So-called masters...

You must have heard Aesop's fable....

A fox was passing, and there were grapes, but the vine was high on a tree. She tried and tried and jumped but they were beyond her reach. So she went away saying, 'They are not worth anything, they are not yet sweet and ripe. They are sour.' She couldn't reach.

But it is difficult for the ego to realize, 'I am a failure.' Rather than recognizing, 'I have failed, they were beyond my reach,' the ego will say, 'They were not worth anything.'

Your many sannyasins, so-called saints, are just like that Aesop's fox. They have renounced the world not because they understood the futility of it but because they were failures and it was beyond their reach -- and they are still filled with grudge and complaint. You go to them and they will still be against, saying, 'Wealth is dirt; and what is a beautiful woman? -- nothing but bones and blood!' Who are they trying to convince? They are trying to convince themselves the grapes are sour and bitter.

Why talk about women when you have left the world? And why talk about wealth when you are not concerned with it? A deep concern still exists. You cannot accept the failure yet and understanding has not arisen.

Remember one trick of the mind: you try to convince people about something just to convince yourself, because when the other feels convinced you feel okay. If you go and tell people that sex is sin and they are convinced or they cannot refute you, you become happy. You have convinced yourself. Looking into others' eyes, you are trying to cover your own failure.

Psychologists say that people accumulate followers just to convince themselves that they know. Without followers, how will you convince yourself? There is no way -- you are alone!

If you go to so-called masters, so-called monks and sannyasins, you will become more tense; you cannot relax. Go to a sannyasin: you become more tense, you become more afraid. And he creates guilt; he will look at you with condemnatory eyes, and the very way he will look at you will say you are a sinner. And he will start condemning: This is wrong, that is wrong; leave this, leave that. This is not the way of a really enlightened person. He will make you feel relaxed. There is a Chinese saying that if you reach a really great man you will feel relaxed with him; if you reach a false great man he will create tension within you. He will make, knowingly or unknowingly, every effort to show that you are low, a sinner; that he is high, above, transcendental.

A buddha will help you to relax, because only in your deep relaxation will you also become a buddha. There is no other way.

There is the difference between a real religious person and a so-called religious person. The so-called religious person always Looks to the rule; he always thinks of what is proper and what is not proper. But a really religious person lives it. There is nothing proper and improper for him. Compassion is so infinitely proper that whatsoever you do through compassion becomes proper automatically.