Just 'B' Yourself

    Yes, it exactly means that--to live as an awareness. An aware-
ness of all the programs the mind has been conditioned for, aware-
ness of all the impulses, desires, memories, imaginations ... all
that the mind can do. One has to be not part of it, but separate--
seeing it but not being it--watching it.
    And one of the most essential things to remember is that you
cannot watch your watchfulness. If you watch your watchfulness,
then the watcher is you, not the watched. So you cannot go beyond
watchfulness. The point that you cannot transcend is your being;
the point that you cannot go beyond is you. You can watch very
easily any thought, any emotion, any sentiment. Just one thing
you cannot watch, and that is your watchfulness. If you manage to
watch it, that means you have shifted: the first watchfulness has
become just a thought; now you are the second watcher. You can go
on shifting back, but you cannot get out of watchfulness because it
is you; you cannot be otherwise.
    So when I say, "Just be yourself," I am saying to you, "Just be
unprogrammed, unconditioned awareness." That's how you have
come into the world, and that's how the enlightened person leaves
the world. He lives in the world but remains totally separate.
    One of the great mystics, Kabir, has a beautiful poem about it.
All his poems are just perfect; nothing can be better. One of his
poems says, "I will give back the soul that was given to me at the
time of my birth as pure, as clean, as it was given to me. I will give
it back that way when I die." He is talking about awareness, saying
that it has remained unpolluted. The whole world was there to
pollute it, but he has remained watchful.
    All you need is just to be watchful, and nothing will affect you.
This unaffectedness will keep your purity, and this purity has cer-
tainly the freshness of life, the joy of existence--all the treasures
you have been endowed with.
    But you become attached to the small things surrounding you
and forget the one that you are. It is the greatest discovery in life
and the most ecstatic pilgrimage to truth. And you need not be an
ascetic, you need not be antilife; you need not renounce the world
and go to the mountains. You can be where you are, you can con-
tinue to do what you are doing. Just a new thing has to be evolved:
Whatever you do, you do with awareness, even the smallest act of
the body or the mind--and with each act of awareness you will
become aware of the beauty and the treasure and the glory and the
eternity of your being.

    There have been many civilizations before ours that have
reached high peaks but destroyed themselves because they grew
in a deep imbalance. They developed great technologies, but they
forgot that even the greatest technological progress is not going to
make people more blissful, more peaceful, more loving, more com-
passionate.
    Our consciousness has not grown at the same pace as our scien-
tific progress, and that has been the cause of many civilizations
destroying themselves. We have created monsters as far as ma-
chines are concerned, and at the same time we have remained
retarded, unconscious, almost asleep. And it is very dangerous to
give so much power to unconscious people.
    That's what is happening now. Politicians are of the lowest
kind as far as consciousness is concerned. They are clever, they are
cunning. They are mean, too, and they make every effort for a
single goal, which is to be more powerful. Their only desire is for
more power--not for more peace, not for more being, not for more
truth, not for more love.
    What do you need more power for?--to dominate others, to
destroy others. All the power accumulates in the hands of uncon-
scious people. So on the one hand, politicians in all the civiliza-
tions that have developed and died@it would he better to say com-
mitted suicide--had all the power in their hands. On the other
hand, the genius of human intelligence was searching for more
and more technology, scientific improvements, and all they dis-
covered finally had to go into the hands of the politicians.
    The destruction of our earth will not come from some other
planet--we are preparing our own graves. We may he aware, we
may not be aware, but we are all gravediggers and we are digging
our own graves. Right now there are only a few nations in pos-
session of nuclear weapons. Soon many more nations will also be
nuclear powers. It is going to be beyond control, with so many na-
tions having so much destructiveness that a single nation could
destroy the whole earth. A single crazy person, a single politi-
cian, just to show his power, can destroy the whole of civiliza-
tion and you will have to begin from ABC. And the destruction is
not only of humanity. With humanity will die all the companions
of humanity--the animals, the trees, the birds, the flowers.
Everything could disappear, everything that is alive.
    The reason is an imbalance in our evolution. We go on develop-
ing scientific technology without bothering at all that our con-
sciousness should also evolve in the same proportion. In fact,
our consciousness should be a little ahead of our technological
progress.
    If our consciousness were in the state of enlightenment... In
the hands of a Gautam Buddha nuclear power would no longer be
dangerous. In the hands of a Gautam Buddha nuclear power would
be turned towards some creative force--because force is always
neutral; either you can destroy with it or you can find ways to cre-
ate something. But right now our powers are great and our hu-
manity is very small. It is as if we have put bombs in the hands of
children to play with.
    Human beings have gone through this struggle since the very
beginning. It is the imbalance between the inner and the outer.
    The outer is easier, and the outer is objective. For example, one
man, Thomas Alva Edison, discovers electricity and the whole of
humanity uses it; there is no need for everyone to discover it again
and again. Inner growth is a totally different phenomenon. A Gau-
tam Buddha may become enlightened, but that does not mean that
everybody else becomes enlightened. Each individual has to find
the truth by himself or herself. So whatever happens on the out-
side goes on accumulating, piling up; all the scientific progress
goes on piling up because each scientist is standing on the shoul-
ders of other scientists. But the evolution of consciousness does
not follow the same law. Each individual has to discover it by him-
self; he cannot stand on the shoulders of somebody else.
    Anything objective can be shared, can be taught in the schools,
colleges, universities. But the same is not true about subjectivity. I
may know everything about the inner world; still I cannot hand
that over to you. It is one of the fundamental laws of existence
that the inner truth has to be discovered by each individual
through his or her own efforts. It cannot be purchased in the
marketplace, nor can it be stolen. Nobody can give it to you as a
gift. It is not a commodity, it is not material; it is an immaterial
experience.
    One can give evidence for this immaterial experience by one's
individuality, by one's presence, compassion, love, silence. But
these are only indications that something has happened inside a
person. That person can encourage you, can tell you that you are
not going inside in vain: "You will find treasures, as I have found."
Each master is nothing but an argument, evidence, an eyewitness.
But the experience remains individual.
     Science becomes social, technology becomes social; the subjec-
tive realm remains individual. That is the basic problem, how to
create a balance.
     In one of the most beautiful forests in Germany, the famous
Black Forest, trees were simply dying for no visible reason. The
government of Germany tried to hide the facts, but you cannot
cover things up forever. The forest was dying, and the reason was
not "natural causes." The reason was the production of certain
gases by the factories and those gases mixing with the atmosphere,
so that when it rains the water becomes acidic. When it falls on a
tree, that tree starts to die, it is poisoned. By now perhaps half the
Black Forest is completely dead.
    There is a layer of ozone around the earth, which is protective;
it protects life on the earth. All of the sun's rays are not good for
life, and the ozone layer reflects a few of those rays. They are
death rays; if they enter the atmosphere they begin to destroy life.
Only those rays are allowed through by the ozone which are not
against life but which are life-enhancing. But stupidly we have
made holes in this layer. One way is by sending rockets to the
moon@which is a simple exercise in stupidity. When the rockets
go outside the atmosphere, they create holes in the ozone layer,
and when they came back they again create holes. Now those
death rays from the sun are entering the atmosphere.
    When this civilization is destroyed, people may think it was a
natural calamity. It is not, we have created it. Because of the accu-
mulation of carbon dioxide and other gases, the temperature of
the earth's atmosphere has begun to rise, and that is creating new
problems. The ice at both the poles, south and north, is melting be-
cause the temperature is going so high. Anybody researching the
phenomenon hundreds of years later on might think it was a nat-
ural calamity. It is not. It is our own stupidity.
    We can learn much, seeing what is happening, and then we
can think introspectively about other civilizations that have dis-
appeared, either through war or through calamities that were
apparently natural. But they weren't necessarily natural. Those
civilizations might have done something stupid that caused the
calamities. There have been highly developed civilizations living
on this earth, but they all got into the same mess we are entering.
They all got into the same darkness we are entering. Their con-
sciousness was not lost--they had no consciousness. They had just
the same superficial consciousness as we have.
    What are you doing to prevent the calamity that is coming
closer every day? The death of this earth is not far away--at the
most a few decades, and that is an optimistic estimate; for the pes-
simists it might happen as early as tomorrow. But even if we give a
hundred years to you, what are you going to do to help human con-
sciousness rise in such a way that we can prevent the global sui-
cide that is going to happen? It is coming from many directions.
Nuclear weapons are one direction that is completely ready. Any
moment and there could be a push-button war. It will not be a
question of sending armies and airplanes to respond. If the oceans
are filled with all the ice that the Himalayas hold, and that of the
South and North Poles, and the Alps and other mountains, we will
be drowned.
    The only possible way to avoid it is to create more meditative-
ness in the world. But it is such an insane world that sometimes it
seems almost unbelievable.
    If, in the coming years, we can go through a revolution, attain
a new consciousness, perhaps the consequences of what has been
happening up to now can be avoided. We should make every effort
to avoid it. It is a particularly dark period, and it will become
darker and darker unless everybody becomes a light unto him-
self or herself and radiates light. Unless everyone starts sharing
their light and their fire with those who are thirsty and hungry
for it, the dawn is not going to come automatically. We have to be
fully alert to make every possible effort in helping consciousness
evolve.
    It is a great struggle against darkness, but also a great opportu-
nity and challenge and excitement. You do not have to become se-
rious about it. You have to do it lovingly, dancingly, with all your
songs and with all your joy, because only in that way is it possible
to bring the dawn and dispel the darkness.
    There is a cosmic law that says, "Only out of the mud the lotus
can grow." The politicians, and the priests of all the religions, the
governments and the bureaucracies--all are creating enough
mud. Now we have to grow lotuses. You have not to be drowned in
their mud; you have to sow seeds for lotuses.
    The lotus seed is a miracle: it transforms the mud into the
most beautiful flower. In the East the lotus has been almost wor-
shiped for two reasons. One, that it arises out of the mud. The
English word human simply means mud. The Arabic word admi sim-
ply means mud, because God made human beings out of mud. But
there is a possibility of growing a lotus flower. It is a big flower,
and it opens its petals only when the sun rises and the birds start
singing and the whole sky becomes colorful. As the darkness
comes and the sun sets, it again closes its petals. It is a lover of
light.
    Secondly, its petals and even its leaves are so velvety that in
the night, dewdrops gather on the petals, on the leaves. In the
early morning sun, those dewdrops shine almost like pearls--far
more beautiful, creating rainbows around themselves. But the
most beautiful thing is that although they are resting on the
petals and on the leaves, the dewdrops don't touch the leaf. Just a
small breeze comes and they slip back into the water, leaving no
trace.
    The lotus flower has been symbolic in the East, because the
East says you should live in the world but remain untouched by it.
You should remain in the world, but the world should not remain
in you. You should pass through the world without carrying any
impression, any impact, any scratch. If by the time of death you
can say that your consciousness is as pure, as innocent, as you
brought it at birth, you have lived a religious life, a spiritual life.
Hence, the lotus flower has become a symbol of a spiritual style of
living. It grows from the mud and yet remains untouched. It is a
symbol of transformation. Mud is transformed into the most beau-
tiful and the most fragrant flower the planet knows. Gautam Bud-
dha was so in love with the lotus that he talked about "the lotus
paradise."
    With our deep meditation and gratitude for existence, it is pos-
sible that this earth can remain growing with more consciousness,
with more flowers; it can become a lotus paradise.
    But a tremendous struggle for a great revolution in human
consciousness is needed, and everybody is called to that revolu-
tion. Contribute all that you can. Your whole life has to be given to
the revolution. You will not have another chance, another chal-
lenge for your own growth and for the growth of this whole beau-
tiful planet.
    This is the only planet in the whole of existence that is alive;
its death would be a great tragedy. But it can be avoided.
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				*Just 'B' Yourself*