from-misery-to-enlightenment-03

Osho,
What is initiation according to you?
The search for truth is as old as man himself.
But there are many kinds of seekers.
The first category I call the curious.
They are the most superficial. They are not read to do anything, sacrifice anything, make any effort. Their curiosity is just like a child’s curiosity – he goes on asking about everything. He does not even bother to listen to your answer; while you are answering him, he is asking about something else. If you don’t answer him, he does not persist in questioning. He has no involvement in it – it is just a little superficial, intellectual irritation, a kind of itching in his mind.
But the curious are many, the majority. They are not ready to pay anything for their question. They want answers given to them ready-made. They are not even ready to thank you for your answer…as if they have obliged you; as if just by asking they have made you important.
The curious go on their whole life like driftwood, just moving in any direction with no idea where they are going, with no sense of direction at all. Why they are going they don’t even consider. Their life is accidental. Somebody is going somewhere – they may start following, imitating. Somebody is asking about truth – they may start asking about truth. They are more like monkeys than men.
I am reminded of a beautiful story: There was one old man who used to sell caps, and in India particularly, in those days, a certain kind of white cap had become a symbol of revolution. The cap was called the Gandhi cap, although Gandhi himself never used it; you cannot find a single picture in which Gandhi is using that cap. But it became known as the Gandhi cap because the followers of Gandhi were using it as a symbol. The white cap became your declaration against the British Raj.
This old man was doing good business selling white caps to people, so wherever there was any kind of gathering, he would go to sell the white caps. Between two gatherings, two fairs, exhibitions, he would make as many caps as he could. It is a simple thing to make – the Gandhian cap may be perhaps the simplest cap in the world. It is just like a small bag; then you fold it three times, it becomes a cap. You open it, and you can use it as a small bag for carrying vegetables or anything. It is multipurpose.
The old man was earning enough, so his son was doing nothing. But the old man was becoming old and he told the son, “Now I am not capable of moving from one place to another place, walking from one town to another town, so you start. I will simply make the caps in the house, you go and do the selling.”
So the son went to sell the caps. On the way – it was too hot a day, and he was still miles away from the place where he was going – he thought to have a little rest under a big Bo tree. He kept all his caps that he was carrying in a bag by his side and went to sleep – and of course, he was wearing a Gandhi cap himself, just as an advertisement.
He didn’t see that the whole tree was full of monkeys. The monkeys became curious about the cap, and they came down; the man was asleep. They looked in the bag and found the caps. So all the monkeys put the caps on their heads, and they were really enjoying themselves, and they were looking cute! When the young man woke up he found his bag empty. He looked all around: who had taken his caps? And then he heard the laughter of the monkeys. When he looked up, all over the tree there was revolution: the whole army of monkeys against the British Raj.
Now there was no way to get those caps back. He came back home very sad and told his father, “I was a fool; I went to sleep and this happened. All the caps are lost, I did not reach the place…and those monkeys made such a fool of me! They were giggling and laughing and making all kinds of faces at me, and there was nothing that I could do.”
The father said, “It happened to me in my young days too. It was my fault that I forgot to tell you. You forget about it. I will tell you the secret – the secret that I also had to learn the hard way by once losing all my caps. And then I inquired of an old man and he gave me the secret; and this is the secret. Tomorrow go again under the same tree. Put your bag in the same place and go to sleep at least pretend, even if you are not sleeping – and let those monkeys take your caps.”
And it happened. He went; he pretended to sleep. The monkeys came one by one, and they were very happy that this man had come again with the same kind of thing. Yesterday’s caps they had lost already: it was just a curiosity, it was nothing of any interest to them. They had played a little with them and when the man was gone they threw the caps. But again he had come – seems to be very stubborn!
But monkeys won’t accept defeat so easily; they again did their thing. And when they all had their caps, the man woke up – he had been simply pretending – and opened his eyes. When they giggled, he giggled louder than them. They were a little shocked: what had happened? Yesterday this man was just ashamed, afraid.
They tried to make faces, but the man made faces at them. They tried to scream, the man screamed louder. They looked at each other: “What has happened? Something strange….” And then the man in great anger took his cap and threw it away.
All the monkeys in anger took their caps and threw them down on the road! “What does this man think – only he can throw? We can also throw.” The man collected all the caps, and laughing, he left. The monkeys were really at a loss; they have been befooled.
But that’s the secret with all monkeys’ minds: Imitation.
They simply imitated, with no idea what they were doing, with no idea why this man was throwing his cap. They simply did it to outdo him, with no thought but how to be on top of him; he could not be allowed to do something that they could not do.
He had defeated them by giggling, by laughing louder, by screaming, by making faces; and this was too much. Now they were not going to let him throw his cap while they just sat there ashamed, feeling impotent that they could not do anything. This is the quality of the monkey’s mind; whether it is in man or in animals does not matter.
The curious mind is monkeyish, the lowest kind of mind.
The second, a higher category, is the student.
He has an intellectual involvement. When he asks something it is not only out of curiosity, it is genuine interest. He wants to know, he is really in search of an answer, but it is still not very deep; it is intellectual, deeper than curiosity. Curiosity is not even intellectual; even idiots can be curious – in fact only idiots are curious. A man of intelligence will not waste his time and energy on unnecessary curiosity.
A Sufi mystic, Bayazid, lived for twelve years with his master. His master used to live behind a very big hall in a small cottage. The hall was for meetings, but Bayazid was continually coming to the master just to sit by his side.
In Sufism this is one of their methodologies: For years the master will not even ask, “Who are you? What is your purpose? Why have you come?” That sorts out the curious without any wastage of time. If the man is such that you go to him and he does not even ask, “Who are you? Sit down; why have you come?” then the curious are not going to remain there for a year or two years.
Twelve years is a long time. After twelve years the master asked the first thing of Bayazid. He said, “My son, just go in the hall. You must have observed that on the right hand there is a shelf containing a few books. You have to bring me this book and he gave its name.
Bayazid said, “I had no idea that on the right side there is a bookshelf because I have never looked to the right or to the left; I was just looking toward you. I was coming to you, I had no interest in looking at anything else. Why should I waste my energy in any way? My whole purpose was just to look at you as much as I could, just to be here with you as much as I could – just to drink your silent presence.”
The master was happy, and he said, “You are accepted. If you had brought the book you would have been rejected.” Very strict, too hard, too inhuman it seems…. The curious person has no place in the world of religion. He should go to circuses, carnivals, movies, television – and there are thousands of things all around the world football matches, volleyball matches, hockey matches, bullfights, boxing. For the curious, the whole world is available. He should not bother about truth, he should leave truth alone; that is not his business.
The student has an intellectual involvement. Intellect is not very deep, but in comparison to curiosity it is really very deep. The people who surrounded Socrates were intellectuals, students. They were asking questions Socrates was giving them answers; then they were asking more questions about his answers, and they were trying to go deeper and deeper into the question, into the answer. But it all remained a gymnastics of intellect.
Socrates is one of those unfortunate masters who wasted his life only with students. He was not a man meant to be just a professor, just a teacher; he was a man born to be a master. But Athens was not the right place for it – he should have been in India; he would have become another Gautam the Buddha – because in Athens the student was the last category, there was nothing deeper than that.
Socrates had giants of intellect come to him – Plato, Aristotle – but they were only intellectuals. A blind man can philosophize about light, there is no trouble about it; intellectually he can know everything about light. But to know light and to know about light are two totally different things.
Intellect is always about and about – it does not bother whether the man has eyes or not. Yes, the man can hear: you can talk about light, you can give him all theories about light, the latest developments of scientific progress, the latest discoveries about light, its nature, its constituents…. Everything can be explained to him. He is blind but that does not mean that he is without intelligence.
Most probably a blind man has more intelligence than those who have eyes, for the simple reason that the man who has eyes uses eighty percent of his mind-energy through the eyes. If he wants to know something about light, he will open the door and go into the open and see the sun. If he wants to know about colors he will go to the garden and see all the flowers and all the trees and all kinds of colors. He has eyes – there is no need to be very intelligent to work out what light is – but the blind man has only one way, and that is through understanding.
Seeing is not possible. And that eighty percent of energy that goes out from the eyes, if one has eyes, is not available for the intellect to use. That’s why blind people hear better than people who have eyes, because their ears get more energy. More energy is available, because otherwise eighty percent is used only by the eyes; twenty percent remains for your whole being.
And when one hundred percent is available…. The blind man’s touch has more energy, more feeling, more emotion, more warmth. It says something. The man with eyes can shake hands and you can feel that you are shaking hands with a dead tree or something. There is nothing, no message. He can hug you and you can feel pressed, that’s all, but there has been no transmission of any kind of energy.
People are without energy; only twenty percent is distributed to all the other senses, so every sense is starving because the eyes are monopolizing your whole energy. It is not without any reason that you become affected, impressed by the eyes more than by anything else. You can simply see that eyes are the most living part in your whole body. What makes your eyes most alive? It is the energy flowing through them. That constant flow of energy makes them so alive.
It is also not a coincidence that if you see a blind man you feel very sad for him. You don’t feel so sorry for a deaf man; you don’t feel at all sad for somebody who cannot smell. In fact, he is in a far better situation; to him nothing stinks. You don’t feel sad if any other sense is missing.
Even if somebody’s legs are missing, hands are missing, you don’t feel sad the same way as when you see a blind man. Why? Without knowing, without being clearly conscious about it, you feel that eighty percent of his life is cut off, he is only twenty percent alive. Naturally, a blind man gets more sympathy.
I have heard that a blind beggar was spreading his hands at the corner of the street and saying, “Give something to a blind man.” And the man who was passing was really generous; he gave him one rupee. And the man said immediately, “But this is not authentic.” In India, to find anything authentic is very difficult. Even if you want to commit suicide, the poison will not work. You cannot find even authentic poison. By the morning you will find yourself perfectly awake and surprised: “What happened to the poison?”
But the blind man saying that the rupee is not authentic…. Naturally the man said, “Are you blind or not? I know the rupee is not authentic, that’s why I have given you the rupee; otherwise who gives a rupee to a blind man? I did it because I could not give it to anybody else; wherever I wanted to purchase something, immediately it was returned because it was not authentic, and they even threatened that they would give me to the police! Somehow I said, ‘It is not my fault, somebody has given it to me, so please forgive me.’ So finally I thought, ‘It is better to get rid of it, otherwise somewhere I am going to get into trouble.’ So I gave it to you.”
The man said, “The real thing is that I am not really a blind man; the real blind man is my friend. Today he has gone to see the movie, and he told me to sit here so nobody takes his place. I am just pretending, I am not blind: the real blind man has gone to see the movie. But sitting in his place I have found that this is far better.
“I have been pretending up to now that I am crippled, but from tomorrow I am going to be blind. This pays far better, and people are more sympathetic. Nobody starts preaching to you that you should work and you should do this and that. People give more – and more politely and more nicely; they don’t treat you the way people treat a beggar.”
In India only the blind man is treated by people with respect; they will call him Surdasji even if he is a beggar. Surdas was one of the most important poets of India. He was blind, and because of his blindness his name became synonymous with blindness. His name does not mean blindness; surdas means a servant of music. And he was a great musician, a great poet, a great singer – but blind. “Ji” is used for respect. So people will not even call a blind man just Surdas, because that is not respectful; he will be called Surdasji.
The man said, “Today I have discovered that my friend is doing a far better job. I have been trying to pretend to be crippled and I have been treated as badly as you can imagine but his going to the movie has changed my whole life – I have decided.”
A blind man simply creates a sympathy in your heart because eighty percent of his life is missing. He has no idea of colors, no idea of light, no idea of beauty, no idea of faces. He is living in complete darkness – that’s what you think; but he does not know even darkness, because for that too, eyes are needed. To see darkness you need eyes.
The blind man has no idea what light is, has no idea what darkness is. That makes it even more strange. In what kind of a world is he living? In what kind of surrounding is he living, where there is no idea of light, not even the idea of darkness? But all his other senses are more alive.
The blind man hears better than you, he tastes better than you, he smells better than you, he touches better than you, and if he thinks, he thinks better than you. If he pours his mind into some subject, he has more intelligence available to do it than you have. Your intelligence is so divided between so many things. He has nothing to divide his attention.
The student is intellectually interested to find what this life is all about, but he is not willing to change himself in order to know anything. He wants to remain the way he is, and just mentally he wants to be fed knowledge. He can become immensely knowledgeable. That’s how all your professors, all your great thinkers are: knowledgeable. They know too much without knowing anything at all.
Existentially they know nothing. If you ask them to give a sermon on love, they can give a sermon on love. But if you ask them, “Have you ever loved? Do you know by experience what love is?” you will shock them, surprise them: What kind of question are you asking?
This was one of my problems when I was a student, because I am not a student, I don’t belong to that category. And every professor wanted me to be just a student – obviously; you enter the university to be a student. And I said, “My interests are deeper. They are not only intellectual, but existential. I simply don’t want to be fed like a computer, I want to experience and know.” And this was really very outlandish to them.
I was sent to the vice-chancellor with a note: “This student says that he is not a student, that he does not belong to the category of student. If he does not belong to the category of student – there are only two categories here, either there are professors or students – what to do with him, because he insists.”
The vice-chancellor said, “You insist that you are not a student?”
I said, “Yes, because I am not.”
He said, “Then why have you entered the university?”
I said, “I have entered the university not to be a student but to be a disciple. Don’t you accept disciples in this university? You give me that in writing, because I am going to make it available to the news media that in this university no disciple is accepted, that to be in this university you are not to be a disciple.”
He said, “My God! You want to create trouble for me. But what is the difference between student and disciple?”
I said, “You are a vice-chancellor and yet you have not come to know the difference between the student and the disciple? Please resign.”
He said, “I was thinking that your professors are a little too fussy and are exaggerating about you, but I was wrong. You are too much! You are asking for my resignation?”
I said, “Of course, because if a vice-chancellor has no idea what a student is and what a disciple is, what is he doing here? You just get out of this place, and take with you all those professors who don’t understand the distinction, because they are all still students.”
To be a student is good in comparison to being curious, but in comparison to the disciple it is simply of no value. It is bogus knowledgeability. And you can go on collecting all kinds of theories, ideologies, philosophies, and you can become a walking encyclopedia, but that will not change you even a single inch. You will remain the same old donkey – now carrying a big load of books too.
Do you think if you put on a donkey the whole set of the Encyclopedia Britannica – of course it will be too heavy and the donkey will be in trouble – do you think the donkey will become in any way a lesser donkey or a better donkey? No, no change is going to happen. He is simply a donkey and he will remain simply a donkey. The Britannica is not going to make any change in him.
Your head is capable of collecting the whole information that is contained in all the libraries of the world. The people who are interested in computers have become aware of the fact that perhaps we will never be able to create a computer that can contain so much as a man’s mind – and in such a small space! Your skull is not very big, but in such a small space you can put all the knowledge available in all the universities of the world. And that is not small.
Just the library of Moscow has enough books that if they are put in a line, the line will go three times around the earth. Perhaps the British Museum library will make four or five lines around the earth. And there are libraries in China and there are libraries in India and there are libraries in America – all over the world are libraries.
There are millions of scriptures in Tibet, Ladakh, Nepal, which are never printed. But all these can be contained in a single skull – such is the capacity of your mind. But it remains only a memory. It does not transform you at all, it has no way of changing you. Yes, you will be deluded by it; you will start hallucinating that you know. You will become respectable.
That was my continual fight with my professors: “All that you know is only verbal – your experience is nil. You may know everything about swimming – all the books about swimming you may have read – but the real test is to come with me and jump into the river. If your knowledge makes you swim, then I will accept it.” And I told this to a professor who I knew did not know how to swim.
So he said, “Only that test will prove it?”
I said, “Only that test.”
Just behind our college was a big lake, so I said, “You come. I have not read a single book about swimming; why should I when I can swim? Why should I waste time in reading a book about swimming when I can enjoy the same time swimming in the lake? Come on with me.”
He could not say that he did not know how to swim, because that would prove my point, so he came along with me. But it was dangerous to take the test…and a few other students came to see what happened. Finally he said, “I never thought that you would drag me to the very logical conclusion of it. I don’t know how to swim, although I can give lectures on swimming.” And he was thought to be the best expert; for those students who were training for competitions, the national competition, he was thought to be the best expert.
I said, “Just think twice before you speak again, because if you speak again I am going to come and throw you into the swimming pool. I will not think of the consequences, of whether you die or you live.”
It is very easy intellectually to hoard:
Intellect is a hoarder.
The second category is dominating the whole world, dominating the first category: the idiots are being dominated by the knowledgeable. These knowledgeable people become politicians, professors, doctors, engineers, scientists and they dominate the idiots, the monkeys with Gandhi caps.
To me, you have to understand the third category, the disciple.
The disciple is one who is existentially interested. He does not want just to know about love, he wants to taste what love is. He wants to experience…his whole concentration is experiential. He will not be satisfied by theories about love, theories about beauty, theories about truth. He wants something tangible – not theories, not empty words – something solid. And it is only experience that can be solid. It is the disciple…. It is a rare category because when you can become respectable just by being knowledgeable, why should you bother about existential knowing? It is risky, dangerous.
Knowledgeable you can become sitting comfortably in a library. But to know, you may have to change yourself drastically because there may be things in you which are preventing knowing. There may be barriers in you which have to be broken. There may be walls around your being which have to be removed. And the most difficult thing is that there may be things which you think are very valuable but which in fact are the hindrances to be removed before you can become a knower.
For example, if you want to experience love, you have to forget all about the love that you have learned from the poets and the so-called professors and writers. You will be surprised, but my own understanding is that the people who have been writing about love are the people who have never loved. Writing about love is their way of finding a substitute. They make beautiful poetry, but have you ever heard of a poet who was really deeply in love, who has experienced love?
For example, Omar Khayyam writes about women, wine, love. Reading him you will think this man must have been the greatest hedonist ever; and the beauty of his poetry is simply incomparable. But the man was a celibate, he never got married, he had no love affairs. He was a mathematician, he was not even a poet. He was a Sufi, and what he is writing when he writes about beauty…. You will think he is talking about the beauty of women – no, he is talking about the beauty of God.
To the Sufis, God is a woman, the beloved, and you are the lovers. When he is talking about love, he means love between you and God. Now, can you visualize what kind of love is possible between you and a God who does not exist at all, whom you have never seen? And he is talking about the beauty of God.
His books in Persian are illustrated and God is actually there as a beautiful woman having wine in her hands to offer to you. Sufis use wine as a symbol: to the man who loves God, God offers a kind of intoxication that does not make him unconscious, but makes him perfectly conscious an intoxication that wakes him up from his sleep.
Fitzgerald, the English translator of Omar Khayyam, had no idea of these symbols. He was a simple earthbound poet, and really a better poet than Omar Khayyam. When he translated, he simply understood that a woman means a woman, wine means wine, love means love. These were not symbols to him.
Fitzgerald made Omar Khayyam world-famous by his misunderstanding. If you try to understand Omar Khayyam in the original you will find such a gap between Omar Khayyam and Fitzgerald that you cannot conceive how Fitzgerald managed to create such beautiful poetry out of this mathematician’s mind.
Even great poets like Byron who continually talk about love have never known love, except casual, fleeting relationships with women – very casual. He was very young when he was expelled from England, not more than thirty. And he was expelled because he became a danger to all beautiful women, particularly to the royal family and the lords and their families. It is known that when Byron would…. He was beautiful also, really handsome, and had a charisma; and his poetry, his name, and his beauty, all together…any woman was ready to fall in love with him.
It was known that whenever he would enter a restaurant, husbands would take their wives’ hands and get out from the other door. Finally the government decided that he should be expelled – because his love affairs were not love affairs at all. He would meet one woman one night and it would be a great love affair; he could not live without her, and his whole life was now in her hands – and the next day he would not even recognize the woman; he had found another, and then the same dialogue…. It is said that sixty women confessed – perhaps there had been many more who had not confessed – sixty young girls confessed that he had deceived them. And when it became a well-known fact and women started talking about what he had said to them, then it was known that it was the same dialogue that he was using again and again on each new woman.
Will you call this man a lover? Can he know the depths of love? Love needs a certain intimacy, a certain time to grow, a certain closeness. It needs two persons to know each other in all ways, good and bad, dark and light. If you only know the person from one side you cannot say that love has yet ripened. The other person has not revealed to you his other side; he cannot yet trust you.
Lovers start opening themselves completely to each other when they know that now even their thorns will be accepted with their flowers, that as they are they are going to be accepted; there is not going to be any rejection, not even a partial rejection. But this needs time. Just meeting casually may be entertainment, but it cannot be love.
Yes, love has its own troubles – anything real has its own troubles. Many people have decided to avoid the troubles; and the only way is to avoid love – then casual relationships are good.
One very intelligent woman – she is English, she is my sannyasin – is married to a very rich man in the Philippines. She is married to his riches, not to him; she is not at all concerned with him, what happens to him. And she is happy because he is continually on tour; his businesses are all over the world, so only once in a while do they meet. She is free. He is moving around, she is moving around. She told me, “I would like to confess to you that I am afraid of love, and I have lived up to now only on casual relationships – so much so that I don’t want to know even the name of the other person, what to say about other qualities and attributes.”
She said to me, “My most beautiful experiences have been while traveling in a train. Suddenly you meet a person; there is no need to know about him because at the next station or after a few hours he will be gone, you will be gone. Perhaps you are not going to see each other again. There is no need for getting in any way personal – it is a kind of impersonal love.”
It is not love, it is simply sex; it is just bodily, biological. But I can understand. The woman is very intelligent. I asked her, “Then there must have been a tragic love affair in the beginning; otherwise, how did you conclude this?”
She said, “That is true. Not once, but three times I have been deceived. I thought it was love, it was not love; again I thought it was love, it was not. And life is short. Three times I trusted those people, but they were simply exploiting my sexuality; and once they were satisfied they became strangers. Then I decided that I have to do something; I am losing my life unnecessarily. So the first thing I did, I married a man whom I do not love, whom I never hope to love, but who has enough riches so that about money I am not going to have any trouble.
“Secondly, I chose this man because he is constantly on tour, so he will not constantly torture me, and we will not be together constantly to harass each other, to embarrass each other. He is free – wherever he wants to go, with whomsoever he wants to go. I am not concerned because I don’t love him, so there is no question of jealousy. And I am free. And when, even after loving a person for three years, ultimately it turns out that he is only a stranger, then what is the point of wasting three years?
“Strangers you can meet every day. And I decided to have relationships only with strangers, traveling in a plane, traveling in a train, meeting somebody in a tourist place for one day or two days or three days; and then to be finished, because more than that and you start becoming addicted to each other – then problems are bound to arise.”
I said to her, “What you are saying makes sense, but you don’t know that you have missed the experience of love completely, just because of its troubles. Just because of the thorns you won’t grow roses in your garden? That will be stupid. Roses will be missed just because of the thorns.
“Thorns can be accepted with the roses – you just have to be a little careful. And what harm can a thorn do? – at the most bring a drop of blood from your finger. But a rose is far more important than a drop of blood from your finger. You have chosen to protect your fingers and you have forgotten completely that you are missing the roses. Are you happy?”
She said, “I am not, that’s why I have come to you from the Philippines. I have everything – money, rich friends, casual relationships, respectability – but I am unhappy.” I said, “You are going to be unhappy, and you will become more and more unhappy because as time passes you will find more and more that what you have chosen is not the right thing.”
The poets who have been writing about love have only momentary relationships. That is thought to be something artistic, avant-garde. Painters, poets, musicians, singers – they are not supposed to have a long-term intimacy, that is against their profession. That makes them common people, ordinary people, household people – and they are superior people.
But these are the people who have given you all the ideas about love. The people who know nothing about love have given you all the ideas about love; and all their ideas are fundamentally wrong because they have come out of zero experience.
For example, all around the world the idea is accepted by all cultures and societies that love is something that happens only once. That’s absolutely wrong. It can happen as many times as you are capable of. It depends on you, on how much love you have in your heart. Yes, there are a few people for whom it happens only once because the quantity of love that they have is finished. Even in one love affair it is gone; then they are empty.
But love is not something that needs to be in such a small quantity. You can have many love experiences, but each experience has to be, for the time that it exists, total, intense. If you are from the very beginning careful – “it is just a momentary thing and tomorrow I say good-bye forever” – then there is no possibility of love happening. But if you think that this love is going to last forever, that for eternity you are going to love this man or this woman…. It may end tomorrow morning – that is not the point – but for the moment this is your feeling, that you have found the person for whom you have been searching, and your total heartbeat is in tune with the other person. For the moment there is nobody else in the world except your beloved. The whole world has disappeared, and you are ready for this moment to become your eternity.
Then even in a single moment you can have the taste of love. It may last for years, it may not last, that is irrelevant – who knows about tomorrow morning? But if somebody asks you this moment, you are ready to promise for the whole of eternity – not just for tomorrow morning, but for all the tomorrows to come.
But the people who have given the ideas about love have given very wrong notions. One notion that they have given is that if you love a person then you have to love the person forever – if it is real love. That is their criterion. If some day after ten years you find your paths separating, then the criterion that you have been carrying in the mind says, “All these ten years you were in a false love and you thought it was real.”
I want to say to you that the reality of love has nothing to do with its longevity. Is the flower not real just because by the evening it fades? Is only the rock real because it will remain tomorrow and the day after tomorrow and the day after that, because the day you were born it was there, and the day you die it will be there? Is only that rock real; and the flowers, thousands of flowers that came and disappeared, came and disappeared, were they unreal? Do you make length of time the criterion of reality? I don’t see any relationship between the two. But because of this idea many people go on hanging around each others’ necks because their love has to be real. They are killing each other to make the love real. If they separate that means their love was not real.
I am not saying that they have to separate to make the love real – don’t move to the opposite extreme, that you have to separate. It will depend on each individual case separately. It is possible that two persons may love their whole life without ever looking anywhere else. It is possible that one may love one person for the time being and then suddenly find that energy is no longer there.
It had come from the unknown.
It has gone to the unknown.
It was not within your power to love somebody; it is not in your power to prevent love from disappearing. You cannot do anything about it, you are simply helpless; so is the other person. Don’t blame anybody. Because of the wrong idea of love, lovers go on blaming each other: “You are destroying it.” Nobody is destroying it. It is a free breeze; it comes, goes – you cannot hold it. And if you close all the windows and all the doors to hold the breeze, it is no longer the same cool breeze. Soon it will be stale as all marriages are – stale, dull.
Both the partners are trying to escape through some place – some window, some door – but the other is keeping watch. The other is also trying to escape from some door but the other is keeping watch. Soon husbands and wives become each others’ jailers. Love has to be for the whole of life, then only is it real – this is stupidity. And because of this idea in the name of love, marriage had to be invented. It is a more stable thing, permanent, legal, social – just like the rock. It is no longer a flower.
The idea has come through people who have not experienced. The same is the case about other ideas – for example, truth. People who know nothing about truth go on talking about it. It is an experience, it is not some object somewhere which one day you are going to find and catch hold of and put in your safe or in a bank.
Truth is not some thing, it is an experience.
You cannot talk about it – you can talk it.
It can be in your very gestures.
It can be in your eyes.
It can be in your presence.
But you cannot talk about it, because when you know truth you know it is your very being, it is – you. It is not somewhere else. You cannot give any description of it, you cannot draw a picture of it. No words are capable of describing it.
Every language falsifies the truth.
Every expression destroys it.
Then what to do? What has the disciple to do? – because he wants to know truth existentially. Then there comes initiation.
Initiation is not needed for the curious – he cannot stay that long. I have been traveling in India for so many years and I was puzzled…. Once I was going to catch the train and somebody came running and said, “Just a minute – does God exist?”
I said, “You must be mad – my train is leaving! What do you want? Do you want Him to exist or not? – because I have to catch my train; I cannot at this moment discuss God’s existence.” He said, “Just a minute – the train is not leaving for three minutes more – just a minute, a single question. I have been trying to find you, and today at last I have found you, but you are in a hurry to catch a train, and you don’t see that I want to know about God.”
I said, “You come to my place…be with me.”
But he said, “That is a little difficult because to come a hundred miles…and then I will have to take leave from my firm, from my office.”
I said, “Then first take care of your office, and your family. Then when you are finished with all these things, and if I am still alive, you come about God…because you are not interested in God, you simply want a man who is running to catch the train. And you don’t see your stupidity – is this the time to ask about God?”
But there are people who are just curious like that. Initiation is not for them, there is no question of initiation. For the student there is no initiation either, because intellectually he can attain knowledge from the universities, from the libraries. There, no initiation is asked for – just of course, registration.
When they asked me to go to the office of the registrar to register, I said, “But I have come to be initiated, not to be registered.” And the man who has invited me to his university, Doctor S.S. Roy, wanted desperately that I should come to the university where he teaches.
For four years continually I had been coming to his university to participate in an inter-university debate, and he was always one of the judges. For four years he had listened to me, and each time he listened to me he invited me, after the debate, to his house. And he would say, “Only one thing: You just leave everything – just come. I want a student like you. My whole professorship is going just rotten. Why don’t you come here? I will make all the facilities possible for you.
“And I cannot help you in any way in some other university because I don’t have any power there. Here, I am the head of the department, dean of the faculty; any day I can become the vice-chancellor. And even if I don’t, the vice-chancellor is my friend, and I will arrange everything.
“I want to remember later in my life that you were my student. And I feel so helpless when you come once a year – I wait the whole year until the university again arranges an inter-university competition. I am always one of the judges…and you can’t see my trouble, that I cannot give you a hundred percent because that will look as if I am favoring you – so I give you only ninety-nine percent. But even then all the judges look at each other, because each year I give you ninety-nine.”
So he had invited me, and finally, after my graduation, I said, “Okay, I am coming for post-graduate work to your college, to your university, and to your department.”
He told me, “You go to the registrar’s office, fill in the form and be registered.”
I told him, “Professor Roy, I have not come here to be registered. What kind of a third-rate word do you use here – registered? Is it an army office or is it a university? Where is the man who is going to initiate me?”
He said, “I knew that you would be a trouble and that I am asking for trouble. You are not yet part of the university and you have started creating trouble! I knew, because for four years I have been listening to the way you use words, the meaning you give to words. I can see “registered” is just ugly; it should be initiation, you are right. But what to do? There is no initiator here, nobody. You will have to get registered.”
I said, “This is simply ugly, because I have come to be a disciple, not to be a student. Isn’t there anywhere a place for a disciple who wants existentially to know?
But there is no place in your ordinary universities because they don’t go beyond the student.
Initiation comes only when somebody is ready to take a great quantum leap from intellect to existence, from words to experience.
You ask me, “What is initiation according to You?.”
The first thing that is needed:
The person should be ready to be a disciple.
So let me explain it to you. A disciple means one who is ready to change himself to know the truth…because as you are you cannot know it; otherwise, you would have known it. As you are, something is basically wrong, upside down, not in the right place.
The disciple is one who is ready and available and gives himself to the master, saying “Do whatsoever you want to me. If you want to cut my head off, cut it, but I have come in order to know the truth.”
A disciple is ready to pay the price whatsoever it is, because at any cost, truth is cheap. Even if you give your whole life, then too you get it for nothing. What is your life? What value has it? It is just a soap bubble – soon it will burst.
But truth will transform you from a mortal into an immortality.
From time, it will take you into eternity.
From all that is tense, full of anguish, a hell, it will pull you out into a state of blissfulness.
The disciple has to be ready to change.
Krishnamurti has been trying his whole life to work with people without initiation – that has been his failure. Of course he could get hold only of students; he could not go deeper than that. He had something to give to those who can go deeper than students, but he himself was preventing disciples from coming to him. Those who had come, he was condemning them. He was forcing them to remain students, just on the intellectual level.
So for sixty years there have been people, thousands around the world, who have listened to him year in, year out; read him continually, and have become completely full of his ideas, but have not changed in any way. They are the same people they were sixty I years before. And now he feels frustrated – but the whole fault is his own. He seems to feel as if people are not intelligent enough. That is not the case.
The people are intelligent enough but you debarred the real intelligent people and you raised and praised high the intellectuals – who are not the real intelligent people. The intelligent person will say, “I am ready to change, but I want to know, not verbally – I want to experience it. And I am ready to do anything, unconditionally.” That unconditional commitment I from the disciple is an absolute necessity for initiation. The word initiation is a very profound word.
It means something that cannot be said, cannot be verbalized; something that is impossible to impart through mind…but still there is a way to imbibe it. And that is the way of initiation. Initiation means the disciple is ready to be available, open to the master, to his presence, his being, his silence.
I say unto you; do not be too much concerned with what I say, but be concerned with what I am.
What I say is only the circumference, what I am is the center.
When a disciple is ready to join with the center of the master, initiation happens. It is an entry into the house of the master.
The doors are opened for the disciple to come in because the disciple has opened his heart for the master to come in. It is on both sides an opening – availability, vulnerability.
And when both sides are open – the master’s side is always open, even to those who are not open; it is only a question of the disciple, because he is continually defending, afraid. That’s what the whole society has been teaching him: “Be on the defense, otherwise somebody is going to exploit you. Be alert, don’t be gullible. Keep yourself ready; if somebody is trapping you, you can escape.”
If this mind is there then you can’t go beyond the stage of the student.
To be a disciple you have to be ready – knowingly, with your eyes open – to step into the unknown, dropping all fear, because the master is the most unknown and unknowable thing in existence. It is not his body, it is not his mind. It is his vibe, his presence – not his person. And to enter into his presence you have to drop all your defense measures. That is initiation. It may take any formal structure. That is not essential; that is just to make it visible.
You are given a red robe, a mala; they are not essential. They are just to make your initiation visible to others, because if it is visible to others they will remind you. Standing before a mirror you will be reminded; continuously you will be reminded that you are a disciple and you have to behave like a disciple. It is just an outer protection.
But the real initiation is something inner, something that triggers in your heart…a moment when the master’s heart and your heart beat in the same rhythm.
When there is a moment when your breathing and your master’s breathing are one, when the twoness is lost, and oneness is felt – that feeling of oneness with the master is initiation.
Disciplehood is a necessary condition for initiation.
And as your initiation becomes ripe, as it becomes easier, natural, spontaneous, then comes the fourth category: the devotee.
Between the disciple and the devotee is the bridge of initiation. The disciple is on the other shore, the master is on this shore. But the disciple is ready to cross the river, to risk his life. To him there is nothing more important that to be with the master. Whether it is a river of water or fire makes no difference, he is going to pass through it.
That very decision changes him from a student into a disciple. That very decision, and immediately – the master may be on the other shore, but he starts pulsating with him – a synchronicity arises. He starts feeling as if he is part of him, not separate. Slowly the bridge is built. More and more your defenselessness, without any effort, just becomes natural to you. The day it becomes natural, you have crossed the bridge: the disciple disappears and the devotee appears. That is the highest category in the world of seeking.
A devotee is one who has nothing to ask, nothing to seek. He has found the master, and that’s enough. He has left himself in the hands of the master, and now he is at ease.
It is just like a small child walking with his father hand-in-hand. The father may be afraid – it is a thick jungle, and the night is coming – but the child has no fear. He is enjoying himself and he is talking about all kinds of things, and the father wants to say, “Shut up! Just walk fast – the night is coming.”
And the child says, “But look at the trees, and look at that tiger!” He is not afraid because he knows his hand is in his father’s hand.
A moment comes when the disciple starts feeling the same way with the master.
Then he is a devotee, then it is a love affair.
Now it has nothing to do with seeking, searching, finding, not finding; there is no question of going anywhere.
Now wherever the master is, is home, is paradise.
You have lost yourself totally in your master’s being.
And the strangest phenomenon is: the moment you are lost utterly in the master’s being, for the first time you have found yourself, and found who you are.