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The flower is open. I suspect your nose is closed.

Your nose has to be opened and you have to reclaim the capacity to smell. You may have lost the sensitivity to smell. You have lived so long in lies that when you come across truth you cannot recognize it. Even truth has to come to you –if truth wants to be recognized – in the garb of a lie. You cannot see it directly. You have learned how to look sideways; you never look directly, your look is never immediate. You are always wavering this way or that and you are always losing the fact.

I am here. This is the flower I am talking about. I am your future. That which is going to happen to you has happened to me. If you cannot smell then don’t blame the flower – blow your nose.

But that is difficult for the ego; the ego is always ready to deny, it is never ready to transform itself. The ego can say, “There is no God”; it cannot say, “Maybe it is because I have got so many blocks that I cannot feel God.” The ego can deny that there is a flower, but it cannot recognize the fact that it has lost the capacity to smell.

Hence there are so many people who deny God. It is easy to deny God, it is comfortable in fact, because if there is no God you need not bother about your nose, you need not work upon your being. If there is no God then there is no work, then there is no growth, then there is no search – you can be lazy, you can drown yourself in lethargy. If there is no God then there is no guilt.

I am against guilt, the guilt that has been created by the priests, but there is a different type of guilt which is not created by the priest. And that guilt is very meaningful. That guilt arises if you feel there is something more in life and you are not working hard to get to it. Then you feel guilt. Then you feel that somehow you are creating barriers to your own growth, that you are lazy, lethargic, unconscious, asleep; that you don’t have any integration; that you cannot move toward your destiny. Then guilt arises. When you feel that you have the possibility and you are not turning it into actuality, then guilt arises. That guilt is totally different.

I am not talking about the guilt that priests have created in humanity: don’t eat this otherwise you will feel guilty, don’t do that otherwise you will feel guilty. They have condemned millions of things, so if you eat, if you drink, if you do this and that, you are surrounded by guilty feelings. I am not talking about that guilt; that guilt has to be dropped. In fact that guilt helps you to remain where you are. Those guilty feelings don’t allow you to know the real guilt inside.

They create so much fuss about small things. You eat in the night and the Jainas create much fuss: you are guilty, you are a sinner. Why have you eaten in the night? Or you have divorced your wife or your husband and the Catholics create a guilty feeling in you; you have done something wrong. It was not wrong to live with the woman and continuously fight, it was not wrong to destroy the woman and destroy yourself, it was not wrong to destroy the children – just between the two of you they were being crushed, their whole life was conditioned in a wrong way. No, that was not bad; but if you get out of that marriage, if you get out of that hell, you feel guilty.

These guilt feelings don’t allow you to see the real spiritual guilt, which has nothing to do with any politics, with any priesthood, with any religion or church. This guilt feeling is very natural. When you see that you can do something and you are not doing it, when you see how potential you are but you are not changing that potentiality into actuality, when you see that you are carrying tremendous treasures as seeds which could bloom, and you are not doing anything about it and you are just remaining in misery – then you feel a great responsibility toward yourself. And if you are not fulfilling that responsibility, you feel guilty. This guilt is of tremendous import.

I am here; the flower is here. In Zen they say that the flower does not talk, but I would like to contradict that. I would like to say to you the flower talks too, but one thing is needed: you need the capacity to hear, you need the capacity to smell. The flower has its own language. It may not talk in the language that you understand. Your language is a very local language; the flower speaks the universal language.

I am here; look into me, feel me, try to imbibe my spirit in you, let my flame come closer to you. Any moment there can be the jump – my flame can jump and light your unlit candle. Just come close, come close… And when I say come close, I mean be more and more in love. Love is the only closeness there is; love is the only intimacy there is. It is not a question of physical closeness; it is a question of inner intimacy. Be open to me, as I am open to you. Be available to me, as I am available to you. Don’t be afraid; you have nothing to lose – except your chains.