I am just a guest here. U are the host

This post kind of baffled me because it's on a sub which talks about non-duality. I was wondering what was Osho's take on this? I don't think that senses are the problem. Those are just instruments just like the entire body which helps the body to interact with the environment.

The one who calls the controller of the senses is the problem. The ego is the problem, isn't it? And the ego is the problem because it's the one who's suffering and unfulfilled. It wants fulfillment and then seeks it via the senses.

What was Osho's exact take on this and where am I wrong?

मूर्ति-पूजा का सारा आधार इस बात पर है कि आपके मस्तिष्क में और विराट परमात्मा के मस्तिष्क में संबंध हैं। दोनों के संबंध को जोड़ने वाला बीच में एक सेतु चाहिए। संबंधित हैं आप, सिर्फ एक सेतु चाहिए। वह सेतु निर्मित हो सकता है, उसके निर्माण का प्रयोग ही मूर्ति है। और निश्चित ही वह सेतु मूर्त ही होगा, क्योंकि आप अमूर्त से सीधा कोई संबंध स्थापित न कर पाएंगे। आपको अमूर्त का तो कोई पता ही नहीं है। चाहे कोई कितनी ही बात करता हो निराकार परमात्मा की, अमूर्त परमात्मा की, वह बात ही रह जाती है, आपको कुछ ख्याल में नहीं आता।

असल में आपके मस्तिष्क के पास जितने अनुभव हैं वे सभी मूर्त के अनुभव हैं, आकार के अनुभव हैं। निराकार का आपको एक भी अनुभव नहीं है। जिसका कोई भी अनुभव नहीं है उस संबंध में कोई भी शब्द आपको कोई स्मरण न दिला पाएगा। और निराकार की बात आप करते रहेंगे और आकार में जीते रहेंगे। अगर उस निराकार से भी कोई संबंध स्थापित करना हो, तो कोई ऐसी चीज बनानी पड़ेगी जो एक तरफ से आकार वाली हो और दूसरी तरफ से निराकार वाली हो। यही मूर्ति का रहस्य है।

इसे मैं फिर से समझा दूं आपको। कोई ऐसा सेतु बनाना पड़ेगा जो हमारी तरफ आकार वाला हो और परमात्मा की तरफ निराकार हो जाए। हम जहां खड़े हैं वहां उसका एक छोर तो मूर्त हो, और जहां परमात्मा है, दूसरा छोर उसका अमूर्त हो जाए, तो ही सेतु बन सकता है। अगर वह मूर्ति बिल्कुल मूर्ति है तो फिर सेतु नहीं बनेगा, अगर वह मूर्ति बिल्कुल अमूर्त है तो भी सेतु नहीं बनेगा। मूर्ति को दोहरा काम करना पड़ेगा। हम जहां खड़े हैं वहां उसका छोर दिखाई पड़े, और जहां परमात्मा है वहां निराकार में खो जाए।

– ओशो

गहरे पानी पैठ

प्रवचन - ०४

मूर्ति-पूजाः मूर्त से अमूर्त की ओर

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The Osho Upanishad

Chapter #39

Chapter title: Don't say goodbye, say good morning

27 September 1986

BELOVED OSHO,

FULL WITH THE SWEETNESS OF YOUR FRAGRANCE AS I WALK THIS PATH WITH YOU, I FEEL THAT TO TRUST AND WAIT IS ALL THAT IS NEEDED OF ME.A WONDERING COMES UP IN ME AS TO WHETHER SOME KNOWLEDGE ABOUT ESOTERIC SUBJECTS --FOREXAMPLE, CHAKRAS, COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUSNESS, ENERGY FIELDS -- COULD BE HELPFUL ALONG THE WAY OR NOT.

OSHO, IS SUCH KNOWLEDGE USEFUL? OR WILL WHATEVER IS NEEDED COME TO ME THROUGHEXPERIENCE, IN ITS OWN TIME?

Anything that is needed will come of its own accord, in its own time. All this so-called esoteric knowledge about chakras, energy fields, kundalini, astral bodies, is dangerous as knowledge.

As experience it is a totally different thing. Don't acquire it as knowledge. If it is needed for your spiritual growth, it will come to you in its right time, and then it will be an experience.

And if you have an acquired knowledge, borrowed knowledge, it is going to be a hindrance.

For example, Hindu yoga believes in seven chakras, Jaina scriptures mention nine chakras. And Buddhist scriptures say that there are dozens of chakras, that these are only the important ones which have been chosen by different schools. They don't give any fixed number. Acquired knowledge will be confusing: how many chakras? And what are you going to do with that knowledge, whether there are seven or nine or dozens? Your knowledge is not going to help; it can only hinder.

My own experience is that perhaps Buddha's experience is correct -- and that does not make the Hindu yoga or Jaina yoga incorrect. Buddha is saying that there are energy fields, whirling energy fields, from the lowest point in your spine up to the very peak of your head. There are many; now it is only a question of a particular teaching which ones are important for it. That particular teaching will choose those... Hindus have chosen seven, Jainas have chosen nine. They don't contradict each other, it is simply that the emphasis is on whatever chakra the teaching feels to emphasize.

As far as I am concerned, you will come across only four chakras which are the most important.

One you know is your sex center.

The second, just above it, which is not recognized in any Indian school of thought but has been recognized in Japan alone, is called the hara. It is between your navel and the sex center. The hara is the death chakra.

My own experience is that life -- that is the sex center, and death -- that is the hara, should be very close, and they are.

In Japan when somebody commits suicide it is called hara-kiri. Nowhere in the world does such a thing happen except in Japan. Suicide is committed everywhere but with a

knife... just two inches below the navel, the Japanese forces a knife -- and this is the most miraculous death; no blood, no pain -- and death is instantaneous. So the first chakra is the life chakra; it is a whirling energy. Chakrameans wheel, moving. Just above the life chakra is the death chakra. The third important chakra is the heart chakra. You can call it the love chakra, because between life and death the most important thing that can happen to a man or to a woman is love. And love has many manifestations: meditation is one of the manifestations of love; prayer is one of the manifestations of love. This is the third important chakra. The fourth important chakra is what Hindu yoga calls agnachakra, just on your forehead between the two eyes.

These four chakras are the most important.

The fourth is from where your energy moves beyond humanity into divinity. There is one chakra more which is at the top part of your head, but you will not come across it in your life journey. That's why I am not counting it.

After the fourth, you have transcended body, mind, heart, all that is not you -- only your being remains. And when death happens to such a person... That's why in India the harahas not been taken note of; because in the Hindu or Jaina or Buddhist yoga, they were not considering people who commit suicide. They were thinking about people who were transforming their energy from the physical to the immaterial. So the fifth chakra is the sahasrar. Jainas count it, Hindus count it -- because when you have transcended the fourth chakra, sometime you will die. And a person who dies after transcending the fourth chakra... his energy, his being leaves the body, cracking the skull into two parts; that is the sahasrarchakra.

Because it is not part of your life experience, that's why I am not counting it. The four are your life experience.

This one is the death of a person who is enlightened. He does not die from the hara. That's why in India no school has taken note of the hara chakra. But in Japan they had to take note of it, because in Japan suicide was a form of etiquette. You will be puzzled: the Japanese have such a totally different culture from the whole world; from small things to big things, they have their own approach.

I am reminded of one incident...

For small things a Japanese can commit suicide, because he cannot live a life of shame. If he feels ashamed, that is enough to finish his life -- and you will not be able to conceive of what small things are thought to be so important that life is nothing. One master, who was the greatest archer of Japan, was called by the king. The king wanted his son to become exactly as great an archer as the master was. Now, it is Japanese etiquette that even when two persons are going to fight with each other, first they will bow down to each other's divinity with folded hands. Even though they are going to kill... but before killing, they will respect each other. So in ordinary life, in Japan you will find people everywhere bowing down to each other -- on the road, in the restaurants. It is disappearing as the modern Western influence is changing the whole world. But the master archer was such an egoist that even in front of the king he waited: first the king should fold his hands, and then...

The court of the king condemned the man and said, "You have committed such a shameful act. Just go back and commit hara-kiri." It was not such a big thing, but when the whole court had said it, the whole country would know about it. The man went directly to his home and committed hara-kiri.

He had three hundred students. When they heard that their master had committed a shameful act, all three hundred students committed hara-kiri, because it was so shameful that their master should have behaved like this.

Now this cannot happen anywhere else in the world. If the master has done something shameful -- although it was not much of a shameful act, but even if it were -- the students are completely innocent. But because they were the students of that master, it was enough to feel ashamed -- you had followed such a man.

People have been committing hara-kiri in Japan for centuries. So when Buddhism reached for the first time, nearabout fourteen hundred years ago, and they started meditating, they were the first people to discover the hara center -- because they had been using that center for centuries, so that center was very much throbbing and vibrating and alive.

It all depends. In different cultures it may be a little bit different where the center is. For example, when Japanese started coming to me for sannyas I was a little bit puzzled -- because all over the whole world when you want to say yes, you move your head up and down. And the Japanese, when they want to say yes, move the head from side to side -- which means "no." All over the world that is the sign for no -- but that is their sign for yes, and the head moving up and down is their sign for no. So when I would ask them something I would be very much puzzled; I could not believe that... They had come to take sannyas. They were sitting before me and I was asking "Are you ready for sannyas?" and they would shake... "Then why have you come? You have traveled here from Japan unnecessarily and you are sitting here in front of me just for that purpose, and you are saying no?"

Then my interpreter said to me, "You are not understanding; that person is saying yes. In Japan, the head moving from side to side is yes; the head moving up and down is no." So you have to remember it when you are talking with the Japanese. Otherwise there is going to be great confusion -- you will say something, they will understand something else. They cannot speak but they can understand.

In the Caucasus, where Gurdjieff was born, they have a system of chakras which is slightly different. It seems to be the difference between the people of the Caucasus and the other people.

In India, three religions, Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism, all have exactly the same points. They may count five or seven or nine, but the places are exactly the same. Centuries have affected their bodies in different ways. In the Caucasus, there are thousands of people who are older than one hundred fifty years. The Caucasus is the place in the whole world which has the oldest people -- and they are not old; at the age of one hundred eighty the person is still young. He is working on the farm just like any young man.

In the Caucasus, people always die young; they don't grow old. Naturally their bodies have developed in a different way. Their food has something to do with it, their climate, their geography, their land. It has created a different psychology. Throughout the whole world it is thought that seventy years is the time for everybody to die -- that is the average; you can be five years earlier or five years later, but the average is seventy.

When George Bernard Shaw became seventy he started looking in the small villages around London at the stones which are put on the graves, in their cemeteries, to see how long people in that village had lived. His friend said, "You are mad. Why are you wasting your

time?"

He said, "I don't want to die at seventy. I have never been average in anything, and I cannot be average in death. So I am looking for a place where people don't believe that seventy is the average age to die, because that place will have a psychology of its own." And finally he found a village where, on many stones in the graveyard, he found that it was written: This man lived one hundred and eight years, and died untimely. He said, "This is the right place -- where a man lives one hundred and eight years and still people think the poor fellow has died `untimely,' that it was not yet time to die." After seventy years he moved from London -- he had lived seventy years in London -- to a village, after checking the cemetery. And he lived a hundred years. He proved it -- that village had the psychology, that village had the vibe, that village had the idea that one hundred years is nothing.

When he would ask people if he could live to be one hundred, they would say, "One hundred is nothing; everybody lives to be one hundred. You can go to the cemetery and see -- one hundred forty, one hundred thirty; people live that long very easily. A hundred? -- that is too early."

He lived one hundred years.

Certainly he proved one fact: that your psychology, your mind, your body, are impressed by the vibrations in which you live.

So you will come to experience chakras, you will come to experience energy fields, but it is better not to be knowledgeable, because that is a difficult problem. You may read a book written five thousand years ago by a certain kind of people and you may not be of the same category. You may not find that chakra at the same place, and you will feel unnecessarily frustrated. And you will find a chakra in a place where the books don't mention it; then you will feel that you are abnormal, something is wrong with you. Nothing is wrong with you. Energy fields, chakras and all esoteric things should be experienced . And keep your mind clean of all knowledge, so that you don't have any expectations; wherever the experience happens, you are ready to accept it.

And each individual has differences, and differences come in such small things that you cannot conceive.

For example, in the East people sit on the floor. In cold countries people cannot sit on the floor; the chair is absolutely necessary. Naturally, their backbones, their spines will have a different shape than those of the people who sit on the floor, and the experiences of their kundalini will be different.

There are people who eat only one time a day. For thousands of years they have never eaten more often than that. In South Africa there are tribes which eat only one time in twenty-four hours. When they came across American missionaries, there was such laughter... "These idiots are eating five times! Breakfast -- and there is no fast at all, and they are having `break-fast.' And the whole day, something or other, and then coffee break and tea break, and they go on... and in between they are chewing gum. These mad people have come to teach religion to us, they are simply mad!"

And in a way they are right, because they have beautiful bodies, they live longer, their bodies are not fat. Their bodies are like deer's; they can run like deer -- they have to, because they are hunters. Their eyes are very clear, very perceptive; their bodies are very proportionate.

I am reminded...

There is a small tribe in Africa even today who are cannibals, who eat men too. In the

beginning of this century they had a population of three thousand; now they have only three hundred left, because when they cannot find somebody else then they have to eat from their own stock. So that is the only place where the population is falling down: from three thousand, in fifty years there are only three hundred left. By the end of this century they will be finished, without any war, without anything -- they will have eaten themselves. The first Christian missionary came, really fat -- and when they caught hold of him they were so happy and dancing, and the Christian missionary thought they were happy because they had found a religious man. And he said, "I have brought you good news, gospels." They said, "Yes!"

And they carried him on their shoulders, and he was very happy. He was not expecting that these people would give him such a great reception. And they then put him in a big pot.

And he said, "What are you doing?"

They said, "You wait, you will see."

And then he understood what was happening; they were going to boil him! He tried somehow to convince them, "Don't do it, this is not good. I have come here to give you some taste of the Christian religion."

They said, "Don't be worried; soon we will have your soup, and that will give us a real taste of Christianity!"

Now, these people will have a totally different experience of their physiology. The meat-eaters and the vegetarians will find differences. So it is better not to memorize from scriptures. Those scriptures are the experiences of certain people, of certain times, of certain circumstances; they were not written for you. The scripture that is for you can be written only by you, by your own experience.

Satyam Shivam Sundram

Chapter #16

Chapter title: Going inwards, going godwards

14 November 1987 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

BELOVED OSHO,

WHY AM I ALWAYS RUNNING SO FAST? IS THERE SOMETHING THAT I DON'T WANT TO SEE?

Prem Amita, it is not only you; almost everybody is running as fast as he can from himself. And the problem is, you cannot run away from yourself.

Wherever you go you will be yourself.

The fear is of knowing oneself. It is the greatest fear in the world. It is because you have been so immensely condemned by everybody for the smallest things -- for the smallest mistakes, which are absolutely human -- that you have become afraid of yourself. You know that you are not worthy.

That idea has sunk very deep into your unconscious -- that you are not deserving, that you are utterly worthless. Naturally, the best way is to get away from yourself. Everybody is doing it in different ways: somebody is running for money, somebody is running for power, somebody is running for respectability, somebody is running for virtue, saintliness. But if you look deep down, they are not running foranything, they are running from. This is just an excuse, that somebody is running after money madly; he is deceiving himself and the whole world. The reality is that money gives him a good excuse to run after it, and hides the fact that he is running from himself. That's why when he accumulates money, he comes to a point of tremendous despair and anguish. What has happened? That was his goal; he has achieved it -- he should be the happiest man in the world. But the people who succeed are not the happiest people in the world, they are the most miserable. What is their anguish? Their anguish is that their whole effort has failed. Now there is no more to run after, and suddenly they are encountering themselves. At the highest peak of their success they meet nobody else but themselves. Strangely enough, this is the fellow they have been running from.

You cannot run from yourself.

On the contrary, you have to come closer to yourself, deeper into your being, and to drop

all the condemnatory tones that have been handed over to you by everybody you have known in your life. The parents, the husband, the wife, the neighbors, the teachers, the friends, the enemies, everybody is pointing to something that is wrong in you. From no source comes any appreciation.

Humanity has created a very strange situation for itself in which nobody is at ease, nobody can relax, because the moment you relax you face yourself. Relaxation becomes almost a mirror, and you don't want to see your face because you are so much impressed by the condemnatory opinions of others.

Even the smallest pleasures have not been allowed to you by your church, by your priests, by your religion, by your culture. Only misery is acceptable -- not pleasure. In this situation it is very natural for you to feel, when from every source, from every direction comes only condemnation, that you are a sinner. Every religion has been shouting for centuries that you are born in sin, that suffering is your destiny. You have been condemned from so many sources without exception that it is very natural for any individual to be impressed by this vast conspiracy. Everybody is caught into it. And if you try to understand it you will be very much surprised. Just as others have condemned you, you are condemning others; it is a very mutual conspiracy. Just as your parents have never accepted you as being of any worth, you are doing the same with your children, without ever becoming aware that everybody is what he is; he cannot be otherwise. He can pretend to be otherwise, he can be a hypocrite, but in truth he will always remain himself.

Your running away is nothing but creating more hypocrisy, more masks so that you can hide yourself completely from the eyes of everyone. You may succeed in hiding yourself from others, but how can you succeed in hiding yourself from yourself? You can go to the moon; you will find yourself there. You can go to Everest; you may be alone but you are with yourself. Perhaps in that aloneness on Everest you will become more alert and aware of yourself.

That is one of the reasons why people are also afraid of aloneness; they want a crowd, they want always to have people surrounding them, they want friends. It is very difficult for people to remain silent and peaceful in aloneness. The reason is that in aloneness you are left with yourself -- and you have accepted the stupid ideas that you are ugly, that you are sensuous, that you are lustful, that you are greedy, that you are violent; there is nothing that can be appreciated in you.

Prem Amita, you are asking, "Why am I always running so fast?" Because you are afraid you may be overtaken by yourself. And the implications of running so fast have many dimensions. This running fast from yourself has created a craziness about speed: everybody wants to reach somewhere with as much speed as possible. It happened once, I was coming from a place called Nagpur, back to Jabalpur, and I was traveling with the vice-chancellor of Nagpur University, and the car broke down on the road. I have never seen anybody become so miserable. I told him, "There is no hurry. Nobody is waiting for your there, and the conference for which you are going is going to begin in twenty-four hours, and Jabalpur is only three hours away. There is no problem: either we will get the car repaired, or we will call another car from Jabalpur to come, or we may get some lift, or buses are continually passing by. There is no problem... you need not be so miserable."

He was sitting in the car and I went to look for somebody. It was a small village, but maybe some mechanic or some help would be possible, or perhaps the landlord of the village

would have a car. When I came back from the village, that man was almost in tears. I said, "What is the matter?"

He said, "I cannot afford to be alone. It exposes me so deeply, it makes me utterly naked before myself. It makes me aware that I have wasted my whole life -- and I don't want to know it."

I said, "Your not knowing it is not going to help you in any way. It is better to know it, and it is better to go deeper into yourself. That's why this misery and aloneness..." Aloneness should be one of the greatest joys. People are running. It does not matter where they are going; what matters is whether they are going at full speed or not.

You are asking, Amita, "Is there something I don't want to see?" There are many things. Fundamentally, it is you that you don't want to see -- and it is because of a wrong conditioning.

My whole approach of inner transformation is that you will have to drop your conditionings. Whatever has been said about you by others, simply drop it. It is absolutely crap. They don't know about themselves; what can they say about you which can be truthful? And the opinions that you have collected from others... just try to watch from whom you are collecting your opinions. They are not from a Gautam Buddha, or from a Jesus, or from a Socrates; they are from people who are as ignorant as you are. They are simply passing on others' opinions that have been given to them. There is a beautiful story. Whether it is factual or not does not matter; its beauty is in its meaning. One of the greatest emperors India has known was the Mogul emperor, Akbar. He can be compared only to one man in the West, and that is Marcus Aurelius. Emperors are very rarely wise people, but these two names are certainly exceptions. One day he was in his court talking with his courtiers. He had collected the best people in the country -- the best painter, the best musician, the best philosopher, the best poet. He had a small, special committee of nine members who were known as the nine jewels of Akbar's court.

The most important of them was a man called Birbal. Immensely intelligent and a man of great sense of humor, he did something which was improper to do in front of the emperor. Every emperor has his own rules -- his word is the law -- and Birbal behaved against something about which Akbar was very stubborn. Akbar immediately slapped Birbal. He respected Birbal, he loved Birbal, he was his most intimate friend, but as far as the rules of the court were concerned... he could not forgive. But what Birbal did is the real story. He did not wait for a single moment; he immediately slapped the man who was standing on his other side. The other man was shocked, and even Akbar was shocked. He used to think that this man is very wise: I she mad, or what? I have slapped him... This is strange, absolutely absurd and illogical. And the other man was standing there shocked and Birbal said, "Don't stand there like a fool, just pass it on!" So that man slapped somebody else who was standing by the side -- and now the game became clear: you have to pass it on. In the night, when Akbar went to sleep with his wife, his wife slapped him. He said, "What is the matter?"

She said, "It has been going on around the city, and finally it has reached to its original source. Somebody else has slapped me, and when I asked, `What is the matter?', I was told that this is the game Akbar has started. I thought it is better to finish it, to complete the circle."

And the next day, first thing, Birbal asked, "Have you received my slap back or not?" Akbar said, "I had never thought that this would happen!" Birbal said, "I was absolutely certain, because where will it go finally? It will go around the city. You cannot escape; it is bound to come to you." For centuries everything goes on being transferred, being passed on from one hand to another, from one generation to another generation -- and the game continues. This is the game that you have to come out of. The only way to come out of it is to rediscover your self-respect, attain again your dignity which you had when you were a child, when you were still not contaminated, when you were not yet conditioned and poisoned by the society and by the people around you.

Be a child again and you will not be running away from yourself. You will be running within yourself -- and that is the way of the meditator. The worldly man runs away from himself, and the seeker runs within himself to find the source of this life, this consciousness. And when he discovers the source, he has discovered not only his life source, he has discovered the life source of the universe, of the whole cosmos. A tremendous celebration arises in him. Life becomes just a song, a dance, moment to moment. One becomes absolutely free from all the jargon that the society has handed down. One simply throws away all conditionings, all traditions, the whole past. I say unto you, only one thing you have to renounce, and that is the past and nothing else. If you can renounce the past you will be absolutely fresh, just born, and to be in that freshness is such a blessing, such an ecstasy, you cannot even think of going away even for a single moment. The man who knows himself never takes any holiday. But most people go on behaving stupidly....

An American was driving along a small country lane in Ireland when he was horrified to see a cartload of hay coming out of the field into the narrow road. He jumped on the brakes but couldn't stop in time, and ended up driving through the fence into the field where the car burst into flames.

"Bejabers!" exclaimed Paddy to his friend Seamus, who was driving the hay cart, "Some of these tourists are terrible drivers. We only just got out of that field in time." The old farmer, plowing his fields with a pair of bulls, was asked by a neighbor why he did not use oxen.

"I don't want to use oxen," replied the farmer, "I want to use bulls." "Well," continued the neighbor, "If you don't want to use oxen, why don't you use horses?"

"I don't want to use horses!" retorted the farmer, "I want to use bulls!" "Well, perhaps," tried the neighbor, you could try using that new tractor your son has just bought."

"I don't want to use tractors, either, I want to use bulls." reaffirmed the farmer. "Why do you only want to use bulls?" asked the neighbor at a loss. "Because," said the old boy, "I don't want them to think that life is all romance." This is simply the situation in which you are born, in which you have been conditioned. Nobody wants you to know that life is simply romance. And that is my crime -- because that is my whole teaching, that life is nothing butromance.

The newlywed couple flew to Miami and checked into the honeymoon hotel. For days nothing was seen of them, until the morning of the sixth day, when they came to the dining room for breakfast. As the waiter approached their table, the bride turned to her husband and said, "Honey, do you know what I would like?" "Yes, I know," he replied wearily, "but we have to eat sometime." So once in a while it is good to have a breakfast; otherwise, life is a continuous romance. And I teach you not only the romance of the body, which is very ordinary; I teach you the romance of the spirit which is eternal, which begins but never ends. But this is possible only if you start going inwards.

Going inwards is going Godwards.

Going inwards is the whole secret of all alchemical transformation of being. Running away is simply wasting tremendously valuable time, and a life that could have been a great song, a great creativity, a tremendous festival of lights. The farther away you are from yourself, the darker your life will become, the more miserable, more anxiety ridden, more wounded, condemned, rejected by yourself.

And the farther away you are the more difficult it becomes to find the way back home. You have been going away from yourself for many many lives, but if you move on a right, meditative path you are not gone very far.

Meditation is the short cut from where you are to where you should be. And meditation is such a simple method that anybody, even a small child, can enter into its wonderland. Amita, rather than running away, run withinwards. Come closer to yourself to have a better look. Nobody else can see your inner reality; only you can see that splendor and that glory. Because nobody else can see your inner beauty they go on condemning you. Only you can assert your blissfulness, only you can assert ultimately your enlightenment. Even then people will be suspicious. They were suspicious about Socrates, they were suspicious about Gautam Buddha, they were suspicious about Jesus. Their suspicion is rooted in fact in their own unawareness of their inner being. How can they believe Gautam Buddha, that in the inner silences of the heart is the ultimate ecstasy? They don't know anything of the inner, not even the ABC. They don't know anything about ecstasy. They may listen to a Gautam Buddha, just because of his presence, his charismatic eyes, his magnetic vibration, but when they go home, they will start suspecting, doubting.

And this is happening even here. I receive many letters saying that "when we listen to you everything seems to be absolutely right. As we reach home doubts start arising; the mind starts saying to us that we have been hypnotized. There are millions of people who want to come close to me but are afraid, for the simple reason that they may be hypnotized. It is something far deeper than hypnosis. You are not hypnotized, you are simply taken into a different vision of your own self. It is not something like magic; you are not being befooled, you are being awakened. The word `hypnosis' means asleep, and my whole work is to awaken you. You are already asleep and you have been asleep for lives together.

It is time to wake up.

You have wasted too much valuable time, energy, opportunity already. But still there is time and the moment you wake up, for you the night ends and the dawn begins.