Be worldly, and yet remain unworldly...

A person who escapes is not really a man of understanding. His very escape shows his fear, not understanding. If you say, "How can I be happy sitting in the marketplace? How can I be silent sitting in the marketplace?" and you escape to the Himalayan silence, you are escaping from the very possibility of ever becoming silent -- because it is only in the marketplace that the contrast exists; it is only in the marketplace that the challenge exists; it is only in the marketplace that distractions exist. And you have to overcome all those distractions.

If you escape to the Himalayas you will start feeling a little still, but at the same time a little stupid also. You will start feeling more silent, but that silence belongs to the Himalayas, not to you. Come back and your silence will be left behind -- you will come alone. And back in the world you will be even more disturbed than before, because you will have become more vulnerable, soft. And you will come with a prejudice, with this idea that you have attained to silence. You will have become more egoistic.

That's why people who have escaped to the monasteries become afraid of coming back to the world. The world is the test. The world is the criterion. And it is easier to be in the world and, by and by, grow into a silence, then the Himalayan silence comes into your being. You don't go to the Himalayas: the Himalayas themselves come to you. Then it is something of your own, then you are the master of it.

I don't teach escape. I also teach renunciation. Many people, orthodox, old people. come to me and they say, "What type of sannyas is this? People have taken sannyas -- they are still living in their families, with their wife, with their children. going to the office, to the factory, to the shop -- what type of sannyas is this?" They have only one conception of sannyas, a one dimensional conception -- of escape. This is multi-dimensional. It is renouncing and yet living here, dropping and yet not dropping, changing and yet remaining ordinary, transforming one's being totally and yet remaining in the ordinary world like everybody else.

The Zen concept of renunciation is my concept of renunciation also. But it is difficult because the world has been condemned so much that it has become almost unconscious; it has become habitual to think in terms of condemnation. If somebody says you are worldly, you feel hurt, insulted. When you want to condemn somebody, you call him worldly -- you have condemned him.

There is nothing wrong in being worldly. Be worldly, and yet remain unworldly -- that is the very art, the art of living between two opposites, balancing oneself between two opposites. It is a very narrow path, like a razor's edge -- but this is the only path. If you miss this balance, you miss truth.

After THAT: Chakras have no power over you, but you have all power over them...

There are seven chakras in the human body. In Zen they are called the seven lions. The first chakra is the sex center; the second chakra, which is just below the navel, is called in Japanese, hara.

The sex center has all the life energy gathered in it. For ordinary human beings, all the energy is gathered at the lowest center. This is just above that. So if you put a knife into the hara, the life energy is released from the hara center, which is just above it, into the cosmos.

The third center is the navel, and the fourth center is the heart. The fifth center is the throat, and the sixth center is the third eye, just between your two eyebrows. The seventh center is just on top of your head.

Once you understand that these centers are significant, that the sex center is the lowest point in your life, and the seventh ... If the energy moves from the first to the second, from the second to the third, from the third to the fourth -- every center has its own expression, and your life goes on changing.

When your energy is at the hara center -- the hara center is the death center -- you suddenly become aware that just as millions of people have been dying since centuries, "I cannot be an exception. I will have to die, if not today, then tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. But someday, that which is born always dies. I am born, I am going to die."

Once you are at the sex center, your whole concentration is on the other sex.

as your energy moves to the second center, the hara, you become absolutely uninterested in sex. It is not celibacy, you have not taken any vow, your energy has simply moved higher. Its concern becomes death. In sex the concern was birth, because through sex is all reproduction.

Moving from sex you have moved from birth to death, a small distance. Suddenly you become aware that "Death is coming and I am concerned only with trivia -- money, power, prestige, respectability. All this will be gone when death comes. I am unnecessarily making the effort of creating a signature on the sands. A little breeze of wind, a little tidal wave, and the signature will be finished."

Death comes as a tidal wave, and all your personality, all your respectability, prestige, are erased. One becomes aware that, "I have to find something which is beyond death."

Once the energy moves to the hara, the concern for the search for something immortal in you becomes very predominant, and when the energy moves to the third center, your concern is no more intellectual. You don't simply philosophize, you don't read the books which say, "Life is eternal"; you don't believe. At the third center -- the navel -- your interest becomes experiential.

As you move above to the fourth center, that is the heart, your whole life becomes a sharing of love. The third center has created the abundance of love. By reaching to the third center in meditation, you have become so overflowing with love, with compassion, and you want to share. It happens at the fourth center -- the heart.

That's why even in the ordinary world people think love comes out of the heart. For them it is just hearsay, they have heard it. They don't know it because they have never reached to their heart. But the meditator finally reaches to the heart.

As he has reached to the center of his being -- the third center -- suddenly an explosion of love and compassion and joy and blissfulness and benediction has arisen in him with such a force that it hits his heart and opens the heart. The heart is just in the middle of all your seven centers -- three centers below, three centers above. You have come exactly to the middle.

That's why the person of the heart is very balanced, utterly balanced. He has a tremendous grace, a beauty that seems to be not of this world. His eyes are showering love, his hands are showering love, even if he does nothing. Even his presence is radiating love. It is a vibration, multidimensional. All around him a love energy goes on flowing. Those who are receptive, their hearts will start ringing a bell. For the first time they will hear a new music, a new harmony, a new synchronicity.

The fifth center is the throat. The throat is the center of expression. When you are too full of experience, you share love at the fourth center, and you share your experience through language, through devices, from the fifth center.

The sixth center is just between the two eyebrows, inside. In India we have called it the third eye. It gives you a tremendous clarity, a vision of the whole existence as it is. And when you open your eyes ... it affects even your ordinary world. Trees are greener, roses are rosier, everything around you of which you were never aware becomes more graceful. Everything around you becomes more beautiful. Even wildflowers look so beautiful; they have their own individuality, they cannot be compared to roses, they cannot be compared to lotuses. There is no comparison at all.

Once you have reached to the sixth -- the third eye -- everything in your life becomes crystal clear. No questions, no answers -- you know it. No belief, no disbelief -- you know it.

And the seventh center is when you become enlightened: the center of samadhi, the center of ultimate awakening, the center where you become a buddha.

A man who has reached to the highest center is capable of using any center of his being, even the lowest. If he wants to use even the lowest -- it will be difficult, because the distance is far away. Bringing the energy back down to the sex center will be a difficult job, but he can use it, it is not impossible. He can use any center if he wants, if there is any need; but otherwise, all those six centers remain silent. On their own they don't pull you, they have no power over you, but you have all power over them.

The man of enlightenment concentrates all the energy into one center. All other centers are no more moving wheels, they are stopped, just as a wheel stops moving. But if he wants, the man of enlightenment can bring the energy down. He can bring it to the sixth center and he can see far and wide with clarity. That will not be possible at the seventh center.

The seventh center is beyond everything. You simply are no more. At the sixth, again you are. The energy comes, the circle, the wheel starts moving. You can bring it down to the fifth ....

The man who has reached to the seventh becomes the master of his whole life structure. He can do everything that he wants, and when he stops, the energy simply moves automatically back to the seventh.