074

Seeking for something, desiring for something, is the basic disease of the mind. Not seeking, not desiring, is the basic health of your being.

It is very easy to go on changing the objects of desire, but that is not the way of transformation. You can desire money, you can desire power... you can change the objects of desire – you can start desiring God – but you remain the same because you go on desiring.

The basic change is to be brought not in the objects of desire, but in your subjectivity. If desiring stops – and remember, I am not saying that it has to be stopped – if desiring stops, then you are for the first time at home, peaceful, patient, blissful, and for the first time life is available to you and you are available to life. In fact, the very division between you and life disappears, and this state of non division is the state of God.

People come to me from all over the world; they travel thousands of miles. When they come to me and I ask, ’Why have you come?’ somebody says, ’I am a seeker of God.’ Somebody says, ’I am a seeker of truth.’ They are not aware what they are asking. They are asking the impossible.

God is not a thing. God is not an object. You cannot seek him. God is this whole. How can you seek the whole? You can dissolve in it, you can merge in it, but you cannot seek it. The seeking simply shows that you go on believing yourself separate from the whole – you the seeker and the whole the sought.

Sometimes you seek a woman, sometimes you seek a man. Sometimes, frustrated from the world, you start seeking the other world – but you are not yet frustrated with seeking itself.

A seeker is in trouble. A seeker is confused. He has not understood the basic problem itself. It is not that you have to seek God, then everything will be solved. Just the opposite – if everything is solved, suddenly there is God.

It happened once: ”A bookseller from south India wrote to a house in New Delhi asking that a dozen copies of the book ’Seekers After God’ be shipped to him at once. Within two days he received this reply by telegraph: NO SEEKERS AFTER GOD IN DELHI OR BOMBAY. TRY POONA.”

Of course they are all here. The seeking is a disease. Don’t make it an egotrip... because when somebody comes and he says that he is a seeker after God, I can see the light of the ego that shows in his eyes; the condemnation of the world – that he is not a worldly man, he is a religious man. The way he says it, shows his pride – that he is not an ordinary man, not part of the ordinary run of humanity. He is special, extraordinary. He is not seeking money, he is seeking meditation. He is not seeking anything material, he is seeking something spiritual.

But to me, and to all those who have ever known, seeking is the world. There is no other-worldly seeking. Desiring is worldly. There is no other-worldly desiring.

In the very desiring, the world exists. What you desire is irrelevant; that you desire is enough to make you worldly. Because all desires are from a basic fallacy – the basic fallacy that you are missing something, that something is needed.

In the very first place, you are not missing anything. Nothing is needed. The world is a nightmare because of desiring, and then nirvana becomes the last nightmare. Of course the last, because if you wake up seeking God and nirvana... if you wake up, then all nightmares disappear.

You have dropped the world. Now you seek god. Please drop God also.

This will look a little irreligious; it is not.

I was reading one statement of Albert Einstein. I loved it. Somewhere he says, ’I am a deeply religious unbeliever.’

In fact a religious person cannot be a believer. A religious person can trust, but cannot believe. Trust comes out of existential experience; belief is just a mind-trip. Belief is just of ideology, concepts, scriptures, philosophy. Trust is of life.

The moment you say ’God’, you have used a belief. God is a belief. But life is not a belief, it is an experience. Let life be your only God. No other God is needed, because all other Gods are human inventions.

Einstein is true when he says, ’I am a deeply religious person, but unbelieving, not a believer.’ What does he mean?

The quality of being religious has nothing to do with the quality of a believer. A believer believes because he desires. A believer believes because he wants to seek something. A believer believes because he cannot live life without the mind. He brings the mind always in between life and himself... as if your hand is hiding behind a glove – you touch your beloved, but not direct; your hand is hidden behind the glove. The glove touches the beloved; you touch your glove only.

A belief is like a glove; it surrounds you. You are never available to life directly, immediately. A religious person is naked in this sense – he has no clothes of beliefs. He is simply direct, in touch with life. In that touch, the melting. In that touch, the merging. In that touch, somewhere you are no more you. Somewhere you have become the whole and the whole has come to you. The ocean drops into the drop and the drop becomes the ocean.

Beliefs are dangerous. We go on changing beliefs. A hindu can become a mohammedan, a christian can become a hindu. Or a religious person, a so-called religious person, can become a communist; a theist can become an atheist – it makes no difference. You go on changing the glove, but the glove remains.

Can’t you see life directly? Can’t you love life directly? Is there really any need to believe in anything? Can’t you trust life?

Let me say it in this way. People who cannot trust, believe. Belief is a substitute; a false coin, a deception. People who can trust need no beliefs. Life is enough. They don’t overimpose any God, any nirvana, any moksha on top of it. There is no need. Life is more than enough. They live life.

Of course, if you have a belief, you can create a future around it. If you don’t have any belief then you don’t have any future, because life is herenow. There is no need to wait. But we go on postponing – to the very moment death comes and takes the gift back.

I was reading:

”Three men were engaged in one of those profitless conversations which involve all of us at one time or another. They were considering the problem of what each would do if the doctor told him he had only six months to live. Said Robinson, ’If my doctor said I had only six months to live, the first thing I would do would be to liquidate my business, withdraw my savings, and have the biggest fling on the French Riviera you ever saw. I would play roulette, I would eat like a king, and most of all I would have girls, girls, and more girls.”’

This man must have been postponing – postponing for death. When a doctor says you have only six months to live, then.... But that too seems to be just a wish, he may not be able – because when the death knocks at the door, one is so shocked and shattered.... When death has come near you, how can you enjoy? You could not enjoy when life was close. When life is receding farther away each moment, how can you enjoy? This is again just a way of believing that if it happens, then ’immediately I will start living’. Who is preventing you from living right now?

”The second man said, ’If my doctor said I had only six months to live, the first thing I would do would be to visit a travel agency and plot out a world tour. There are thousands of places on earth I have not seen and I would like to see them before I die – the Grand Canyon, the Taj Mahal, Angkor Wat – all of them.”’

Who is preventing you? Why are you waiting for death to come and then you will go and see the Taj Mahal? Will you be able to see the Taj Mahal then? Your eyes will be so filled with darkness that the Taj Mahal won’t look like a Taj Mahal. It will be impossible to see when death has come into the mind. It will make you blind. An inner trembling will overpower you. You will not be able to hear, you will not be able to see, you will not be able even to breathe. But why do people go on postponing?

”Said the third man, ’If my doctor said I had only six months to live, the first thing I would do would be to consult another doctor.”’

This seems to be the most representative of all men. This is what you are also going to do. You are not going to live even then. You will try another doctor who can again give you hope, who can again give you future, who can again tell you, ’No need to be worried – you can still postpone. No need to be in a hurry – death is far away.’ You will find, you will seek someone, who can still give you hope.

Hope is a way of postponing life. All desiring is a way of postponing life, and all beliefs are tricks how to avoid that which is and how to go on thinking about that which is not.

God is not. Life is. Please don’t be seekers of God. Nirvana is not. Life is. Please don’t be seekers of nirvana.

And if you stop seeking nirvana, you will find nirvana hidden in life itself. If you stop seeking God, you will find God everywhere... in each particle, in each moment of life. God is another name of life. Nirvana is another name of life lived. You have just heard the word ’life’; it is not a lived experience.

Drop all beliefs, they are hindrances. Don’t be a christian, don’t be a hindu, don’t be a mohammedan. Just be alive. Let that be your only religion. Life – the only religion. Life – the only temple. Life – the only prayer.