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Methods are never of any use. Methods have never been any good, but they still serve a purpose. The purpose is negative. If you have a thorn in your foot, you need another thorn to pull it out. Once the first thorn is pulled out by the second, don’t put the second back in the wound just out of gratefulness. Throw away both! The second thorn is as much a thorn as the first; their qualities are not different.

Because your mind is so full of rubbish, you need something to pull it out. But whatsoever is going to pull it out is rubbish in its own way; it is the same. Poison is needed to kill poison. Don’t cling to the second poison, thinking it is medicine; don’t become addicted to the second poison.

It is good that you say: [All the beautiful methods are no good anymore.]

They never were. But they still serve a purpose, because man lives in such stupidity that he has to be pulled out of it. And remember, your lies, your beliefs, your ignorance, have to be dropped somehow; some ways and means have to be invented. Once your mind is dropped, you will see the whole ridiculousness of all the methods. Then you will understand that they were never needed at all.

But don’t start talking about it to others, because there are many people who may drop them from the very beginning, seeing that if they are not needed then why bother? They are needed, although there comes a time when they have to be dropped. Use them, and drop them. All methods are like ladders. When you have climbed the ladder and you have reached the upper floor, you need not bother about it at all, it can be thrown away.

In fact it should be thrown away. Keeping it may be some unconscious desire in you to go back; you want to keep the ladder there in case you decide to go back to your old rubbish. The ladder can help in that way too. A ladder is neutral – it can take you to the upper floor, it can bring you back down to the old situation. But the ladder cannot direct you. In fact the moment you have climbed the ladder, you have used it and reached a different plane of life, a different plane of understanding, throw the ladder away immediately, before you start clinging to it.

So it is good that you think methods are no good anymore.

[‘I’ will let the mind drop and the methods too.]

If methods are no good anymore, where is the mind? And if the mind is still there to be dropped, then please don’t be in a hurry; the methods still have a little function to fulfill.

You will not be able to let the mind drop. Who are you except the mind? Who will drop the mind, who will let the mind drop? You are not yet; you will know yourself only when the mind is dropped. When the mind disappears, you will know who you are. Before that, you don’t know. It is just the mind thinking about dropping the mind. The mind is very subtle, very cunning; it can go on playing new games. It can say, “Yes it is so beautiful to drop the mind.” And it is still the mind! And the mind can say, “There is no need for any method. You can drop me easily – it is up to you.” The mind is playing a very subtle trick. It is helping you to drop the methods first, and then the mind thinks, “We will see – we will see if you can drop me!”

If it has really been understood – that methods are no longer useful – it is synonymous to that understanding that the mind is dropped. They mean the same thing: to know that methods are no longer needed, no longer useful, is to see that the mind is no longer there. Mind is method, mind is technique. The mind cannot exist without methods, methods cannot exist without the mind; they go together. They are two aspects of the same energy.

And you say: [I fear that you will send me back to hell.]

If methods are really dropped, there is no way to go back to hell. Even if I want to send you, I cannot. Methods are needed to go to hell. Methods are needed to come out of hell, methods are needed to go into hell, but no method is needed to go to heaven. When you are out of hell, you are in heaven.

So the whole question is how to be out of hell? Out of hell is heaven. Heaven is not some place where you have to go, otherwise methods would be needed, paths and ways would be needed. No paths and no ways are needed. All paths, all ways, lead into hell. But if you are in hell, then you will have to use the same paths and the same ways to come back.

Let me tell you one of the most beautiful parables that has ever been invented by man, the parable of Adam and Eve eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. The moment they have eaten the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge they fall – the original fall. They are no longer in paradise, they are no longer deathless, they are no longer in eternity; they have lost contact. What has happened? The mind has been created.

That is the meaning of the parable. Eating from the Tree of Knowledge creates the mind; the moment they ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, the mind was created. Adam and Eve are still in the same place, in the same space, they have not gone anywhere. But the mind is created – and once the mind is there, paradise is lost, forgotten. One falls asleep and starts dreaming of hells, death, etcetera, etcetera.

Now you will have to vomit the fruit of knowledge. You will have to vomit the mind out of your system. Once you have vomited knowledge out of your system, suddenly you will be awakened to the fact that you are in paradise. And you will start laughing at the whole ridiculousness of it, because you will know, you will become perfectly aware, that you had never been anywhere else. You have always been here, always and always – you had just fallen asleep and had a nightmare. Now that the poison is out of your system, the nightmare is finished.

We are in the Garden of Eden, right now, this very moment. Nobody can send you to hell except knowledge, except methods, except the mind.

Try to understand. Rather than being in a hurry to drop anything, try to understand. Become more aware, become more alert, more watchful, more observant, and methods will disappear and mind will disappear in the same instant. And then there is no hell – in fact there never has been, you had only imagined it. It is all paradise and always paradise. We are in God, we are gods.

Enough for today.