~~~ YOUR AGREEMENT AND DISAGREEMENT ~~~

The teacher had just finished giving her first-graders the basic facts of life. Little Mary raised her hand from a front-row seat. “Can a six-year-old boy make a baby?”

“No,” said the teacher smiling, “that would be impossible. Any other questions, class?”

Pause. Mary again put her hand up. “Can a six-year-old girl make a baby?”

“No,” said the teacher. Whereupon the little boy behind Mary leaned forward and whispered loudly in her ear, “Ya see! I told ya, ya didn’t have nothin’ to worry about!”

All your agreements, all your disagreements, are just finding ways to remain the way you are, not to change. People’s whole lives are devoted to one work: How not to change. They GO on saying, “I don’t want to be miserable,” and they go on doing things which make them miserable. They go on saying, “I want to change,” but I look deep down in them and they don’t want to change.

In fact, this express desire that they want to change is again a trick not to change; so they can say to the world, “I am trying to change and I am saying loudly and shouting loudly I want to change, and still if nothing is happening what can I do?”

You cannot change – the last thing I would like to say about this question – YOU cannot change. You can only allow change to happen. Trying to change, you will never change. Who is trying? The old? Look at the inner logic of it: you are trying to change yourself. It is almost like pulling yourself up by your own shoe-strings. What can happen out of it? Nothing is possible. You cannot change yourself, because WHO is this one who is trying to change? It is your past. It is you.

You can allow a change to happen. What can you do to allow it? Please don’t agree and disagree with me. You just listen! You just be here. You just let my presence function as a catalytic agent. You just get infected by me. You just catch the disease that I am having, the measles that I am having. You just allow me. You don’t try to change yourself.