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Niseema, the real master never fits with your expectations. And if he fits he is not a master. The real master cannot fit with your expectations, your expectations come out of your mind. Your mind is the problem: it has to go down the drain, in toto.

A real master never fits with your expectations. And those who fit with your expectations are just businessmen, not real masters. They fit, they have to fit – that’s how they depend on you. A real master is always a shock, a shattering. He will not in any way allow himself to fit with you. Then only can he destroy you.

A real master is not a consolation. A real master has to uncreate you – how can he be a consolation? He has to demolish you; he is not a renovation. He is not just patching up things, he has to uproot you from the very roots and transform you to another dimension. He is a transmutation.

Nothing will ever fit with a real master.

Do you think Jews were unnecessarily angry with Jesus? The anger was this, that he didn’t fit with their expectation. He used to move with people who were not respectable. He used to live with people who were gamblers, drunkards, thieves. He used to stay in houses where no respectable person, no rabbi, would be ready to go. He allowed this prostitute, Magdalene, to become his closest disciple. He was not fitting with their expectations. A religious person should behave in a certain way – he was behaving outrageously, he was annoying people.

Now, you ask me: "Since I have been here this time, I have been feeling increasingly unspiritual"...

That is your truth. And I am here to bring your truth to the surface. You must have been repressing what you call ’unspiritual’. In calling it unspiritual you simply say that you are against it; you are condemning it. Our words are significant. When you call something unspiritual you have condemned it.

You say: "Since I have been here this time, I have been feeling increasingly unspiritual"...

You are becoming increasingly real, that’s all. All your ideas of spirituality are being taken away. They were forced, pseudo. You were just repressing your reality and calling it spirituality. You were against yourself. You were not enjoying your being; you were crippling it, poisoning it. You were a victim. Now you are gathering courage to be yourself. Don’t call it unspiritual; you are becoming real, you are becoming natural. And how can nature be unspiritual and how can reality be unspiritual?

To be with me means first I have to take all that is pseudo in you. The false has to be known as false. And knowing it as false, it drops. The true can arrive only when the false has disappeared. Now, your spirituality was false, Niseema. It was just a facade, it was a show-window spirituality. Deep down, you were always that which you are finding yourself now. Now your depth is meeting with your surface; they are losing the division, the split. You are relaxing, you are dropping the conflict with yourself. The top dog and the bottom dog are meeting, for the first time there is a merger happening. This is the beginning of growth, because only the real can grow.

The plastic, the synthetic, the false, cannot grow. You can have plastic flowers, but they cannot grow. Growth happens only to the real and your spirituality was like a plastic flower. That’s how people are spiritual. Deep down they are absolutely the opposite, on the surface they have painted faces.

I am taking your painted face away, I am taking your mask away, the mask is slipping off. Hence this question has arisen. You must be becoming afraid: ”What kind of master is this? And what am I doing here?” You must have come here expecting that you would become more spiritual, and I am making you more real! In your words, more ’unspiritual’.

"Since I have been here this time I have been feeling increasingly unspiritual and more and more stupid." ...

That is a good beginning. To feel that one is ignorant is the beginning of wisdom. Only stupid people never feel that they are stupid. This is how wisdom arises – when you start seeing the stupidity of it all, something has happened in you, a ray of light has entered. To move into the world of understanding, first one has to drop all kinds of knowledge. So I am taking your pseudo-spirituality and I am also taking your borrowed knowledge.

The so-called spiritual people carry great knowledge – esoteric, occult, they go on collecting it. They consult I Ching and they consult astrology books and they read tarot cards and they go into the mysteries of kabala. And all are just mind games. They have nothing to do with spirituality, they are really meant for stupid people to play around with. And these people go on reading the Bible and the Vedas and the Gita – and they cram it, they become parrots. And then they think they know.

Knowledge is not knowing. Anything borrowed can never be your knowing.

So when you come to me, many things are going to happen. Each day you will feel poorer and poorer, and you had come to become richer and richer. So naturally, only the very courageous can stay with me, otherwise people escape. Because who wants to become poorer? You had come with so much knowledge and now you feel stupid. Now what kind of game is this? You had come to learn something, but what I am proposing here is not learning but unlearning.

You had come to accumulate a little bit more. You had already a beautiful collection of knowledge, you wanted to make it more up-to-date. You wanted to have something from a modern Buddha. Because the old Buddha is twenty-five centuries old, and things have changed. You wanted an up-to-date version of Buddhahood. And you come here and I start taking things away from you. Your knowledge starts disappearing and you feel in a panic: what is happening? You start feeling stupid. You have always been stupid! Just that knowledge was giving you the idea that you are not.

Now this is a great revelation. Your spirituality starts looking false, plastic – and you have been thinking that you are a saint, almost on the verge of enlightenment. And all your morality starts looking meaningless, because it was just an imposition from the outside. It was because of fear that you were moral, or because of greed that you were moral. All your character looks cheap, because I teach you a totally different kind of life: character-less. Only in characterlessness is there freedom. And only in characterlessness does real character arrive – character that springs from your very source, is not imposed from the outside, is not imposed by the society, is not a kind of obedience but is a growth of freedom. It is a totally different thing, it happens only to people who are rebellious enough.

I don’t teach you obedience, I teach you rebellion.

So naturally, your spirituality gone, your morality gone, your knowledge gone, all down the drain – suddenly you are standing there looking stupid, nude, ignorant, characterless, immoral, unspiritual. Now, what kind of disciplehood is this? Naturally, the question arises.

But, Niseema, this is the beginning. First I have to take all that you have away – so your burdened heart is unburdened, so all the garbage that you have gathered is thrown out and you are clean, left clean. In that cleanliness, in that purity, in that unburdening, you will start growing. And that growth I am not going to give to you, it will happen to you. You are ready for it – just the garbage is too much and it doesn’t allow you to grow. It is as if a rosebush has been covered by garbage – Vedas, Gitas, Koranas, Bibles, all garbage – and the rosebush is dying. I have to take all these books away. Soon the rosebush will start growing, and the day is not far off when you will see the first roses blooming.

"I feel to be enjoying sensual pleasures and in general to be very hedonistic." ...

Beautiful. Enjoy. Because it is only through enjoying them that you will come to see the illusoriness of them – there is no other way. If I say they are illusory, Ikkyu says they are illusory, Buddha says they are illusory, they are not going to become illusory just because these people say so. You have to see it on your own. Buddha has said again and again: Don’t believe what I say, unless you have examined it, lived it, observed it, concluded it, on your own.

How can you know the illusoriness of these enjoyments unless you go into them? Go into them. Go into them as totally as possible, so sooner you can come out. Be a hedonist. By being a hedonist you will see that all pleasures bring pain, that each pleasure is followed by great pain. Slowly slowly, you will see that the pleasure and pain are two aspects of the same coin. You cannot get rid of pain unless you see this. Once you have seen that pleasure and pain are together, inevitably together....

There is no way to separate them. That’s what we have been doing, down the ages – just trying to separate them. We want all the pleasures and we don’t want any pain. And they are together, they come together. We want to avoid pain and we want to enjoy pleasure. But the pain comes.

When you see this happening again and again, one day the very experience will make you capable of dropping both. And the day one drops pleasure and pain both, what happens is called bliss. Great silence, great joy arises – which is not pleasure, remember, because it has the counterpart of pain in it. It is sheer joy, eternal joy. But it arises only when pleasure and pain both have been dropped.

And if you don’t become a hedonist, if you don’t experience its truth, then you will become a spiritual hedonist. Then you will think of the same joys – in paradise of course, not here, but of the same joys. You will hanker after the same women, the same men, the same wine – but in paradise. You will have to postpone a little bit, that’s all.

Your saints are just the same as you – in fact more greedy than you, more hedonistic than you, but they are waiting for paradise. They will take their revenge there. They will see to it that you all suffer in hell, because you enjoyed on the earth and they suffered on the earth, so now they will be rewarded. They will have beautiful women in paradise, eternally young, with no perspiration, etcetera, etcetera. And rivers of wine. Wine is not sold in pubs in paradise – rivers. And there has never ever been any effort for prohibition. You can jump into rivers of wine, you can bathe in rivers of wine, you can drink as much as you want. And all kinds of food will be available, and with no fear of becoming fat. Nobody has ever heard – have you ever seen any fat angel? They never become fat; they go on eating and eating. And all their work consists of is jubilation, singing songs in the praise of the Lord, and fooling around.

These are your saints. Once they were saints sitting with long faces, now they are fooling in paradise. Your saints are not against pleasure, they are only against the momentariness of it; remember it. They are only against the momentariness of it, because it is fleeting. So what is the point of running after it? They are waiting for permanent pleasure. They are real hedonists, more hedonistic than you.

So if you become spiritual, so-called spiritual, then you will be just waiting for your time, impatiently waiting for when paradise arrives and you can jump into all kinds of pleasures. You can explode, and you can explore all kinds of pleasures that you have denied to yourself on the earth. This is not much different; the worldly and the other-worldly are not different, they are the same.

What I am trying to make you aware of here is not that you have to become hedonistic in the other world, or you have to become antagonistic to hedonism in this world. What I am trying here is to make you aware of the whole situation of life. If something in your unconscious hankers for pleasure, go into it – that is the only way to go beyond it. Going through is the only way to go beyond. Don’t repress.

So Niseema, be hedonistic, totally hedonistic. Enjoy all sensual pleasures – there is no fear about it, because they are all dream stuff. So if you are enjoying a dream, I am the last person to be worried about it. If your saints are against it, that simply shows that they have not yet understood that it is all a dream. Why should they be against it?

That’s why my statements sometimes make you very much confused. Just the other day, I talked against love. And every night, every evening, I suggest to people to move into love. They become very puzzled. They have fallen in love with this madman – in the morning he says ”All love is illusion”, in the evening he says ”Fall in love, go headlong.”

I am saying it because it is illusion: go headlong, so soon you will be out of it. If you go in a miserly way you may take years or lives to come out of it, and I may not be here to help you. So I say go headlong – just jump into the whole turmoil of the world, so that you can come out of the illusion.

If it is an illusion you will come out of it, there is no need to be worried about it. And even if you don’t come out of it, so what? It is just an illusion! Enjoy it while it lasts! Sooner or later you are bound to be awake. And my own experience is that the more you go into these experiences of life, the more the awakening comes closer. When the night is darkest the morning is the closest. When you are moving in an illusion so deeply and it looks so real that everything else looks unreal in comparison to it, that is the moment when the morning is very close.

You say: "This doesn't fit with my previous feelings and ideas about being close to a master." ...

How can you have any ideas without being close to a master? What expectations can you have? All those expectations will be your projections – will be your desires, your fears, your greed. They can’t be based on truth. Now you are with me. Being with me for a few years, you will know what it is to be with a master. If you can remain with me long enough to be finished totally, then you will know what it is to be with a master. It is to be with your own death, total death.

But only when you are annihilated is there a possibility of God arising in you. Only after crucifixion the door opens for resurrection.