701

The mind may like to follow me, but the mind is impotent. The mind is a very small part, and it has no will. It dreams well, it thinks well, it plans well, but it has no will. It cannot act. As far as action is concerned, the mind is a coward. In thinking, it is very brave; in action, it is absolutely cowardly. So when you listen to me, if you only think about me, and you think about whatsoever I say, the mind will say: Perfectly true! Very good! This is what I always wanted. But you will never practice it.

So don’t listen to me from the mind. There is another way of listening. Listen to me as a total being, not only from the mind; listen to me from your very guts. Only then will you practice what I am saying; otherwise, you will remain divided. The mind will think one thing and you will go on doing just the opposite. Then you will repent and then you will feel guilty. Then it is better not to listen to me at all because I am not here to create guilt in you. That would be a sin. To create guilt in anybody is a sin. So remember: I will not be responsible for it; you are creating it yourself.

Listen to me as a total organic unity – your blood also listens, your heartbeats also listen, your bones, your marrow, your guts – you listen to me as a total being. Then, only then, will you be able to practice it. In fact, to say “you will be able” is not right – you will practice it. If you have heard me as a total unitary being, you have already started practicing it. There will be no need to make a conscious effort to practice it; you will find it. It has moved into your bloodstream, it has become part of you. You cannot do other than practice it.

So listen to me rightly, and when I say listen to me rightly I mean: don’t listen to me from the head. The head is the culprit because the head has found techniques of listening that don’t allow the whole being to be aware of what is happening. It does not expose your whole being to me. You listen from the head, hiding behind a narrow slit, a small hole just like a keyhole. You go on collecting whatsoever I am saying. You are not drinking and eating me, you are not digesting me; otherwise the question of practice will never arise. You just go on thinking about what I am saying; you go on interpreting, making your own theories, explanations, comments, and then you get hung up in the head. Then you come to a decision. But the head has no power to implement it; the head is not the executive force in you.

The head has no will, it is impotent. It can think, but it can never implement. That’s why thinkers go on thinking. If you see their lives, you will simply be surprised. It seems unbelievable! Their thinking is very rich and their lives absolutely poor. They cannot decide about small things; their thinking remains indecisive.

It happened in the life of a great German thinker, Immanuel Kant: a woman fell in love with him and she waited and waited for some day when he would ask for her hand. But he would talk of a thousand and one things, great things, philosophical speculations, but he would never ask for her hand. Finally, tired, she herself asked, “I would like to get married to you.”
He became very puzzled. He said, “Let me think. I cannot do anything without thinking.”

And the story goes that he started thinking. One day he knocked at the woman’s door – he had decided to get married, he had decided to say yes. When he asked the father if he could see his daughter, the father said, “But she is already married, and she has two children by now! Where have you been all this time?” Almost seven years had passed. He was thinking and thinking and thinking. His diaries still exist; he had found three hundred and fifty-four reasons for marriage and three hundred and fifty reasons against marriage. Because there were four reasons more for marriage, he decided that now something had to be done – but it was too late.

The life of thinking is a bogus life; it has no substratum in it. It is a life of limbo: neither of the earth nor of the sky, just in between. If you listen to me from your head, this problem is going to haunt you your whole life. The head will say yes, and then the problem will arise: how to practice it? Your whole being has not heard about it, and the whole being will go on going its own way. Your whole being will not bother about your head – it doesn’t bother.

In fact, your whole being never listens to your head. It gives your head the opportunity to think, but whenever a question of decision arises, your wholeness comes to a decision, not your head. You decide: Now, no more anger, enough is enough! It is always bad and it poisons and leaves a bad taste in the mouth, and it simply creates more trouble and solves nothing. Your head decides: No more anger, now I have made a decision! And then the next day you are angry. What happened? Your whole being had not even heard about the decision. Your bones, your blood, your guts, are not even aware of your decision.

It is a luxury to think. Unless you hear me from your wholeness, not as thinking beings, but if you throb with me, if your heart beats with me, if you fall in rhythm with me, then there will be no need. This “how to practice problem” will never arise. You will practice. Suddenly you will see that you are practicing. If something goes true to your being, if something is felt by your totality as truth, it is already on the way to being practiced. You have digested it, and then it never creates guilt.

This question of guilt has to be understood; otherwise, you will listen to me and you will not be able to follow. Then you will feel guilty. And I am here to make you happy, not to make you guilty. A guilty person is an ill person. A guilty person is a poisoned person. A guilty person is not in harmony; he is in an inner conflict. He wants to do something and is always doing something else, just the opposite. The rift grows bigger and bigger, and the bridge becomes more and more impossible. Guilt creates schizophrenia: you become two people, or even many people. You become a crowd; you become polypsychic – you lose unity.

Listen to me from your whole heart. Absorb me. Otherwise it is better not to listen to me – forget all about me. But please don’t feel guilty. If you have listened rightly, if you have listened at all, then the question of practice never arises. You are practicing it. It is as natural as if when you want to go out, you go out through the door, not through the wall. You see the door; you simply go out by the door. You don’t even think where the door is, you don’t ask: Where is the door? You don’t make a decision like: This time I am going to go through the door, not through the wall; like: I am going to stick to my decision whatsoever happens; whatsoever the temptation, I am not going through the wall – I will go through the gate. If you think such things, that simply shows that you are mad. And you will go through the wall; you will not go through the gate. The wall is too tempting; you are fascinated, obsessed.

Understanding brings its own practice. Understanding is enough. If you understand me, then there is no problem. So if the problem of practice arises, I am not going to tell you to make more forced efforts. No. Drop all efforts. Try again to understand me. You have missed in the first place; you have missed the very thing, the very seed, which brings practice spontaneously.

Listen to me again. Listen to me very relaxed. When your head listens, you are very attentive, concentrated; there is a tension. Listen to me very relaxed. Allow me to surround you from everywhere. Let me be a climate surrounding you from everywhere. And just allow me in, soak me in; be like a sponge – not attentive, relaxed, like a sponge – so you can drink whatsoever I am saying. There is no need to think about it; drink it. Let it become a part of your being.

And then you will see that you are never following me. If the understanding is there, you always follow yourself. Guilt is not created and the follower is not created. Guilt is not created and the conflict – how to practice it – is not created. Then you are not a follower. You become my lovers but not my followers – and that is a totally different dimension. If you find some day that there is something which the head says has to be followed and done, practiced, and you are not doing it, don’t make any effort to practice it. Try to listen to it again. Go from the very first moment of understanding again; start from the very beginning.

This is a trick of the mind. First it misleads you – just verbal, intellectual understanding – and it gives you an impression that you have understood. Secondly, it says: Now practice! And you cannot practice because you have not soaked it in; it has not yet become part of you, it is not integral to you. It is something foreign, alien. How can you practice it? It becomes a load, a burden. Then the head says: You are guilty! You understand and you don’t do it. So now, whatsoever you do, you will not feel good about it. This understanding, which you think you have, cannot be practiced, so you will feel bad. That’s how so many millions of people remain in guilt, in sin, burdened, crushed under the burden.

Drop it! That dimension is wrong. Start listening to me again. There is no need to understand me intellectually. I am not an intellectual, and I am not teaching you any doctrines. I am simply allowing you to participate in my being, to get in rapport with me, to get in tune with me. My whole effort is so that you can find a certain harmony between me and you, so that you can become partners with me, sharers with me of something unknown that has happened to me, and is possible to happen to you. I want to hold your hand. I want to give you courage, not intellectual understanding. I want to give you life. I want to share something which is overflowing in me.

So don’t listen from the head; that is the wrong place to listen from. In Zen they say: Listen from the belly. That is better. Try it sometime: listen to me from your belly. That is better than your head. In Tao they say: listen from the bottom of your feet. That is even better – because if you listen from the bottom of your feet, to travel from the feet to the head it will pass through your whole being. If you listen from the belly, that too is very good; at least it will be heard from the middle, from the very center.

I tell you: listen to me as a whole. There is no need to listen from the bottom of the feet or from the belly or from the head. Just listen to me as a whole being. For example, if you are in danger and somebody is running behind you with a sword, how will you run? Just with your head? Just with your feet? Just with your belly? No, you will run as a total unit. You will forget completely where the head is and where the feet are and where the belly is. Everything will be forgotten. You will become a total unity. You will run as one.

That is the way to be here with me. Soak me in, absorb me, and then there is no problem of practicing me. It will start affecting you. It will start changing you. You will be surprised: suddenly you will see you have practiced it. Somebody was angry and there was no anger in you; you could remain calm and serene. Suddenly you have practiced it; not that you tried to practice it – it has become part of your being, it just happened.

You will be surprised: if the understanding is true, rather than feeling guilty, you will feel many, many surprises – at your own behavior, at your own responses. In the same old situation, somebody will insult you, and you will not feel anything at all. As if it just goes through you, never hits anywhere; just passes through, does not leave a wound, does not even scratch you! And you can smile and look back: what just happened? A miracle! Understanding is miraculous. It is the only miracle there is.

If you have understood me, you will find at every point of your life, with every step, surprises waiting for you. You will not be able to believe that “This is happening to me!” because you expect only the old, and this is new, absolutely new. You will start falling in love with yourself. A new being is arising.