Monastery/Marketplace

Strangely enough, people are feeling very much at ease, taking a
sunbath. Ten thousand people on a small beach taking a sunbath,
relaxing.
    The same person on the same beach alone will not be able to
relax. But he knows thousands of other people are relaxing all
around him. The same people were in the offices, the same people
were in the streets, the same people were in the marketplace, now
these people are on the beach.
    The crowd is an essential for the false self to exist. The
moment it is lonely, you start freaking out. This is where one
should understand a little bit of meditation.
    Don't be worried, because that which can disappear is worth
disappearing. It is meaningless to cling to it--it is not yours, it is
not you. You are the one when the false has gone and the fresh,
the innocent, the unpolluted being will arise in its place.
    Nobody else can answer your question "Who am I?"-- you will
know it.
    All meditative techniques are a help to destroy the false. They
don't give you the real--the real cannot be given. That which can
be given cannot be real. The real you have got already; just the
false has to be taken away.
    Meditation is just a courage to be silent and alone. Slowly, you
start feeling a new quality to yourself, a new aliveness, a new
beauty, a new intelligence, which is not borrowed from anybody,
which is growing within you. It has roots in your existence. And
if you are not a coward, it will come to fruition, to flowering.
    Only the brave, the courageous, the people who have guts can
be religious. Not the churchgoers: who yield to base fears. Not the
Hindus, not the Mohammedans, not the Christians: they are
against searching. It is the same crowd, and they are trying to
make their false identity more consolidated.
    You were born. You have come into the world with life, with
consciousness, with tremendous sensitivity. Just look at a small
child. Look at his eyes, the freshness. All that has been covered by
a false personality.
    There is no need to be afraid. You can lose only that which
needs to be lost. And it is good to lose it soon, because the longer it
stays, the stronger it becomes, and one does not know anything
about tomorrow. Don't die before realizing your authentic being.
Only those few people are fortunate who have lived with authen-
tic being and who have died with authentic being because they
know that life is eternal, and death is a fiction.
    Then move out of it! One should always be watchful, because if
one is not feeling happy in any situation, in any mood, then one
should come out of it. Otherwise that becomes your habit, and by
and by you lose sensitivity. You will go on being miserable and liv-
ing in it, which simply shows a very deep insensitivity.
    There is no need! If you are not feeling good in isolation, then
come out of it. Meet with people, enjoy company, talk and laugh,
but when you feel you are fed up with it, move into isolation again.
    Always remember to judge everything by your inner feeling of
bliss. If you are feeling blissful, everything is all right. If you are
not feeling blissful, then whatsoever you are doing, something
somewhere is wrong. The longer you remain in it, the more it
becomes just an unaware thing, and you completely forget that it
is through your cooperation that the miserable feeling continues.
It needs your cooperation; it cannot exist itself.
    Human growth requires that one moves from one polarity to
another. Sometimes being alone is perfectly good: one needs one's
own space, one needs to forget the whole world, and to be oneself.
The other is absent so you have no boundary to yourself. The other
creates your boundary, otherwise you are infinite.
    Living with people, moving in the world, in society, by and by
one begins to feel confined, limited, as if there are walls all around.
It becomes a subtle imprisonment, and one needs to move. One
needs sometimes to be perfectly alone so that all boundaries disap-
pear, as if the other does not exist at all, and the whole universe
and the whole sky exists only for you. In that moment of aloneness
one realizes for the first time what infinity is.
    But then if you live in it too much, by and by the infinity bores
you, it becomes tasteless. There is purity and silence, but there is
no ecstasy in it. Ecstasy always comes through the other. One then
starts feeling hungry for love, and wants to escape from this
aloneness, this vast expanse of space. One wants a cozy place sur-
rounded by others, so that one can forget oneself.
    This is the basic polarity of life, love and meditation. People
who try to live through love and relationships alone, by and by
become very limited. They lose infinity and purity, and they
become superficial. Always living in relationships means always
living on the boundary where you can meet the other. So you are
always standing at the gate, and you can never move into your
palace, because only at the gate is the meeting-point where the
other passes by. So people who only live in love, by and by become
superficial. Their life loses depth. And people who live only in
meditation will become very deep, but their life loses color, loses
the ecstatic dance, the orgasmic quality of being.
    Real humanity, the humanity of the future, will live with
both the polarities together, and to share that understanding is
my whole effort. One should be free to move from one to another,
with neither polarity becoming a confinement. You should not be
afraid of the marketplace, nor too afraid of the monastery. You
should be free to move from the marketplace to the monastery,
and from the monastery to the marketplace.
    This freedom, this flexibility of movement, I call sannyas. The
bigger the swing, the richer your life. There are attractions to
remaining with just one of the polarities because then life is
simpler. If you just remain with people, in the crowd, it is simple.
Complexity comes with the contradictory, the opposite pole. If
you become a monk or you go to the Himalayas and just live there,
life is very simple. But a simple life which has no complexity in it
loses much richness.
    Life should be both complex and simple. One has to seek this
harmony continuously; otherwise life becomes of one note, a
single note. You can go on repeating it, but no orchestra can be
created out of it.
    So whenever you feel that something is now becoming trouble-
some, immediately move before you become unaware. Never make
anywhere your home, neither relationships nor aloneness. Remain
flowing and homeless, and don't abide at any polarity. Enjoy it,
delight in it, but when it is finished move to the other: make it a
rhythm.
    You work in the day, by night you rest, so that again by the
next day you are ready to work, energy regained. Just think of a
man who goes on working all day and all night, or who goes on
sleeping day and night--what kind of a life will that be? One will
be a madness, the other a coma. Between the two there is a bal-
ance, a harmony. Work hard so that you can relax. Relax deeply so
that you become capable of working, of being more creative.


				Monastery/Marketplace