
I say be in the world and yet be beyond it
excerpt
series:
A Sudden Clash of Thunder
Chapter 8
Aug 18, 1976 Chuang Tzu Auditorium

017



(no question)
Yes, my emphasis is not to choose -- be choiceless.
Because if you choose, you become narrow. Every choice narrows you down. Every choice says, "Now I will have a window to the sky, not the whole sky." Why? Why have a frame to the sky? The sky is frameless.
When you stand at a window and look into the sky, you have falsified the sky -- because your window-frame looks as if it is framed on the sky. Then you have only a limited vision, narrow. Why be poor?
Why not come out of the house and see the sky as it is -- infinite?
To me, life is an infinite expanding energy. Don't make any choice! That's why I don't put sannyas against the world. I say be a sannyasin and be in the world, because a sannyasin, if he chooses the life of the monk and escapes from the world, will be poorer for that -- because the world has many things to give to you.
It is a tremendously beautiful device of God's -- to help you grow, to give you challenges, to give you new adventures; to give you opportunities to test yourself, your awareness, your being. If you escape from the world you will be escaping from all these opportunities.
Sitting in a cave in the Himalayas you will be very poor -- poor in the sense that you will not have richness of experience. And by and by you will become stupid.
You will become silent -- that's true -- because there will be nothing to distract you. But that silence also is of the Himalayas, it is not yours. Come back to the world and in the marketplace you will see your silence has disappeared. It was not yours -- it was part of the Himalayan silence. You were deceived by yourself.
When silence happens in the marketplace then it is true, then it is yours -- now nobody can take it away. Now no distraction can be a distraction to you. You can remain anywhere; whatsoever the situation, your silence will remain there as a deep substratum to your being. It is inner.
So I don't say leave the world. I say be in the world and yet be beyond it -- so that you can have both the experiences of the sansari, the worldly, and the sannyasin, the other-worldly. When both are possible, why choose?
Make life as big as possible. Don't narrow it down.
A Sudden Clash of Thunder
Chapter 8