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Nobody can exist without a center.

Life is impossible without a center. You may not be aware of it, that’s another matter. It has not to be created but only rediscovered. And remember, I am not saying discovered, I am saying rediscovered.

The child in the mother’s womb remains perfectly aware of the center. The child in the mother’s womb is at the center, vibrates at the center, pulsates at the center. The child is the center in the mother’s womb, he has no circumference yet. He is only essence, he has no personality yet.

Essence is the center, that which is your nature, that which is God-given. Personality is the circumference, that which is cultivated by society; it is not God-given. It is by nurture, not by nature.

As the child comes out of the womb, he comes for the first time in contact with something outside of himself. And that contact creates the circumference. Slowly, slowly, the society initiates the child into its own ways. The Christian society will make the child a Christian; and the Hindu, a Hindu, and so on and so forth. Then layer upon layer of conditioning is imposed on the child.

Basically, if you enter a well-developed personality you will find these three things.

First, a very thin positive layer – positive but phony. That is the layer which goes on pretending; that is the layer where all your masks are contained. Fritz Perls used to call that layer the “Eric Berne layer” – where you play all kinds of games.

You may be crying within, but on that layer you go on smiling. You may be full of rage, you may like to murder the other person, but you go on being sweet. And you say, “How good of you to come. I am so happy. Glad to see you.” Your face shows gladness – that is phony.

But to exist in a phony society you will need a phony layer; otherwise you will be in as much difficulty as Socrates was, Jesus was, I am. That phony layer keeps you part of the phony society. You don’t fall apart. It is a false world, what in the East we have called maya. It is illusory, it is all false and phony.

The other person is also smiling falsely as you. Nobody is smiling. People are carrying wounds, but they have decorated their wounds with flowers, they are hiding their wounds behind flowers.

Parents are in a hurry to give this layer to the child. They are in a hurry because they know the child has to exist as a member of a false society. It will be difficult for the child to survive without it; it functions as a lubricating agent.

This is a very thin layer, skin-deep. Scratch anybody a little and suddenly you will find flowers have disappeared, and rage and hatred and all kinds of negative things are hidden behind it. That is the second layer, negative but still false.

The second layer is thicker than the first. The second layer is the layer where much work has to be done. That’s where psychotherapies come in. And because there is a great negative layer behind the positive, you are always afraid to go in. Because to go in means you will have to cross that ugly phenomenon, that dirty rubbish that you have gathered, year in and year out, your whole life.

Where does the second layer come from?

The child is born as a pure center, innocence, with no duality. He is one. He is in the state of unio mystica; he does not yet know that he is separate from existence. He lives in unity, he has not known any separation. The ego has not arisen yet.

But immediately the society starts working on the child. It says, “Don’t do this. This will not be acceptable to the society – repress it. Do this because this is acceptable to the society, and you will be respected, loved, appreciated.

So a duality is created in the child; on the circumference a duality arises. The first layer is the positive that you have to show to others, and the second layer is the negative that you have to hide within yourself.

The child is innocent. He is innocent in his love; he is innocent in his anger. He does not make a distinction. When he is in love he is in love, and he is totally in love. And when he is angry he is totally angry, he is just pure anger, hence the beauty of the child.

Even when he is angry he has a superb beauty, grace – even in his anger, because the totality is there. Grown-ups, even when they are in love, are not so beautiful because the totality is missing.

We create a division in the child, each child. Our society has lived up to now in a kind of schizophrenia. The real humanity has not yet been born. The whole past has been a nightmare, because we divide the person into two: the positive and the negative; yes and no; love and hate. We destroy his totality.

These two layers are our split. The first layer is positive and false; the second layer is negative and false. They are false because only the total can be real. The partial is always false because the partial denies something, rejects something, and the denied part makes it false.

Only in total acceptance does reality arise.

The center is there in you, but you will have to go digging through these two layers, the positive and phony, and the negative and phony. And then you will fall into that oceanic oneness, the total, the whole. Then suddenly great bliss arises – that is satori. It is not to be created, it is already there. It is not even to be discovered, it has only to be rediscovered. You had known it before, hence the search. Otherwise the search was impossible.

Why do people go on searching for bliss? – because they must have known it. Somewhere deep down, the memory still persists of those sweet moments in the mother’s womb when all was quiet, still, when all was one, when there was no worry, no responsibility, when there was no other. It was paradise. It is the meaning of the symbol of the Garden of Eden. The womb is the Garden of Eden.

But you cannot live in the womb forever; sooner or later you have to come out of the womb. And the moment you come out of the womb, the society is bound to educate you. The society and the education are not yet human. It is neurotic, it is very primitive because it does not help the child to grow in his center.

It does not help the child to grow remaining alert of the center. On the contrary, it tries in every way so that the child forgets the center and becomes identified with a false personality that the society is providing to the child.

The society is not interested in the child; the society is interested in maintaining its own structure. The society is not interested in the individual; it is against the individual, it is all for the collective. And the collective has been neurotic, and the collective has been ugly.

But the society is past oriented and the individual is future oriented. The individual has to live in the future, and the society knows only the past in which it has lived. The society has no future; the society consists of the past. It goes on imposing that past on the child.

In my vision, in a real human society, nothing will be imposed on the child – nothing at all. Not that the child will be left all alone to himself. No, he will be helped, but nothing will be imposed.

He will be helped to remain whole; he will be helped to remain rooted in the essence. He will not be forced to shift his consciousness from the essence to the personality. The future education will not be an education in personality, it will be an education in essence.
And that is the meaning of a religious education.

Up to now there is no religious education. And whatsoever you call religious education is either Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan; that is indoctrination, not religious education. Religious education will help the child to remember what is already there inside him, not to forget it.

A real education will make the child more meditative, so he never loses contact with his inner being. There is every possibility to lose because he will be moving with others, he will start imitating others. He will have to learn many things from others. Let him learn, but let him become aware that he is not to become an imitator.

But that is just what is being done, and has been done down the ages. We teach children to become imitators: “Be like Jesus. Be like Socrates. Be like Buddha.” The child can only be truly himself and nobody else – ever. And whatsoever he will try to become will be false and phony.

You ask me, “Today in lecture I looked at you and I felt myself so shallow and phony and false.”

It is good. It is immensely beautiful that you felt it. This is the beginning.

If you become aware of the phony, you cannot remain unaware long of that which is real. Because to be aware of the phony means that somewhere you have started becoming aware of the real. Maybe it is very vague, cloudy, not yet clear, not yet transparent, muddy. But the beginning has started.

To know the false as false is the beginning of knowing the real as real. This is a good beginning, an auspicious beginning.

You say, “There doesn’t seem to be anything deeper inside me.” To become aware of this, that “There is nothing deeper inside me,” is the first step toward depths.

Millions of people go on thinking that their shallow personality is their soul. Their shallow personality has depth, they think. They go on believing it and believing it, they go on missing their reality.

My function here is to make you aware of the false and the phony and the unreal and the superficial. And when for the first time it dawns that you are phony, it hurts, because you have always believed just the opposite.

You have always remained with the idea that you are very, very real and deep, that you have heights and depths – and you have nothing.

Right now as you exist, you don’t have any depth, you don’t have any height. You exist as persona; you are not yet aware of the essence. And only the essence can have heights and depths. But to become alert that “I am shallow” is good, tremendously important, significant.

Don’t forget it again, remember it. It will hurt, it will become a pain in the heart, it will become a wound. It will be like an arrow going deeper and deeper, and it will become more and more painful.

That is the journey that every seeker has to go through. That is the pain which is needed for your rebirth. Don’t forget it, and don’t start believing again in the old phony personality.

You are not that which up to now you have been thinking you are. You are something totally different. You are not this body. You are in the body but not the body. And you are not this mind either; the mind is there, but you are far beyond the mind. You are the witness.

You say, “I felt myself so shallow…” Who has felt it? Remember that.

Shallowness itself cannot feel that it is shallow. It will have no idea of depth. How can it feel it is shallow? Misery itself cannot feel that it is misery; somebody else is needed, somebody who has known states of bliss. Only that one can become aware of misery. Disease cannot feel itself as disease, only health can feel disease as disease. Remember that.

Who has become aware that “I am shallow, I am false and phony, and that there seems to be no depth in me?” Who is this?

This witness is you. This is your center; your center is arising out of the chaos of your personality. This is a great moment, a moment of great blessings. Don’t lose track of it. Howsoever painful the journey, one has to go through it because the end is utterly blissful.

This is the sacrifice that each sannyasin has to do – the sacrifice of the phony on the altar of the real.