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.
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