Ambition is the root of politics...

Mind IS politics, because mind is ambitious and ambition is the root of politics. If you are ambitious you are political. Your ambition may take the form of religion, but the politics is there. Then you are competing with other saints.

The night Jesus departed from his disciples, the so-called apostles were not much worried about what was going to happen to Jesus. Their worry was: after Jesus, when the Day of Judgment will come and they all will go to paradise, who will stand next to Jesus? Of course, Jesus will be at the right hand of God; that much they can concede. But who will be next to Jesus? They were quarreling and arguing about this. The last night of the master, tomorrow he may be crucified... but that is not their concern. Those apostles are political, and those apostles have created Christianity, and Christianity is politics and nothing else. So is Hinduism and so is Mohammedanism -- all political desires hidden behind religious words.

Man cannot live without politics, because of the mind. You are brought up, you are trained to be political. Every child is poisoned from the very beginning, poisoned by ambition. We teach children to be ambitious: be somebody in the world, be somebody special, somebody superior, defeat others! We give the idea to every child that life is a struggle and only the fittest survive. Whether you survive by right or wrong means, that is not important.

Twenty-five years of education -- almost one third of your life you are being trained to be ambitious. How can you avoid politics? The only way to avoid politics is to get out of your mind; that means that unless mind is dropped totally, politics will go on clinging to you. You can even be antipolitical but then that will become politics.

"Why do people think that to live without politics is impossible?" -- because they cannot conceive how to live without the mind and desire, or how to live without ambition. They know only one way to live: compete, fight! If you are not going to dominate the other, the other is going to dominate you; so before the other dominates you, dominate the other. It is certainly better to dominate than to be dominated; it is better to be the master than to be the slave; it is better to be rich than to be poor. And there is great struggle, and millions of people are fighting for the same thing -- and things are not so many.

How many people can be presidents, and how many people can be prime ministers, and how many people can be Fords, Rockefellers and Morgans and Birlas and Tatas? How many people? Very few people. And life is short, and these are the goals to be fulfilled. If you cannot be a Rockefeller, if you cannot be the president of a country, your life is a sheer wastage, you are a failure. Unless you understand that even by becoming a Rockefeller, a Morgan, you are not going to achieve anything... you will be farther away from yourself. You will be deeper in the dreams.

By becoming a president or a prime minister you are not going to achieve any peace or bliss. No music is going to explode in your innermost being. In fact, you will become more and more ugly. By the time a person becomes a prime minister he becomes the ugliest possible, because the whole struggle makes him ugly. He has to be cunning, more cunning than others, otherwise he will not succeed. He has to be cruel, he has to be violent, he has to be very diplomatic. He has to say one thing, think another, do still another. By the time he reaches to the highest post of his desire, he is completely destroyed. He is no more a human being. He is hollow inside; he has no substance, no soul.
But these people are thought to be successful people, these people are thought to be the makers of history. These people are thought to leave their mark on human evolution. These are the most mischievous people in the world, these are the greatest criminals: Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, these are the real criminals in the world. Small criminals suffer in the prisons, big criminals become presidents and prime ministers.

But the people who have not been able to achieve these foolish desires also suffer very much. They suffer from an inferiority complex, from failure. Your education creates only two kinds of people. First, those who succeed, and by succeeding they come to know that they have wasted their lives. But it is pointless to tell it to others, because then others will laugh and will think you ridiculous. It is better to go on smiling although you know deep down that you have failed, your life has not been of any significance, you have not enjoyed being here. You have not danced, no song has been sung by your heart. Your whole life has been an experiment in futility. You know it but it is too late. You cannot go back, and you cannot say the truth -- that will simply reveal your stupidity. It is better to go on playing the role of being successful.

And then the other kind is those who see these successful people and suffer with great jealousy, envy, are greatly wounded that "We could not make it in this life." This is politics.

Let the mind be dropped. Don't be a slave of your mind. Become more conscious, more alert of all the nuisance that your mind is doing to you, the mess the mind is creating in you, the chaos the mind has reduced you to. Just watch, be alert. And slowly slowly, as your watchfulness grows -- Buddha calls it "right mindfulness" -- you will be able to slip out of the mind. Out of the mind and you are out of politics; otherwise, whatsoever you do is politics. If you don't do anything, that too is politics. You participate, either positively or negatively. If you vote you participate, if you don't vote still you participate, in a negative way. There seems to be no choice. In every way you will be part of it.

The whole crowd is going in a certain direction. If you move in some other direction the crowd becomes angry at you. The crowd does not allow nonconformists. It wants total submission, it wants slaves, it respects slaves. It gives all kinds of honors -- from the lowest honor to the Nobel Prize -- to the slaves, to the conformists, to those who are somehow supporting the status quo.

You can see it happening everywhere. Just look at the so-called respectable people, they are the greatest slaves. That's why they get respect. It is a mutual understanding. You follow the crowd, the crowd respects you, calls you a saint, a mahatma.

If you feel that politics is a dirty game, don't be worried: "Why do people think that to live without politics is impossible?"
Don't waste your time in that. The crowd is going to remain like that forever, but you can come out of it. Even if you can manage that, that's enough. And maybe if you can manage, then a few others will see the light too, because they will see a new joy arising in your being, a new aroma surrounding you, a new aura, a new atmosphere, a new milieu will start touching other people's hearts.

I am not saying, "Become a missionary." That is a dirty word. But if you are out of these ugly games, your life becomes such a beautiful phenomenon that those who have eyes will see and those who have ears will be able to hear and those who have hearts will be able to feel it. And that's all that you can do. That is real service.

Clinging is the same; to what you cling is irrelevant...

The greatest blessing is when you lose mind and meditation both. To lose the mind is only half the way; the goal is not reached. One who loses the mind starts clinging to meditation; meditation becomes his mind. Meditation becomes his possession, his treasure -- far more beautiful than mind certainly, far more joyous, far more blissful, worth achieving.

To lose the mind is to lose all your miseries. Then great ecstasies bloom, then great joys well up within your being. But even to be ecstatic is to be disturbed. Even to be joyous is to be not totally at home. One has to go beyond ecstasy, beyond the joy, beyond the exhilaration. One has to become utterly peaceful. Hence, Buddha never talks about bliss; he talks about peace, silence. That is the ultimate goal.

Transcend the mind, using the method of meditation. Then do not cling to meditation -- because clinging is the same; to what you cling is irrelevant. The moment the mind disappears, let the meditation also disappear. Neither be a mind nor a no-mind. This is the ultimate goal, the goal of buddhahood. Then you have arrived. Then there is peace. You are no more, only peace exists. There is nobody to possess it.

Half of you was killed when you dropped the mind, and half of you was killed when you dropped meditation. The worldly part disappeared with the mind and the so-called spirituality disappeared with the meditation. Now you are neither body nor soul. You are not. A tremendous nothingness, a total nobodiness exists. Buddha calls it SHUNYA, nirvana. Everything has ceased: misery and joy, day and night, summer and winter, life and death, all are gone. The whole duality is transcended.

Feel blessed. Feel immensely fortunate if both disappear -- although in the clinging it will look very crazy. First, to drop the mind looks very crazy. But then meditation is there to give you a new settlement, a new order, a new discipline -- higher, better, more sophisticated, more cultured, more inner, more subjective.

When you drop meditation, all order, all discipline, all structure, disappears. You take a plunge into the utterly unknown, the ultimate unknown.

This is the moment of the real birth -- not of you but of God. You are no more, now only God is. And by "God" I don't mean a person; by "God" I only mean an experience.

Nobody is born uncreative...

CREATIVITY has nothing to do with any activity in particular -- with painting, poetry, dancing, singing. It has nothing to do with anything in particular.

Anything can be creative -- you bring that quality to the activity. Activity itself is neither creative nor uncreative. You can paint in an uncreative way. You can sing in an uncreative way. You can clean the floor in a creative way. You can cook in a creative way.

Creativity is the quality that you bring to the activity you are doing. It is an attitude, an inner approach -- how you look at things.
So the first thing to be remembered: don't confine creativity to anything in particular. A man is creative -- and if he is creative, whatsoever he does, even if he walks, you can see in his walking there is creativity. Even if he sits silently and does nothing, even non-doing will be a creative act. Buddha sitting under the Bodhi Tree doing nothing is the greatest creator the world has ever known.

Once you understand it -- that it is you, the person, who is creative or uncreative -- then this problem disappears.

Not everybody can be a painter -- and there is no need also. If everybody is a painter the world will be very ugly; it will be difficult to live. And not everybody can be a dancer, and there is no need. But everybody can be creative.

Whatsoever you do, if you do it joyfully, if you do it lovingly, if your act of doing it is not purely economical, then it is creative. If you have something growing out of it within you, if it gives you growth, it is spiritual, it is creative, it is divine.

You become more divine as you become more creative. all the religions of the world have said: God is the Creator. I don't know whether He is the Creator or not, but one thing I know: the more creative you become, the more godly you become. When your creativity comes to a climax, when your whole life becomes creative, you live in God. So He must be the Creator because people who have been creative have been closest to Him.

Love what you do. Be meditative while you are doing it -- whatsoever it is! irrelevant of the fact of what it is.

If your act is your love-affair, then it becomes creative. Small things become great by the touch of love and delight.

Very few people are accepted as creative: A few painters, a few poets -- one in a million. This is foolish! Every human being is a born creator. Watch children and you will see: all children are creative. By and by, we destroy their creativity. By and by, we force wrong beliefs on them. By and by, we distract them. By and by, we make them more and more economical and political and ambitious.

When ambition enters, creativity disappears -- because an ambitious man cannot be creative, because an ambitious man cannot love any activity for its own sake. While he is painting he is looking ahead; he is thinking, 'When am I going to get a Nobel Prize?' When he is writing a novel, he is looking ahead. He is always in the future -- and a creative person is always in the present.

We destroy creativity. Nobody is born uncreative, but we make ninety-nine percent of people uncreative.

But just throwing the responsibility on the society is not going to help -- you have to take your life in your own hands. You have to drop wrong conditionings. You have to drop wrong, hypnotic auto-suggestions that have been given to you in your childhood. Drop them! Purify yourself of all conditionings... and suddenly you will see you are creative.

If you are loving you will see that the whole existence has individuality. Don't pull and push things. Watch, communicate; take their help -- and much energy will be preserved.

Even trees are creative, rocks are creative. You are man: the very culmination of this existence. You are at the top -- you are conscious. Never think with wrong beliefs, and never be attached to wrong beliefs, that you are uncreative. Maybe your father said to you that you are uncreative, your colleagues said to you that you are uncreative. Maybe you were searching in wrong directions, in directions in which you are not creative, but there must be a direction in which you are creative. Seek and search and remain available, and go on groping -- unless you find it.

Each man comes into this world with a specific destiny -- he has something to fulfill, some message has to be delivered, some work has to be completed. You are not here accidentally -- you are here meaningfully. There is a purpose behind you. The Whole intends to do something through you.

all is accidental except your consciousness...

Whatsoever is accidental... you are living in a big house, in a palace. Remember that if this palace is taken away from you, there is no point in becoming depressed. Once you were living outside the palace, so again you are under the sky. You become very respectable, and then something happens... you are condemned by the society. What is the point to be worried about it? One day you were not famous at all and you were happy -- again you can be happy.

One day you were not in this world! When you were not born, do you remember that you were in any way unhappy? -- then why be worried when you die? You will be again in the same state. You were not, and you don't remember any unhappiness. One day you will again disappear... why be worried? You will be again in the same state: you will not be again -- at least not in the way that you are here.

This is what Zen people say: Find out your original face -- the face that you had before you were born, and the face that will be there when you are dead. Find out the eternal, and don't pay much attention to the accidental.

If you can drop out of the accidental, you have dropped out of the world. There is no need to go anywhere: it is an inner attitude.

REMEMBER remain alert that you don t get too much attached to the accidental -- and all is accidental except your consciousness. Except your awareness, all is accidental. Pain and pleasure, success and failure, fame and defamation -- all is accidental. Only your witnessing consciousness is essential. Stick to it! Get more and more rooted in it. And don't spread your attachment to worldly things.

I don't mean leave them. I don't mean leave your house, leave your wife, leave your children -- but remember that it is just an accident that you are together. It is not going to be an eternal state. It has a beginning; it will have an end. Remember that you were happy even before it began; and you will be happy when it has ended. If you can carry this touchstone, you can always judge what is accidental and what is essential.

That which is always is truth. That which is momentary is untrue.

In the East and in the West there is a difference in the definition of truth. In the Western philosophy, truth is equivalent to the real. In the East. truth is equivalent to the eternal -- because in the East we say even the momentary is real: real for the moment; but it is not true because it is not eternal. It is just a reflection. The reflection is also real!

You see the moon in the sky and the reflection in the lake -- the reflection is also real because it is there! There is a difference between the reflection and no reflection, so it is real. Even a dream is real, because when you dream it is there! It is real as a dream, but it is real. The only difference between the dream and the waking state is that the dream lasts only for a few moments -- the waking state lasts longer. But in the East we have come to the ultimate awakening also. Then this waking state also looks momentary, then this too is dreamlike.

The eternal is true. The temporal is untrue. Both are real. The accidental is also real and the essential is also real, but with the accidental you will remain in misery. And with the essential the doors of bliss open, the doors of satchitanand -- of truth, of consciousness, of bliss.

now he is seeking God, bliss, heaven... but he remains the same...

THERE IS NOTHING TO BE FOUND IN PARTICULAR. The search for the particular is illusory, utterly illusory. The mind seeks something in particular; that is the problem with the mind. God is not a particular thing or a particular being; God is sheer existence. All that is is God. God is the greatest generality. You cannot find Him somewhere because He is everywhere. You cannot find Him in any place because He is the whole, the total. You cannot indicate Him; whatsoever the indication, it will be wrong: He is in all directions, within and without.

Mind is narrow; it goes on seeking in a very concentrated way. Concentration is not the approach towards God. Concentration is a mind approach. God is everywhere, so you have to relax, you have to be meditative. That's the difference between concentration and meditation. Concentration is a focusing of the mind exclusively on something. That's what desire is: a concentrated mind, a mind intent to reach somewhere, to reach something, a great seeking -- but it has to be narrow. And God is the infinite.

You have to relax, and you have to drop all searching -- only then you'll find Him. Seek, and you will never find Him. Just be, and He has always been there surrounding you. He has never left you for a single moment, because you cannot exist without Him. It is impossible to be without Him for a single split moment. He is your life. He is your being. You can exist without food for months, you can exist without water for a few days, you can exist without air for a few seconds, but you cannot exist without God even for a split second. It is impossible.

One who is searching is still in the world. The searcher is part of the world. One day he was seeking money, power, prestige; now he is seeking God, bliss, heaven, but the search continues. He has only changed the objects of the search, but he remains the same.

You are just like a fish already in the ocean. Maybe the ocean is so obvious that you can't see: you are born in it, you are made of it, you will dissolve in it. It is a question of recognition, not of search.

A searching mind becomes concentrated. Relax and just recognize.

So I don't say to you to seek God, I say to you to live Him right now. There is no need to seek -- enjoy Him right now, celebrate! Let it be a festival. He has already happened. He is just waiting for you to dance with Him, to delight with Him.

One day, when you arrive, you simply are amazed that for so many lives you were seeking something which had never been there, and that which has been there was so close to you, and there was no need to seek it.

Become feminine, become a woman...

There are two approaches towards God: one is of the male mind -- aggressive, active; the other is of the feminine mind -- passive, receptive. Bauls belong to the second approach. Just as Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu belong to the second approach, Mahavir and Patanjali belong to the first approach.

The male mind seeks and searches God as if God is somewhere else and has to be discovered. The feminine mind simply prays and waits. The feminine mind trusts that "When I am ready, God will come to me." It is God who comes, not the seeker who goes to God. And in fact, how can you seek God? You don't know Him, you don't know His address, you don't know the direction, you don't know the definition. And even if you come across Him, how are you going to recognize Him? because recognition is possible only if you have known Him before.

All search in a way is futile. And because of the male mind, atheism has become very predominant in the world. It is the failure of the male mind that atheism has become so prevalent. In the West atheism has become really the greatest religion -- because the West is male-oriented. The very orientation is of conquering -- as if there is a fight between man and God, as if there is a tussle, a wrestling. In the West the result of this effort has been only that God has completely disappeared. Nietzsche declared, "God is dead." Nietzsche is the very essence of the male mind: will to power, will to dominate, will to possess.

If you search for Him too much, your very search will become a barrier.

There have been a few people who have attained through that approach also -- a Mahavir, a Patanjali -- but those cases are rare, and the struggle is very long and unnecessary. God comes to you. God is always coming to you. The Bauls say, "It is not you who seek Him, it is He who is seeking you. It is not that you pray to Him, He is praying to you. Listen! Be passive, accept. He is knocking on the door, and inside the room you are so occupied in searching and seeking that you cannot listen to the knock." Man cannot seek God; only God can seek man. This is a profound truth to be understood, because how can you seek God? How can you relate? You are so dark, so dull, so asleep, so unconscious, so ignorant -- how are you going to seek? And whatsoever you seek will never be bigger than you, cannot be. Your God will be your God.

If horses seek God, they will make an image of God, but the image will be of a horse, not of a man -- because man has never done anything good to horses. In fact, if they had some mythology about the devil, man's image would be the image of the devil. If trees are seeking God, they will seek in the form of trees -- because we cannot go beyond our form. Our form will be the limitation. So if you seek, the God is going to be yours, and your God is almost no God.

Let Him seek you. Allow Him. His hand has been reaching for you continuously; just be in a let-go. Don't escape from Him, that's all. There is no need to seek Him positively, just don't escape from Him. Let Him be, listen, be receptive, welcome. In that listening, in that receptivity, He will penetrate you. Become feminine, become a woman.

A Buddha is a woman.

Become a woman, mean of course, psychologically, spiritually. It has nothing to do with your body, but your attitude. Woman is patient. Just think of a man having a child in his belly for nine months. You cannot conceive that a man will be able to tolerate it -- impossible. A woman is very patient, accepting. The woman's resistance is much stronger than man's. Man in fact is the weaker sex. He may be stronger as far as muscles are concerned, but muscles are no criterion of strength.

Revolutionaries are in the same boat...

Basho is the greatest haiku poet of Japan, the Master haiku poet. But he was not just a poet. Before becoming a poet he was a mystic; before he starting pouring out with beautiful poetry, he poured deep into his own center. He was a meditator.

It is said that Basho was entering upon a journey when he was a young man. The journey was an endeavor to find himself. Not long after he had begun he heard a small child crying alone in the forest -- maybe he was sitting under a tree, meditating, or trying to meditate; he heard a small child crying alone in the forest. He meditated for a long time on what to do. He then picked up his pack and continued on his way, leaving the child to its own fate.

In his journal he recorded: "First one has to do what one needs for oneself before one can do anything for another."

Looks hard...a child alone in the forest, crying, and this man meditates on whether to do anything or not, whether he can help the child, whether it will be right to help him or not. A child, a helpless child crying in the wilderness, alone, lost -- and Basho meditates over it and finally decides that how can he help somebody else when he has not even helped himself yet. He himself is lost in a wilderness, he himself is lonely, he himself is childish. How can he help anybody?

The incident looks very hard, but is very meaningful. I'm not saying don't help a child in the forest if you find him crying and weeping. But try to understand: your own light is not burning and you start helping others. Your own inner being is in total darkness and you start helping others. You yourself are suffering and you become a servant of the people. You have not passed through the inner rebellion and you become a revolutionary. This is simply absurd, but this idea arises in everybody's mind. It seems so simple to help others. In fact, people who really need to change themselves always become interested in changing others. That becomes an occupation, and they can forget themselves.

Kahlil Gibran has written a small story:
There was a dog, a great revolutionary one might say, who was always teaching other dogs of the town that "Just because of your nonsense barking we are not growing. You waste your energy by barking unnecessarily." A postman passes, and suddenly...a policeman passes, a sannyasin passes.... Dogs are against uniforms, any sort of uniform, and they are revolutionaries. They immediately start barking.

The leader used to tell them, "Stop this! Don't waste energy, because:this same energy can be put into something useful, creative. Dogs can rule the whole world, but you are wasting your energy for no purpose at all. This habit has to be dropped. This is the only sin, the original sin."

The dogs were always feeling that he was perfectly right; logically, he was right: why do you go on barking? And much energy is wasted; one feels tired. Again the next morning one starts barking, and again by the night one is tired. What is the point of it all? They could see the leader's meaning, but they also knew that they were just dogs, poor dogs. The ideal was very great and the leader was really a revealer -- because whatsoever he was preaching he was doing. He never used to bark. You could see his character: that whatsoever he preached he practiced also.

But by and by, they got tired of his constant preaching. One day they decided -- it was the birthday of the leader -- and they decided, as a gift, that at least on that night they would resist the temptation to bark. At least for one night they would respect the leader and give him a gift. He could not be more happy than this. All the dogs stopped that night. It was very difficult, arduous. It was just like when you are meditating, how difficult it is to stop thinking. It was the same problem. They stopped barking, and they had always barked. And they were not great saints, but ordinary dogs. But they tried hard. It was very, very arduous. They were hiding in their places with closed eyes, with clenched teeth, so they would not see anything, they would not listen to anything. It was a great discipline. The leader walked around the town. He was very puzzled: "To whom to preach? Whom to teach now? What has happened?" -- complete silence. Then suddenly when midnight had passed, he became so annoyed, because he had never really thought that the dogs would listen to him. He had known well that they would never listen, that it was just natural for dogs to bark. His demand was unnatural, but the dogs had stopped. His whole leadership was at stake. What was he going to do from tomorrow? because all he knew was just to teach. His whole ministry was at stake. And then for the first time he realized that because he was constant}y teaching from the morning till the night that's why he had never felt the need to bark. The energy was so involved, and that was a sort of barking.

But that night, nowhere, nobody was found guilty. And the preacher-dog started feeling a tremendous urge to bark. A dog is, after all, a dog. Then he went into a dark lane and started barking. When the other dogs heard that somebody had broken the agreement, then they said, "Why should we suffer?" The whole town started barking. Back came the leader and said, "You fools! When are you going to stop barking? Because of your barking we have remained just dogs. Otherwise, we would have dominated the whole world."

Remember well that a social servant, a revolutionary, is asking for the impossible -- but it keeps him occupied. And when you are occupied with others' problems, you tend to forget your own problems. First, settle those problems, because that is your first, basic responsibility.

THERE are always problems in the world, and the world has always been there, and the world will remain there. If you start working out: changing circumstances, changing people, thinking of a utopian world, changing the government, the structure, the economy, the politics, the education, you will be lost. That is the trap known as politics. That's how many people waste their own lives. Be very clear about it: the only person you can help right now is you yourself. Right now you cannot help anybody. This may be just a distraction, just a trick of the mind. See your own problems, see your own anxieties, see your own mind, and first try to change it.

It happens to many people: the moment they become interested in some sort of religion, meditation, prayer, immediately the mind tells them, "What are you doing sitting here silently? The world needs you; there are so many poor people. There is much conflict, violence, aggression. What are you doing praying in the temple? Go and help people." How can you help those people? You are just like them. You may create even more problems for them, but you cannot help. That's how all the revolutions have always failed. No revolution has yet succeeded because the revolutionaries are in the same boat.