If you know, you know -- there is no way of distracting you...

Once a great philosopher went to see Ramakrishna. The philosopher argued against God, and he argued really well. His name was Keshav Chandra Sen. Ramakrishna was utterly illiterate; he knew nothing of philosophy, he had never been to the university, he had only read up to the second standard. He could write and read Bengali a little bit.

The philosopher was well educated, world famous, he had written many books. He argued, and Ramakrishna laughed. And each time the philosopher gave a beautiful, profound argument against God, Ramakrishna would jump and hug him. A great crowd had gathered to see the scene, what was happening. The philosopher was very much embarrassed, because he had come to argue, and what kind of argument is this? This man laughs, dances -- sometimes hugs.

The philosopher said, "Are you not disturbed by my arguments?"

Ramakrishna said, "How can I be disturbed? I am really enjoying your arguments. You are clever, you are intelligent, your arguments are beautiful -- but what can I do? I know God! It is not a question of argument, it is not that I believe in God. Had I believed, you would have disturbed me, you would have taken all my clarity and you would have confused me. But I KNOW he is!"

Becoming a beggar will never make you Enlightened...

Buddha became a beggar by renouncing his kingdom; but do you think he is the same kind of beggar, can be put in the same category, as any other beggar who has never known anything of delicious food, of a beautiful woman, of a palace, of all the joys that are possible? On the surface they both look the same; both have a begging bowl. But they are not the same -- they belong to totally different categories.

I would like you to belong to the category of the buddha.

But... first he was a Zorba, and only then he became a buddha.

The other has never been the experiencer of outside reality. He can only repress his sex; he is not frustrated with it.

Buddha has no need to repress -- he has lived it, over-lived it; otherwise, in twenty-nine years one does not renounce the world.

A poor man can become respectable by becoming a beggar in the name of religion, but he will never become enlightened. Hence my emphasis is: before you enter into the inner world, be finished with the outer. Live it so totally -- your life torch should burn from both the ends together. The more totally you live, the quicker you will understand that there is not much. It is only the unlived part of life that seems to be attractive. If you have lived totally then nothing seems to be attractive. And only in that state can you move inwards without hesitation and without any split.

Live at ease, with all that is available on the outside. Don't be in a hurry, because anything left unlived will pull you back again. Finish it. And then there is no need to escape from your house or from your bank account, because they are no longer a burden on you. They don't mean anything. Perhaps they have a certain utility, but nothing is wrong with them.

Even a Gautam Buddha needs food, but somebody else earns it. He needs clothes, and somebody else earns them for him. You earn your own food. It is better to earn your own clothes, your own shelter. What is the point to be understood? -- there is nothing in them that binds you.

What binds you is the lust for the unlived life.

So live life totally and let this lust disappear.

Then you can live in a palace with the same ease as you can live in a poor man's hut. But if a palace is available, then why unnecessarily torture yourself in a poor man's hut? Just, the palace should not be your prison.

And because all these great enlightened people consistently renounced the world, it created an atmosphere in the whole of the East that poverty is something spiritual. It is sheer nonsense. Poverty is not spiritual; it is ugly. It is one of the wounds that has to be healed.

If poverty were spiritual, then there would have been millions of Gautam Buddhas in the East. But we have never heard about beggars becoming buddhas.

Pleasure may be the lowest step, but it is part of the same ladder. The highest step may be enlightenment, may be blissfulness, but it is the same ladder. And if you renounce the first rung of the ladder, you will never reach to the last rung.

Just think -- you are standing upon the first rung of the ladder. There are two ways of renouncing it: one is getting down, the other is moving to the second rung. Both have renounced the first rung of the ladder. Gautam Buddha moves to the second, and you are moving below the first.

You see that he has left the first rung, but you have not understood that he has left the first rung for the second. He will leave the second rung for the third, and he will go on leaving the third and the fourth for the final. But you have become afraid of the first, because you have seen buddhas leaving the first, so you never step on the first. You remain below the first.

LOVE: Don't ask for it, if somebody asks you. Give it...!

Everybody wants to be loved; that is a wrong beginning.

It starts because the child, the small child, cannot love, cannot say anything, cannot do anything, cannot give anything; he can only get. A small child's experience of love is of getting: getting from the mother, getting from the father, getting from brothers, sisters, getting from guests, strangers -- but always getting. So the first experience that settles deep in his unconscious is that he has to get love. But the trouble arises because everybody has been a child, and everybody has the same urge to get love; nobody is born in any other way. So all are asking, "Give us love," and there is nobody to give because the other person was also brought up in the same way.

One has to be alert and aware that just an incident of birth should not remain a constant prevailing state of your mind. Rather than asking, "Give me love," start giving love. Forget about getting, simply give -- and I guarantee you, you will get much. But you are not to think about getting. You are not even indirectly, by the side, to watch whether you are getting it or not. That much will be enough disturbance. You simply give, because to give love is so beautiful that getting love is not so great. This is one of the secrets.

Giving love is the really beautiful experience, because then you are an emperor. Getting love is very small experience, and it is the experience of a beggar. Don't be a beggar. At least as far as love is concerned, be an emperor, because it is an inexhaustible quality in you. You can go on giving as much as you like. Don't be worried that it will be exhausted, that one day you will suddenly find, "My God! I don't have any love to give anymore."

Love is not a quantity; it is a quality, and a quality of a certain category that grows by giving and dies if you hold it. If you are miserly about it, it dies. So be really spendthrift. Don't bother to whom -- that is really the idea of a miserly mind: I will give love to certain persons with certain qualities.

You don't understand that you have so much... you are a raincloud. The raincloud does not bother where it rains -- on the rocks, in the gardens, in the ocean -- it doesn't matter. It wants to unburden itself. And that unburdening is a tremendous relief.

So the first secret is: Don't ask for it, and don't wait, thinking that you will give if somebody asks you. Give it!

The founder of the theosophical movement, Madame Blavatsky had a strange habit her whole life -- and she lived long, and traveled all over the world and created a world movement... In fact no other woman has been so powerful in the whole history of man, has had influence worldwide. She used to carry many bags with her, full of seeds of flowers. Her whole luggage was nothing but seeds of flowers. Sitting in the train by the side of the window she would go on throwing seeds outside the window, and people would ask, "What are you doing? You carry so much unnecessary luggage, and then you go on throwing those seeds out of the window for thousands of miles."

She said, "These are seeds of flowers, beautiful flowers. When the summer goes and the rains come, these seeds will become plants. Soon there will be millions of flowers. I will not be coming back on the route and I will never see them, but thousands of people will see them, thousands of people will enjoy their fragrance."

She actually made almost all the railroads in India full of flowers, and people said, "When you will not see them again, what is your joy?"

She said, "My joy is that so many people will be joyful. I am not a miser. Whatever I can do to make people joyful, happy, I will do; it is part of my love." She really loved humanity, and did everything that she felt was right.

Just give your love to anybody -- a stranger. It is not a question that you have to give something very valuable, just a helping hand and that will be enough. In twenty-four hours, whatever you do should be done with love, and the pain in your heart will disappear. And because you will be loving so much, people will love you. It is a natural law. You get what you give. In fact you get more than you give.

Learn giving, and you will find so many people being loving towards you who had never looked at you, who had never bothered about you.