FIND ME IN STUPAS...
Don't waste your time. Don't go in search of sacred places...
NOR IN INDIAN SHRINE ROOMS, NOR IN THE SYNAGOGUE, NOR IN CATHEDRALS, NOT IN MASSES, NOR IN KIRTANS, NOT IN LEGS TWISTING AROUND THE NECK...
Kabir says: You can go on practicing yoga for lives, and you will not find Him. Of course yoga will give you better health - that is another matter; that has nothing to do with God. Yoga may help you to live longer, that is another matter - what has that to do with God?
And you can go to the temples and the mosques and the churches, and they will give you comfort and consolation. But consolation is not going to help either. In fact that will be destructive, because all consolation hinders your intensity to seek and search. The temples are pseudo-places - they have been created as substitutes so people can have cheap religion. Nobody wants to risk, nobody wants to pay the price. People want some cheap religion available to them, so whenever they feel a hunger for God they can go to the temple and to the priest and can have consolation: 'Yes, I have done something.'
That simply puts the fire of their search out; it puts out the fire. All consolations destroy your urge to search - what is the point when you can find consolations so cheaply? All consolations have to be taken away from you. That is the revolution of Kabir: Destroy all consolations. And your so-called religion is nothing but a consolation. When there is no consolation you will have to search - it will become a continuous urge in you. The fire will grow and grow and it will enflame your being.
NOR CAN YOU FIND HIM IN EATING NOTHING BUT VEGETABLES.
Now, these are all stupid things. But people ARE stupid, and they want something very mediocre to believe in. Now, there are people who think that if you go on eating vegetables, just vegetables and nothing else, you will attain to God. And I am not saying that to be a vegetarian is bad - it is good. That is not what Kabir means. He says: It is irrelevant. To be a vegetarian is good, more human, more aesthetic - but it has nothing to do with the search for God. And if you think that this is enough, then your very idea will become a barrier. Then you will be complacent. Then you will sit m your home eating your vegetables and you will think 'All that can be done, I am doing.'
But you can go on eating vegetables and you can go on vegetating. That is not going to help.
And remember again, Kabir is not saying that vegetarianism is not good - he was a vegetarian. But these are irrelevant points. You can do yoga exercise, you can be a vegetarian - good, but nothing to do with God as such. And if you think this is enough, more than enough, all that one can do, then you are stuck. Then you will not move, then there will be no revolution in your life - you will live in misery and you will die in misery. And God was so close by. And just a touch, just one experience, one glimpse, would have transformed you to utter joy.
WHEN YOU LOOK FOR ME, YOU WILL FIND ME INSTANTLY.
Kabir says: When you LOOK for me... When there is the intention, the desire, the utter desire to know - when you are ready to stake all for that desire - that is the meaning of:
WHEN YOU LOOK FUR NOEL YOU WILL FINAL ME INSTANTLY Not even a single moment do you have to wait - because God is not far away, so there is no need for any time to elapse. You are not to journey to Him, you have just to be awake. And your great intensity for the search will make you awake.
Have you ever tried a simple experiment? You want to get up early in the morning, five o'clock, and at night when you go to sleep you simply make a deep desire. You put a seed in your being: 'At five o'clock I am going to be awake. Nothing is going to hinder me, I will suddenly find myself awake.' If you have not tried it, try and you will be surprised - just a deep desire to be awake at five, and at five you will find you are awake, your eyes are open. Suddenly sleep disappears.
And one more surprise will be waiting for you, that it is exactly five. The body has a clock inside it; the body has an understanding of time, a very accurate understanding of time. Just the intensity, just the honesty, the sincerity - the only thing to remember is the sincerity. When you are saying 'I will get up at five' don't be insincere. Underneath, don't go on saying 'Who bothers? - this is just an experiment, and it is not going to happen, and it is so cold... anyway, just to see whether it happens or not...' If these things are there then it will not happen; you will have destroyed it. Trust it and it will happen.
And the same is true about your metaphysical sleep. You are asleep metaphysically, because you don't know who you are. That is the metaphysical sleep. You don't know what this existence is - that is the metaphysical sleep. If you make an intense total desire to wake up, you can wake up instantly this moment. It is you who have decided to remain asleep, it is you who can come out of it; nobody else is responsible for it. And don't go on throwing responsibility on others, because that is what keeps you asleep - if others are responsible for your sleep then what can you do? When others change, when they decide to wake you, then you will wake up.
Mind is so cunning, it goes on finding explanations. There are people who say 'When God wants us to be awake He will wake us. Meanwhile, we sleep. What can we do? It is fate.' These are cunning tricks. God is constantly calling you, but He never interferes with your freedom. He respects your freedom; your freedom is far more valuable then anything else. So if you decide to be asleep, you remain asleep. He goes on calling but He does not disturb you, He does not come and shake you and shock you. That's why His voice is called 'the still small voice'. He goes on speaking in such silent ways that if you want to hear you will hear, if you don't want to hear there is no need to hear.
WHEN YOU LOOK FOR ME, YOU WILL FIND ME INSTANTLY.
In the poetry of Kabir, in his philosophy, this idea 'If you look for me' is very central. What exactly he means is that the look has not to be lukewarm. You can meet with God only when you are boiling at a hundred degrees - only then do you evaporate. Only then does the visible meet with the invisible - the earth starts moving into the sky, only at a hundred degrees' temperature. Ninety-nine won't do - you will become hot but you will not evaporate. Total intensity is needed, totality is needed.
All partial efforts are useless. If you are doing partial efforts it is better not to. Why waste time? - because it is not going to happen; you could have done something else. Whenever you are total in it, it happens instantly. And when you look for God the look has to be so total that there is no looker in it - just as when the dance is total there is no dancer in it, only dance.
When you are listening to me totally there is no listener in it, only listening. When I am speaking to you there is no speaker in it, only speaking. Whenever the dancer is there AND the dance then there is not totality. Then the energy is divided into two, the dancer and the dance; then there is a contradiction in it. But when-ever the dancer disappears into the dance, it is what meditation is all about.
When you are looking for God, BE the look and disappear in the look. Just become the eyes and forget everything else, and instantly it is revealed.
YOU WILL FIND ME IN THE TINIEST HOUSE OF TIME.
The word that Kabir uses for 'the tiniest house of time' and that has always been used in the East is PAL. PAL means the gap between two moments. One moment passes, another comes, between the two there is a tiny gap - has to be, otherwise one moment will overlap the other. It is a very very tiny space, but it has to be there to make those two moments distinct and separate. It is very swift, but that gap is the door - through that gap you enter into eternity. That gap is called PAL. In English there is no word for it; in English 'the tiniest house of time' is the moment. But what is between two moments? Look at my two fingers: between the two fingers there is a gap - those two fingers can be as close as possible but there is a gap. That gap between two moments is called PAL. That is the tiniest, that is the atom of time.
That PAL IS the door to now. That gap is the present. One moment has become past, another moment is still in the future, and between the two is the gap, the present.
YOU WILL FIND ME IN THE TINIEST HOUSE OF TIME.
KABIR SAYS, 'STUDENT, TELL ME, WHAT IS GOD?
HE IS THE BREATH INSIDE THE BREATH.'
Whenever you ask about God you ask as if God is there like a problem to be encountered. You ask as if you are standing outside God and speculating, observing Him. You ask as if God is an object.
God is not an object, God is your subjectivity. God is not there outside, God is your inferiority, your innerness. That is the meaning when Kabir says:
HE IS THE BREATH INSIDE THE BREATH.
Watch your breath and you will come to know what he means - you will see one thing which cannot be seen unless you watch your breath. Buddha made it a great technique for meditation, watching the breath, because through watching it you will come to know the breath inside the breath.
The word 'breath' means life. In Sanskrit the word for breath is prank: prank means life. In Hebrew the word for breath means spirit. In all the languages of the world, breath is thought to be synonymous with life or spirit or soul. But breath is not the real soul - you will come to this experience only when you watch.
Try a small experiment: sitting silently, just start watching your breath. The easiest way to watch is from the entrance of the nose. When the breath comes in, feel the touch of the breath at the entrance of the nose - watch it there. The touch will be easier to watch, breath will be too subtle; in the beginning just watch the touch. The breath goes in, and you feel it going in: watch it. And then follow it, go with it. You will find there comes a point where it stops. Just somewhere near your navel it stops - for a tiny tiny moment, for a pal, it stops. Then it moves outwards again; then follow it - again feel the touch, the breath going out of the nose. Follow it, go with it outside - again you will come to a point, the breath stops for a very tiny moment. Then again the cycle starts.
Inhalation, gap, exhalation, gap, inhalation, gap. That gap is the most mysterious phenomenon inside you. When the breath comes in and stops and there is no movement, that is the point where one can meet God. Or when the breath goes out and stops and there is no movement.
Remember, you are not to stop it; it stops on its own. If you stop it you will miss the whole point, because the doer will come in and witnessing will disappear. You are not to do anything about it. You are not to change the breath pattern, you are neither to inhale nor to exhale. It is not like pranayam of yoga, where you start manipulating the breath; it is not that. You don't touch the breath at all - you allow its naturalness, its natural flow. When it goes out you follow it, when it comes in you follow it.
And soon you will become aware that there are two gaps. In those two gaps is the door. And in those two gaps you will understand, you will see, that breath itself is not life - maybe a food for life, just like other foods, but not life itself. Because when the breathing stops you are there, perfectly there - you are perfectly conscious, utterly conscious. And the breath has stopped, breathing is no more there, and you are there.
And once you continue this watching of the breath - what Buddha calls vipassana or anapanasati you - if you go on watching it, watching it, watching it, slowly slowly you will see the gap is increasing and becoming bigger. Finally it happens that for minutes together the gap remains. One breath goes in, and the gap... and for minutes the breath does not go out. All has stopped. The world has stopped, time has stopped, thinking has stopped. Because when the breath stops, thinking is not possible. And when the breath stops for minutes together, thinking is impossible, absolutely impossible - because the thought process needs continuous oxygen, and your thought process and your breathing are very deeply related.
When you are angry your breath has a different rhythm, when you are sexually stimulated you have a different breath rhythm, when you are silent a different breath rhythm again. When you are happy a different breath rhythm, when you are sad a different rhythm again. Your breathing goes on changing with the moods of the mind. The vice versa is also true - when the breath changes, the moods of the mind change. And when breath stops, mind stops.
In that stopping of the mind the whole world stops - because the mind is the world. And in that stopping you come to know for the first time what is the breath inside the breath: life inside life. That experience is liberating. That experience makes you alert of God - and God is not a person but the experience of life itself.
WHAT HAS DEATH AND A THICK BODY DANCES BEFORE WHAT HAS NO THICK BODY AND NO DEATH.
In this experience you will see that there are two things within you: the deathless and the mortal.
The body is mortal, full of death. And inside the body there is a transcendence which is deathless.
WHAT HAS DEATH AND A THICK BODY...
The gross body, the physical body, is mortal. This mortal body goes on dancing before something which has no death and no thick body, no gross body. Inside you there is a witness, an eternal witness - before that eternal witness all dance continues. The body goes on dancing in a thousand and one ways: the dance when you were a child, and the dance when you were young and in love and in passion, and the dance when you become old and the passion disappears and wisdom arises - and so many dances.
But all these dances are of the mortal body, the body that is made of physical elements and will disappear. It is only a combination for the time being; it is a compound, it cannot last for ever. It is a machine - but behind the machine, behind this mortal body, there is something immortal, deathless.
That is your consciousness - call it God, call it the soul, or call it whatsoever you feel like.
This innermost core of your existence is God.
HE IS THE BREATH INSIDE THE BREATH.
WHAT HAS DEATH AND A THICK BODY DANCES BEFORE WHAT HAS NO THICK BODY AND NO DEATH.
THIS IS YOUR REAL LIFE. You are too much attached with the body, identified with the body, that's why you are so much afraid of death. Otherwise, to be afraid of death is ridiculous - because you cannot die; you in your innermost core cannot die. You only go on changing houses, from one body to another. You have lived in many bodies, you have passed through many bodies.
When Buddha became enlightened, the first thing he said to nature was this - he looked at the sky and said 'Now you will not need to create another house for me.' Strange words. To whom was he talking? He was just saying to nature in general, at large: 'You will not have to trouble yourself again, you will not need to make a body for me. I have understood who I am.'
In that understanding, one is freed from the body of death. In that moment...
THE TRUMPET SAYS, 'I AM YOU.'
In that moment the whole existence, God, says to you: I am you.
THE SPIRITUAL MASTER ARRIVES AND BOWS DOWN TO THE BEGINNING STUDENT.
And now this has happened for the first time to you. You are just a beginning student, just on the threshold of the temple of God - but when it happens...
THE SPIRITUAL MASTER ARRIVES AND BOWS DOWN TO THE BEGINNING STUDENT.
God comes and bows down to you, the whole existence bows down to you. The great miracle has happened: you are no more, the self has disappeared. The whole existence celebrates it, worships it, bows down to you.
THE SPIRITUAL MASTER ARRIVES AND BOWS DOWN TO THE BEGINNING STUDENT.
TRY TO LIVE TO SEE THIS!
Kabir says: Try to live to see this - don't go without seeing it. Realize this, this is the goal of all spirituality.
And remember these words of Michael Adam:
Life is a dance... the dance goes on with us and without us. The dance is: it always is... stones dance as surely as stars. A rock is a slow dance; a flower is a little faster... The choice is ours: to dance with the quick, or to join the procession of the dead. The way of the dead brings security, comfort, fame, so that there can be no good reason to join the dance. To give a motive to this way of life, which is the way of love, is to belittle it. The whole point is its pointlessness. One dances for no reason, as the rose opens in the morning and is for no reason red. There is no virtue in it.
The dance of life is God's dance. You can participate in it or you can withhold yourself. There is every reason to withhold - the society is afraid of all those people who start dancing with God, because they become dangerous, they become rebellious, they become free. They are no more slaves, they throw their chains, they get out of all prisons. They dance in the streets, they dance under the stars, they participate in God's dance. They are not afraid of death, so they cannot be reduced to slaves.
The fear of death is the root cause that you can be converted into a slave. Without fear, who can reduce you to a slave? A fearless man cannot be reduced to a slave, so society tries in every way to make you afraid. The society does not want you to know that you are life eternal. It does not want you to know that death is illusory, that it doesn't happen really, that it only appears to happen - that death is utterly false, that it is a lie. The society does not want it, the society wants you to live in illusions. The truth is too much.
'The choice is ours: to dance with the quick, or to join the procession of the dead.' But the society is the procession of the dead. Corpses - walking around, moving around, manipulating each other, bossing each other about. The choice is ours. Remember: if you respect life you should not allow any death to settle in you, you should not allow any fear to settle in you. And you should not compromise - there is no need.
But 'The way of the dead brings security, comfort, fame, so that there can be no good reason to join the dance.' The society respects the crippled, the paralyzed, the dull, the stupid, the dead - they are good people, they are civilized people. It kills a Christ, it poisons a Socrates, it tries in every way to destroy a Buddha. But it respects the ordinary, the mediocre, the bourgeois, the middle-class - there is an investment in it. If you want to enjoy the dance of life - and without enjoying it you will be missing the whole opportunity, a great opportunity, a great benediction - if you want to enjoy the dance of life you will have to take this risk. You will have to drop all desire for fame, you will have to drop all desire for respectability.
If you can drop the desire for respectability, one day it happens - the miracle:
THE SPIRITUAL MASTER ARRIVES AND BOWS DOWN TO THE BEGINNING STUDENT.
TRY TO LIVE TO SEE THIS!
You must have heard a famous philosophic saying: NETI NETI. It means 'not this, not that'. The philosopher goes on saying 'This is not God, that is not God.' Ask the philosopher 'What is God?' and he never answers it. He simply goes on saying what is not God. 'NETI NETI: this is not God, that is not God' - his method is that of elimination. He says 'When I have denied all that is not God then whatsoever is left is God.' This is a very roundabout way, very long, unending.
It is as if you ask somebody 'Who is the man named Rama?' - and the person starts taking you on a tour of the world and he says 'This is not Rama, this is not Rama, this is not Rama...' Millions and millions of people are there, and he goes on and goes on and denies everybody who is not Rama.
And then - if that day ever comes - he says 'Now whosoever is left and has not been pointedly denied is Rama.' By that time you may have forgotten your question.
Kabir says just the polar opposite. The philosopher says: NETI NETI - not this, not that. Kabir says:
ITI ITI - it is here, it is here, this, this. Kabir says: He is everywhere. There is no need to deny, there is no need to go on saying 'This is not God, that is not God.' This is it. Everything is it. ITI ITI.
This approach is very realistic, very earthly. That's why he says:
ARE YOU LOOKING FOR ME? I AM HERE IN THE NEXT SEAT...
ITI ITI.
... YOUR SHOULDER IS AGAINST MINE.
YOU WILL NOT FIND ME IN THE STUPAS, NOR IN INDIAN SHRINE ROOMS, NOR IN THE SYNAGOGUE, NOR IN CATHEDRALS, NOT IN MASSES, NOR KIRTANS, NOT IN LEGS TWISTING AROUND THE NECK...
ITI ITI: I am here, I am here.
... NOR IN EATING NOTHING BUT VEGETABLES.
WHEN YOU LOOK FOR ME, YOU WILL FIND ME INSTANTLY...
ITI ITI - because I am here, because I have always been here, because I have never gone anywhere else. ITI ITI.
YOU WILL FIND ME IN THE TINIEST HOUSE OF TIME.
KABIR SAYS, 'STUDENT, TELL ME, WHAT IS GOD?
HE IS IN THE BREATH INSIDE THE BREATH.'
WHAT HAS DEATH AND A THICK BODY DANCES BEFORE WHAT HAS NO THICK BODY AND NO DEATH.
THE TRUMPET SAYS, 'I AM YOU.'
ITI ITI.
THE SPIRITUAL MASTER ARRIVES AND BOWS DOWN TO THE BEGINNING STUDENT.
TRY TO LIVE TO SEE THIS!
ITI ITI.