So those who fight, they are creating their own defeats. If you want to be defeated, fight. If you want to win, do not fight.
Victory needs knowledge, not fight. Fight is a subtle violence. And this is strange, but this has happened: those who talk about nonviolence to others are very much violent against themselves.
There are teachings and traditions which say, "Do not be violent to anyone," but those same teachings are very much violent as far as you are inwardly concerned. They teach you to be violent with yourself, but not to be violent with others.
All types of asceticism, renunciation, negative attitudes, life-denying philosophies, are based on maintaining a violent attitude toward yourself. They tell you to be violent with yourself.
Tantra is absolutely nonviolent. It says, if you cannot be nonviolent with yourself, you cannot be nonviolent with anyone else - that is impossible. A person who is violent to himself will be violent to everyone; in his nonviolence also he will be just hiding his violence. Aggression can be turned against yourself, but that aggressive attitude is destructive.
But that doesn't mean to remain the animal which you are. The moment you accept your heritage, the moment you accept your past, the future becomes an opening. Through acceptance is the opening. The animal is the past; it need not be the future. There is no need to go against the past - and you cannot go. Use it creatively.
What can be done to use it creatively? The first thing is to be profoundly aware of its existence.
Those who fight are not aware of it. Because they are afraid, they push the animal behind, they push the animal into the unconscious. Really, there need not be any unconscious, but because of suppression the unconscious is created. You feel many things within which you condemn without understanding them. A man who understands condemns nothing; there is no need. He can even use poison as a medicine because he knows. Everything can be used creatively. Because you do not know, in ignorance poison is poison. With wisdom it can become the elixir.
The person who is fighting against his sex, anger, greed, against the animal, what will he do? He will suppress. Fighting is suppression. He will push down anger, sex, greed, hatred, jealousy. He will push everything down somewhere underground, and he will create a false structure above ground.
It is said that it is very extraordinary to find a man who learns through life - very rare. Really, no one learns. If you learn, then you cannot commit the same mistake twice. But you go on committing the same thing again and again. Rather, the more you commit, the more you become prone to commit it. You are angry again and again, and again and again you repent it, and you have not learned anything. Given the stimulus, you will be angry, and you will do the same madness, and then you will repent again - that is also part of it. And then you will again be ready to be stimulated and to be angry.
The third thing: if you want to turn in, learn! Whatsoever you are doing, learn through it. Take the essential out of it. Look back at what have you been doing with your life and your energy and your time. The same mistakes, the same foolishnesses, the same stupidities, again and again.
So you move in a wheel. However, it is not good to say that you move the wheel: rather, the wheel moves you. Mechanically, you go on and on and on. That is why in India we have called the world SANSAR. SANSAR means the wheel which goes on, and you are just clinging to some spoke on it and you go on moving.
Unless you learn something about this wheel, this vicious circle, this sansar, unless you learn something about it, you will not leave the spoke and jump out of it. So three words, three key words:
Death: make it a constant contemplation.
Meaning: go on searching for it in your life.
And learn: learn through your life, because there is no other learning. Scriptures won't give you anything.
If your own life cannot give you something, nothing can give it to you. Learn through your own life, conclude through it. What have you been doing with yourself? If you are in a wheel, jump out of it. But to know that you are in a wheel, you will have to go deep into understanding and learning.
These three things will help you to turn in.
"Do not talk such things. You make me very sad."
Diogenes said, "But you will become very sad when you win the whole world. What can I do? I am just imagining, and I have come to conclude that this is useless. You are making a suicidal effort.
You yourself are trying to win the whole world - so then what? If you succeed, then what? "
Alexander returned from Diogenes very disturbed, upset, sad. He said to his companions, "This man is very dangerous. He has shattered my dreams." And he could never forget, could never forgive Diogenes. The day he died, he remembered him again, and he said, "It may be that that fellow was right: then what ?"
So the next thing is to remember always that whatsoever you are doing, whatsoever you are achieving, remember to ask, "If I succeed, then what?" Is there any meaning in it all, or is there just some artificial meaning given by you only to divide, to create an illusion around you so that you feel you are doing something worthwhile - and all the time you are really wasting life and energy, not doing anything worthwhile! There is only one thing worthwhile: if you can become happy without anything, without any dependence: if you can be blissful alone, totally alone. If nothing is needed for your bliss, only then can you be blissful; otherwise you will be in misery, always in misery.
Dependence is misery, and those who depend on possessions, those who depend on accumulated knowledge, those who depend on this or that, they are helping their own misery to become accumulated more and more. So the next point to remember is to ask whether you have any meaning, or whether you are just floating along without any meaning. Are you just making believe that this or that is the meaning of your existence?
One man used to come to me. He used to say that if his son gets into college, that would be all and he would be very happy. He was a poor man, a very ordinary clerk, and that was the only dream, that his son would get into college. Then the son got into college. Now the son has become a forest official. A few months back the son was here and he told me, "I am getting only six hundred rupees per month. I have two children and this is my only dream, that they can get a good education; that is all. I am working hard. If they can be well educated and if I can send one of my children to some foreign country to study, that is all I ask."
His father is no more; he has died. This was his meaning in life, his purpose - to make his boy educated and well placed. Now the boy is well placed, and now the boy has the same purpose, to help his children become educated and well placed. And he will die, and those children will go on doing the same nonsense.
What is the meaning of all this? What are you doing? Just passing time? Just destroying life? Or have you got some authentic meaning which you can say makes you happy, blissful? This is the second consideration which will turn you inward.
And thirdly, man goes on forgetting. You go on forgetting things. You were angry yesterday, and you repented it. Now you have forgotten, and if the same stimulus is given again, you will be angry again. This has been so for your whole life: you go on repeating the same things.
A poor man is concerned with having a house. For years together he will work for it. His life has a meaning; something has to be achieved. And when he gets the house he will be happy for a few days at least, but then bigger houses are there... So he will go on moving, doing this and that, never thinking about his life as a whole, whether it has any meaning or not. He never takes life as a whole.
Just imagine that you have everything - the house, the car that you long for, and all your dreams are fulfilled. So now what? Just imagine that whatsoever you need is there, you have it. Now what?
Suddenly meaning disappears. You are standing on an abyss; nothing can be done. You become meaningless. You are already meaningless, just not aware. Even if you get the whole world, then what? What is fulfilled?
Alexander was coming to India, and he met a great saint, Diogenes. Diogenes was one of the most penetrating minds ever born. He lived naked like Mahavir; he is the Mahavir of Greek civilization and culture. He left everything, renounced everything, not because through renouncing things he was going to get anything - that is not real renouncing, not authentic renunciation. If you renounce something to get something, that is a bargain. If you think that you are going to have some reservation in heaven and that is why you renounce, it is not renunciation. If you renounce the bodily pleasures to have spiritual pleasures, this is not renunciation.
Diogenes renounced everything, not because out of it he was going to get something. He renounced just to see if when he has nothing, whether there is any meaning or not. He thought that if one possesses nothing, if even then one has a meaning, a purpose, a destiny, then death cannot annihilate anything, because death can annihilate only a possessions and the body is also possession. He left everything. He had only one thing: a wooden bowl out of which to drink water.
He thought, "This is not much of a possession." Then one day he saw a child drinking water with his hands. He immediately threw away the bowl. He said, "If a child can drink water with his hands, am I more weak than a child?"
When Alexander was coming to India to conquer, to make a world empire, somebody informed him that just on the way, where he would be stopping, there lived a great sage who was just the opposite of him. He was told, "You are going to make a world empire, and he has even thrown away his bowl because he says that as he is happy without it, why carry this burden? And you say that unless the whole world becomes your empire, you cannot be happy. So he is just at the opposite pole, and it would be good if you meet him."
Alexander was fascinated. It happens that the opposite always fascinates. The opposite always fascinates; it has a deep s*xual attraction. Just a man is attracted to woman or woman is attracted to man, there is the same attraction with the opposite. Alexander could not by-pass Diogenes, but it was not good for him to go to Diogenes, and it was impossible that Diogenes would come to him - there was no solution.
Diogenes was informed. Many, many messengers came to inform him that "The Great Alexander is passing this way. It would be good if you meet him." He said, "The Great Alexander? Who has said this to you! I think he himself has. So tell your Great Alexander that he has nothing to give to me, and there is no need for him to meet me - and I am a very small man." He used to say, "Really, I am a dog, not a man at all - just a dog, so there is no need. It is below his dignity to meet this dog."
Then Alexander had to come. Diogenes is reported to have said, "I hear you are going to win the whole world, so I thought, I closed my eyes and thought, 'Okay! If I have won the whole world, then what?' This has been my problem constantly: if I have won the whole world, then what?" It is reported that Alexander, after hearing this, became very sad. "Then what?" he said to Diogenes.
Thirty years is so long, the distance is so much, it is as if death is not going to occur.
If you want to contemplate death, know another fact about it: it can occur the next moment; it is possible the very next moment. You may not be able to hear my whole sentence, I may not be able to complete it. My mother's father used to tell me that when I was born he consulted one astrologer, one of the best known astrologers of those days. The astrologer was to make my KUNDALI - birth chart. But the astrologer studied it and he said, "If this child survives after seven years, only then will I make the chart. It seems impossible that he can survive for more than seven years, so it is useless. If the child is going to die in seven years it is useless to make the kundali; it will be of no use. And it has been my habit," the astrologer said, "that unless I am certain that the kundali will be useful I never make it." So he didn't make it.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, I survived. Then my mother's father went to the astrologer, but he was dead, so he never could make my kundali. He was dead, and I have been constantly wondering about this. He was aware of the fact that this child may die, but he was not aware of the fact that he may die. He was not aware! It seems that he was absolutely unconcerned - and he was no ordinary man. But no one is concerned with his own death. Knowingly, cunningly, we are not concerned with it because it creates a fear. So I have always suspected that that astrologer might have never looked at his own kundali; otherwise he would have become aware.
Death is possible the very next moment, but the mind will not believe it. I say it and your mind will say, "No! How is it possible the next moment? It is far away." But that is a trick. If you postpone, you cannot contemplate. It must be so near that you can focus on it. And when I say that the next moment it is possible, I mean it. It can happen, and whenever it will happen it will be the next moment. Just before it, you could not have conceived that it was going to happen.
A person is dying: just a moment before he could never have thought that death is so near. It always happens in the next moment - remember. It has always happened that way, and this will be the way always. It always happens in the next moment. Bring it near so that you can focus on it, and that very focusing will help you to enter in, a new need will be created.
Secondly, you go on living. You go on creating artificial meanings and purposes for this very moment.
You never think of your life as a whole, whether it has any meaning or not. You go on creating new meanings, and you push yourself on with those meanings. That is why a poor man lives a more meaningful life than a rich man - because a poor man has many things to get, and that gives a meaning to his life. If you are really rich, it means you have everything that is possible and this world cannot offer anything to you. Then your life becomes meaningless. Now you cannot create any meaning for this moment, for this day, to help you live. That is why the richer a society, the more affluent a culture, the more meaninglessness is felt. Poorer societies never feel meaninglessness.
Three things are to be remembered. Firstly, death. Remember, all life-needs force you to move outward. If you want to move inward, death must become a basic concern; otherwise you cannot move inward. That is why it happened that persons like Buddha, who became deeply conscious of death, started moving inward. Only when you become aware of death will you create the need to look back.
Life looks outward. Unless you become aware of death, religion is meaningless for you. That is why animals have no religion. They are alive, they are as much alive as man, or even more, but they cannot be conscious of death, they cannot conceive of death, they cannot see death in the future.
They see that others are dying, but it never occurs to the animal mind that this death is an indication of his death also.
For the animal mind death always occurs to others. And if for you also death is just something which happens to others, you still live in the animal mind. If you are not aware of death, you have not yet become man. That is the basic difference between animal and man-because animal cannot be aware of death, only man can be. If you are not aware of death you are not a man yet, and only man creates the need to move inward.
To me, man means awareness of death. I am not saying become afraid of death; that is not awareness. Just be aware of the fact that death is coming nearer and nearer and you have to be prepared for it.
Life has its own needs; death creates its own needs. That is why younger societies are irreligious - because younger societies are not yet aware of the phenomenon of death; it has not become a central concern for them. An older society - for example, India, one of the oldest societies in existence - is so much aware of death. Because of that awareness, deep down India is religious.
So the first thing: become aware of death. Think about it, look at it, contemplate it. Do not be afraid, do not escape the fact. It is there and you cannot escape it! It has come into existence with you.
Your death is born with you; now you cannot escape it. You have hidden it in yourself - become aware of it. The moment you become aware that you are going to die, that death is certain, your total mind will start looking in a different dimension. Then food is a basic need for the body, but not for the being, because even if you get food death will occur. Food cannot protect you from death, food can only postpone. Food can help you to postpone. If you get a good shelter, a good house, it will not protect you from death. it will only help you to die conveniently, comfortably. And death, whether it happens comfortably or uncomfortably, is the same.
In life you may be poor or rich, but death is the great equalizer. The greatest communism is in death.
Howsoever you live, it makes no difference; death happens equally. In life, equality is impossible; in death, inequality is impossible. Become aware of it, contemplate it. And it is not only that death is certain somewhere in the future: with the idea that it is very far away, you will again not be able to contemplate it. The mind has a very small range; the focus of the mind is very small. You cannot think beyond thirty years. After thirty years there will be death... it is as if you are not going to die.
From my eyes, my center is just as near as you are near me. I can see you if I move outward, I can see myself if I move inward. And we are at the doors of the senses, but naturally, the bodily needs are such that consciousness moves outwards. You need food, you need water to drink, you need a house where to live. These are your bodily needs and these can only be found in the world, so quite naturally, consciousness moves through the senses toward the world. Unless you create a need which can only be fulfilled when you move inward, you will never move inward.
For example, if a child were born self-sufficient, if he didn't need any food, he would not look at his mother at all. The mother would become irrelevant, meaningless, because for the child the mother is not the meaning: food is the meaning. The mother is his first food, and because the mother gives him food and satisfies a basic need, without which he will die, he starts loving the mother. That love comes secondly, as a shadow, because the mother is fulfilling a basic need.
So those mothers who are feeding their children through bottles should not expect much love because for the child food is the need, not the mother. The mother will come into his being, enter into his being only through food. That is why food and love are deeply related-very, very deeply related. If your love need is fulfilled, you will need less food. If your love need is not fulfilled, you will need more food. So those who love and who are loved will not gather much fat. There are other reasons also, but this is one of the most basic. They will not eat much. If love is not fulfilled, then food becomes a substitute. Then they will eat much.
For the child, food is the basic need. But if a child should be born who can be self-sufficient, who does not need any food, who does not need any outward help to be alive, he will not move in the world at all. Do you think he will move? There would be no need. And unless a need is there, the energy will never move. We move outwardly not because we are sinners. We move outwardly because we have needs which can be fulfilled only through objects-which can be gained if we move in the world of objects.
Why do you not move inward? Because you have not yet created the need to move inward. Once the need is there, it is as easy to move inward as to move outward. What is that need? That need is concerned with religion. You cannot be religious unless that need is there. How is that need created? By what process does one become aware of a deep need which helps you move inward?
There is one thing that I wanted to tell you about in connection with this matter of looking. He has found one skull in Mexico and one in Tibet. Both of these skulls have holes at the third eye spot, and the holes are such that they could only have been made by a gun bullet. The skulls are at least one-half million to one million years old. If the holes were made by an arrow, they could not be round. They are so round that they could not have been made by an arrow; only a bullet could make such holes. So that author tries to prove by this that bullets existed one million years before.
Otherwise how were these two men killed?
But really, that doesn't prove anything about bullets. Whenever the third eye is blocked completely and the energy moves suddenly, this hole can appear. The energy is just like a bullet coming from within - just like a bullet. It is concentrated fire; it will create a hole. Those two skulls with holes show not that those men were killed by bullets, but simply that there was a third eye phenomenon. The third eye was blocked completely; energy became concentrated. The eyes were stopped completely; energy could not move, and it became fire. Then it exploded. Just so that there would not be such an accident, in Tibet they discovered and devised methods to make a hole so that the energy could move easily.
Nothing is wrong even if it happens. Even if one dies in it nothing is wrong, because one has achieved something which is beyond death. But just to be safe, stop whenever you feel that something wrong can happen - with any method, not only with this. With any method, if you feel something wrong is possible, stop.
Don't be worried whether you will be able to make it in this life or not. Once you have started flowing, you have already made it.
Every river is constantly moving to be the ocean. The problem is only with those who have become ponds, closed, not open to flow, having forgotten that this is not their destiny, this is death. To be a pond is to commit suicide, because there is no growth anymore, no new spaces, no new experiences, no new skies - just the old pond, rotting in itself, becoming more and more muddy.
To be a seeker means dropping this static state and becoming a changing, moving, flowing river.
It does not matter when you reach the ocean.
The beginning is the end.
The whole beauty is in the beginning, because once you have started moving, the end, falling into the ocean, is absolutely determined. The beginning was in your hands; it was your freedom, hence the beauty of the beginning.
Falling into the ocean will be tremendously ecstatic, but it is not in your hands. What was in your hands was the beginning, and you gathered courage; you jumped out of a static, dead situation into a living being... alive, singing and dancing.
Who cares when the ocean comes?
The beginning is enough, more than enough - because falling into the ocean is bound to happen.
Jivan Mary, you have started flowing. Rejoice in it. Don't think of the tomorrow. Today is enough unto itself, a blessing, a benediction.
And you are the ocean - what more are you going to gain when you fall into the ocean? It is simply the realization that the water, whether in a dewdrop or in the biggest ocean, is of the same nature; every dewdrop contains oceans in it, and all the oceans are made only of dewdrops.
So the real seeker is not concerned about the goal.
The real seeker is concerned about the right beginning, and you are blessed because the right beginning has happened.
In Tibet there were even surgical operations for the third eye. Sometimes it happens that your third eye is blocked because you have not used it for millennia. If the third eye is blocked and you stop your eyes, you will feel a certain uneasiness because the energy is there and there is no path where to move. In Tibet they devised certain operations to have the passage cleared. This can be done.
And if it is not done, then many things can happen.
Just two or three days before, one sannyasin - she is here - came to me. She said, "There is a very hot sensation at the third eye." And not only was there the sensation, the skin had become burned as if really someone had burned it from the outside. The sensation, the burning, was inside, but the skin was affected. It became completely burned. She was afraid - what had happened? The feeling was pleasant, the warmth was very pleasant as if something were melting. Something was happening, but even the physical body had become affected, as if actual fire had touched it.
The reason? The third eye had started functioning, the energy began to move in it. It had been cold for lives together; energy never moved through it. When for the first time energy moves there is the warmth. When for the first time energy moves there is the burning sensation. And because the passage has to be created and forced, it may become like fire. It is concentrated energy hammering on the third eye.
In India we have been using sandalwood powder and other things, ghee and other things, just on the third eye spot. We call this mark a TILAK. It is put just on the third eye spot in order to give a certain coolness from the outside. So if warmth comes within and fire moves within, it should not affect the skin outside. Not only can the skin be burnt by it, sometimes even holes have appeared on the skull.
I was reading one of the most penetrating books about one of the very deep mysteries of human existence on the earth. There have always been proposals that man came from some other star, because there seems to be no possibility that man suddenly evolved on earth. There seems to be no possibility really that man could have evolved from a baboon or a chimpanzee. And there has been no link, because if man evolved from the chimpanzee to be man, there must be links - something that is between man and chimpanzee - but there is no such thing. With all the available data and discoveries, we have not yet found a single body structure, a skull or anything, which we can say is a link between the chimpanzee and man.
Evolution means steps. A chimpanzee cannot suddenly become a man - stages must have been followed. But there is no proof, so Darwin's theory remains a hypothesis. There are no in-between links.
So there have always been fantastic proposals that man must have appeared on the earth suddenly.
A man's skull dating very far back, a hundred thousand years back, has been found. But in comparison with other skulls there is nothing lacking in it. It is the same type of skull, with the same brain, with the same structure. We have not evolved really as far as mind structure is concerned.
So it seems man suddenly appeared on earth. He must have come from some other planet. For example, now we are traveling into space, and if we find some planet worth living upon we will populate it; then suddenly man will appear there. I was reading a book about such a proposal, and the author has been finding many things to help his hypothesis.
You are being taught everything, but you are not being taught to be your self. This is the ugliest form of society possible, because it makes every body miserable ...?
The moment a woman enters her period of menses, her aura changes completely: it becomes s*xual, aggressive, depressed, all that is negative surrounds the woman, and this happens every month. Only because of this Buddha was not ready to initiate women. He said that it was difficult because every month the menses moves in a circle, periodically, and nothing can be done voluntarily.
Something can be done, but it was difficult to do that in Buddha's time. Now it can be done.
Mahavir completely denied any possibility of a woman being liberated from a woman's body. He said that a woman has to be born again as a man, and only then can she be liberated. So all the effort should be channelled for a woman to enter a new birth as a man. Why? It was a problem of the aura.
If you initiate a woman, every month she will fall down and the whole effort will be lost. There was no discrimination, no evaluation about whether or not woman and man are equal; that was not the question. But for Mahavir the question was this: how to help? So he found an easier way: to help a woman to be reborn as a man. That was easier. It meant that a woman had to wait for another life, and the whole effort had to be directed toward the goal that she should be born in a male body.
This appeared easier to Mahavir than to initiate a woman, because every month she comes back down to the original state and all effort is lost. But these two thousand years have done much.
Particularly, tantra has done much.
Tantra has found different doors, and tantra is the only system in the world which makes no differentiation between man and woman. Rather, on the contrary, it says that a woman can become easily liberated, and the reason is the same, only looked at from a different angle. Tantra says that because a woman's body is periodically regulated, she can detach herself from her body more easily than man. Because man's mind is more involved in the body, that is why he can regulate it. Man's mind is more involved in the body; that is why he can control his sex.
Woman's mind is not so involved in the body. The body functions as an automata - different, on a different layer, and the woman cannot do anything about it. It is like an automatic mechanism; it goes on. Tantra says that because of this woman can detach herself from her body very easily. And if this becomes possible - this detachment, this gap - then there is no problem.
So it is a very paradoxical thing: if a woman decides to be celibate and to detach herself from her body, she can maintain her purity more easily than a man. Once the detachment is there, then she can forget the body completely. Man can detach himself very easily, can control very easily, but his mind is more involved in the body. That is why he can control, but then he will have to control every day, continuously. And because feminine sex is passive, it is very easy for a woman to be relaxed about sex. Man's sex is active. It is easy for him to control it, but difficult for him to relax about it.
So tantra has been trying to find many, many ways, and tantra is the only system which says there is no difference, that even a feminine structure can be used. So tantra is the only path which gives women equal status. Otherwise, every religion, whatsoever it may say, deep down feels that women are inferior. It may be Christianity, it may be Islam, it may be Jainism, it may be Buddhism, but deep down it feels this, and the reason is the diagnosis through the third eye, the aura - the forming of the aura every month at the time of menses.
With the third eye you become capable of seeing things which are there, but which cannot be seen with ordinary eyes. All the methods about looking affect the third eye, because looking means a certain energy moving outward from you toward the world. If blocked, if suddenly blocked, the energy will find another path, and the third eye is just near.
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