because it is emptiness! And it hurts much –
though it is emptiness, it still hurts much!
Because to make way for it the ego has to die.
But I am happy that you are dying
because this is the only way to be beyond death –
I say: the only way.
Remember this always.
Sekkyo once said to one of his monks:
Can you get hold of emptiness?
I will try, said the monk; and he cupped his hands in the air.
That is absurd, said Sekkyo.
You have not got anything in there.
Well, master, said the monk, please show me the right way.
Thereupon Sekkyo seized the monk’s nose and gave it a great yank.
Ouch! yelled the monk. You hurt me!
I cannot help it,
because that is the only way to get hold of emptiness!
said Sekkyo.
232. Love.
Man asks questions and then answers them himself.
Nothing is answered in this way.
But man is capable of deceiving himself –
and the whole of philosophy
is nothing but such a deception.
Man asks: What is mind?
And then answers himself: Not matter?
And then asks: What is matter?
And then answers: Not mind?
And this stupid game goes on.
I have heard about a distinguished philosopher
who always began his speeches with: Why are we here?
He had occasion to address the inmates
of a mental hospital
and ended with: Ladies and Gentlemen, why are we here?
One of the inmates called out:
We are all here because we are not all there!
233. Love.
The mind always thinks in terms of the self.
It is egocentric.
During the French revolution
a man from Paris stopped at a village
and was asked by a friend what was happening.
They are cutting off heads by the thousands,
said the visitor.
How terrible! cried the villager.
That could ruin my hat business!
But this is the way of the mind,
and because of this it is never in tune with the cosmos,
so how can it know life?
It cannot know it because it cannot be one with it.
Really with the mind there is no knowing
but only superficial acquaintance.
Intimate and deep knowing comes only with no-mind –
and meditation is the dissolving of mind into no-mind.
234. Love.
A monk asked Hyakujo Yekai:
What is the most miraculous event in the world?
Hyakujo said: I sit here all by myself!
235. Love.
Freedom from becoming means freedom for being.
Becoming is desiring,
being is that which is.
Becoming is longing for the future,
being is to be in the present.
Becoming is mental,
being is existential.
That is why becoming must cease for the being
to reveal itself.
Becoming is just like the smoke around the flame,
or just like the outer covering around the seed,
so please let the smoke go
for the flame to explode in its complete glory
and splendor,
and let the seed die to its outer shell
so that it may be what it is in its innermost depth.
236. Love.
No more principles are needed.
The world is already much too burdened with principles
and people who are men of principle.
I have heard that once a priest was consoling a widow.
He said with much feeling that her dead husband
was a man of principle.
That he was, sighed the widow.
Every Saturday night for these past twenty years
the poor man would come home
and faithfully hand me his pay envelope –
he never missed doing that.
Of course the envelope was always empty,
but mind you,
he was loyal to the principle of the thing.
237. Love.
Religion is – living without conflict,
that is, without ideas
and without ideals,
because whenever one lives with ideals
there is conflict,
there is conflict between
that which is and that which should be,
and then life is misery.
See this and go beyond.
In fact the very seeing of the fact is going beyond.
And please do not ask the seemingly inevitable, “How?”
Because there is no how to it.
Either you see it or you do not see it –
and moreover the how again creates conflict.
238. Love.
Bhakti needs only time to absorb the shock she
has come across
in her deep meditations;
remember – only time and nothing else.
The shock is nothing new.
It happens whenever the deeper layers of the unconscious
are encountered.
Before any mutation this is absolutely necessary.
Be grateful to the divine because this is a good omen.
Bhakti needed it badly,
and when she is out of it she will be a totally new person.
Soon she will be twice-born.
At present she is passing through a great spiritual crisis,
so you be with her – but just as if you are not.
Be present, but with absolute absence.
This is the only way you can be helpful to her.
Let her be alone as much as possible.
Do not talk with her
except where it is needed absolutely,
and then too be telegraphic.
But if she herself wants to talk
let her talk as much as she likes,
and you yourself just be a passive listener.
Let her do whatsoever she wants to do or not do
and soon everything will be okay.
Do not worry at all.
I will always be there beside you –
and if you can see, you will be able to see me also.
Of course Bhakti will feel my presenceand become aware
of me so many times in these days. Convey my blessings to her.
239. Love.
One day a man came to the Sufi teacher, Bahauddin.
He asked for help in his problems
and guidance on the path.
Bahauddin told him to abandon spiritual studies
and to leave his court at once.
A kind-hearted visitor began to remonstrate
with Bahauddin.
You shall have a demonstration, said the master.
At that moment a bird flew into the room
darting hither and thither,
not knowing where to go in order to escape.
The master waited until the bird settled
near the only open window
of the chamber and then suddenly clapped his hands.
Alarmed, the bird flew straight
through the opening of the window
to freedom.
To him that sound must have been something of a shock,
even an affront, do you not agree? said Bahauddin.
240. Love.
Fu Ta Shih says:
Each night one embraces a Buddha while sleeping,
each morning one gets up again with him.
Rising or sitting –
both watch and follow one another
Speaking or not speaking –
they are in the same place.
They never part even for a moment
but are like the body and its shadow.
If you wish to know the Buddha’s whereabouts,
in the sound of your own voice
there he is.
Do you understand this?
If not now – when will you understand?
And this is not being asked for the first time,
but many many times in many many lives
the same question has been raised –
and you have not yet answered!
Now, is it not time enough?
241. Love.
Mind is localization of consciousness,
and it can be localized in any part of the body.
Ordinarily we have localized it in the head,
but other cultures and other civilizations in the past
have tried other parts of the body also,
and on other planets
there are beings with other parts of their bodies
working as their minds.
But whatsoever the part chosen
localization of consciousness means its freezing,
and whenever it ceases to flow freely as is needed
it is no longer consciousness in its suchness.
Meditation means: consciousness in its suchness.
So let consciousness fill the whole body,
let it flow throughout the totality of your being
and you will have a feeling of aliveness
which is never known and felt
by localized consciousness.
Whenever there is localization of consciousness
the part in which the localization happens
becomes tense and diseased
and the remainder of the body becomes a dead weight.
But with meditative consciousness
or flowing consciousness
everything changes completely:
the whole body becomes alive, sensitive and aware
and consequently weightless.
Then there is no center at which
tensions can exist and accumulate:
they cannot exist without frozen blocks of consciousness.
The flowing, moving consciousness
washes them out constantly with every movement.
And when the whole body is alive
only then do you begin to feel
the cosmic consciousness all around you.
How can a frozen consciousness,
and that too surrounded by a dead body,
feel the cosmic?
242. Love.
Now man knows more about man than ever
and yet no problem is solved.
It seems that something is basically wrong
with our so-called knowledge itself.
This whole knowledge is derived from analysis,
and analysis is incapable of penetrating
the depths of consciousness.
The analytical method is all right for matter
or for things
because there is no inside to them,
but consciousness is insideness,
and to use the analytical method with consciousness
is to treat it as an object,
while it is not an object at all.
And it cannot be made an object;
its very nature is subjectivity,
its being is subjectivity,
so it must not be approached from outside
because then whatsoever is known about it is not about it.
Consciousness must be approached from inside –
and then the method is meditation and not analysis.
Meditation is synthetic:
it is concerned with the whole and not with the parts,
it is subjective and not objective,
it is irrational or super-rational and not rational,
it is religious or mystic and not scientific.
Authentic knowledge of consciousness
comes only through meditation and all else is
just superficial acquaintance
and basically erroneous
because the very source of it is fallacious and poisonous.
243. Love.
Life is a dream so enjoy it;
but do not ask for more because
then you only disturb the dream
and get nothing except a disturbed night.
Be a witness to the dreaming mind
and then there is transcendence:
then you go beyond dreaming and beyond mind itself.
And know well that there is an awakening
below the dreaming mind
which is nothing but just a disturbed dream.
One can get to this below-dreaming state of awakening
through asking for more, desiring more –
as ordinarily we all do.
In a dream Mulla Nasruddin saw himself
being counted out coins
and when there were nine silver pieces in his hand
the invisible donor stopped giving them.
Nasruddin shouted: I must have ten! so loudly
that he woke himself up.
Finding that all the money had disappeared
he closed his eyes again and murmured,
All right, then, give them back –
I will take the nine.
There is also an awakening above the dreaming mind –
the real awakening
in comparison to which man ordinarily is asleep.
One can reach this awakening
through witnessing the dreaming mind –
and unless one reaches it one is not really alive.
244. Love.
The divine is that from which one cannot depart,
and that from which one can depart is not the divine.
So find that from which you have never departed
and cannot ever depart from –
and then laugh at the absurdity of the human mind
and its efforts!
Buddha is still laughing because of that.
Listen!
245. Love.
Why does man suffer?
Man suffers because of his craving,
craving to possess that which cannot be possessed,
and craving to keep things forever with himself
which are essentially impermanent.
And chief among these things is his own ego,
his own persona.
But all things are impermanent.
Except for change itself
everything changes.
Really nothing is
because everything is only a process,
so as soon as one tries to possess anything it slips away.
The possessor himself is slipping away constantly!
Then there is frustration
and then there is suffering.
Know this well,
realize this well and there will be no suffering
because then you have unearthed the root.
246. Love.
The self can never be free –
because the self itself is the bondage.
This is the meaning of the penetrating saying of Jesus:
He that saveth his life shall lose it
and he that loseth his life shall know life abundant.
Or that of Lao Tzu in Tao-te-Ching:
He who humbles himself shall be saved,
he who bends shall be made straight,
and he who empties himself shall be filled.
One is not to make the self free;
rather on the contrary, one has to be free from the self.
The self is nothing but the husk of the seed.
Do not cling to it.
Sings Wu Ming Fu:
The seed that has to grow must lose itself as a seed,
and they that creep may be transformed
through the chrysalis to wings.
Wilt thou then, O mortal, cling to husks
which wrongly seem to you to be the self?
247. Love.
The gates of the temple are wide open
and it is only after thousands of years
that such opportunity comes to this earth.
Know well that they will not remain open forever.
The opportunity can be lost very easily,
and you are still wavering,
and you are still hesitating –
to enter or not to enter,
to be or not to be.
I know that the challenge is great, but I know also
that your being is completely ready to take the jump.
Hence my insistent call for you to come and enter.
And this is not for the first time that I have called you,
nor the first life;
I know you, Bhakti, through so many births!
And soon you will also remember many things.
But not before the jump.
Only your superficial persona is resisting, not you –
and it is expected to resist always
and it is expected to resist always
because the moment one takes the plunge
into the unknown
it has to die naturally.
So please do not identify yourself with it;
be a witness to it, and you will be in the jump.
It is time now to die to the old ego
and be reborn to the supreme self!
248. Love.
Logic is not all;
nor is consistency;
because even madness has its own methods,
rationalizations and inner consistencies.
A madman was throwing handfuls
of crumbs around his house.
What are you doing? someone asked him.
Keeping the elephants away, he answered.
But there are no elephants in these parts,
said the inquirer.
That’s right – my method is effective, isn’t it?
declared the madman.
249. Love.
Total acceptance of existence is impossible for the mind
because the mind exists as denial.
It exists with the no,
and with a total yes it dies.
So it continues to find reasons to say no
even if there are no reasons.
Walking with a disciple one day
Mulla Nasruddin saw for the first time in his life
a beautiful lakeland scene.
What a delight! he exclaimed. But if only,
if only…
If only what, master? asked the disciple.
If only they had not put water in it! said the Mulla.
250. Love.
Meditation is like the sea:
receiving the dirty river and yet remaining pure.
You need not be purified before it,
but you will come out of it purified.
Meditation is unconditional,
purity is not a prerequisite but a consequence.
251. Love.
Be as if dead,
and then dualisms will not contaminate you
and you will reach the state
of the non-arising of thought.
The brightness of self-nature will appear in full –
and when this happens you are no more.
This disappearance is the appearance of the divine,
so please – disappear!
252. Love.
Existence exists in order to exist –
and likewise life.
There is no meaning to it beyond itself
so never posit any meaning,
otherwise you will feel its meaninglessness.
It is not meaningless and it cannot be so
because there is no meaning in it all!
The very search for meaning is mean and ugly
because it comes from the utilitarian mind of man.
Existence simply is
and likewise life:
there is no purpose in it
and there is no end to it.
Feel it here and now!
Please do not practice it
because that is the way of the utilitarian mind.
Be playful
and only then will you know the playfulness
of the universe.
And to know that is to be religious.
253. Love.
Do not continue moving in the old rut –
and the way out is just by your hand.
The mind is the past, the dead past;
one has to break it somewhere and jump out of it
The mind is the prison, the slavery.
Be free of it.
And the moment is ripe.
Of course I know that you are still not clearly aware of it
but you are not unaware either.
Gather courage and jump into the unknown.
Just one step is enough
because the next follows it automatically.
But do not go on thinking and thinking and thinking.
Thinking promises to lead you somewhere
but the promise remains always a promise,
because thinking is just impotent
as far as life is concerned.
So please, be existential.
Do not hesitate.
And you have nothing to lose – because you
have nothing!
Realize this and be nothing – no-one.
254. Love.
Life is movement,
process,
fluidity;
but ideas become fixed,
so they become also anti-life.
They become dead blocks.
Do not remain with them.
Move.
And do not fear inconsistency
because life is not a syllogism,
life is not a theory
but a mystery.
Someone asked Mulla Nasruddin: How old are you, Mulla?
Forty.
But you said the same last time I asked you, five years ago!
Yes, I am always consistent and always stand by
what I have said.
255. Love.
Mind means consciousness somewhere –
centered,
focused and tense.
Meditation means consciousness nowhere,
and when it is nowhere it is everywhere –
decentralized.
Unfocused and non-tense.
Mind is agony by its very nature,
meditation – ecstasy.
Do not treat consciousness like a cat tied to a string.
This very treatment –
or mistreatment –
creates the mind.
The consciousness must be left
to itself, utterly free
to move and be
according to its nature.
Do not localize it.
Do not be partial.
This is the essence of my discipline of no-discipline.
Preserve the absolute fluidity of your consciousness
and then you will not be,
and when you are not and only consciousness is
then for the first time the doors of the divine
are open to you.
256. Love.
Yes, man learns by experience!
Two old drunkards
were in the habit of coming together twice a week
to the wine-seller to get drunk.
After years of this one of them died.
His old friend came in on the Saturday
and they told him his pal had died –
that the whisky had been taken into blood circulation
and so saturated his blood and his breath
that one night before going to bed
the old man went to blow out the candle
and his breath caught fire and he was burned to death.
The other man promptly called for a Bible
and took an oath that from that time forward
he would never blow out another candle in his life!
Yes, man learns by experience!
257. Love.
Do not imitate anyone,
do not follow anyone,
otherwise you will be just a pseudo existence –
and that is worse than suicide.
Be yourself –
and only then
can you be responsible
and authentic and real.
But ordinarily everyone is just secondhand and borrowed,
and that makes everything ugly.
Mulla Nasruddin went to a mosque and sat down.
His shirt was rather short
and the man behind him pulled it lower,
thinking it looked unseemly.
Nasruddin immediately pulled the shirt of the man
in front of him.
What are you doing? asked the man in front.
Don’t ask me, ask the man behind – he started it,
said Nasruddin.
258. Love.
The real religious experience
cannot be organized, taught or transmitted.
To systematize it is to kill it.
It is so living and moving and dynamic
that to impose a pattern on it is impossible;
and the experience is always so unique and individual
that it cannot be put into any category –
although it happens when the individual is not.
It cannot be followed,
for everyone has to find it for himself,
and that is the beauty of it,
and also its freedom and virginity.
It is not new in the sense of any opposition to the old,
it is new in the sense of timelessness –
that is, eternally fresh and innocent –
as every flower is new
and every sunrise is new
and every love is new.
It is not borrowed from the past,
it is not based on any tradition,
it is not derived from without,
it happens within,
without any causality.
It happens unconditionally.
It is not continuous with the mind,
it is a discontinuous explosion.
There are clouds in the sky
and the sky cannot be seen,
but there is no causal chain.
The clouds have gone
and the sky is clear
but there is no cause-and-effect relationship.
The sky has not even known the clouds!
It has not been affected by them in any way whatsoever.
259. Love.
Life becomes more authentic
in the direct encountering of death.
But we always try to escape the fact of death,
and so life becomes pseudo and phony.
Even death, when authentic, has a beauty of its own
while pseudo-life is just ugly.
Meditate on death
because there is no way to know life
unless you stand face to face with death.
And it is everywhere;
wherever life is death is also.
They are really two aspects of one and the
same phenomenon,
and when one comes to know this, one transcends both.
Only in that transcendence is the total flowering of consciousness
and the ecstasy of being.
260. Love.
Man adds everything to his ego –
while everything goes on without him.
He is nothing,
but he thinks himself everything.
Mulla Nasruddin was walking past a well
when he had the impulse to look into it.
It was night, and as he peered
into the deep water
he saw the moon’s reflection there.
I must save the moon! the Mulla thought,
otherwise she will never wane
and the fasting month of Ramadan
will never come to an end.
He found a rope, threw it in and called down:
Hold tight! Keep bright, help is at hand!
The rope caught in a rock inside the well
and Nasruddin heaved as hard as he could.
Straining back he suddenly felt the rope give way
as it became loose and he was thrown on his back.
As he lay there panting
he saw the moon riding in the sky above.
Glad to be of service, said Nasruddin.
Just as well I came along, wasn’t it?
261. Love.
Are you really aware of what anger is?
Are you really aware of it when it is present?
I ask these questions
because man is never present in the present.
Man lives in the past
and only becomes aware of anything
when it has become a part of his memory.
One becomes aware of anger and sadness
only when they are all over,
and then awareness is just pseudo-awareness;
it is not awareness but remembering,
and remembering leads nowhere
because it is running in a circle.
Then one can fight with anger
but can never understand it,
and fighting with anger is anger –
of course more subtle
and therefore more strong and more poisonous.
So do not think about anger or sadness or happiness
and do not understand remembrance to be awareness
but be aware when anger is present.
Be totally conscious of it,
live it consciously and do not escape from it
and then you will know what it is.
To understand it is to transcend it.
Then you will find a silence descending on you
which passes all understanding.
262. Love.
Never to have seen the truth
is better than to have seen it
and not to have acted on it.
263. Love.
One should never be afraid of rising thoughts or desires
but only of the delay in being aware of them.
264. Love.
The purest ore is produced from the hottest furnace;
and the brook would lose its song if we removed the rocks.
265. Love.
Be empty and you will know.
Be empty and you will be the mirror.
Only total nothingness is capable of knowing all!
I have heard that the nun Chiyono studied for years
and meditated for years on the ultimate questions
of existence
but was unable to find the light.
The thinking was filling her so much
that she could not be a passage for the divine.
She was so filled with herself
that she could not be a host to the divine guest,
and the more she longed for enlightenment
the further off it was.
But one moonlit night she was carrying an old pail filled with water
– and the thing happened!
She was watching the full moon reflected
in her pail of water
when the bamboo strip that held the pail staves broke.
The pail fell all apart,
the water ran out,
the moon’s reflection disappeared –
and with it Chiyono herself disappeared.
She was not – but the enlightenment was there!
She wrote this verse:
This way and that way
I tried to keep the pail together,
hoping the weak bamboo
would never break.
But suddenly the bottom fell out:
no more water
no more moon in the water –
and emptiness in my hand!
266. Love.
One day Lin-chi was asked: What is the essence of meditation?
Lin-chi came right down from his seat
and taking hold of the questioner by the front of his robe,
slapped his face, then let him go.
The questioner, of course, stood there stupefied.
Then Lin-chi laughed and said to him:
Why don’t you bow?
This woke him from his reverie,
and when he was about to make a bow to the master
he had his first taste of meditation!
Please read this again and again and again,
and if you do not have the same taste
then slap your face yourself
then laugh and bow down to yourself –
and then you will certainly have the same taste.
267. Love.
The sun is rising high in the sky.
Its light enters the house through an opening.
The dust is seen moving in the ray of light
but the empty space of the room is unmoving.
Now close your eyes and be silent.
Then ask yourself: Who am I –
the moving dust or the unmoving space of the room?
Do not answer intellectually,
because intellectual answers are not answers,
but wait and realize.
Hsu Yun says: The mind is nothing but foreign dust.
Who are you – the mind? – the foreign dust? or —?
268. Love.
The mind exists to raise questions,
but only questions.
It never answers,
and it can never answer.
That is beyond it,
it is not meant for that,
that is not its function.
But it tries to answer,
and the result is the mess called philosophy!
Meditation never questions,
but it answers.
It is the answer,
because it is life,
because it is existence.
Question – and there is no answer.
Do not question – and you are the answer.
Why is it so?
It is so because
the questioning consciousness, mind, is disturbed,
and the non-questioning consciousness, no-mind,
is silent, quiet and at rest in its suchness.
Philosophy comes out of questioning,