There is no such thing as permanence at all. Everything is constantly changing. Everything is in a flux. Because you cannot face the impermanence of all relationships, you invent sentiments, romance, and dramatic emotions to give them certainty. Therefore you are always in conflict.
All I can guarantee you is that as long as you are searching for happiness, you will remain unhappy.
Nature is busy creating absolutely unique individuals, whereas culture has invented a single mold to which all must conform. It is grotesque.
There is no power outside of man. Man has created God out of fear. So the problem is fear and not God.
What is there to understand? The significance of life? How long will it take to understand the significance and the meaning of life? 20 years? 30 years? And the same question will be here in another 20 years, I guarantee you. Until you stop asking that question. When that question is not there, you are there. So that’s the reason why you keep asking the question: you do not want the question to come to an end. When that comes to an end, there will not be anybody, left there, to find out the meaning, the purpose and the significance of life.
Charity is the filthiest invention of the human mind: first you steal what belongs to everyone; then you use the law and various other means to protect it.
You give charity to prevent the have-nots from rebelling against you. It also makes you feel less guilty. All do-gooders feel ‘high’ when they do good.
The body is a fortuitous concourse of atoms. There is no death for the body, only an exchange of atoms. Their changing places and taking different forms is what we call ‘death.’ It’s a process which restores the energy level in nature that has gone down. In reality, nothing is born and nothing is dead.
I have searched everywhere to find an answer to my question, ‘Is there enlightenment?’ but have never questioned the search itself. Because I have assumed that goal of enlightenment exists, I have had to search. It is the search itself which has been choking me and keeping me out of my natural state. There is no such thing as spiritual or psychological enlightenment because there is no such thing as spirit or psyche at all. I have been a damn fool all my life, searching for something which does not exist. My search is at an end.
*Only if you reject all the other paths can you discover your own path.
You think when you don’t want to do anything. Thinking is a poor alternative to acting. Your thinking is consuming all your energy. Act, don’t think!
This question haunted me all my life and suddenly it hit me: ‘There is no self to realize. What the hell have I been doing all this time?’ You see, that hits you like lightning. Once that hits you, the whole mechanism of the body that is controlled by this thought is shattered. What is left is the tremendous living organism with an intelligence of its own. What you are left with is the pulse, the beat and the throb of life.
All your experiences, all your meditations, all your prayer, all that you do, is self-centred. It is strengthening the self, adding momentum, gathering momentum, so it is taking you in the opposite direction. Whatever you do to be free from the self also is a self-centred activity.
Everything you stand for, believe in, experience and aspire to is the result of thought. And thought is destructive because it is nothing more than a protective mechanism, programmed to protect its own interests at all costs.
You are not ready to accept the fact that you have to give up. A complete and total ‘surrender’.
It is a state of hopelessness which says that there is no way out. Any movement in any direction, on any dimension, at any level, is taking you away from yourself.
Food, clothing and shelter — these are the basic needs. Beyond that, if you want anything, it is the beginning of self-deception.
The body is not interested in anything you are interested in. And that is the battle that is going on all the time.
My interest is to point out to you that you can walk, and please throw away all those crutches. If you are really handicapped, I wouldn’t advise you to do any such thing. But you are made to feel by other people that you are handicapped so that they could sell you those crutches. Throw them away and you can walk. That’s all that I can say. ‘If I fall….’ – that is your fear. Put the crutches away, and you are not going to fall.
The plain fact is that if you don’t have a problem, you create one. If you don’t have a problem you don’t feel that you are living.
Man is just a memory. You understand things around you by the help of the knowledge that was put in you. You perhaps need the artist to explain his modern art, but you don’t need anybody’s help to understand a flower. You can deal with anything, you can do anything if you do not waste your energy trying to achieve imaginary goals.
The search ends with the realization that there is no such thing as enlightenment. By searching, you want to be free from the self, but whatever you are doing to free yourself from the self is the self. How can I make you understand this simple thing? There is no ‘how’. If I tell you that, it will only add more momentum to that (search), strengthen that momentum. That is the question of all questions: “How, how, how?”
Nature is interested in only two things–to survive and to reproduce one like itself. Anything you superimpose on that, all the cultural input, is responsible for the boredom of man.
There is no such thing as experience here. You seem to know, you imagine. Imagination must come to an end…I don’t know how to put it. The absence of imagination, the absence of will, the absence of effort, the absence of all movement in any direction, on any level, in any dimension – THAT is the thing. That is a thing that cannot be experienced at all. It is not an experience.
You know, this dialogue is only helpful when we come, both of us, to a point where we realize that no dialogue is possible, that no dialogue is necessary. When I say understanding or seeing, they mean something different to me. Understanding is a state of being where the question isn’t there any more. There is nothing there that says, “Now I understand!” That’s the basic difficulty between us. By understanding what I am saying, you are not going to get anywhere.
Your situation and prospects only seem hopeless because you have ideas of hope. Knock off that hope and the crippling feelings of helplessness go with it.
There is no such thing as truth. The only thing that is actually there is your ‘logically’ ascertained premise, which you call truth.
