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Yes, it is – and the most selfish. There is nothing like it, it is incomparably selfish. And one has to be selfish; there is no other way to be. All the teachings that go on telling you not to be selfish have not helped. Rather, they have distracted your being, they have made you unnatural.

The self is your center, and to be selfish is the only way there is to be. The more you try to be not selfish, the more you become eccentric. The word eccentric is beautiful; it simply means off-center. Then you are no longer rooted in yourself, then you are no longer grounded in your being – and a man who is not grounded in his being lives a false life, lives an artificial life. His whole life is more like a dream than like a reality.

And deep down you cannot help it, deep down you remain selfish. At the most you become hypocrites. You try to be unselfish, but that is an impossibility. Even in your effort to be unselfish you will remain selfish. So you create a duality, a conflict, and whatever you say on the surface, deep down you go on denying it – and you know it well because how can you deceive yourself? The surface says one thing, the depth goes on broadcasting just the opposite.

It happened… There was a case against Mulla Nasruddin in the court and the judge asked, “Did you sleep with this woman, Nasruddin? Nasruddin said, “No, your honor, not at all, your honor, not even a wink!”

This is the situation. You say something and immediately your inner depth contradicts it. You become a contradiction. You become tense. Your life becomes a deep anguish, a suffering. I teach you to be totally selfish because I teach you that which is natural. But if you understand me well – which is difficult, you may misunderstand me – if you are really selfish then much flows out of your life which is absolutely unselfish. Because when a man is grounded in his own being he has so much to share, so much to give, there is no need to be altruistic. If you are centered you are altruistic because you have overflowing love, overflowing being – you have to share. You are just like a flower, so full of fragrance it goes on sharing it with the winds. You are like a pregnant being, you carry so much within you that you have to give, to share, and by sharing it grows more. But you share it from your center.

So I am not saying that when you become selfish, then you are not unselfish – no, just the opposite. When you try to be unselfish you remain, deep down, selfish. When you become totally selfish a tremendously beautiful unselfishness happens in your life. But you are not even conscious about it, because if you are conscious it is false. Things which are natural and healthy need no consciousness. Are you conscious of your breathing? Yes, sometimes, when something goes wrong, when something is ill, when the breathing is not as it should be. Then you become alert. You are alarmed, then you become conscious. Otherwise the breathing goes on day and night, twenty-four hours, whether you are asleep or awake, whether you are in love or in hate, whether you move or you sit, whatever you do the breathing continues. It does not depend on your being conscious of it – and it is fortunate that it doesn’t depend on your consciousness, otherwise you would be already dead. If you had to be careful about it, if you had to do it, it would have stopped long before.

Unselfishness should be like breathing. You should be centered, then it happens. Unselfishness is not the opposite of selfishness, unselfishness is the by-product of being totally selfish. This is what I teach you. And all the churches and all the religions and all the priests and preachers, they have been teaching you just the opposite. They have corrupted humanity, they have poisoned your minds. You cannot be centered and you are trying to help others, to be of service to them. The only help that you can give, the first and the very basic thing, is to be centered and rooted within yourself.

Yes, enlightenment is a selfish search. This is half of the answer I would like to give you. Now the other half.

Because enlightenment is a selfish search, the most selfish, incomparably selfish, you cannot attain enlightenment through search. The search will make you a beautiful person – wise, compassionate, in a thousand and one ways – but not enlightened.

So, for me there exist three types of persons. One, the so-called religious person, the moral, the puritan, the so-called good, who goes on trying to be unselfish and remains selfish. Second, the person who knows there is no other way to be, knows that to be selfish is the only way there is, who becomes centered and becomes unselfish – who through selfishness attains unselfishness as a by-product, he makes no effort to attain it. And the third person: who is neither selfish nor unselfish. He is the enlightened person who goes beyond duality, who goes even beyond the self.

Hidden in yourself is the no-self. Hidden behind you is emptiness, nothingness, what Buddha has called śūnyatā, absolute nothingness.

So the second part of the answer: you cannot attain enlightenment through searching. All search fails there because until the seeker is lost, enlightenment is not possible – and how can the seeker be lost if there is search? How can the seeker be lost if there is a self? It is not possible. So what happens? How does a man become enlightened? He searches and searches, and there comes a moment when he realizes the total absurdity of searching for it. Because you can search for something that is not already within you, you can search for something that is in the future – but how can you search for that which is already the case? Through searching you will miss it. How can you search for the seeker himself? The seeker can search for everything except himself. Trying to search for himself is absurd. How can the seeker seek himself? For searching, a distance is needed between the seeker and the sought.

When the distance is not there – and it is not there – the seeker is the sought. When this is realized, and it is realized after much search, remember. Don’t drop searching. I am not saying that; it is realized after many failures, when all hope is lost. It is realized only when you have searched in all ways possible, when you have done all that you could, no stone has been left unturned, not even a single corner has been left unsearched, you have done all that can be done, nothing is left – you simply sit. The search drops from you: no hope, no possibility of ever gaining this goal. In a moment of absolute frustration you drop the search – this is how it happened to Buddha, this is how it happened to me, this is how it always happens.

You make tremendous effort, and that is needed! I’m not saying that right now you can drop the search: How can you drop it if you have not got it? Search hard. Make all the effort you can, bring your total energy to it, but I am not saying that through it you will attain. Without it you will never attain, through it no one has ever attained. You will have to pass through it. Go in, and then a moment comes when you come out, freed from all search and seeking. Then suddenly you turn inward, because a search is always outward. Seeking, you always look somewhere else, seeking you run all over the space, seeking you go in all directions – and there is something within you that is beyond all directions. You may call it the eleventh direction.

There is something within you which need not be searched for but only realized. It happens in a single moment, not even in a single moment, in a split second – not even that – it doesn’t happen in time. Search stopped, seeker gone, suddenly it is there. It has always been there.