The Natural State

In the words of U.G. Krishnamurti
Peter Maverick    1  ·  2  ·  3  ·  4  ·  5  

1972-1980—India and Switzerland




Whatever you do in the pursuit of truth or reality takes you away from your own very natural state in which you always are. It's not something you can acquire, attain or accomplish as a result of your effort. All that you do makes it impossible for what already is there to express itself. That is why I call this your natural state. You're always in that state. What prevents what is there from expressing itself in its own way is the search. The search is always in the wrong direction, so all that you consider very profound, all that you consider sacred, is a contamination in that consciousness. You may not [Laughs] like the word contamination but all that you consider sacred, holy and profound is a contamination. There's nothing that you can do, it's not in your hands. This is something which I can't give because you have it. It is ridiculous to ask for a thing which you already have. There isn't anything to get from anybody. You have what I have. I say you are there.
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I was brought up in a very religious atmosphere. My grandfather was a very cultured man. He knew Blavatsky [the founder of the Theosophical Society] and Olcott, and then, later on, the second and third generations of Theosophists. They all visited our house. He was a great lawyer, a very rich man, a very cultured man and, very strangely, a very orthodox man. He was a sort of mixed-up kid: orthodoxy, tradition on one side and then the opposite, Theosophy and the whole thing on the other side. He failed to establish a balance. That was the beginning of my problem.

[U.G. was often told that his mother had said, just before she died, that he “was born to a destiny immeasurably high.” His grandfather took this very seriously and gave up his law practice to devote himself to U.G.'s upbringing and education. His grandparents and their friends were convinced that he was a yoga bhrashta, one who had come within inches of enlightenment in his past life.]

He had learned men on his payroll and he dedicated himself for some reason—I don't want to go into the whole business—to create a profound atmosphere for me and to educate me in the right way, inspired by the Theosophists and the whole lot. And so, every morning those fellows would come and read the Upanishads, Panchadasi, Nyshkarmya Siddhi, the commentaries, the commentaries on commentaries, the whole lot, from four o'clock to six o'clock, and this little boy of five, six or seven years—I don't know—had to listen to all that crap. So much so that by the time I reached my seventh year I could repeat most of those things, the passages from the Panchadasi, Nyshkarmya Siddhi and this, that and the other.

So many holy men visited my house—the Ramakrishna Order and the others; you name it, and those fellows had somehow visited that house—that was an open house for every holy man. So, one thing I discovered when I was quite young was that they were all hypocrites: they said something, they believed something, and their lives were shallow, nothing. I lived in the midst of people who talked of these things everlastingly—everybody was false, I can tell you. So somehow, what you call existentialist nausea—revulsion against everything sacred and everything holy—crept into my system and threw everything out.

That was the beginning of my search. I did everything, all the austerities. I was so young but I was determined to find out if there was any such thing as enlightenment. I wanted that very much. Otherwise, I wouldn't have given my life. Then my real search began. All my religious background was there in me. Then I started exploring. For some years I studied psychology and also philosophy, Eastern and Western, mysticism, all the modern sciences, everything. The whole area of human knowledge I started exploring on my own.

Before my forty-ninth year I had so many powers, so many experiences, but I didn't pay any attention to them. The moment I saw someone I could see their entire past, present and future without their telling me anything. I didn't use them. I was wondering, puzzled, you see, “Why do I have this power?” Sometimes I said things and they always happened. I couldn't figure out the mechanism of that. I tried to. They always happened. I didn't play with it. Then it had certain unpleasant consequences and created suffering for some people.
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[U.G. was travelling all over the world, still lecturing. In 1955, leaving his daughters in India, he and his wife moved to the United States in search of treatment for his son Vasant's polio. By 1961 his money was finished, and he felt beginning within him a tremendous upheaval which he could not and did not wish to control, and which was to last six years and end with the ‘calamity’. His marriage broke up. He put his wife and sons—a second, Kumar, had been born in Chicago—on a plane to India, and he went to London. He arrived penniless and began roaming the city. For three years he lived idly in the streets. His friends saw him as heading on a headlong course downhill, but he says that at the time his life seemed perfectly natural to him. Later, religious-minded people were to use the mystics' phrase ‘the dark night of the soul’ to describe those years, but in his view there was “no heroic struggle with temptation and worldliness, no soul-wrestling with urges, no poetic climaxes, but just a simple withering away of the will.”]

All kinds of funny things happened to me. I remember when I rubbed my body like this, there was a sparkle, like a phosphorous glow, on the body. She [Valentine] used to run out of her bedroom to see—she thought there were cars going that way in the middle of the night. Every time I rolled in my bed there was a sparkling of light [Laughs] and it was so funny for me—“What is this?” It was electricity—that is why I say it is an electromagnetic field. At first I thought it was because of my nylon clothes and static electricity; but then I stopped using nylon. I was a very skeptical heretic, to the tips of my toes, I never believed in anything; even if I saw some miracle happen before me, I didn't accept that at all—such was the make-up of this man. It never occurred to me that anything of that sort was in the making for me.

Very strange things happened to me, but I never related those things to liberation or freedom or moksha, because by that time the whole thing had gone out of my system. I had arrived at a point where I said to myself “Buddha deluded himself and deluded others. All those teachers and saviors of mankind were damned fools—they fooled themselves—so I'm not interested in this kind of thing anymore,” so it went out of my system completely. It went on and on in its own way—peculiar things—but never did I say to myself, “Well, [Laughs] I am getting there, I am nearer to that.” There is no nearness to that, there is no farawayness from that, there is no closeness to that. Nobody is nearer to that because he is different, he is prepared. There's no readiness for that; it just hits you like a ton of bricks.

The whole thing is finished for me and that's all. The linking gets broken and once it is broken it is finished. Then it is not once that thought explodes—every time a thought arises it explodes. The division cannot stay there, it's a physical impossibility. You don't have to do a thing about it. That is why I say that when this explosion takes place (I use the word explosion because it's like a nuclear explosion) it leaves behind chain-reactions. Every cell in your body has to undergo this change.

It's an irreversible change. There's no question of your going back. It is like a nuclear explosion. It shatters the whole body. It is not an easy thing. It is the end of the man, such a shattering thing that it blasts every cell, every nerve in your body. I went through terrible physical torture at that moment; not that you experience the explosion—you can't experience the explosion—but its after-effects. The fallout is the thing that changes the whole chemistry of your body. The senses are operating now without any coordinator or center, that's all I can say. Unless that alchemy or change in the whole chemistry takes place, there is no way of freeing this organism from thought, from the continuity of thought.

The blinking of the eyes stopped and then there were changes in taste, smell and hearing. I noticed that my skin was soft like silk and had a peculiar kind of glow, a golden color.

I no longer spend time in reverie, worry, conceptualization and the other kinds of thinking that most people do when they're alone. My mind is only engaged when it's needed, for instance when you ask questions, or when I have to fix the tape-recorder or something like that. My memory is in the background and only comes into play when it's needed, automatically. When it's not needed there is no mind here, there is no thought; there is only life.

My body had gone away and it has never come back. The points of contact are all that is there for the body. Nothing else is there for me because the seeing is altogether independent of the sense of touch here. I had discovered that all my senses were without any coordination. I felt the life energy drawing to a focal point from different parts of my body. Even now it happens to me. The hands and feet become cold, the body becomes stiff, the heartbeat slows down, the breathing slows down and then there is a gasping for breath. Up to a point you are there. You breathe your last breath, as it were, and then you are finished.

What happens after that, nobody knows. How long it lasted I don't know. I can't say anything about that because the experiencer was finished. There was nobody to experience that death at all. So that was the end of it. I got up. The things that had astonished me that week had become permanent fixtures. I call all these events a calamity because from the point of view of one who thinks this is something fantastic, blissful, full of love, ecstasy and all that kind of a thing, this is physical torture. Not a calamity to me but to those who have an image that something marvelous is going to happen.

It's something like you imagine New York. You dream about it. You want to be there. When you are actually there, nothing of it is there. It is a godforsaken place and even the devils have probably forsaken that place. It's not the thing that you had sought after and wanted so much but totally different.

What is there you really don't know. You have no way of knowing anything about that. There is no image here. Then suddenly, there was an outburst of tremendous energy shaking the whole body, vibrating. It lasted for hours. I couldn't bear it but there was nothing I could do to stop it. There was a total helplessness. This went on and on, day after day. Whenever I sat, it started—this vibration like an epileptic fit or something. Not even an epileptic fit; it went on for days. It was a very painful process because the body has limitations. It has a form, a shape of its own.

So when there is an outburst of energy which is not your energy or my energy but God's (call it by any name you like) it is like a river in spate. The energy that is operating there does not feel the limitations of the body. It is not interested. It has its own momentum. It is a very painful thing. It is not ecstatic, blissful and all that rubbish, stuff and nonsense. It is really a painful thing.

Oh I suffered for months before and after that, everybody has—a great cascade; not one but thousands. It went on and on for months. It's a very painful experience, painful in the sense that the energy has a peculiar operation of its own. It is clockwise, counterclockwise, and then it is this way, and then this way, and then this way. Like an atom, it moves inside—not in one part of your body—the whole body. It is as if a wet towel were being wrung to get rid of the water. It is like that—the whole of our body. It's such a painful thing. It goes on even now. You can't invite it. You can't ask it to come. You can't do anything. It gives you the feeling that it is enveloping you, that it is descending on you.

Every time it is new. Very strange, every time it comes in a different way. So you don't know what is happening. You lie down on your bed and suddenly it begins. It begins to move slowly like ants. I'd think there were bugs in my bed, jump out, look, see no bugs, then I'd go back, then again. The hairs are electrified. So it slowly moves. There were pains all over the body. Thought has controlled this body to such an extent that when that loosens, the whole metabolism is agog. The whole thing was changing in its own way without my doing anything. Every cell started changing and it went on and on for six months. In all, it took three years for this body to fall into a new rhythm of its own. I behaved normally, I didn't know what was happening. It was a strange situation.

The state is something natural. Do you see the swellings here? Yesterday was the new moon. The body is affected by everything that is happening around you. It is not separate. Whatever is happening there is also happening here. There is only the physical response. This is affection. Your body is affected by everything that is happening around you, and you can't prevent this for the simple reason that the armor that you have built around yourself is destroyed. So it is very vulnerable to everything that is happening there.

There are certain glands. These ductless glands are located in exactly the same spots where the Hindus speculated the chakras are. They have feelings, extraordinary feelings. There is one gland here which is called the thymus gland. Doctors tell us that is active through childhood until puberty then becomes dormant. In your natural state that gland is reactivated.

[Up and down his torso, neck and head, his friends observed swellings of various shapes and colors which came and went at intervals. On his lower abdomen, the swellings were horizontal, cigar-shaped bands. Above the navel was a hard, almond-shaped swelling. A hard, blue swelling like a large medallion in the middle of his chest was surmounted by another smaller, brownish-red, medallion-shaped swelling at the base of his throat. These were as though suspended from a varicolored, swollen ring—blue, brownish and light yellow—around his neck. His throat was swollen to a shape that made his chin seem to rest on the head of a cobra, as in the traditional images of Shiva. Just above the bridge of the nose was a white, lotus-shaped swelling. All over the head the small blood vessels expanded, forming patterns like the stylized lumps on the heads of Buddha statues. The arteries in his neck expanded and rose, blue and snake-like, into his head.]
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If somebody hurts himself there, that hurt is felt here—not as a pain, but there is a feeling, you see—you automatically say “Ah!” This actually happened to me when I was staying in a coffee plantation: a mother started beating a child, a little child, you know. She was mad, hopping mad, and she hit the child so hard, the child almost turned blue. And somebody asked me “Why did you not interfere and stop her?” I was standing there—I was so puzzled, you see. “Who should I take pity on, the mother or the child?”—that was my answer—“Who is responsible?” Both were in a ridiculous situation: the mother could not control her anger, and the child was so helpless and innocent. This went on—it was moving from one to the other—and then I found all those things [marks] on my back. So I was also part of that. (I am not saying this just to claim something.) That is possible because consciousness cannot be divided. Anything that is happening there is affecting you—this is affection, you understand? There is no question of your sitting in judgement on anybody; the situation happens to be that, so you are affected by that. You are affected by everything that is happening there.

Consciousness is, of course, not limited. If he is hurt there, you also are hurt here. If you are hurt, there is an immediate response there. I can't say about the universe, the whole universe, but in your field of consciousness, in the limited field in which you are operating at that particular moment, you are responding—not that you are responding.

And all the other glands also here... There are so many glands here; for example, the pituitary—‘third eye’, ‘ajna [command] chakra’, they call it. When once the interference of thought is finished, it is taken over by this gland: it is this gland that gives the instructions or orders to the body; not thought any more; thought cannot interfere. (That is why they call it that, probably. I'm not interpreting or any such thing; perhaps this gives you an idea.) But you have built an armor created an armor with this thought, and you don't allow yourself to be affected by things. But you have built an armor, created an armor, with this thought and you don't allow yourself to be affected by things.

Since there is nobody who uses this thought as a self-protective mechanism it burns itself up. Thought undergoes combustion—ionization, if I may use your scientific term. Thought is, after all, vibration. When this kind of ionization of thought takes place it sometimes covers the whole body with an ash-like substance. Your body is covered with that when there is no need for thought at all. When you don't use it what happens to that thought? It burns itself out—that is the energy—it's a combustion. The body gets heated, you know. There is tremendous heat in the body as a result of this, and so the skin is covered—your face, your feet, everything—with this ash-like substance. That's one of the reasons why I express it in pure and simple physical and physiological terms. It has no psychological content at all. It has no mystical content. It has no religious overtones at all, as I see it. I am bound to say that and I don't care whether you accept it or not. It is of no importance to me.

This kind of a thing must have happened to so many people. It is not something that one is specially prepared for. There are no purificatory methods necessary. There is no spiritual practice necessary for this kind of a thing to happen, no preparation of any kind. The consciousness is so pure that whatever you are doing in the direction of purifying that consciousness is adding impurity to it. Consciousness has to flush itself out, it has to purge itself of every trace of holiness, every trace of unholiness, everything. Even what you consider sacred and holy is a contamination in that consciousness.

It is not through any volition of yours. When once the frontiers are broken—not through any effort of yours, not through any volition of yours—then the floodgates are open and everything goes out. In that process of flushing out you have all these visions. It's not a vision outside there or inside of you. Suddenly, your whole consciousness takes the shape of those people who have come into this state. Not great men, not the leaders of mankind, it is very strange, but only those people to whom this kind of a thing happened.

Hundreds of people, probably something happened to so many hundreds of people. This is part of history—so many rishis, some Westerners, monks, so many women, and sometimes very strange things. You see, all that people have experienced before you is part of your consciousness. They run out of your consciousness because they cannot stay there any more, because all that is impurity, a contamination there.

You can say probably it is because of the impact on the human consciousness of the explosions of all those saints, sages and saviors of mankind that there is this dissatisfaction in you, that whatever is there is all the time trying to burst out, as it were. Maybe that is so. I can't say anything about it. You can say that they are there because they are pushing you to this point and once the purpose is achieved they have finished their job and they go away. But this flushing out of everything good and bad, holy and unholy, sacred and profane, has got to happen. Otherwise, your consciousness is still contaminated, still impure. During that time, it goes on and on, there are hundreds and thousands of them. Then, you see, you are put back into that primeval, primordial state of consciousness.

Once it has become pure, of and by itself, then nothing can touch it, nothing can contaminate that any more. All the past up to that point is there but it cannot influence your actions any more. All these visions and everything were happening for three years after the calamity. Now the whole thing is finished. The divided state of consciousness cannot function at all any more. It is always in the undivided state of consciousness.

Nothing can touch that. Anything can happen. The thought can be a good thought, a bad thought. It doesn't matter what comes there—good, bad, holy, unholy. The whole thing is finished. That is why I have to use the phrase religious experience, not in the sense in which you use the word religion. It puts you back to the Source. You are back in that primeval, primordial, pure state of consciousness. Call it awareness or whatever you like. In that state, things are happening and there is nobody who is interested, nobody who is looking at them. They come and go in their own way.

The most puzzling and bewildering part of the whole thing was when the sensory activities began their independent careers. There was no coordinator linking the senses. Like a baby I had to learn everything all over. All the knowledge was in the background and never came to the forefront, you see. But I knew that something really fantastic had happened inside. What it was I didn't know but that didn't bother me. That bewildering situation continued for a long time. All the knowledge was in the background. It's the same situation even now. When I am looking at something I really don't know what I'm looking at. That is why I say it is a state of not knowing. I really don't know. Once you are there through some luck, some strange chance, from then on everything happens in its own way.

You are always in a natural state. There is no question of going in and out of it, you are always there. It is a state of not knowing, you really don't know what you are looking at. I can't do anything about it, there is no question of my going back or anything, it is all finished. It is operating and functioning in a different way.

Somehow, you see, by some luck, by some strange chance, this kind of thing happens, and the whole thing is finished for you. The background is the only thing that can express itself. What else is there? My expression of it is the background—how I struggled, my path, how I rejected the paths of others. Up to that point I can say what I did or what I did not do and that it did not help me in any way.

If people come and ask me questions I answer. If they don't it makes no difference to me. I have not set myself up in the holy business of liberating people. I have no particular message for mankind except to say that all holy systems for obtaining enlightenment are bunk and that all talk of arriving at a psychological mutation through awareness is poppycock. Psychological mutation is impossible. The natural state can happen only through biological mutation.
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There is no teaching of mine and never shall be one. A teaching implies a method or a system, a technique or a new way of thinking to be applied in order to bring about a transformation in your way of life. What I am saying is outside the field of teachability. It is simply a description of the way I am functioning. It is just a description of the natural state of man. This is the way you, stripped of the machinations of thought, are also functioning. The natural state is not the state of a self-realized, God-realized man. It is not a thing to be achieved or attained. It is not a thing to be willed into existence. It is there. It is the living state.

This state is just the functional activity of life. By life I do not mean something abstract but the life of the senses functioning naturally without the interference of thought. Thought is an interloper which thrusts itself into the affairs of the senses. It has a profit motive. Thought directs the activity of the senses to get something out of them and uses them to give continuity to itself.

Your natural state has no relationship whatsoever with the religious states of bliss and ecstasy. They lie within the field of experience. Those who have led man on his search for religiousness throughout the centuries have perhaps experienced those religious states, so can you. They are thought-induced states of being and as they come so do they go. All are trips in the wrong direction. They are all within the field of time. Timeless can never be experienced, grasped, contained, much less given expression to, by any man. That beaten track will lead you nowhere. There is no oasis situated yonder. You are stuck with the mirage.
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This state is a physical condition of your being. It is not some kind of psychological mutation. It is not a state of mind into which you can fall one day and out of the next. You can't imagine the extent to which, as you are now, thought pervades and interferes with the functioning of every cell in your body. Coming into your natural state will blast every cell, every gland, every nerve. It is a chemical change. An alchemy of some sort takes place. But this state has nothing to do with the experiences of chemical drugs. Those are experiences, this is not.
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Does such a thing as enlightenment exist? To me what does exist is a purely physical process. There is nothing mystical or spiritual about it. If I close the eyes some light penetrates through the eyelids. If I cover the eyelids there is still light inside. There seems to be some kind of a hole in the forehead which doesn't show but through which something penetrates. In India that light is golden, in Europe it is blue.

There is also some kind of light penetration through the back of the head. It's as if there is a hole running through between those spots in front and back of the skull. There is nothing inside but this light. If you cover those points there is complete, total darkness. This light doesn't do anything or help the body to function in any way, it's just there.

This state is a state of not knowing. You really don't know what you are looking at. All there is inside is wonderment. It is a state of wonder because I just do not know what I am looking at. The knowledge about it, all that I have learned, is held in the background unless there is a demand. When required it comes quickly like an arrow, then I am back in the state of not knowing, of wonder.

You can never understand the tremendous peace that is always there within you that is your natural state. Your trying to create a peaceful state of mind is in fact creating disturbance within you. You can only talk of peace, create a state of mind and say to yourself that you are very peaceful, but that is not peace, that is violence. There is no use in practicing peace or reason to cultivate silence. Real silence is explosive. It is not the dead state of mind that spiritual seekers think. That doesn't mean anything at all. This is volcanic in its nature. It's bubbling all the time—the energy, the life—that is its quality.

Life is aware of itself, if we can put it that way. It is conscious of itself. When I talk of feeling I do not mean the same thing that you do. Actually, feeling is a physical response, a thud in the thymus. The thymus, one of the endocrine glands, is located under the breast bone. When you come into your natural state, sensations are felt there. You don't translate them as good or bad. They are just a thud. If there is a movement outside of you in your field of vision, that movement is also felt in the thymus. The whole of your being is that movement, or vibrates with that sound. There is no separation. This does not mean that you identify yourself with it. There is no you there, nor is there any object. What causes that sensation you don't know. You do not even know that it is a sensation.

Affection (this is not my interpretation of the word) means that you are affected by everything, not that some emotion flows from you towards something. The natural state is a state of great sensitivity, but this is a physical sensitivity of the senses, not some kind of emotional compassion or tenderness for others. There is compassion only in the sense that there are no others for me and so there is no separation. Actually, there is always a gap between any two sensations. The coordinator bridges that gap, establishes itself as an illusion of continuity. In the natural state, there is no entity coordinating the messages from the different senses, each sense is functioning independently in its own way.

When there is a demand from outside which makes it necessary to coordinate the senses and come up with a response, still there is no coordinator but there is a temporary state of coordination. There is no continuity. When the demand has been met, again there is only the uncoordinated, disconnected, disjointed functioning of the senses. This is always the case. Once the continuity is blown apart, not that it was ever there but the illusory continuity, it's finished once and for all.

All that you know lies within the framework of your experience, which is of thought. This state is not an experience. I am only trying to give you a feel of it, which is, unfortunately, misleading. When there is no coordinator, there is no linking of sensations, there is no translating of sensations. They stay pure and simple sensations. I do not even know that they are sensations. I may look at you as you are talking. The eyes will focus on your mouth because that is what is moving and the ears will receive the sound vibrations. There is nothing inside which links up the two and says that it is you talking.

What functions is a primordial consciousness untouched by thought. The eyes are like a very sensitive camera. The physiologists say that light reflected off objects strikes the retina of the eye and the sensation goes through the optic nerve to the brain. The faculty of sight, of seeing, is simply a physical phenomenon. It makes no difference to the eyes what they are focused on, they produce sensations in exactly the same way. The eyes look on everyone and everything without discrimination. Left to themselves they do not linger but are moving all the time. They are drawn by the things outside. Movement attracts them, or brightness, or a color which stands out from whatever is around it.

There is no self looking. The consciousness is like a mirror reflecting whatever is there outside. The depth, the distance, the color—everything is there, but there is nobody who is translating these things. Unless there is a demand for knowledge about what I am looking at, there is no separation, no distance from what is there. There is a kind of clarity.

The eyes do not blink except when there is sudden danger. This is something very natural because things outside are demanding attention all the time. Then when the eyes are tired they may be open but the vision is blurred. If they stay open all the time, if the reflex action of blinking is not operating, they become dry and there are some glands beyond the outer corners of the eyes, not activated in your case, which act as a watering mechanism. But by practicing not blinking one will not arrive in this state, one will only strain the eyes. Once you are in your natural state, by some luck or some strange chance, all this happens in its own way.

When I am walking and suddenly see something different because the light has changed, this consciousness suddenly expands to the size of the object in front of the body and the lungs take a deep breath. This is pranayama, not hyperventilation or inhaling through one nostril and exhaling through the other. This pranayama is going on all the time. So there is consciousness of a sudden change in the breathing and then it moves on to something else. It is always moving. It does not linger on something which thought has decided is beautiful. There is no one directing.

As for listening, when you leave the sense of hearing alone all that is there is the vibration of the sound. The words repeat themselves inside of you as in an echo chamber. This sense is functioning in just the same way with you except that you think the words you are hearing come from outside of you.
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Get this straight—you can never hear one word from anyone no matter how intimately you think you are in relationship with that person. You hear only your own translations always. They are all your words you are hearing. All that the other person's words can possibly be to you is a noise, a vibration picked up by the eardrum and transferred to the nerves which run to the brain. You are translating those vibrations all the time trying to understand because you want to get something out of what you are hearing. When there is no translation, all languages sound the same whether or not your particular knowledge structure speaks a particular language. The only differences are in the spacing of the syllables and in the tune. Languages are melodic in different ways but the appreciation of music, poetry and language is all culturally determined and is the product of thought.

Your movement of thought interferes with the process of touch just as it does with the other senses. Anything you touch is always translated as hard, soft, warm, cold, wet, dry and so on. Without this thought process there is no body consciousness, there are only isolated points of contact, impulses of touch which are not tied together by thought. So the body is not different from the objects around it. It is a set of sensations like any others. Your body does not belong to you.

Perhaps I can give you the feel of this. I sleep for four hours at night no matter what time I go to bed then I lie in bed until morning fully awake. I don't know what is lying there in the bed. I don't know whether I'm lying on my left side or my right side. For hours and hours I lie like this. If there is any noise outside, it just echoes in me. I listen to my heartbeat and don't know what it is.

There are only the sensations of touch from points of contact and the gravitational pull, nothing inside links up these things. Even if the eyes are open and looking at the whole body there are still only the points of contact and they have no connection with what I am looking at. If I want to try to link up these points of contact into the shape of my own body probably I will succeed but by the time it is completed the body is back in the same situation of different points of contact. The linkage cannot stay.

My talking comes out in response to the questions which are asked. I cannot sit and give a talk on the natural state. That is an artificial situation for me. There is nobody who is thinking thoughts and then coming out with answers. This state is expressing itself. I really don't know what I'm saying and what I'm saying is of no importance. You may transcribe my own talking but it will make no sense to me. It is a dead thing.

What is here, this natural state, is a living thing. It cannot be captured by me, let alone by you. It's like a flower. This simile is all I can give. It just blooms. It's there. As long as it is there it has a fragrance which is different and distinct from that of every other flower. You may not recognize it. It's of no importance. You can't preserve its perfume. Whatever you preserve of this is not the living thing. Preserving the expressions, teachings or words of such a man has no meaning. This state has only contemporary value, contemporary expression.
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The natural needs of a human being are basic: food, clothing and shelter. You must either work for them or be given them by somebody. If these are your only needs they are not very difficult to fulfill. To deny yourself the basic needs is not a sign of spirituality. But to require more than food, clothing and shelter is a neurotic state of mind.

Is not sex a basic human requirement? Sex is dependent upon thought. In the natural state, there is no build-up of thought. Without that build-up sex is impossible. The body normally is a very peaceful organism and then you subject it to this tremendous tension and release which feels pleasurable to you. Actually, it is painful to the body. But through suppression or attempts at sublimation of sex you will never come into this state.

As long as you think of God you will have thoughts of sex. Ask any religious seeker you may know who practices celibacy whether he doesn't dream of women at night. Why do you weave so many taboos and ideas around this? Why do you destroy the joy of sex? Not that I am advocating indulgence or promiscuity but through abstinence and continence you will never achieve a thing.

There must be a living contact. There are no images here. There is no room for them. The sensory apparatus is completely occupied with the things I am looking at now. And so, if you are totally tuned in to the sensory activity, there is no room for fears about who will feed you tomorrow or for speculation about God, truth and reality. This is not a state of omniscience wherein all of man's eternal questions are answered, rather a state in which the questioning has stopped. It has stopped because those questions have no relation to the way the organism is functioning, and the way the organism is functioning leaves no room for those questions.

The body has an extraordinary mechanism for renewing itself. This is necessary because the senses in the natural state are functioning at the peak of their sensitivity all the time. So when the senses become tired the body goes through death. This is real physical death not some mental state. It can happen one or more times a day. You do not decide to go through this death. It descends upon you.

It feels, at first, as if you have been given an anaesthetic. The senses become increasingly dull, the heartbeat slows, the feet and hands become ice cold and the whole body becomes stiff like a corpse. Energy flows from all over the body towards some point. It happens differently every time. The stream of thoughts continues but there is no reading of the thoughts. At the end of this period you conk out. The stream of thought is cut. There is no way of knowing how long that cut lasts.

There is nothing you can say about that time of being conked out. That can never become part of your conscious existence or conscious thinking. You don't know what brings you back from death. If you had any will at that moment you could decide not to come back. When the conking out is over, the stream of thought picks up exactly where it left off. The dullness ends and clarity returns. The body feels very stiff then slowly it begins to move of its own accord, limbering itself up. It is an extraordinary movement. Those who have observed my body moving say it looks like the motions of a newly born baby. This conking out gives a total renewal of the senses, glands and nervous system. After it, they function at the peak of their sensitivity.

Life is action. Questioning your actions is destroying the expression of life. A person who lets life act in its own way without the protective movement of thought has no self to defend. What is keeping you from being in your natural state? You are constantly moving away from yourself. You want to be happy either permanently or at least for this moment. You are dissatisfied with your everyday experiences and so you want some new ones. You want to perfect yourself, to change yourself. You are reaching out, trying to be something other than what you are. It is this that is taking you away from yourself.

Society has put before you the ideal of a perfect man. No matter in which culture you were born, you have scriptural doctrines and traditions handed down to you to tell you how to behave. You are told that through due practice you can even eventually come into the state attained by the sages and saints, and so you try to control your behavior, to control your thoughts, to be something unnatural. Your effort to control life has created a secondary movement of thought within you which you call the self.

This movement of thought within you is parallel to the movement of life but isolated from it. It can never touch life. You are a living creature yet you lead your entire life within the realm of this isolated, parallel movement of thought. You cut yourself off from life. That is something very unnatural. The natural state is not a thoughtless state. That is one of the greatest hoaxes perpetrated for thousands of years. You will never be without thought. Being able to think is necessary to survive but in this state thought stops choking you. It falls into its natural rhythm.

This is the crux of the whole problem. The one that is looking at what you call the self is the self. It is creating an illusory division of itself into subject and object, and through this division it is continuing. This is the divisive nature that is operating in you, in your consciousness. Continuity of its existence is all that interests it. As long as you want to understand yourself or to change yourself into something spiritual, into something holy, beautiful or marvelous, you will continue. If you do not want to do anything about it, it is not there. It's gone.

Through thinking you cannot understand a thing. You are translating what I am saying in terms of the knowledge you already have just as you translate everything else, because you want to get something out of it. When you stop doing that, what is there is what I am describing. The absence of what you are doing—trying to understand or trying to change yourself—is the state of being that I am describing. Because you are not interested in the everyday things and happenings around you, you have invented the beyond, timelessness, God, truth, reality, enlightenment or whatever, and search for it.
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There may not be any ultimate truth. You don't know a thing about it. Whatever you know is what you have been told, what you have heard, and you are projecting that information. What you call something is determined by the learning you have about it, and whatever knowledge you have about it is exactly what you will experience. The knowledge creates the experience and the experience then strengthens the knowledge. What you know can never be ultimate reality.

In the natural state the movement of self is absent. The absence of this movement probably is the beyond but that can never be experienced by you. It is when the you is not there. The moment you translate, the you is there. You look at something and recognize it. Thought interferes with the sensation by translating. You are either thinking about something which is totally unrelated to the way the senses are functioning at the moment or else labeling. That is all that is there. The word separates you from what you are looking at, thereby creating the you. Otherwise, there is no space between the two.

Every time a thought is born, you are born. When the thought is gone, you are gone. But the you does not let the thought go and what gives continuity to this you is the thinking. Actually, there is no permanent entity in you, no totality of all your thoughts and experiences. You think that there is somebody who is thinking your thoughts, somebody who is feeling your feelings. That's the illusion. I can say it is an illusion but it is not an illusion to you.

Your emotions are more complex but it is the same process. There is a sensation in you and you name it. This brings into existence the one who is translating this sensation. Self is nothing but a word. This labeling is only necessary when you must communicate. You think the thoughts of your society, feel the feelings of your society and experience the experiences of your society. There is no new experience. So all that any man has ever thought or felt must go out of your system. And you are the product of all that knowledge. That's all you are.

All that you know about what you call thought is what you have been told. You are all the time trying to do something with it because somebody has told you that you must change this or replace that, hold on to the good thoughts and not the bad thoughts. Thoughts are thoughts; they are neither good nor bad.

As long as you want to do something with whatever is there you are thinking. Wanting and thinking are not two different things. Wanting to understand means there is a movement of thought. You are adding momentum to that movement, giving it continuity. The senses function unnaturally in you because you want to use them to get something. Why should you get anything? Because you want the self to continue you are protecting that continuity. Thought is a protective mechanism. It protects you at the expense of something or somebody else.
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If you could be in a state of awareness for a single moment once in your life the continuity would be snapped, the illusion of the experiencing structure, the you, would collapse and everything would fall into the natural rhythm. In this state you do not know what you are looking at. That is awareness. If you recognize what you are looking at you are there again experiencing the old, what you know. What makes one person come into his natural state and not another person, I don't know. Perhaps it's written in the cells. It is acausal. It is not an act of volition on your part. You can't bring it about. There is absolutely nothing you can do.

You can distrust any man who tells you how he got into this state. One thing you can be sure of is that he cannot possibly know himself and cannot possibly communicate it to you. There is a built-in triggering mechanism in the body. If the experiencing structure of thought happens to let go, the other thing will take over in its own way. The functioning of the body will be a totally different functioning without the interference of thought except when it is necessary to communicate with somebody. You have to throw in the towel, be totally helpless. No one can help you and you cannot help yourself.

This state is not in your interest. You are only interested in continuity. You want to continue, probably on a different level, and to function in a different dimension, but you want to continue somehow. You wouldn't touch this with a barge pole. This is going to liquidate what you call you, all of you. This structure is born of time and functions in time but does not come to an end through time.

You can't understand what I am saying. It is an exercise in futility on your part to try to relate the description of how I am functioning to the way you are functioning. This is a thing which I cannot communicate nor is any communication necessary. No dialogue is possible. When the you is not there, when the question is not there, what is, is understanding. You are finished. You'll walk out. You will never listen to anybody describing his state or ask any questions about understanding at all.

What you are looking for does not exist. You would rather tread an enchanted ground with beatific visions of a radical transformation of that non-existent self of yours into a state of being which is conjured up by some bewitching phrases. That takes you away from your natural state. It is a movement away from yourself. To be yourself requires extraordinary intelligence. You are blessed with that intelligence. Nobody need give it to you. Nobody can take it away from you. He who lets that express itself in its own way is a natural man.
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You see, the animal becomes a flower. That seems to be the purpose if at all there is any purpose in nature. I don't know. There are so many flowers there. Look at them! Each flower is unique in its own way. Nature's purpose seems to be (I cannot make any definitive statement) to create flowers like that, human flowers like that.

Man becomes man for the first time, and that is possible only when he frees himself from the burden of the heritage we are talking about, the heritage of man as a whole. Then only does he become an individual. For the first time he becomes an individual. That is the individual I am talking about. That individual will certainly have an impact on human consciousness. Like when you throw a stone in a pool it sets in motion circular waves. Maybe that's the only hope that man has.

That's the first time such an individual becomes a man. Otherwise, he is an animal. And he has remained an animal because of heritage, because his heritage has made it possible from the point of view of nature for the unfit to remain, or it would have rejected them a long time ago. It has become possible for the unfit to survive—not the survival of the fittest but of those unfit to survive—and religion is responsible for that.

He's not a perfect man. He's not an ideal man. He cannot be a model for others. He becomes freed from all the animal traits in him. Animals follow. Animals create leaders. And the animal traits are still persisting there in man. That is why he creates a leader and follows.

You become yourself. You see, the shock that your dependence on the entire heritage of mankind has been wrong, that realization dawns on you. It hits you like lightning that your dependence on this culture, be it Oriental or Occidental, has been responsible for this situation in you. That applies to the whole as well because the nation is the extension of the individual and the world is the extension of the different nations.

So you are freed from the burden of the past and become for the first time an individual. There is no relationship between these two flowers at all so there is no point in comparing and contrasting the unique flowers that nature has thrown up from time to time. They in their own ways have had their impact. Each flower has its own fragrance.

If it had not been for the heritage of man which we are so proud of we would have had so many flowers like this. It's not that I am interpreting or understanding nature's ways, the purpose of evolution or any such thing. There may not be any such thing as evolution at all. If it had not been for culture, nature would have thrown up many more flowers. It has become a stumbling block to man's freeing himself in his own way. What is responsible for his difficulty is culture. It is of no use to the society at all but it is there.

If it had not been for culture the world would have produced more flowers, different kinds and varieties of flowers, not only the one rose that you are so proud of. You want to turn everything into one model. What for? Whereas, nature would have thrown up from time to time different flowers unique each in its own way, beautiful each in its own way. That possibility has been destroyed by this culture which has a stranglehold on man, which prevents him from freeing himself from the burden of the entire past.

One ceases to be somebody else and is simply what one is. This shock, this lightning, hitting with the greatest force, shatters everything, blasts every cell and gland in the body. The whole chemistry seems to change. There's nothing to certify that but I'm not interested in satisfying anyone's curiosity because I am not selling this. I am not collecting followers and teaching them how to bring about this change. It's something which you cannot bring about through any volition or effort of yours. It just happens. I say it is acausal. What its purpose is I really don't know but it is something, you see.

The whole chemistry of the body changes so it begins to function in its own natural way. That means everything that is poisoned and contaminated by the culture is thrown out of the system. It is thrown out of your system and then that consciousness or life or whatever you want to call it expresses itself and functions in a very natural way. The whole thing has to be thrown out of your system.

This individual is neither a theist nor an atheist nor an agnostic. He is what he is. The movement that has been created by the heritage of man which is trying to make you into something different from what you are comes to an end and what you are begins to express itself in its own way, unhindered, un-handicapped, unburdened by the past of mankind as a whole. Such a man is of no use to the society. On the contrary, he becomes a threat. He doesn't think that he is chosen, chosen by some power to reform the world. He doesn't think that he is a savior or a free or enlightened man. And the moment followers fit him into the tradition, there arises a need for somebody else to break away from that tradition, that is all.

Whatever I say stands or falls by itself. It doesn't need the support of any authority of any kind. That is why such a man is a threat to the society. He's a threat to the tradition because he's undermining the whole foundation of the heritage. My talking to people is incidental. I mean it. Otherwise, I would get up on a platform. What is the point in getting up on a platform? I am not interested. I have no message to give.

It's not in anybody's hands but you have a hundred per cent certainty because it is not that it is my special privilege or that I'm specially chosen by anything. It's there in you. That's what I mean by saying there's no power outside of man. It is the same power, the same life, that is functioning there in you. Something is trying to express itself and the culture is pushing it down. When once it throws the culture out then it expresses itself in its own way.

That is the fragrance of this flower. Such an individual cannot retire into a cave or hide himself. He has to live in the midst of the world. He has no place to go to. That is the fragrance of this flower. When you stop trying to understand what this flower is and what this perfume is which you have never known, there is another flower, not a copy of that flower. The moment you stop trying to compare this, trying to understand and even imagine what this flower is, what its fragrance is, there is a new flower there which has no relationship whatsoever with all the flowers that we have around us.

When this thing happened to me I realized that all my search was in the wrong direction and that this is not something religious, not something psychological, but a purely physiological functioning of the senses at their peak capacities. You want to know what my state is and make it part of knowledge, i.e. the tradition, but knowledge must come to an end. Your wanting to know only adds momentum to your knowledge. It is not possible to know what this is because knowledge is still there and is gathering momentum. The continuity of knowledge is all you are interested in.

I want to make it very clear that there is no movement. You are not going to move from what you are. You haven't even taken one step. There is no need for you to take any step. This consciousness which is functioning in me, in you, is the same. In me it has no frontiers. In you there are frontiers. You are enclosed in that.

Probably, this unlimited consciousness pushes you, I don't know. Not me, I have nothing to do with it. It is like the water finding its own level, that's all. That is its nature. That is what is happening in you. Life is trying to destroy the enclosing thing, that dead structure of thought and experience which is not of its nature. It's trying to come out, to break open. You don't want that. As soon as you see some cracks there you bring some plaster and fill them in and block it again. It doesn't have to be a person that pushes you. Anything teaches you just the same if only you let it.
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You will never know what life is. Nobody can say anything about life. You can give definitions but those definitions have no meaning. You can theorize about life but that is a thing which is not of any value to you. It cannot help you to understand anything. When the question burns itself out what is there is energy. You can't say anything about that energy. It is already manifesting itself, expressing itself in a boundless way. It has no limitations, no boundaries. It is not yours, not mine. It belongs to everybody. You are part of that. You are an expression of that. Just as the flower is an expression of life, you are another expression of life.

You are not different from the animal. You don't want to accept that fact. The only difference is that you think. Thinking is there in the animal also but it has become very complex in the case of man. That's the difference. Don't tell me that animals do not think. They do. But in man it has become a very complex structure and the problem is how to free yourself from this structure and use it only as an instrument to function in this world. It has no other use at all. It has only a contingent value—to communicate something, to function in the world—that's all, not philosophical concepts. That has no meaning at all.

Wanting anything other than the basic needs is self-deception. All this thinking has no meaning at all. Thinking is unnecessary except to communicate with somebody. Everyone is talking to themself. It is wearing you out and all methods that we use are adding more and more to that, unfortunately. All techniques and systems are adding to that. There is nothing you can do to end thinking. You see, you have to come to a point where you say to yourself, “I am fed up with this kind of thing.” Nobody can push you there.

Thought is there when there is a demand for it. When there is no demand for it you don't know whether it is there or not. But when there is a need for it, when there is a demand for it, it is there to guide you and to help you communicate with someone. What decides that demand is not here it is out there. The situation demands its use. It is not self-initiated.

You have no way at all of finding out for yourself the seat of human consciousness because it is all over and you are not separate from that consciousness. For some reason or the other the culture has limited the possibility of the potential evolving into its completeness and wholeness.

Somewhere along the line possibly thought was necessary but it has become the enemy of man now. It has become the enemy of man because the potential of the evolutionary process is thwarted by the culture's creation of a perfect man, a religious man, a gentleman and so on, that is quite the opposite of what is inherent here. Every human being has a unique personality of his own which is trying to express itself.

The culture has created what is called a normal man. You see, character building is in the interests of the continuity of the society. The character building mechanism has suppressed and thwarted what is there inside. It is in this sense that I use the word personality. There is nobody like you anywhere in this world among the six billion people we have. Physiologically speaking, the individual is an extraordinary piece of creation by the evolutionary process. So I say that every individual is unique. Whatever is there is trying to express itself and blossom into a human being.

The human being has lost all of the animal instincts and he has not developed the human instincts. What these people talk of—psychic powers, clairvoyance—they are all human instincts. And they are necessary because there are two things that the human organism is interested in. One: its survival at any cost. That is one of the most important things. It has a survival mechanism of its own which is quite different from the survival mechanism of the movement of thought. The second thing is to reproduce itself. It has to reproduce. These are the two fundamental characteristics of the human organism, the living organism.

The culture has made it impossible for the personality to express itself in its own way because the culture has different ideas. It has created a neurotic state. It has created this divisive movement of thought. This divisive movement has got to come to an end if whatever is there is to express itself and come into flower. That possibility is part of the human mechanism. It is built-in there.

The problem is that anything you do—any movement in any direction on any level—gives continuity to the structure of thought. The separation between mind and body must come to an end. Actually, there is no separation. I have no objection to the word mind but it is not in one particular location or area. Every cell in your system has a mind of its own and its functioning or working is quite different from that of the other cells.

So the whole chemistry of the body has to change. It has to undergo a sort of alchemy, if I may put it that way. Fortunately, there are certain areas in the human organism which are outside the control of thought. This is what I have discovered for myself. They are the glands, what you call the ductless glands. The day you control them that's the end of man. He will lose everything. He will become just a nut and bolt in the social structure. What little freedom he can have, what little opportunity there is for this personality to express itself, will be lost.

These glands are outside the control of thought. A tremendous amount of money is being spent and a lot of research is going on to find out why they are there, what the function of those glands is—the pituitary gland, the pineal gland, the thymus gland and so forth. Unless they are activated, any chance of human beings flowering into themselves is lost.
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I can't say there is any such thing as an evolutionary process but there seems to be. What its nature is, what its purpose is, I do not know, but it seems to be trying to create something. Man remains incomplete unless the whole of this human organism blooms into something, like a flower.
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Society is there inside, not outside. Culture is part of human consciousness and everything that any predecessor has experienced is part of that. Not that there is an entity which reincarnates. There is no entity there. So the whole business of reincarnation is absurd as far as I am concerned. That is why in your dreams you dream as if you are flying like a bird. Likewise, the sex fantasies man has, the animal postures, The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana—all that is part of that consciousness which is transmitted from generation to generation.

The genetic is only part of it. Consciousness is a very powerful factor in experiencing things but it is not possible for anybody to find out the content of the whole thing. It is too vast. The day the endocrine glands are controlled it will change the personality of man. If nature had been allowed to go on in its own way everybody would have become a unique flower. The possibility is there of a change taking place which is not progressive. It has to happen in a very sudden and explosive way to break the whole thing.

This has no social, religious or mystical content. Maybe it affects the whole of human consciousness. It is bound to. There is only one mind, one consciousness. Whatever happens here is bound to affect. You see, there is a constant battle going on here between what is here trying to express itself in its own way and the culture preventing it. But you can't do a thing through volition. It has to happen. That is why I say it is acausal.

It seems to have happened to some people during the course of history. Each one has given expression to that uniqueness in their own way according to their background. It is an expression of that background. Nature, in its own way, throws out from time to time some flower, but this end product of human evolution cannot be used by this evolutionary process as a model to create another one. If it throws out one flower, that is it, you see. You can't preserve it. You can't preserve the perfume of that because if you preserve it, it will stink. The evolutionary process or movement is not interested in using the one that it has perfected as a model for further creation. It has a creation of its own.

The one question that this organism is interested in is, “How to throw off the whole thralldom, the whole strangling influence of culture?” That question is the only question this organism has, not in words, not as a thought—the whole human organism is that one question. I don't know whether I make myself clear. That is the one question, you see, which is throbbing, pulsating, in every cell, in the very marrow of your bones, trying to free itself from this stranglehold. That is the one question, the one thought. That is the savior.

For that question there is no way of finding an answer. With that question it is impossible for one to do anything. So it explodes. When there is no way to move with it, no space, the explosion takes place. That is like a nuclear explosion. It breaks the continuity of thought. Actually, there is no continuity of thought because thoughts are disconnected, disjointed things. But something is linking them up—what you call the self or the center, which is illusory. I can say it is illusory because it is only the knowledge you have about that which creates the identity. All the talk of self-knowledge or self-knowing has no meaning to me. It is within the framework of knowledge. It is playing tricks with itself.

So this continuity comes to an end and thought falls into its natural rhythm. Then it can't link up. The linking gets broken and once it is broken it is finished. Then it is not once that thought explodes—every time that a thought arises it explodes. It is like a nuclear explosion, you see, and it shatters the whole body. It is not an easy thing. It is the end of the man, such a shattering thing that it will blast every cell, every nerve in your body. I went through terrible physical torture at that moment. Not that you experience the explosion—you can't experience the explosion—but its after-effect, the fallout, changes the whole chemistry of your body. Then thought cannot link up any more. The constant demand for experiencing things comes to an end.

This is purely and simply a machine functioning automatically. The mechanism is functioning in an automatic way but with an extraordinary intelligence that is there. It knows what is good for it. There is an tremendous intelligence which is guiding the mechanism of the human body and its interest is protection, to protect its survival. Then the senses become very important factors. They begin to function at their peak capacity without the interference of thought except when there is a demand for it.

Thought is not self-initiated. It always comes into operation on demand. It depends upon the demands of the situation. There is a situation where thought is necessary and so it is there. Thought is only for the purposes of communication. Otherwise, it has no value at all. Then you are guided by your senses and not by your thoughts any more. All this talk of controlling the senses is tommyrot, absolute rubbish. The senses have a built-in mechanism of control. It is not something to be acquired. You can try to control, say, the sense of taste, but in this state you don't have to discipline or control yourself. This physical or human organism or whatever you want to call it is guided by sensory activity alone and not by thinking, not by mind at all.
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I tell you, you are not an ordinary being; you are an extraordinary being (Laughter.) There is no one like you. You are ‘the one without a second’ that the Upanishads talked about. The ideal of the perfection that has been placed before us has put the whole thing on the wrong track. The perfect being doesn't exist at all.
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Questioning my actions before and after is over for me. The moral questions about words or actions are no longer there. I have no regrets, no apologies. Whatever I am doing is automatic. In a given situation I am not capable of acting in any other way. I don't have to rationalize, think logically, nothing. That is the one and only action in that particular situation. Next time the action will be different. There are new factors.

You may see it as inconsistency or contradiction. I cannot act in any other way. There's no connection between the two actions. It is physical, not psychological. I don't remember anything that is not happening at that particular moment. There is no reaction, only response. But you are reacting all the time. There is the judgement for or against, “This is right, that is wrong.”

The response I am talking about is the physical response to the situation. I function in the physical plane all the time. I am not thinking of anything when I see you. If I turn this side you are wiped out, you are finished for me. There is no mind. If necessary it is recalled, if you ask questions. Reaction is thinking about it—right, wrong, good, evil. Response is just looking without the intervention of thought. Reaction is mental. Response is physical. You are all the time reacting. You are not physically responding to the things out there.

The physical organism knows what to do in a particular situation. So you don't have to think about it. There is no preparation. If there is a snake you step back. It is finished. You don't think about it. Physiological protection is all that this physical organism is interested in, nothing else. The structure which is always thinking of every possible situation, envisaging how to be prepared to deal with each and every kind of situation that might arise during the course of your life, is a thing that has no meaning because every situation is quite different.

Life guides you. I don't want to use the word life because that mystifies the whole thing. This organism is interested in protecting itself and it knows how to survive. When I go for a walk I tell friends, “Please, for goodness sake, look, don't think.” You don't have to think. Just use your eyes and your ears and they will guide you. The vision becomes extraordinarily clear. The listening mechanism becomes extremely sensitive, that is all. The senses are not deprived of their activity here, they have a field day. They go where they want, think what they want, anything that comes. There is no good thought, no bad thought, no sensual thought, no spiritual thought. All thoughts are the same.

You may ask, “How can such a man have a sensual thought?” There is nothing he can do to suppress that thought or to give room for that thought to act. This is a reality, a fact. But when these thoughts try to take root there everything in you tightens. You don't have to do a thing. The thoughts cannot stay there. There is no continuity, no build-up. One knows what it is and there it ends. Something else comes up.

But it doesn't end there for you. You say, “How can I have these sensual thoughts?” You think you are not free if you have sensual thoughts but if you don't have them you can be certain that you are not a living human being. Saint or sinner, one must respond to every stimulus.
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You must respond. If there is a woman, there must be a physical response to that. Otherwise, you are a corpse. But here there is no continuity, no build-up. Something else comes up. Thoughts come and go, most of the time you don't even know that they are there. They cannot stay. They are moving. When you recognize there's trouble, fine, it cannot stay there for long. It is pushed out by the next thing. Before you realize what is happening it is gone. When you try to look at it, it is not there. What you are looking at is completely different from what was there before. You don't have to do a thing.

This man is not a stone. He is affected by everything that is happening there. Nor does he bother to create an armor. The religious man has built an armor around himself. Here the cumulative process has come to an end. The only action is physical action, only on that level. The senses are running like wild horses. There is nobody who is controlling them. They run here, there and everywhere as the situation demands.

This action is the movement of life, the real movement of life, and it has no direction. If you accept the helplessness the problem is solved. That is why I say there is no freedom of action for you. It's not a fatalistic philosophy I am talking about but preventing the past from interfering with and coloring the present. All this talk of sublimation of sex energy is bunkum.

I make emphatic statements because it is something I have experimented with before and I know what it is. By conserving sex energy you are not going to improve yourself in any way. It is too silly and too absurd. Why has so much stress been laid on that? Abstinence, continence, celibacy, is not going to help to put you in this state, in this situation. You can have sex today and this kind of thing can happen to you tomorrow. And this can happen even through sex.

If there is a moment there where there is nobody who is experiencing anything—that is the moment when this kind of a thing can happen. It doesn't have to be the discourse of a religious man. Anything that is happening can do the trick because if you don't translate anything that will take care of it.

There is no such thing as sublimation, nothing going up there. It is only going out. But these holy men won't accept it. If they were honest enough they would know what they are saying. Sex is unfortunately separated from other activities. Why I have always wondered. It is one. It can't be separated. Why have they put it on a different level? It is that that has created the problem. Religion is responsible for that. It has created that for us.

The questioning of our actions is really the moral problem. We must have new moral codes of conduct. That is necessary, otherwise we can't function. That is the trouble now. The old codes are all out of date, anachronistic, finished. Who cares about sex? Sex is so easy now. The extraordinary man, as opposed to your ordinary man, has to live here in this society. He cannot run away and live in a cave and meditate.

There is no conflict with this society at all. Although it is so unreal I function in the world accepting the reality accepted by everybody. It is very important. I can't sit in a cave. This is the only reality for such a man. The ultimate reality is bosh and nonsense. It doesn't exist. It's a myth. As long as you are feeling the feelings of society you are part of that society. Because you have no such thing as your own thoughts, your own experiences or your own feelings, you can't run away from this society.

You are not separate from the society. You are the society. You are part of this world. You are affected by it. You are not involved but you are affected. There is a difference between getting involved and allowing yourself to be affected. All the windows are open. It doesn't matter, this or that, anything can come. We have very strange ideas in the religious field, all kinds of funny things.

You are escaping from yourself. What you do or do not do does not matter at all—your practice of holiness, your practice of virtue. That is socially valuable for the society but that has nothing to do with this. The moral codes of conduct have no relationship whatsoever to this. Not that this man is immoral. He cannot be immoral. It is impossible for him, you see. His behavior patterns probably to some extent fall within the framework of the moral and religious code but he's a danger. What I am saying is a threat to you as you know yourself and as you experience yourself.
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My point is this; that not because of love but because of the terror of liquidating ourselves we will learn to live together. You cannot hurt anybody without hurting yourself, not psychologically but physically. Only when we realize this will we learn to live together. As long as each individual seeks his own security, there can be no overall security. We are talking of peace in international terms but it has to percolate down to the level of individual relationships.

Only terror will make us live together in peace whether we like it or not. You can take a revolver and make the world's strongest, most powerful man dance for you. It is a fact. This is going to survive somehow. You are not going to let the whole thing blow up. Man has survived for so long and now we are all of a sudden talking about values and all that kind of stuff. What for? It has not helped us to live in harmony.

We have created this moral problem, you see. Plants and animals don't have a religious problem. Man has created this religious problem. You see, this has absolutely no social content at all and I can't think of any collective action. So this individual is just like something thrown out by nature and whether anybody recognizes him or not is of no importance. This man cannot be of any use to this society. I don't have the missionary zeal in me or any desire to save mankind.

I am not in the holy business. I sing my own song. If somebody comes I talk. If nobody comes I go for a walk or look at the birds, look at the trees. So many things are happening. But I don't go out and sit on a platform and talk. I am not cut out for that kind of a thing. I am a simple man. I don't want to complicate things unnecessarily. You see, my position is very simple. I'm always available. I have no private life which I can call my own. Anybody can come at any time. I just see them and say, “Good morning, what can I do for you?” That's all I can do. I have nothing to give, that's all.
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Knowledge is not something mysterious or mystical. You know that you are happy and you have theories about things. This is the knowledge we are talking about. You introduce another knowledge; spiritual knowledge. But spiritual knowledge, sensual knowledge—what is the difference? We give the names to them. Fantasies about God are acceptable but fantasies about sex are called sensual, physical. There is no difference between the two. One is socially acceptable, the other is not. You are limiting knowledge to a particular area of experience so then it becomes sensual and the other becomes spiritual. Everything is sensual to me.

The knowledge that is essential for the living organism—all of that is necessary. But all those speculations about God, truth, reality, have no meaning at all. They are all cultural values. They are totally unrelated to the survival of the living organism. They are all socially, arbitrarily fixed, religious values. All our tastes are cultivated tastes. Likes and dislikes are all cultivated.

There is no such thing as absolute morality. By morality I mean questioning your actions before and after. It is all social. For the smooth running of society these codes are necessary. These religious people have created a policeman inside you. Certain actions are termed good and certain other actions are termed bad either before or after you do them. That hasn't helped you in any way.

It is thinking that has created the problem. Man's problem is basically the moral dilemma—questioning your actions before and after. It has become a neurological problem, not a religious problem. Even God is a neurological problem. God is the jumbled spelling of dog but the whole of your being is reacting to the word God.

All your beliefs, they are not just psychological, they are neurological. You don't know what is good. You know only what is good for you. That's all you are interested in. Everything centers around that; all your art and reason centers around that. I am not being cynical. That's a fact, nothing wrong with it. I'm not saying anything against it. The situations change but it is that which is guiding you through all situations. I'm not saying it is wrong, you see. If it is not so something must be wrong with you. As long as you are operating in the field of what they call the pair of opposites, good and bad, you will always be choosy in every situation. That is all, you cannot help that.

A moral man is a chicken. A moral man is a frightened man, a chicken-hearted man. That is why he practices morality and sits in judgement over others. And his righteous indignation! A truly moral man will never talk of morality or sit in judgement on the morals of others; never. Man is always selfish and he will remain selfish as long as he practices selflessness as a virtue. The basic pleasures you are indulging in I am not against at all. Whatever you do I am not against at all.

There is restlessness because you have an ideal way of doing things, a perfect way of doing things. You think that there is something more interesting than what you are doing. If that is knocked off, what you are doing becomes very interesting.

You have been told that you should practice desirelessness but that is falsifying you. Desire is there. Desire as such can't be wrong, can't be false, because it is there. Anger as such can't be false because anger is there. You are talking of some energy which those people have defined as God or God-knows-what. Don't you see that it is the very thinking that has turned this into a problem? Anger is energy. Desire is energy. All the energy you want is already in operation there. What the hell do you want energy for? You are destroying this energy through thinking. It is only thinking that has created the problem. Without thinking there is no problem. What I'm saying is that through thinking you cannot solve the problem. Thinking can only create problems.

You hope that you will be able to resolve the problem of desire through thinking because of the models of saints who you think have controlled or eliminated desire. If that man has no desire, as you imagine, he is a corpse. Don't believe that man at all! Such a man builds some organization and lives in luxury which you pay for. You are maintaining him. He is doing it for his livelihood. There are always fools in the world who fall for it.

Once in a while he allows you to prostrate before him. You will be surprised if you live with him. You will get the shock of your life if you see him there. That is why they are all aloof, because they are afraid you will catch them some time or the other. The rich man is always afraid that you will touch him for money; so too the religious man. He never comes in contact with you. Seeing him is far more difficult than seeing the president of your country. That is a lot easier than seeing a holy man. He is not what he says he is, what he claims he is. But those men who have made it, they live amongst the people. You can see them always there.
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You will never know the truth because it's a movement. You cannot contain it. You cannot express it. It's not a logically ascertained premise. It has to be your discovery. What good is my experience? We have thousands of experiences recorded. They haven't helped you. It's the hope that keeps you going because hope is the structure.

So-called self-realization is the discovery for yourself and by yourself that there is no self to discover. That will be a very shocking thing, I tell you. It's not going to be an easy thing. It's not going to be handed over to you on a gold platter. You have to become completely disillusioned then the truth begins to express itself in its own way. It is useless to try to discover the truth. The search for truth is absurd.

You cannot communicate what you cannot experience. I don't want to use those words because inexpressible and incommunicable imply that there is something which cannot be communicated, which cannot be expressed. There is an assumption that there is something there which cannot be expressed, which cannot be communicated. There is nothing there. I don't want to say there is nothing there because you will catch me; you will call it emptiness, void and all that sort of thing. I can only put it this way—whatever is there cannot be experienced. Whether there is anything there I don't know. I have no way of knowing it at all.

Even assuming for a moment that you are an enlightened man, you have no way of knowing anything about it. It can never become a part of your knowledge. This has understood that it is not possible to experience anything any more. I don't know if I quite make myself clear. The individuality, the isolation, the separation or whatever you want to call it is not there anymore. What separates you, what isolates you, is thought. It creates frontiers, boundaries. Once that is not there you are boundless, limitless; not that you can experience that boundlessness and limitlessness of your consciousness.

The content of your consciousness is so immense that you can't say anything about it. That is why I say it's a state of not knowing. You really don't know. But how do you know that you do not know? It's not that you say to yourself that you do not know but in relation to the ordinary state of consciousness you have no way of knowing that at all; nobody has any way. There is not even an attempt on your part to grasp something. You don't accumulate experiences.

If you want to experience one thing, the whole series of mysteries are there knocking on your door. This is not an experience at all. You are interested in experiencing the ultimate reality—truth, God, God-knows-what—but it's futile for you to attempt to experience a thing which you cannot experience. It doesn't mean that it is beyond the experiencing structure. Rather, the experiencing structure comes to an end. If you don't recognize what you are looking at it means you are not there.

What are you? You are nothing but a bundle of all these experiences, the knowledge you have about them. I see and I don't know what I'm looking at. My sensory perceptions are at their peak capacity but there is nothing inside of me which labels. The knowledge I have about things is in the background. It is not operating.

In a way the whole of life is like a great big dream. I am looking at you but I really don't know anything about you. This is a dream, a dream world. There is no reality to it at all. When the experiencing structure is not manipulating consciousness or whatever you want to call it then the whole of life is a great big dream from the experiential point of view; not from this point of view here but from your point of view.

You see, you give reality to things—not only to objects but also to feelings and experiences—and think that they are real. When you don't translate them in terms of your accumulated knowledge, they are not things. You really don't know what they are. To you, in relation to the reality you give to things, you would call this state of not knowing a dream.

Here there is no such thing as reality any more, let alone the ultimate reality. I function in the world as if I accept the reality of everything the way you accept it. It's like water flowing. When there is an obstacle to the water then there is an action there, either it overflows or it takes a diversion, but here and now when I begin to walk in that direction there is no question of an obstruction or anything there.
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Look here—there is no present to the structure of the you. All that is there is the past which is trying to project itself into the future. You can think about past, present and future but there is no future, there is no present, there is only the past. Your future is only a projection of the past. If there is a present, that present can never be experienced by you because you experience only your knowledge about the present and that knowledge is the past. So what is the point in trying to experience that moment which you call now?

The now can never be experienced by you. Whatever you experience is not the now. So the now is a thing which can never become part of your conscious existence and which you cannot give expression to. The now does not exist as far as you are concerned except as a concept. What you experience is only the knowledge you have about it, and the knowledge has come from some outside agency always. It is somebody else's, not yours. Somebody else will come along and take it away. A more persuasive man comes along and says, “That's not the way to experience, there's another way,” and so on. As I see it, there is no preparation for it—no yoga, no prayers, no meditation. Probably, you will experience anything you want. Thought is something extraordinary.

You have to go through all these experiences. Sometimes out of nowhere something like an experience too extraordinary to have happened to you or anybody ever before is there, but that did not come out of nowhere. It is part of the knowledge of consciousness. All that man has experienced before you is part of consciousness. It is all there. All that is a contamination; anything you experience, however profound it may be, is a contamination. It has nothing to do with this state. Somebody has experienced that before. Anything you experience there is a worthless thing, it is not that. Whatever is experienced is thought-induced. Without knowledge you can't experience and experience strengthens the knowledge. It is a vicious circle—the dog chasing its own tail.

Expansion of consciousness is nothing, but you give so much importance to that. Drugs will make it a lot easier than all these meditations and yogas. There is a sudden blow-up of consciousness and this sudden expansion releases tremendous energy there inside of you. What is the effect of that on the physical body? The physical body responds to what you call the sudden expansion of consciousness. The only way the physical body can respond to that sudden expansion of consciousness is by taking a sudden breath. Suddenly you take a breath and the whole breathing pattern changes. It's breathtaking. You experience such things all the time. There is nothing to these experiences. None of these experiences mean anything.

The realization dawns on you that those experiences, however profound they may be, aren't worth anything, that's all. You may be in a blissful state; even after that calamity you have blissful states, ecstatic states, a sudden melting away of everything that is there. It doesn't mean anything. You experience, I experience—what is the difference?

In India, holy people experience some petty little thing called a blissful state or the absence of body consciousness and they think something marvelous is happening. All those things are limitations. They are limiting consciousness. They are not in any way helping. But to you probably they are of great interest because man is functioning all the time in that limited consciousness. All those religious experiences are no different from the experiences people have when they take drugs.

You cannot experience anything which you can call your own. Whatever you experience, however profound that experience may be, is the result of the knowledge that is part of your consciousness. Somebody must have, somewhere along the line, experienced bliss, ecstasy—call it by whatever name you like—and that experience is part of your consciousness. You have to come to a point where you see that there is no such thing as a new experience at all. The mystic who experiences what the sages have talked about is still in the field of duality, whereas the sages or seers are functioning in the undivided state of consciousness.

The mystic experience is an extraordinary one because it is not an intellectual experience. It helps them to look at things differently, to feel differently, to experience things differently and to interpret the statements of the sages and seers for others. Had it not been for the mystics, the sages would have been clean forgotten long ago. The sages don't depend upon any authority. What they say is the authority. This the sages talked about but the mystics just had experiences. They tried to share that through music and all kinds of things but this is not an experience which can be shared with somebody else. This is not an experience at all.

The mystics are trying to tell you, so they are always in the field of duality, whereas the sage, or seer, or whatever you want to call him, is in the state of undivided consciousness. He does not know that he is a free man so for him there is no question of trying to free others. He is just there. He talks about it and then he goes.

Gaudapada had no disciples. He refused to teach anybody. Ramana Maharshi taught nobody, initiated nobody. Great teachers never use any authority and they do not interpret anyone. The mystics help you to look at things differently, to interpret things differently. You cannot become a sage through any effort. It is not in you hands. A sage cannot have a disciple. A sage cannot have a follower because it is not an experience that can be shared. Even an ordinary experience you can't share with others. Can you tell somebody who has never experienced sex what the sex experience is like?

The sages and seers are original and unique because they have freed themselves from the entire past. Even the mystic experience is part of the past. Not that the past goes for such a man but for him the past has no emotional content. It is not continually operative, coloring the actions. This is the ultimate. You have to totally surrender yourself. It is not surrender in the ordinary sense of the word.

It means there isn't anything you can do. That is total surrender, total helplessness. It can't be brought about through any effort or volition of yours. If you want to surrender to something it's only to get something. That's why I call it a state of total surrender. It's a state of surrender where all effort has come to an end, where all movement in the direction of getting something has come to an end.

All wanting is totally absent. Even the hope must go that some miracle will happen and it will descend upon you from somewhere. All those to whom this kind of thing has happened have really worked hard, touched rock-bottom, staked everything. It does not come easily. It is not handed over to you on a gold platter by somebody. It is a very simple thing, so simple that the complex structure does not want to leave it alone. 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.

You are interested in experiencing bliss, love, God-knows-what, but that is a worthless thing. If I experience bliss, is that bliss? It is created by the knowledge I have; it is the knowledge. To be free from knowledge is not an easy thing. You are that knowledge—not only the knowledge that you have acquired in this life but the knowledge of millions of years of everybody's experiences. People have some experiences, you see, and on that they build a tremendous superstructure.

The thing is so simple that the complex structure does not want to leave it alone. I don't like the articles written about me. You are trying to present me as a religious man which I am not. You are failing to comprehend the most important thing that I am emphasizing. These articles don't give any idea of what I am expressing.

There is no religious content—there are no mystical overtones at all—in what I am saying. Man has to be saved from the saviors of mankind! The religious people, they kidded themselves and fooled the whole of mankind. Throw them out! That is real courage.

Courage is to brush aside everything that man has experienced and felt before you. You are the only one greater than all those things. Everything is finished. The whole tradition is finished, however sacred and holy it may be. Then only can you be yourself. That is individuality. For the first time you become an individual. As long as you depend upon somebody, some authority, you are not an individual. Individual uniqueness cannot express itself as long as there is dependence. You don't have to depend upon any authority; it has an authority of its own. You will never interpret anything. You will never rely on any authority.

The problem is that even if such a person doesn't talk his very presence becomes a model for somebody. The fact that somebody sits here from morning till evening—what can I do about it? Sometimes they go into trances. They say, “How can you deny what is happening to me?” And I say, “You may do what you like.” How can I convince you that I have nothing more than you have? I don't have anything that you don't have.

Your wanting something from somebody is the cause of your misery. The end of illusion is the end of you, so you can't be without illusion. You can only replace one illusion with another. It is very difficult to make you understand the absurdity of the whole search.

I am blocking every escape. Each outlet has to be blocked to put you in a corner. You must be choked to death, as it were. Only a real teacher can find that out and tell you, nobody else. Not those people who interpret the texts; all that is totally unrelated. Only such a man can talk. And such a man never encourages you because he knows that if this kind of a thing has to happen to somebody, that person will not need the help of anybody. In spite of everything it will happen.

Whatever you are doing is blocking its happening. It is misleading to put it that way because there is nothing to happen. You don't realize that whatever you are doing is a self-centered activity. Whatever you are doing in any direction is only strengthening or distorting the whole thing. Spirituality is self-centered activity. It is very difficult to understand that. The instrument that you are using is born in the field of cause and effect. It cannot conceive of anything happening without cause and effect. That is why that is not the instrument, and there is no other instrument.

It is a quantum jump. It jumps from here to there. You cannot link up these things. You put me on the other side of the river. You want to cross in a boat. That boat is a leaky boat and you will sink. There is no other bank and there is no river to cross, no boat. It is very difficult for you to understand that. You have created an image and put the image on the other side. I say, “No, for goodness sake, I am on the same bank. There is no river to cross and no boatman is necessary!”

Nobody can guide you. You have no guidelines because he himself doesn't know. If I knew, I would guide you along. Such a man cannot guide or lead you anywhere. It is not that I am against gurus, not at all. He knows, even your books say it, that it is not the guru that can help you. It doesn't mean some sort of mysterious thing.

The hymns say, “Whomever it chooses, to him it happens.” That does not mean that there is any power outside of you. That potential is there in you already. It has the capacity to explode. If through some strange chance, if through some luck, thought remains by itself without splitting itself into two—something has to happen to that. It is like an atomic explosion, not one but trillions. When it explodes it blasts everything that is there. It is a chain reaction. One after the other, every cell is involved.

It is not so easy. Not through logic or power or somebody's teaching can you make it happen, but the possibility of that kind of thing happening is there in everybody because that is its nature. I can't give it to you or tell you how this happened. That is the reason why I say it has no cause and cannot be reproduced. Reproducing a copy has no value at all. That is why it cannot be reproduced. It is not my opinion. No teacher has reproduced another teacher like himself. While he may have followers, he has something which cannot be reproduced because nature does not use anything as a model to reproduce another.

So all your morality and all your practicing this, that and the other has no meaning. That is why the Upanishadic seers never talked of morality or practices whereas the saints have emphasized them because they are second-class imitators. This kind of a thing, if it has to happen, will happen in spite of those things. If anything has to happen it has to happen here and now.
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You see, the trouble is that the more beliefs you have the more difficult it becomes for you because one more thing is added to your tradition. Your tradition, which you want to preserve, has been strengthened and fortified by the appearance of a new man because you are trying to fit him into the framework of your tradition. This structure is interested in protecting the tradition. But this is interested in breaking the cumulative nature of the tradition, not in maintaining the tradition but in breaking it.

A certain person breaks it and you make it a part of that accumulated wisdom. That is why it becomes more difficult. Even the revolutionary statement of that particular individual who has achieved this breakthrough has already become part of your tradition. Your very listening has destroyed the revolutionary nature of this breakthrough and has made this a part of knowledge, tradition, because you are the tradition. The listening mechanism that is operating there in you is the tradition. It strengthens itself, fortifies itself, through the listening process.

By the time this has been accepted, the need has been created for somebody else to come and blast it. That is why I am talking. The very expression of this has created the need for something new to happen. That is its nature. That is the purpose, if there is any purpose, not to create a following but to create something new there. Something new is saving you from the burden of the past. The moment it is given expression to, it is old. Why be like those handing over the torch from one person to another and maintaining the hierarchical structure?

Following another is an animal quality. Man cannot become man so long as he follows somebody. What is responsible for man remaining an animal is that culture, the top dog. Following somebody, that has not helped you at all. Why be a cheap imitation of Buddha or whosoever? What for? I tell you, you are far more unique and extraordinary than all those saints and saviors of mankind put together. Why do you want to be a cheap imitation of that fellow? That is one of the myths. Forget it. You have that potential. The first thing is to drop copying others.
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Now supposing you are there, let us put it that way. You will not say to yourself or to others that you are a free man. You will not try to free anybody. It is just there like the flower. The wildflower has a beauty of its own. Other flowers are no match to that. It will go one day. It doesn't matter. There is nothing that you can do. That statement has no meaning for you because you are doing something all the time. You have to do something or the other, so this statement has no meaning, no relevance to you at all.

The description of this state is a very dangerous thing because you are trying to relate this to the way you are functioning. Whatever you want you can get, whatever experience you want, but whatever you experience is worthless. Enlightenment, if there is any such thing, is not an experience at all. So this dawns on you, this realization, if you want to put it that way, that there is nothing to realize.

Self-knowledge, or self-realization, is to realize for yourself and by yourself that there is no self to realize. That is going to be a shattering blow to the one pursuing it. That is why it happens to one in a million, one in a billion, not because of what he does or does not do. All your doing is the barrier. Unless you are there you can't understand the meaninglessness of this at all. When you are there you see that the very search is the self, the very thing you want to be free from. There is no you independent of the search; that you don't understand.

It is the goal that you have set before yourself that has created the you. If the goal goes, if you brush aside the goal, you replace one with another. You can't be without illusion. You replace one illusion with another. If illusion goes, you go. If you accept the goal it is alright with me but I say that the goal itself is false. I maintain that there is nothing to be achieved, nothing to be accomplished, nothing to be attained. So all that you are doing to achieve your goal is meaningless. The earlier it dawns on you the better for you. If those things produce some experiences it will be very difficult for you to transcend your own experience.

Somewhere along the line it is bound to dawn on you, you know, that it is not taking you anywhere, but the hope keeps you going, the hope that one day through the same thing you will probably reach your goal, because that instrument is born out of time, is born out of cause and effect, and it cannot conceive of anything except in terms of time. So if time is not there, there is nothing to happen, let alone in the future, because it is time that has created the need for the timeless. Time means the future. If this time is cut off, it is not as if what you expect to happen will happen now. There is nothing to happen here. Time burns itself out when the timeless is knocked off.

Whatever you want to happen is in terms of time. Assuming for a moment that you are already in the blissful state, you don't want to be in that state tomorrow. Whatever the state you want to be in, you are not in that state, because the goal is there, which is tomorrow, not today. So if this is not there, the thought which is thinking in terms of something happening in time is not there. Unfortunately, there is nothing to happen. Happening is in time. When time is not there, there is no happening.

Self is God. The divine you want in the future is already here. There is nothing to happen. Achieving—it doesn't matter what you call it—is in time so it is bound to be caught up in cause and effect. You want to produce a result but this is not a result, not a happening, not an achievement. Anything you do with this will cause you pain. There's no end to that. You will keep searching for this eternally. You are not going to get it. Even if you get what you want and experience bliss, love, God-knows-what, there is always more of it. Silence you experience but you want permanent silence. You want always to be in silence but in the very nature of things there is no permanence at all.

You have never lived with these people. I do not know if there are any. It's a very simple thing. It's so simple that the complex structure does not want to leave it alone. There's nothing that you can do. You can stay with any teacher all your life. Nothing is going to happen. There is no inside or outside, you understand? The triggering apparatus is part of you. It's there. All techniques strengthen the very self you want to be free from. For what are you meditating? You want to be free from something. There is a continuous flow of thoughts and you are linking up all these thoughts all the time.
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All meditation is a self-centered activity. I don't talk of a meditative state. This individual is always in a state of meditation. “Where is that movement?” I am wondering. That is the meditation that is going on. Not that I am wondering in the usual sense of the word. This individual remains in a state of wonder for the rest of his life. Outside and inside are created by thought. When there is no movement of thought you don't know whether it is inside or outside. This is just like a mirror, a live mirror reflecting things exactly as they are.

There is nobody here. I don't see anything. The whole of my body is reflecting things exactly the way they are out there. The recognizing and naming mechanism is in the background except when there is a need for it. This absence of the movement of thought which recognizes and names things is the state of moksha. You imagine that it's something he goes into and comes out of. Not at all, he's always there. Whether the eyes of such a man are open or closed, he does not know what he is looking at. This state is always a state of wonder. He doesn't know what he is hearing, he doesn't know what he is smelling, and yet his senses are working at their peak capacities, extraordinarily sensitive, taking in everything.

There is a constant demand on your part to experience everything that you look at, everything that you are feeling inside, because if you don't do that you are coming to an end. You as you know yourself, you as you experience yourself, are coming to an end, and you do not want that to come to an end. You want the continuity. So all spiritual pursuits are in the direction of strengthening that continuity. It's a self-centered activity. Through self-centered activity how can you be free from the activities of the self? All your experiences, all your meditations, all your prayer, all that you do, is self-centered. 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-centered activity.

You can't divide these things into two. The process you adopt to reach what you call being is also a becoming process. I don't know if I make myself clear. There is no such thing as being and becoming. You are always in the becoming process, no matter what you call it. If you want to be yourself and not somebody else, that also is a becoming process. There is nothing to do about this. Anything you do to put yourself in that state of being is a becoming process. That is all that I am pointing out.

Every time you do something, whether it is a good deed or a bad deed, you are strengthening that. You see, we are all functioning in a thought sphere, if I may use that phrase. What you pick out of that is according to your particular background, your culture. This is the product of the culture. You pick up thoughts which are beneficial to you to protect thought. Thought is a protective mechanism. What is it that it is protecting? It is protecting itself. It will do everything possible to prevent itself from breaking up. So even if you introduce the so-called spiritual pursuits it is only the strengthening of that. It is not in the opposite direction so you are on the wrong track.
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I am always negating what I am saying. I make a statement but that statement is not expressing all that is being said so I negate it. I negate the first statement, the second statement and all the other statements. That is why sometimes it sounds very contradictory. I am negating it all the time; not with the idea of arriving at any point, just negating. There is no purpose in my talking. I am only pointing out the basic situation that you cannot understand what I am talking about.

It is not possible for you to listen to me without interpreting. I am all the time trying to knock off the reference point. When the reference point is absent, there is no need to understand me. You understand? I am all the time saying that. You won't even know what I am talking about. You are not in a position to accept or reject what I am saying. You accept a statement because it fits your reference point, your assumptions, like self-realization, God-realization, etc. The reference point is you. There is nothing other than the reference point there. That is you. If the reference point goes, you go with it. That is the end of you.

Your very listening is interpretation. You never listen to anybody. It is not possible for you to listen to anybody without interpreting. The interpretation is a part of your background, you see, so it is not possible for you to listen to anything without interpreting what you are listening to.

So is there any other listening? There is a listening quite independent of words, but that is not on the conscious level. It does not mean that you are unconscious. I must make it very clear. That is a pure and simple physical response to the sound. The sound sets in motion the tympanum. So it is just a vibration. You really don't know what he is talking about. This is a physiological phenomenon so I express this only in physiological terms, not in psychological, not in religious, not in spiritual terms, because it's very important for me to express this state in pure and simple physical and physiological terms.

This is just a machine responding to the stimuli of your questions. You have created the problem of their answers, I am not involved. I have no commitment to consistency. I have no viewpoint to put forward, no thesis to expound. I only respond to your stimulus. When you ask a question it is picked up immediately, I don't even decode it. Before you have even asked the question the answer is there. You can do it, it is nothing unusual. If you are not preoccupied with anything of your own it is an easy thing. It is not thought-reading. It is just an echo chamber.

What is going on there is going on here. You can't do that. You want to decode every thought, to translate everything. What I'm saying can't be experienced by you except through the help of thought. In other words, as long as movement of thought is there it is not possible for you to understand what I'm talking about. When it is not there, there is no need for you to understand. In that sense, there is nothing to understand.

Life is one unitary movement, not two different movements. It's moving, it's a continuous flux, but you cannot look at that flux and say, “That is a flux.” Then why do I say this is a flux? It is only to give you a feel about it that I use those words, but if you translate these words in terms of your concepts and abstractions you are lost. Really, you do not know a thing about what is being said. You don't understand at all. So if you realize that, what happens? Then there is no movement of thought there. Wanting to understand means there is a movement of thought.

You really don't know a thing about what this chap is saying. Then what happens inside of you is only that you repeat these phrases, word by word, without translating them, without interpreting them in terms of your concepts. His talking is just a noise. You are an echo chamber there. That's all that happens. You are not there. When the you is there you are translating.

This is just a pure and simple physiological functioning of the organism. Because there is life, there is a response. The response and the stimulus are not two different movements. You cannot separate the response from the stimulus. The moment you separate the response from the stimulus, there is a division, it is a divisive consciousness that is in operation.

So it is one movement. Thought and life are one interfluent movement. But there seems to be a movement of thought parallel to the movement of life going on in you all the time. There seems to be, otherwise there would be no need for us to sit and talk about this. Listening to me or trying to understand me would not be there. If there were no continuity of thought in you this situation which we have created for ourselves in this room wouldn't exist anymore. You wouldn't want to listen to any chap describing how he is functioning. Why should you? If he is functioning that way, alright, jolly good. Why are you interested in that? Why do you establish any relationship?

As long as you listen to me you are lost. You listen to me because you want to understand what I am talking about, not that it is something abstract or difficult but your understanding is through that instrument and that is not the instrument. The refined, sensitized instrument, you call intuition, but there is no other instrument. If that is not the instrument and there is no other instrument, the logical conclusion from that statement is, “Is there anything to understand?” There is nothing to understand. That understanding is here somehow. I don't know how it came. That is why I cannot take you there. It has no cause. You are interested in finding out the cause because you want it to happen in you.

So it is not a question of understanding me. It is just not possible to understand. The only thing you can understand is within a certain framework and in relation to a point of reference. You think that the more you listen, the more these things become clear to you, but the clarity of thought is making it more difficult for you to understand what I am talking about. As long as you think that you can see more and more clearly, I say you have seen nothing. If you say you have seen, you have not seen, because seeing is the end of the structure that says that. There is no seeing you can know. In other words, there is no seeing. As long as you think you can understand this more, see the world around you more clearly, I say you will see nothing and understand nothing. The difference between you and me is that you are trying to understand. The absence of what is going on there is what is here. I can only point out the obstacle, that's all.

You see, it is not that I know I am in a state of not knowing. The statement, “I don't know a thing,” is an expression of that state. Be very clear about it, it is not that I say to myself that I don't know what I am looking at. That state is throwing out the expression. That is the expression, the description, of the state by itself, not that there is somebody who is saying it. The state itself, by itself, says, “I really don't know a thing about it.”

When all attempts and efforts on your part fail to fit what is being said into the logical framework, the rational framework, I have to say that you cannot in any way understand what it is all about. It is beyond logic. It is beyond rationality. You can never experience it. Don't try! That is not going to help you at all. There are no two ways about it. You, the structure trying to understand, are not going to understand. I can't understand a thing about it. You are still trying to understand, experience, something which you can never understand.

The sages spoke at a time when words had different connotations. Their students listened and passed it on. That is why I often ask, “What is my teaching? Please tell me.” I don't know a thing about my teaching. I don't know a thing about my state. Not that I can. I know I cannot. The limitation is there. It has its own limitation and it has understood its limitation. It cannot experience that at all, that's all I am saying.

You see, your very listening is an interpretation. You cannot listen to what I am saying. If you are in that state where there is just an echo of what I am saying, repeating the words without understanding them, you really don't know what this chap is talking about and you don't even try to understand. I am telling you the simple fact that you cannot listen to me at all. Whatever you make out of your listening is your own listening, not what I am saying. What I am saying you don't know, I don't know.

What I am saying has no logic. If it has a logic it has a logic of its own, I don't know anything about it. But you have necessarily to fit me into the logical structure of your thought. Otherwise, the logical structure there, the rational thing, comes to an end. You see, you have to rationalize, that is what you are, but this has nothing to do with rationality. It has nothing to do with your logic.

What do you want to understand? There is nothing to understand. That is the understanding I am talking about. If you understand what it is all about, what I am talking about, you are already there. It will be something new, something totally new. You will give expression to it in a completely different way. You will not repeat what Buddha said, what Jesus said, what Rajneesh said or what some other is saying. It will be new and it will express itself in a totally different way. How will it express itself I don't know, you don't know, nobody knows.
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If others fit me into their frameworks it is their business. We do not have any vested interest in that. You will probably fit me into some framework and say that so-and-so said this before. That is my misfortune wherever I go. J. Krishnamurti people come, Rajneesh people come, others come, and they say, “You are saying the same thing!” How the hell do you know I am saying the same thing? Do you know anything of what he is talking about? First of all, you must know what he is talking about and what is there behind it and then you can compare what I am saying with what he is saying.

I am not saying any of those things. I don't compare myself with anybody. Why compare myself with sages, saints and saviors? It would be the biggest tragedy of my life, wouldn't it? I don't compare myself at all. What I am saying is not the same thing that has been said before, no. How do I know? You see, you are trying to fit me into that framework. You have necessarily to do that. If you don't do that you come to an end. That is a dangerous point.

So you have to reject me totally, saying, “He is talking some nonsense, rubbish, bosh!” Or you have to fit me into whatever particular background you have or into somebody else's framework and say, “He is saying the same thing.” Otherwise, the tin gods you have created out of somebody's teaching will collapse. You have necessarily to do that, either one or the other.
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You are not going to get anything here. You are wasting your time. Pack up and go! That is my message. I have nothing to give. You have nothing to take. If you continue to sit there you are wasting your time. The one thing you have to do is get up and go. If you still think I can give you something you'll have to sit there until kingdom come. I have nothing to give. There's nothing to be given. The holy business, I am not in it. I don't want a thing. I have nothing to give so there's no breach of contract here; nothing. I don't want anything. You may think that I am talking for self-fulfillment. If I do, that will be my tragedy, my misery. So you are out. You are not interested in involving yourself in my tragedy.

I do not give a damn for you. I know you are doomed. If you think something is going to happen and sit here day after day, week after week, year after year, waiting till kingdom come, even then no kingdom will come. Go where you will and do what you want! I tell you very clearly, loud and clear, in clear, unmistakable language, that there is nothing to be communicated now or at any time. I am really surprised, in spite of that assertive statement you hang on here. It is your funeral. You are chasing something which does not exist. There is nothing to be transformed, nothing to be changed, nothing to be understood. So long as you want to be like me you will remain what you are, asking the same questions. You will get the same answer. The one answer for all questions is, “Stop asking questions!”
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The whole culture is built on the foundation of kill and get killed. They are even teaching that. You can't be other than what you are. Whatever you are trying to do to change, you will not succeed. Stop running away from yourself! What is the good of my saying so? There is no use my telling you that because you are not going to stop it. I am telling you to stop it. You are not certain of it, “Maybe there is something that can be done.”

I am certain that you have no freedom of action. In that sense, I go a step further and say that you are genetically controlled. Naturally, you will say that that statement is a theory. You have a hope that you can do something. There are many people in the holy business who assure you that you can do something, so you will go there, as simple as that. My certainty remains.

Alright, you can go and try your luck. In the end you will find out for yourself and by yourself, “That chappie is right!” I'll sing my song and go.

On my side it is very clear. There are so many people who have said they can help you but you are not going to get anything from anybody because there is nothing to get. That is why I say that since there is no such thing as enlightenment, the question whether someone is enlightened or not does not at all arise. You are all like-minded people who are after such things, that is all. That is your projection, your ideation, about those people, that is all that I am saying. There may not be anything there other than what you have projected on them.
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This is not a thing to be talked about and praised. You are not called upon to change this world. I am not interested in changing the society. What I am saying has absolutely no social content at all. This is an extraordinarily beautiful world! You want to change this world so that you can live in a world of your own ideas. The real problem is that you want to change yourself and find it's impossible so you want to change the world to fit it into your own pattern.
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You want to be a good man, a nice man, an innocent man, and all that stuff. You want to be something different, but always in the future. That is what all the teachers promise you, and they just promise, a next life or an afterlife. Till then he is in business, he is assured. If he says there is nothing you leave him. That is why I do not have to bother. You are going to leave in any case because what brings you here will certainly take you somewhere else. You are interested in getting something, some kind of a false hope or promise. Here you are not going to get it.
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I don't give false hopes or promises, but religious leaders have created some hope, so you go on and on, like riding a tiger you can't get off. There's no journey. Both are kidding themselves, those who take or pretend to take you on the journey and those who are trying. You can't walk with me. You are so frightened of the thorns there, the stones, you want a trained guide. I myself don't know the terrain. Have you never heard of the proverb that warns you never to walk with a man who has sandals because he always walks on thorns? You will get into trouble. I myself do not know the terrain, I am just going.
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This cannot be used to change the world, reform the world, create a new man, a new world—all that is balderdash. Maybe some people do it just to help some people. That's alright, do something. If it works, it works. But to suggest something like that, knowing very well that it is not going to work, is not right, “Let's give them some new toys to play with, all the traditional ways have failed.”
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What are you doing? You are not doing anything. You are repeating new phrases, new words, new idioms. That is all you are doing. You don't accept the fact that all that is a contamination there in that consciousness. Whatever you consider sacred, whatever you consider extraordinary, is a contamination in that consciousness. It has to purify itself. All that—all that dross, all that is holy, all that is sacred—must go. When that has gone you are yourself, otherwise there is dependence.
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If religiousness is all you are interested in, there is no need to look anywhere other than organized religion. The profound statements of the great teachers are not much different from each other. All I am saying is that looking to alien lands and religions does not mean anything. You learn new techniques, new systems, new phrases, and then you begin to think and speak in terms of this new language and probably you feel just great but basically it does not mean anything at all.
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There is a very powerful plaster. If there is a little crack in your structure you will plaster it over. It is very powerful. It has millions of years of momentum. It knows all the tricks. It can invent any trick to gain momentum. That is its nature. There isn't anything you can do about it. You can discuss it for years but I promise you, you will not get anywhere. If anyone makes you believe you can get somewhere, he's taking you for a ride. There is no one who is honest in this field. No outside agency can help you.

I am not asking you to do anything. How can you be interested in this kind of a thing? What you are interested in is a totally different thing, fancy stuff, fantasy. You may indulge in all kinds of fantasy, that's your affair. If this is not a fantasy, you will be interested in some other kind of fantasy. How can you be interested in liquidating yourself? All that you know—you as you know yourself, you as you experience yourself—is interested in continuity. It knows all the tricks. You cannot beat that. All questions reduce themselves to the one question, “How am I going to get what you have?” And through that a structure is permanently establishing itself there and getting its continuity. There is no “how”.

I am not interested in the whole field of self-expression—getting in touch with one's feelings, overcoming inhibitions and so on. I respond to what people come to see me about, the natural state. If people are interested in psychological change, so-called consciousness expansion and all that, let them go to encounter groups or see psychiatrists and engage in what I call the Freudian fraud. In the end, their so-called growth will not bring them happiness. At best, they will simply have learned to be unhappy in a new and richer way. I am not concerned with that. My interest is in the subject they come to see me about in the first place.

My interest is in pointing out the utter impossibility of doing anything whatsoever to attain the natural state. Anyhow, the people who come to see me do not stay very long. They come a few times or hang around for a few months then they either go back to their ordinary lives or go on to some fellow who promises them what they seek. Either way that's fine with me. But one thing I will never do is deceive them. I will never suggest in any way that I can give them anything. I will never hook them into some phony baloney idea about practicing undifferentiated awareness and the observer being the same as the observed and all that.

Everything is okay with me. I am perfectly happy with everything as it is. I am happy with misery, poverty and death. I am also happy with wealth and psychological fulfillment. I think the solution to your real problems is, in any case, not possible for you unless you undergo the sort of biological transformation that has happened to me, which is not to say that I ever consider myself superior to you or to anyone else because of this. Quite the contrary, the idea of superiority or inferiority never even enters my head for one moment. The total absence of this idea is one of the characteristics of this whole transformation business.
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The natural state is one in which thinking and life are not two things but one. It is not an intellectual state. It is more like a state of feeling, although I use the word feeling in a different sense than that in which you use the word. It is a state of not seeking. Man is always seeking something—money, power, sex, love, mystical experience, truth, enlightenment—and it is this seeking which keeps him out of his natural state. And although I am in a natural state, I cannot help someone else, because it is my particular natural state, not another's.

So don't listen to me or anybody. Listening to other people is what you've been doing all your life. It's the cause of your unhappiness. You are unique. There is no reason for your wanting to be like another chap. You can't be like him anyway. This wanting—wanting to listen, wanting to understand, wanting to be like such-and-such an individual—has come about because society is interested in creating a perfect man, but there is no such thing as a perfect man. All we can do is be ourselves and no one can help you be that.

You keep listening to someone, it makes no difference whom. And you keep hoping that somehow, tomorrow or the next day, by listening more and more, you will get off the merry-go-round. You listen to your parents and teachers tell you to be good and dutiful and not be angry and so on and that doesn't do any good so you go and learn meditation. You find someone in the holy business and you fall for it. Or perhaps he touches you and you see some light or God-knows-what and you hope he will help you experience enlightenment, but he cannot help you. I do not know if you see the utter helplessness of the situation and how, if anyone thinks he can help you, he will inevitably mislead you. And the less phony he is, the more powerful he is. The more enlightened he is, the more misery and mischief he will create for you.

Life as such has no beginning and no end. It is a beginningless and endless movement and you are only an expression of it. You are conscious of yourself through thought, by which I mean not just conscious thought but that conditioning which transforms the life that passes through you into feelings, into pleasure and pain. And this thought is not yours. It is what you have learned from others. It is second-hand. It belongs to everybody. You belong to everybody. When you accept nature, everything falls into its own rhythm. There is nothing to control and nothing to ask. You don't have to do a thing. You are finished.
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You don't let your power express itself. That's something living, vital. It's the throb, the pulse, the beat of life. You are an expression of that life. How can you experience that? This structure of thought through which you experience is dead. It cannot experience that life at all because the one is something living and the other is dead, and there can't be any relationship between the two. You can only experience dead things, not a living thing. Life has to express itself. This is a thing which nobody can teach you. You don't have to get it from somebody. What you have is there. No outside agency can help you; nobody.

So all outside agencies are finished. That is a very difficult point to arrive at. You don't go and listen to anybody no matter how holy he may be. He may be the god of gods, he may say, “I have come to liberate the whole of mankind.” If you go there just to satisfy your curiosity that's a different matter. You don't seek anything from any source outside so you fall back on yourself and you really don't know.

You want to find out. You ask the question again and again, you are stuck with it, “How can I understand this thing?” When you are finished with all answers from outside and no answer is forthcoming from inside, what happens to that question? That question cannot remain there, it dissolves itself. Ionization of thought takes place because it cannot escape, and that is energy. That is life.

You can't do a thing. Don't get on this journey of freeing yourself from the conditioning of your own thought. But you are still trying. You accept these ideas. You never question the validity of those statements. It doesn't matter who says it, it is false for you. Not only that, it is falsifying you because you do not test the validity of those statements for yourself. The conditioning, you see, you will never be free from that. Don't believe anybody.

I don't accept that there is such a thing as the mind, let alone the open mind or the unconditioned mind. There is no totality of these thoughts and experiences. They are all disconnected, disjointed things. You'll never be free from thought. If there is any such thing as a thoughtless state it can never be experienced by you or by anybody. Whatever you experience there is created by this thought.
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It is time that creates the timeless and then pursues it, and through this pursuit time is continuing. Continuity is all that it is interested in. Abstractions are very misleading. If you start talking in terms of innocence, in terms of this, that and the other, you are lost. In that state you really don't know what you are looking at. You don't know that you are looking at your wife. Can there be any relationship? You see, you can talk of innocence but when there is no mind why talk of the innocent mind? Where is the mind or the unconditioned mind? These phrases are very misleading. They are not going to help in any way. To me there is no such thing as mind. Mind is a myth. There is nothing there to be transformed, radically or otherwise.

There is no self to be realized. The whole religious structure that has been built on this foundation collapses because there is nothing there to realize. You can come here. Nothing will happen. Nothing will evolve. You will not get anything from me. That is why I am safe. I live my own life. If somebody comes, I say, “Tell me, what can I do? There's nothing much I can do. Thank you. Goodbye.”

The very nature of mind is neurotic because it wants two things at the same time. So every individual is neurotic and when you can't get it you become psychotic, you become wild. Not that you necessarily go and beat somebody but you are destroying yourself because the violence is there inside of you. What makes you unhappy is the search for a thing that does not exist. This is the unfortunate situation. You are not getting anywhere. That is not the way at all. Then what is the way? There is no way. Anything I say you turn into a way and add to the momentum. That is not the way. That is not the path. It has to be yours.

All paths must go. As long as you follow somebody else's path, the path is the product of thought. So it is actually not a new path, it's the same old path, and you are playing the same old game in a new way. It is not a new game. It is the same old game that you are playing all the time, but you think you are playing a new game. You have to come to a point where you can't do anything at all.

I say there is no translator who is translating the sensations. There is not even the knowledge that they are sensations. You are translating all these sensations. You can't stop the translation. You are the product of translation. There may not be any stoppage. If somebody says there is a stoppage, “To hell with what he is saying, this chap is either a cuckoo or some far out, freaked out ape. He is talking about things that are not real to me.” You don't have the courage. You don't want to accept the reality of yourself.

What I am saying is something totally unrelated to the way you are functioning. So then naturally it has to slow down. You don't know. You come to a point where you don't know what to do about the whole business, “I can't do anything. This is the only way I know. I don't know any other way.” If you see the futility of it all maybe it will not really stop but slow down.
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There is nothing to do, nothing to achieve. This is what I have been trying to communicate to those of you who come to see me and who care to listen to me. As long as you want to get or achieve something or want to be enlightened you are not going to be an enlightened. I don't know, I never say to myself, “I am an enlightened man, a self-realized man.” What does it mean? It doesn't mean anything to me. So to me there's no point in talking about enlightenment or going about with my head raised saying to myself and others, “Come ye and listen to me. I am an enlightened man. I am going to liberate you all.” That's the holy business.

Maybe you've heard that there is some funny fellow, that he's brutal and is saying all sorts of things. Probably, curiosity brought you here, I don't know. And if you say I do all this for kicks it is alright with me, but I'm not doing it for kicks. Alright, assuming for a moment that I am doing all this for pleasure—why do you allow yourself to be used by me? Keep away! Don't allow yourself to be used by me!

Stay away! My interest is to send you all packing. Don't allow yourself to be exploited by me! I don't get any pleasure. If you don't come tomorrow it's all the same but you don't believe it because the only thing you know is pleasure. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with pleasure. Don't say that it is something wrong. If you accept that you are here for exactly the same reason that a man goes to a bordello, that's going to give you a terrible shock. There's no difference at all.

Perhaps you have heard something about a transformed individual and that is what is bringing you here. This is not born out of thinking. These are just words springing up from their natural source without any thought, without any thought structure.

So take it or leave it! You will be better off if you leave it. Anything you listen to is turned into a method, a system. You want to get something through this. For example, somebody says there is a mind and you must uncondition your mind. How are you going to uncondition your mind? You are conditioning your mind through this lingo. That is all that it is necessary for you to see.

I'll sing this song the rest of my life until I drop dead. Whether anybody listens to it or not is of no importance to me. So, then you leave this chap alone. You never establish any relationship with this man. The moment you use this to get whatever you want to get or to arrive at some kind of a destination you are tricking yourself into the same old game.

There isn't anything you can get from any spiritual discourses or from any religious book. This is what I have been trying to point out to those who care to listen to me. There is nothing to accomplish, nothing to attain. If you are searching for and want anything, the first thing you must do is throw away—lock, stock and barrel, hook, line and sinker—all this stuff that you are hanging on to, otherwise there is no chance for you to be yourself. Any path you follow leads you astray, puts you on the wrong track. If you make anything out of what I am saying you are lost, body and soul, and if there is a God, He must, out of His sheer mercy, save you all and save you from me.

One thing I make very clear, I'm not here to liberate you at all. Who am I to liberate you? What is it that you want to liberate yourself from? You are trying to ask for a thing that you have so I only point out that you're on the wrong track. Your teacher must go. It doesn't matter who it is. What you are reading is the very thing you must be free from.
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You are moving away from yourself. You have to be yourself and a path is trying to turn you into something other than yourself. Why do you want to be somebody other than yourself? You see, otherwise you wouldn't listen to anyone. Look here, I want to be full of feeling for everybody. Somebody is talking about love, for example, so you want to be full of that love, whatever it is. You are projecting a hundredfold what you think love is, for example. That's what makes it difficult for you to be yourself.

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