There was a little town in America where
people gathered in the evening to make music.  They had a saxophonist, a
drummer, and a violinist, mostly old people.  They got together for the
company and for the sheer joy of making music, though they didn't do it
very well.  So they were enjoying themselves, having a great time, until
one day they decided to get a new conductor who had a lot of ambition and
drive.  The new conductor told them, "Hey, folks, we have to have a
concert, we have to prepare a concert for the town."  Then he gradually got
rid of some people who didn't play too well, hired a few professional
musicians, got an orchestra into shape, and they all got their names in the
newspapers.  Wasn't that wonderful?  So they decided to move to the big
city and play there: But some of the old people had tears in their
eyes.  They said, "It was so wonderful in the old days when we did things
badly and enjoyed them."  So cruelty came into their lives, but nobody
recognized it as cruelty.  See how lunatic people have become!

Some of you ask me what I meant when I said, "You go ahead and be yourself,
that's all right, but I'll protect myself, I'll be myself."  In other
words, I won't allow you to manipulate me.  I'll live my life; I'll go my
own way; I'll keep myself free to think my thoughts, to follow my
inclinations and tastes.  And I'll say no to you.  If I feel I don't want
to be in your company, it won't be because of any negative feelings you
cause in me.  Because you don't anymore.  You don't have any more power
over me.  I simply might prefer other people's company.  So when you say to
me, "How about a movie tonight?"  I'll say, "Sorry, I want to go with
someone else; I enjoy his company more than yours."  And that's all
right.  To say no to people -- that's wonderful; that's part of waking
up.  Part of waking up is that you live your life as you see fit.  And
understand: That is not selfish.  The selfish thing is to demand that
someone else live their life as YOU see fit.  That's selfish.  It is not
selfish to live your life as you see fit.  The selfishness lies in
demanding that someone else live their life to suit your tastes, or your
pride, or your profit, or your pleasure.  That is truly selfish.  So I'll
protect myself.  I won't feel obligated to be with you; I won't feel
obligated to say yes to you.  If I find your company pleasant, then I'll
enjoy it without clinging to it.  But I no longer avoid you because of any
negative feelings you create in me.  You don't have that power anymore.

Awakening should be a surprise.  When you don't expect something to happen
and it happens, you feel surprise.  When Webster's wife caught him kissing
the maid, she told him she was very surprised.  Now, Webster was a stickler
for using words accurately (understandably, since he wrote a dictionary),
so he answered her, "No, my dear, I am surprised.  You are astonished!"

Some people make awakening a goal.  They are determined to get there; they
say, "I refuse to be happy until I'm awakened."  In that case, it's better
to be the way you are, simply to be aware of the way you are.  Simple
awareness is happiness compared with trying to react all the time.  People
react so quickly because they are not aware.  You will come to understand
that there are times when you will inevitably react, even in
awareness.  But as awareness grows, you react less and act more.  It really
doesn't matter.

There's a story of a disciple who told his guru that he was going to a far
place to meditate and hopefully attain enlightenment.  So he sent the guru
a note every six months to report the progress he was making.  The first
report said, "Now I understand what it means to lose the self."  The guru
tore up the note and threw it in the wastepaper basket.  After six months
he got another report, which said, "Now I have attained sensitivity to all
beings."  He tore it up.  Then a third report said, "Now I understand the
secret of the one and the many."  It too was torn up.  And so it went on
for years, until finally no reports came in.  After a time the guru became
curious and one day there was a traveler going to that far place.  The guru
said, "Why don't you find what happened to that fellow."  Finally, he got a
note from his disciple.  It said, "What does it matter?"  And when the guru
read that, he said, "He made it!  He made it!  He finally got it!  He got it!"

In your pursuit of awareness, don't make demands.  It's more like obeying
the traffic rules.  If you don't observe traffic rules, you pay the
penalty.  Here in the United States you drive on the right side of the
road; in England you drive on the left; in India you drive on the left.  If
you don't, you pay the penalty; there is no room for hurt feelings or
demands or expectations; you just abide by the traffic rules.

You ask where compassion comes in, where guilt comes in all this.  You'll
know when you're awake.  If you're feeling guilty right now, how on earth
can I explain it to you?  How would you know what compassion is?  You know,
sometimes people want to imitate Christ, but when a monkey plays a
saxophone, that doesn't make him a musician.  You can't imitate Christ by
imitating his external behavior.  You've got to be Christ.  Then you'll
know exactly what to do in a particular situation, given your temperament,
your character, and the character and temperament of the person you're
dealing with.  No one has to tell you.  But to do that, you must be what
Christ was.  An external imitation will get you nowhere.  If you think that
compassion implies softness, there's no way I can describe compassion to
you, absolutely no way, because compassion can be very hard.  Compassion
can be very rude, compassion can jolt you, compassion can roll up its
sleeves and operate on you.  Compassion is all kinds of things.  Compassion
can be very soft, but there's no way of knowing that.  It's only when you
become love -- in other words, when you have dropped your illusions and
attachments -- that you will "know."

As you identify less and less with the "me," you will be more at ease with
everybody and with everything.  Do you know why?  Because you are no longer
afraid of being hurt or not liked.  You no longer desire to impress
anyone.  Can you imagine the relief when you don't have to impress anybody
anymore?  Oh, what a relief.  Happiness at last!  You no longer feel the
need or the compulsion to explain things anymore.  It's all right.  What is
there to be explained?  And you don't feel the need or compulsion to
apologize anymore.  I'd much rather hear you say, "I've come awake," than
hear you say, "I'm sorry."  I'd much rather hear you say to me, "I've come
awake since we last met; what I did to you won't happen again," than to
hear you say, "I'm so sorry for what I did to you."  Why would anyone
demand an apology?  You have something to explore in that.  Even when
someone supposedly was mean to you, there is no room for apology.

Nobody was mean to you.  Somebody was mean to what he or she thought was
you, but not to you.  Nobody ever rejects you; they're only rejecting what
they think you are.  But that cuts both ways.  Nobody ever accepts you
either.  Until people come awake, they are simply accepting or rejecting
their image of you.  They've fashioned an image of you, and they're
rejecting or accepting that.  See how devastating it is to go deeply into
that.  It's a bit too liberating.  But how easy it is to love people when
you understand this.  How easy it is to love everyone when you don't
identify with what they imagine you are or they are.  It becomes easy to
love them, to love everybody.

I observe "me," but I do not think about "me."  Because the thinking "me"
does a lot of bad thinking, too.  But when I watch "me," I am constantly
aware that this is a reflection.  In reality, you don't really think of "I"
and "me."  You're like a person driving the car; he doesn't ever want to
lose consciousness of the car.  It's all right to daydream, but not to lose
consciousness of your surroundings.  You must always be alert.  It's like a
mother sleeping; she doesn't hear the planes roaring above the house, but
she hears the slightest whimper of her baby.  She's alert, she's awake in
that sense.  One can not say anything about the awakened state; one can
only talk about the sleeping state.  One hints at the awakened state.  One
cannot say anything about happiness.  Happiness cannot be defined.  What
can be defined is misery.  Drop unhappiness and you will know.  Love cannot
be defined; unlove can.  Drop unlove, drop fear, and you will know.  We
want to find out what the awakened person is like.  But you'll know only
when you get there.

Everyone asks me about what will happen when they finally arrive.  Is this
just curiosity?  We're always asking how would this fit into that system,
or whether this would make sense in that context, or what it will feel like
when we get there.  Get started and you will know; it cannot be
described.  It is said widely in the East, "Those who know, do not say;
those who say, do not know."  It cannot be said; only the opposite can be
said.  The guru cannot give you the truth.  Truth cannot be put into words,
into a formula.  That isn't the truth.  That isn't reality.  Reality cannot
be put into a formula.  The guru can only point out your errors.  When you
drop your errors, you will know the truth.  And even then you cannot
say.  This is common teaching among the great Catholic mystics.  The great
Thomas Aquinas, toward the end of his life, wouldn't write and wouldn't
talk; he had seen.  I had thought he kept that famous silence of his for
only a couple of months, but it went on for years.  He realized he had made
a fool of himself, and he said so explicitly.  It's as if you had never
tasted a green mango and you ask me, "What does it taste like?"  I'd say to
you, "Sour," but in giving you a word, I've put you off the track.  Try to
understand that.  Most people aren't very wise; they seize upon the word --
upon the words of scripture, for example -- and they get it all
wrong.  "Sour," I say, and you ask, "Sour like vinegar, sour like a
lemon?"  No, not sour like a lemon, but sour like a mango.  "But I never
tasted one," you say.  Too bad!  But you go ahead and write a doctoral
thesis on it.  You wouldn't have if you had tasted it.  You really
wouldn't.  You'd have written a doctoral thesis on other things, but not on
mangoes.  And the day you finally taste a green mango, you say, "God, I
made a fool of myself.  I shouldn't have written that thesis."  That's
exactly what Thomas Aquinas did.

A great German philosopher and theologian wrote a whole book specifically
on the silence of St. Thomas.  He simply went silent.  Wouldn't talk.  In
the prologue of his Summa Theologica, which was the summary of all his
theology, he says, "About God, we cannot say what He is but rather what He
is not.  And so we cannot speak about how He is but rather how He is
not."  And in his famous commentary on Boethius' De Sancta Trinitate he
says there are three ways of knowing God: (1) in the creation, (2) in God's
actions through history, and (3) in the highest form of the knowledge of
God -- to know God tamquam ignotum (to know God as the unknown).  The
highest form of talking about the Trinity is to know that one does not
know.  Now, this is not an Oriental Zen master speaking.  This is a
canonized saint of the Roman Catholic Church, the prince of theologians for
centuries.  To know God as unknown.  In another place St. Thomas even says:
as unknowable.  Reality, God, divinity, truth, love are unknowable; that
means they cannot be comprehended by the thinking mind.  That would set at
rest so many questions people have because we're always living under the
illusion that we know.  We don't.  We cannot know.

What is scripture, then?  It's a hint, a clue, not a description.  The
fanaticism of one sincere believer who thinks he knows causes more evil
than the united efforts of two hundred rogues.  It's terrifying to see what
sincere believers will do because they think they know.  Wouldn't it be
wonderful if we had a world where everybody said, "We don't know"?  One big
barrier dropped.  Wouldn't that be marvelous?

A man born blind comes to me and asks, "What is this thing called
green?"  How does one describe the color green to someone who was born
blind?  One uses analogies.  So I say, "The color green is something like
soft music."  "Oh," he says, "like soft music."  "Yes," I say, "soothing
and soft music.''  So a second blind man comes to me and asks, "What is the
color green?"  I tell him it's something like soft satin, very soft and
soothing to the touch.  So the next day I notice that the two blind men are
bashing each other over the head with bottles.  One is saying, "It's soft
like music"; the other is saying, "It's soft like satin."  And on it
goes.  Neither of them knows what they're talking about, because if they
did, they'd shut up.  It's as bad as that.  It's even worse, because one
day, say, you give sight to this blind man, and he's sitting there in the
garden and he's looking all around him, and you say to him, "Well, now you
know what the color green is."  And he answers, "That's true.  I heard some
of it this morning!"

Lets get back to that marvelous sentence in the gospel about losing oneself
in order to find oneself.  One finds it in most religious literature and in
all religious and spiritual and mystical literature.

How does one lose oneself?  Did you ever try to lose something?  That's
right, the harder you try, the harder it gets.  It's when you're not trying
that you lose things.  You lose something when you're not aware.  Well, how
does one die to oneself?  We're talking about death now, we're not talking
about suicide.  We're not told to kill the self, but to die.  Causing pain
to the self, causing suffering to the self would be self-defeating.  It
would be counterproductive.  You're never so full of yourself as when
you're in pain.  You're never so centered on yourself as when you're
depressed.  You're never so ready to forget yourself as when you are
happy.  Happiness releases you from self.  It is suffering and pain and
misery and depression that tie you to the self.  Look how conscious you are
of your tooth when you have a toothache.  When you don't have a toothache,
you're not even aware you have a tooth, or that you have a head, for that
matter, when you don't have a headache.  But it's so different when you
have a splitting headache.

So it's quite false, quite erroneous, to think that the way to deny the
self is to cause pain to the self, to go in for abnegation, mortification,
as these were traditionally understood.  To deny the self, to die to it, to
lose it, is to understand its true nature.  When you do that, it will
disappear; it will vanish.  Suppose somebody walks into my room one day.  I
say, "Come right in.  May I know who you are?"  And he says, "I am
Napoleon."  And I say, "Not the Napoleon .  .  ."  And he says,
"Precisely.  Bonaparte, Emperor of France."  "What do you know!"  I say,
even while I'm thinking to myself, "I better handle this guy with care."

''Sit down, Your Majesty," I say.  He says, "Well, they tell me you're a
pretty good spiritual director.  I have a spiritual problem.  I'm anxious,
I'm finding it hard to trust in God.  I have my armies in Russia, see, and
I'm spending sleepless nights wondering how it's going to turn out."  So I
say, "Well, Your Majesty, I could certainly prescribe something for
that.  What I suggest is that you read chapter 6 of Matthew: "Consider the
lilies of the field .  .  .  they neither toil nor spin."

By this point I'm wondering who is crazier, this guy or me.  But I go along
with this lunatic.  That's what the wise guru does with you in the
beginning.  He goes along with you; he takes your troubles
seriously.  He'll wipe a tear or two from your eye.  You're crazy, but you
don't know it yet.  The time has to come soon when he'll pull the rug out
from under your feet and tell you, "Get off it, you're not Napoleon."  In
those famous dialogues of St. Catherine of Siena, God is reported to have
said to her, "I am He who is; you are she who is not."  Have you ever
experienced your is-not-ness?  In the East we have an image for this.  It
is the image of the dancer and the dance.  God is viewed as the dancer and
creation as God's dance.  It isn't as if God is the big dancer and you are
the little dancer.  Oh no.  You're not a dancer at all.  You are being
danced!  Did you ever experience that?  So when the man comes to his senses
and realizes that he is not Napoleon, he does not cease to be.  He
continues to be, but he suddenly realizes that he is something other than
what he thought he was.

To lose the self is to suddenly realize that you are something other than
what you thought you were.  You thought you were at the center; now you
experience yourself as satellite.  You thought you were the dancer; you now
experience yourself as the dance.  These are just analogies, images, so you
cannot take them literally.  They just give you a clue, a hint; they're
only pointers, don't forget.  So you cannot press them too much.  Don't
take them too literally.

Do not suppress desire, because then you would become lifeless.  You'd be
without energy and that would be terrible.  Desire in the healthy sense of
the word is energy, and the more energy we have, the better.  But don't
suppress desire, understand it.  Understand it.  Don't seek to fulfill
desire so much as to understand desire.  And don't just renounce the
objects of your desire, understand them; see them in their true light.  See
them for what they are really worth.  Because if you just suppress your
desire, and you attempt to renounce the object of your desire, you are
likely to be tied to it.  Whereas if you look at it and see it for what it
is really worth, if you understand how you are preparing the grounds for
misery and disappointment and depression, your desire will then be
transformed into what I call a preference.

When you go through life with preferences but don't let your happiness
depend on any one of them, then you're awake.  You're moving toward
wakefulness.  Wakefulness, happiness -- call it what you wish -- is the
state of nondelusion, where you see things not as you are but as they are,
insofar as this is possible for a human being.  To drop illusions, to see
things, to see reality.  Every time you are unhappy, you have added
something to reality.  It is that addition that makes you unhappy.  I
repeat: You have added something .  .  .  a negative reaction in
you.  Reality provides the stimulus, you provide the reaction.  You have
added something by your reaction.  And if you examine what you have added,
there is always an illusion there, there's a demand, an expectation, a
craving.  Always.  Examples of illusions abound.  But as you begin to move
ahead on this path, you'll discover them for yourself.

For instance, the illusion, the error of thinking that, by changing the
exterior world, you will change.  You do not change if you merely change
your exterior world.  If you get yourself a new job or a new spouse or a
new home or a new guru or a new spirituality, that does not change
you.  It's like imagining that you change your handwriting by changing your
pen.  Or that you change your capacity to think by changing your hat.  That
doesn't change you really, but most people spend all their energies trying
to rearrange their exterior world to suit their tastes.  Sometimes they
succeed -- for about five minutes they get a little respite, but they are
tense even during that respite, because life is always flowing, life-is
always changing.

So if you want to live, you must have no permanent abode.  You must have no
place to rest your head.  You have to flow with it.  As the great Confucius
said, "The one who would be constant in happiness must frequently
change."  Flow.  But we keep looking back, don't we?  We cling to things in
the past and cling to things in the present.  "When you set your hand to
the plow, you cannot look back."  Do you want to enjoy a melody?  Do you
want to enjoy a symphony?  Don't hold on to a few bars of the music.  Don't
hold on to a couple of notes.  Let them pass, let them flow.  The whole
enjoyment of a symphony lies in your readiness to allow the notes to
pass.  Whereas if a particular bar took your fancy and you shouted to the
orchestra, "Keep playing it again and again and again," that wouldn't be a
symphony anymore.  Are you familiar with those tales of Nasr-ed-Din, the
old mullah?  He's a legendary figure whom the Greeks, Turks, and Persians
all claim for themselves.  He would give his mystical teachings in the form
of stories, generally funny stories.  And the butt of the story was always
old Nasr-ed-Din himself.

One day Nasr-ed-Din was strumming a guitar, playing just one note.  After a
while a crowd collected around him (this was in a marketplace) and one of
the men sitting on the ground there said, "That's a nice note you're
playing, Mullah, but why don't you vary it a bit the way other musicians
do?"  "Those fools," Nasr-ed-Din said, "they're searching for the right
note.  I've found it.

Another illusion: You are all those labels that people have put on you, or
that you have put on yourself.  You're not, you're not!  So you don't have
to cling to them.  The day that somebody tells me I'm a genius and I take
that seriously, I'm in big trouble.  Can you understand why?  Because now
I'm going to start getting tense.  I've got to live up to it, I've got to
maintain it.  I've got to find out after every lecture: "Did you like the
lecture?  Do you still think I'm a genius?"  See?  So what you need to do
is smash the label!  Smash it, and you're free!  Don't identify with those
labels.  That's what someone else thinks.  That's how he experienced you at
that moment.  Are you in fact a genius?  Are you a nut?  Are you a
mystic?  Are you crazy?  What does it really matter?  Provided you continue
to be aware, to live life from moment to moment.  How marvelously it is
described in those words of the gospel: "Look at the birds of the air: they
neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns .  .  .  Consider the lilies of
the field .  .  .  they neither toil nor spin."  That's the real mystic
speaking, the awakened person.

So why are you anxious?  Can you, for all your anxieties, add a single
moment to your life?  Why bother about tomorrow?  Is there a life after
death?  Will I survive after death?  Why bother about tomorrow?  Get into
today.  Someone said, "Life is something that happens to us while we're
busy making other plans."  That's pathetic.  Live in the present
moment.  This is one of the things you will notice happening to you as you
come awake.  You find yourself living in the present, tasting every moment
as you live it.  Another fairly good sign is when you hear the symphony one
note after the other without wanting to stop it.

"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom," people say to me
sometimes.  But wait a minute.  I hope they understand what they're saying,
because we always hate what we fear.  We always want to destroy and get rid
of and avoid what we fear.  When you fear somebody, you dislike that
person.  You dislike that person insofar as you fear that person.  And you
don't see that person either, because your emotion gets in the way.  Now,
that's just as true when you are attracted to someone.  When true love
enters, you no longer like or even dislike people in the ordinary sense of
the word.  You see them clearly and you respond accurately.  But at this
human level, your likes and dislikes and preferences and attractions, etc.,
continue to get in the way.  So you have to be aware of your prejudices,
your likes, your dislikes, your attractions.  They're all there, they come
from your conditioning.  How come you like things that I don't
like?  Because your culture is different from mine.  Your upbringing is
different from mine.  If I gave you some of the things to eat that I
relish, you'd turn away in disgust.

There are people in certain parts of India who love dog flesh.  Yet others,
if they were told they were being served dog steak, would feel
sick.  Why?  Different conditioning, different programming.  Hindus would
feel sick if they knew they had eaten beef, but Americans enjoy it.  You
ask, "But why won't they eat beef?"  For the same reason you won't eat your
pet dog.  The same reason.  The cow, to the Indian peasant, is what your
pet dog is to you.  He doesn't want to eat it.  There is a built-in
cultural prejudice against it which saves an animal that's needed so much
for farming, etc.

So why do I fall in love with a person really?  Why is it that I fall in
love with one kind of person and not another?  Because I'm
conditioned.  I've got an image, subconsciously, that this particular type
of person appeals to me, attracts me.  So when I meet this person, I fall
head over heels in love.  But have I seen her?  No!  I'll see her after I
marry her; that's when the awakening comes!   And that's when love may
begin.  But falling in love has nothing to do with love at all.  It isn't
love, it's desire, burning desire.  You want, with all your heart, to be
told by this adorable creature that you're attractive to her.  That gives
you a tremendous sensation.  Meanwhile, everybody else is saying, "What the
hell does he see in her?"  But it's his conditioning -- he's not
seeing.  They say that love is blind.  Believe me, there's nothing so
clear-sighted as true love, nothing.  It's the most clear-sighted thing in
the world.  Addiction is blind, attachments are blind.  Clinging, craving,
and desire are blind.  But not true love.  Don't call them love.  But, of
course, the word has been desecrated in most modern languages.  People talk
about making love and falling in love.  Like the little boy who says to the
little girl, "Have you ever fallen in love?"  And she answers, "No, but
I've fallen in like."

So what are people talking about when they fall in love?  The first thing
we need is clarity of perception.  One reason we don't perceive people
clearly is evident-- our emotions get in the way, our conditioning, our
likes and dislikes.  We've got to grapple with that fact.  But we've got to
grapple with something much more fundamental -- with our ideas, with our
conclusions, with our concepts.  Believe it or not, every concept that was
meant to help us get in touch with reality ends up by being a barrier to
getting in touch with reality, because sooner or later we forget that the
words are not the thing.  The concept is not the same as the
reality.  They're different.  That's why I said to you earlier that the
final barrier to finding God is the word "God" itself and the concept of
God.  It gets in the way if you're not careful.  It was meant to be a help;
it can be a help, but it can also be a barrier.