Voice of Silence
You are everything – you are the seed and you will also become the tree.
And when the flowers bloom and the fragrance emanates from them, then it is you who will be in those flowers and in that fragrance.
If you have the wrong understanding about yourself, then all your hard work will go to waste.
The first thing: the first
thing for you to understand about yourself is that you don’t know anything. If you did know, then there would have been
no need for you to read this. If you are able to catch hold of even one ray of sunlight, then the whole path which reaches
to the sun has opened up because by catching that ray you can reach to its original source, the sun. And if you are able to
taste even one drop of the ocean, then you have tasted the whole ocean. If you know even a little bit of life, then there
is no need to ask anyone anything. With the help of that little bit that you know, you can keep moving on ahead.
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The
classic of purity is one of the most profound insights into nature. I call it an insight, not a doctrine, not a philosophy,
not a religion, because it is not intellectual at all; it is existential. The man who is speaking in it is not speaking as
a mind, he is not speaking as himself either; he is just an empty passage for existence itself to say something through him.
That’s how the great mystics have always lived and spoken. These are not
their own words - they are no more. they have disappeared long before; it is the whole pouring through them. Their expressions
may be different, but the source is the same. The words of Jesus, Zarathustra, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Krishna, Mohammed are not
ordinary words; they are not coming from their memory, they are coming from their experience. They have touched the divine,
and the moment you touch the divine you evaporate, you cannot exist any more. You have to die for God to be. This is a Taoist
insight. Tao is another name for God, far more beautiful than God because God, the word God, has been exploited too much by
the priests They have exploited in the name of God for so long that even the word has become contaminated - it has become
disgusting. Any man of intelligence is bound to avoid it because it reminds him of all the nonsense that has happened on the
earth down the ages in the name of God, in the name of religion. More mischief has happened in the name of God than in any
other name.
Tao in that sense is tremendously beautiful. You cannot worship Tao because Tao
does not give you the idea of a person. It is simply a principle, not a person. You cannot worship a principle - you cannot
pray to Tao. It will look ridiculous, it will be utterly absurd, praying to a principle. You don’t pray to gravitation,
you cannot pray to the theory of relativity.
Tao simply means the ultimate principle that binds the whole existence together.
The existence is not a chaos that much is certain; it is a cosmos. There is immense order in it, intrinsic order in it, and
the name of that order is Tao. Tao simply means the harmony of the whole.
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The inner world, the world of the spirit,
follows certain laws, and those laws are unchangeable, they are perennial. Hence I have called this series Philosophia Perennis
- the perennial philosophy. Those laws are not time-bound, they are beyond time. Time itself functions within those laws.
If you want to do something in the outside world, you will need to know how the outer existence functions, because unless
you know how it functions you are bound to fail.
Nature has no obligation to adjust to you - you will have to adjust to nature.
You can win nature only by adjusting yourself to nature. You can become a conqueror too, but not against nature - with nature,
in tune with nature. You can become a master of the inner kingdom too - not against the laws but in tune with those laws.
It is because of this mystic vision - that the world is not accidental, not anarchic,
but an absolutely harmonious, cosmic, orderly world - that Pythagoras was able to discover many things for the seekers. One
thing that he discovered was that music can become the milieu for meditation. He was the first to introduce that idea too
to the West. In the East we have known it for centuries, that music is the best aid to meditation. Why? because music creates
harmony around you, and the harmony around you can provoke harmony within you. If the outside is harmonious, the inside also
starts falling in line with it - and that you have watched many times.
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I would like to discuss a few more points relating to the real center of the
body. A few questions have also been asked about this.
Neither the head nor the heart - the navel is the most important and basic
center of man’s life.
Man has developed according to his mind, so the direction, the flow of his life
has gone wrong. In the past five thousand years we have educated and developed only the mind, only the intellect. The results
have been very harmful. The results are that almost every human being is on the verge of madness - a little push and anyone
can become mad. The mind is almost on the verge of a breakdown: a little push and the mind can collapse.
It is also a surprising thing that in the last half century, within the last
fifty years, almost all the greatest thinkers of the world have gone mad.
In the West in the last half century there has hardly been a single thinker who
did not experience some kind of madness. Great poets, great thinkers, great philosophers, great scientists have all been found
to be suffering from some kind of madness. And slowly, slowly, as more and more of humanity is becoming educated, the symptoms
of madness are also reaching the common people.
If a new man is to be created, it is absolutely essential to change the center
of man’s life. If that center is closer to the navel instead of to the head, it will be closer to the life-energy.
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What
is a sage? An empty boat – no words inside, the empty sky without the clouds. No sound, no noise, nobody mad, no chaos
within, a continuous harmony, equilibrium, balance. He lives as if he is not. He is as if he is absent. He moves, but nothing
moves within him. He talks, but the inner silence is there. It is never disturbed; he uses words, but those words are only
vehicles – through those words he is sending you something which is beyond words. And if you catch and grab the words,
you will miss.
When you listen to a sage, don’t listen to his words; they are secondary,
they are superficial, they are only peripheral. Listen to him, don’t listen to his words. When the words reach you,
just put them aside, as the traveler will do who has crossed the sea – he leaves the boat there and goes on. Leave the
boat there and go on. If you carry the boat, you are mad. Then your whole life will become a burden, you are burdened by the
boat. A boat is not to be carried on the head. Feel grateful, that is okay, but carrying the boat on your head is too much.
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Emotional Wellness
Emotions cannot be permanent. That’s why they are called “emotions”—the
word comes from “motion,” movement. They move; hence, they are “emotions.” From one to another you
continually change. This moment you are sad, that moment you are happy; this moment you are angry, that moment you are compassionate.
This moment you are loving, another moment full of hatred; the morning was beautiful, the evening is ugly. And this goes on.
This cannot be your nature, because behind all these changes something is needed like a thread that holds all of them together.
Just as in a garland you see flowers, you don’t see the thread, but the thread is what is holding all the flowers, in
the same way these emotions are all flowers. Sometimes anger flowers, sometimes happiness, sometimes pain sometimes anguish.
But these are all flowers, and your whole life is the garland. There must be thread; otherwise you would have fallen apart
long ago. You continue as an entity—so what is the thread, the polestar? What is permanent in you?
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