Why am I not curious about anything anymore

Satyam Shivam Sundram, Chapter #3

Question 1

BELOVED OSHO,
WHY AM I NOT CURIOUS ABOUT ANYTHING ANYMORE?

Devageet, twelve hundred years ago there was a mystery school exactly like this. The mystery school belonged to one of the greatest Sufis, Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi. The Turkish word mevlana means Beloved Master; it has never been used for anyone else.
In front of his mystery school was written in bold letters: „This place is not for those who are only curious.“
Curiosity has no spiritual meaning.
Curiosity is something like itching in your mind: if you itch it goes; if you don’t itch it goes also.
Curiosity has no passion in it; it is very superficial. Just by the way, an inquiry, a question arises in you — but it is not your quest, you are not to dedicate your life in searching for the answer to it. You are not even going to commit yourself to the exploration.
Curiosity is cheap. If somebody answers, good; if nobody answers, that too is okay. You are not deeply interested… it is not arising out of your heart. Curiosity has to disappear before you can attain to a passionate inquiry into existence.
So, Devageet, it is not a bad sign, but a tremendously important indication that you are on the right path. The path does not belong to the curious ones; it belongs to those who are committed, dedicated, who are ready even to sacrifice their lives for the experience of truth. As the curiosity disappears you are no more a student, you become a disciple.
That’s the only difference between the student and a disciple. The student is only curious, gathering knowledge from all the sources without much concern. It is not his essential search, just gathering knowledge to cover up his ignorance. But the ignorance remains there, and the more it is covered, the more dangerous, because you start forgetting it. And a man who has forgotten his ignorance is a man utterly lost.
To go on remembering that you are ignorant is to go on remembering that the night is not over and your morning has not yet come — that you have to go a long way still before the darkness will disappear and you will see the first signs on the horizon of the sun rising with all its colors and all its beauty and all its blessings.
The curious person is not at all accountable for anything deep. The moment you become passionately interested to know, it becomes a question of life and death. Without knowing, your life seems to be just a desert without any oasis anywhere. You have to know; only then will your life have some significance, some meaning, some relevance, some reason to go on existing.
But the disciple is only a beginning, not the end — but the right beginning. A moment comes when your passionate longing to know turns into still deeper waters. It becomes a longing not just to know, but to be.
Knowledge is always something there; there is a distance between you and the known. You are not one with it; the knower is separate from the known. That is the state of knowledge. It cannot quench your thirst. The water is there, you are there, but there is no connecting link. Your thirst will become even more fiery.
That great moment also comes in the life of the disciple when he drops the quest for knowing and starts the quest for being.
The curious is interested only in information.
The disciple is interested in knowledge.
The devotee is interested in transformation. He is not contented to know the truth; he will be contented only when he becomes the truth.
And in fact it is just poverty of language that I have to use the word `becoming‘. No one ever becomes the truth, because everyone is already the truth. Truth is your very being, not your becoming. It is not a process, it is not a path that has to be traveled, it is not some faraway goal that you have to reach.
Truth is something in your innermost being that has always been there from eternity to eternity whether you know it or not. Whether you realize it or not, whether you recognize it or not, it does not matter; it is there.
The devotee does not become the truth, he discovers that he is the truth. And this discovery is the greatest discovery possible for human consciousness.
So it is perfectly good that you are not curious about anything anymore. It is a sign of maturity, of moving from the state of the student to the disciple. And as I know you, Devageet, you have already moved even from the state of the disciple to the ultimate glory of being a devotee. Your quest, your inquiry is no more a dry exploration. It has become your love, it has become your very heartbeat. Naturally, all curiosity will disappear.
One day you will realize that even to know about truth, to know about godliness, to know about beauty… you are no more interested in knowing. Knowing about water is not going to help. Even knowing it scientifically, that it consists of oxygen and hydrogen, is not going to quench your thirst.
The most glorious moment on the path comes when your whole interest and passion becomes concentrated on a single point of discovering yourself, of discovering that you have always been, you are, even in this moment, and irrespective of whether you understand or not, you will remain always your authentic, your essential, your existential being. It contains all:
Satyam, shivam, sundram.
The truth, the godliness and the tremendous beauty that arises from the recognition of your being truth, of your being part of a divine existence. Your every gesture becomes a dance, your every silence becomes a song, your words become aflame with a new fire, with a new light — your whole life becomes a source of a magnetic force.
Just a few days before, a child was born in France. The mother had been working in an atomic plant. While she was pregnant for nine months she was exposed to atomic radiation and the doctors and the surgeons were very interested to know how it had affected the child.
And they were surprised: the child was very healthy, very radiantly healthy. They were thinking he may be blind, they were thinking he may be crippled. Those people had never seen such a beautiful child, so alive and so vibrant.
But then there was another shock and surprise: as they put the child on the table, all the instruments of the surgeons and the doctors started moving towards the child. The child had become a magnetic force.
Exposure to continuous radiation in very minute doses has been found by Japanese scientists to be very healthgiving. Bigger doses can kill; as the quantity becomes bigger it becomes dangerous. A qualitative change comes in through greater quantity. At the very minimum, soft doses of radiation can create immense health and well-being.
One scientist in Japan has been working for twenty years in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on this particular project: Is there any possibility of a certain quantity of radiation being life-affirmative? When he came back after twenty years to the university he belongs to, his colleagues could not believe it. They had all aged twenty years and that man seemed to have become younger than when he had gone. He is sixty-five, but he looks forty-five. He had discovered a tremendous thing.
He loves me immensely, and he has sent me a few small things. Just a small bottle of radioactive material… he has been using it for one year. He just puts it in his bathtub and the water becomes radioactive, but in a very soft and minimum dose. He has sent me a belt that he has been using for one year; it is filled with radioactive material from Hiroshima, and that belt, he feels, has taken away his old age, has taken away his diseases.
He was immensely concerned about my health, and he is going to come here. I have not used those things that he has sent, because what is a soft dose to one person may be too much to another. I have a very delicate physical structure, so I am waiting for him first to see the difference between me and himself, and then to decide.
As you move from the disciple to the state of the devotee, suddenly you start radiating something that has been dormant in you for centuries. You become a magnet — not an ordinary magnet, but a spiritual magnet. People will start moving towards you, not knowing why, but experiencing a tremendous desire to be with you and a great feeling of well-being and a great turning inwards.
I had started my journey alone, and without informing anybody I found that my caravan is becoming bigger and bigger and bigger. People from faraway lands around the world have come, wondering why they are coming, not knowing the inner pull.
Devageet has the heart of a small child, utterly innocent. His transformation from disciplehood to the glorious space of being a devotee has come to him very naturally, very spontaneously, without any effort on his part. Just being in my presence, just being with me he has moved millions of light-years.
It is natural, Devageet, that your curiosities will disappear. Soon you will find another thing disappearing — your longing for knowledge. These are good indications of coming back home.
Perhaps just one step more and you will have forgotten curiosities, questions, quest for knowledge, and you will simply relax in the new light that you have found within yourself, perfectly at ease, cool and calm, not a single worry in the world, at ease with the trees and the birds and the ocean and the stars.
You love to laugh, you have a great sense of humor, and according to me all the religions in the past have missed the great religious quality of the sense of humor. The reason was that they were all against life, they could not be for laughter; they were all against love, how they could be in favor of laughter? They were life-denying, not life-affirming ideologies.
Hence you don’t see a single instance in the life of Jesus when he would have laughed. Even before he was crucified he lived like he was continuously being crucified. The crucifixion of Jesus seems to be the ultimate outcome: this guy will never be satisfied unless he is crucified.

„Why were you kissing my young daughter in that dark corner last night?“ said the angry father.
„Now that I have seen her in the daylight,“ said Ernie, „I sort of wonder myself.“

In the darkness you have been curious and you have been many more things, but in the light you start sort of wondering, „What have I been doing?“

It was the couple’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary and the wife said, „Darling, you have been a very good husband over the years and I would like to show you my appreciation. Is there anything that you would like on this special day?“
The husband thought for a while and then said, „Yes, actually there is. You have always forbidden me to look into the top drawer of your cupboard. I would really like to see what is in there.“
His wife agreed and he opened it. Inside there were two eggs and about ten thousand dollars in cash.
„What are the eggs for?“ he inquired.
„Well,“ said his wife, „I guess it’s time you should know. Every time I was unfaithful to you, I put an egg in the drawer.“
„Twice in twenty-five years,“ smiled the husband, „that’s understandable. But what is all that money?“
„Well, darling,“ she replied, „Each time I had a dozen eggs, I sold them.“

Devageet, it is very good not to be curious about unnecessary things, because one never knows….

Friendliness is enough

The New Dawn, Chapter #20

Question 1

BELOVED OSHO,
IS THE CONCEPT OF SOULMATES MORE USEFUL THAN MARRIAGE?

Prem Pragyan, one of the most significant things in man’s life has been the love affair. Birth is not in your hands, death is not in your hands; and these are the only three great things in life: birth, love, and death. Only love is in your hands, only love gives you the freedom and dignity of being a human being; otherwise, birth and death happen just like any other animal, or any tree. Love should be kept as pure and unpolluted as possible.
You are asking, „Is the concept of soulmates more useful than marriage?“ Concepts don’t matter. What matters is your understanding. You can change the word `marriage‘ to the word `soulmates‘, but you are the same. You will make the same hell out of soulmates as you have been making out of marriage — nothing has changed, only the word, the label. Don’t believe in labels too much.
Why has marriage failed? In the first place, we raised it to unnatural standards. We tried to make it something permanent, something sacred, without knowing even the ABC of sacredness, without knowing anything about the eternal. Our intentions were good but our understanding was very small, almost negligible. So instead of marriage becoming something of a heaven, it has become a hell. Instead of becoming sacred, it has fallen even below profanity.
And this has been man’s stupidity — a very ancient one: whenever he gets into difficulty, he changes the word. Change the word `marriage‘ into `soulmates‘, but don’t change yourself. And you are the problem, not the word; any word will do. A rose is a rose is a rose … you can call it by any name. You are asking to change the concept, you are not asking to change yourself.
Marriage has failed because you could not rise to the standard that you were expecting of marriage, of the concept of marriage. You were brutal, you were barbarous, you were full of jealousies, you were full of lust; you had never known really what love is. In the name of love, you tried everything which is just the opposite of love: possessiveness, domination, power.
Marriage has become a battlefield where two persons are fighting for supremacy. Of course, the man has his own way: rough and more primitive. The woman has her own way: feminine, softer, a little more civilized, more subdued. But the situation is the same. Now psychologists are talking about marriage as an intimate enmity. And that’s what it has proved to be. Two enemies are living together pretending to be in love, expecting the other to give love; and the same is being expected by the other. Nobody is ready to give — nobody has it. How can you give love if you don’t have it?
And when you feel that love is not coming towards you … and both feel the same: a great frustration and an idea, a suspicion that perhaps the other has deceived you. Before the marriage both were using beautiful words, sweet nothings; both were bringing their best to attract the other, to catch hold of the other. And once they are married, and the law has entered in, and society has granted you freedom to live together, soon the honeymoon is over. Even before coming back from the honeymoon it is over … all is finished because you have come to know the other in their total wholeness, which is ugly.
The facade, the mask that they were wearing before the marriage has slipped. You cannot hold it for twenty-four hours. When you live with someone, you have to come down from your hypocrisies and be whatever you are — and you know that you are not the person you pretend to be. The same is true about the other. And then it becomes a struggle to possess the woman, to possess the man.
The only significant symptom of love is, it never possesses; on the contrary, it gives freedom. It is happy in the happiness of the other. It does not beg; it is not a beggar. It is an emperor. It gives, and it gives unconditionally.
But in actual life, what we have been doing for centuries is asking the other to give; and the other is also asking you to give. And both are beggars, their bowls are empty; they don’t have anything to give. It becomes a struggle, a warfare.
You can change the concept from marriage to soulmates, but what about you? What about the people who will become soulmates? If they are the same people who were becoming a couple in a marriage, nothing will change.
My suggestion is, neither marriage is needed nor soulmates are needed — just friendliness is enough. You don’t know anything about soul, how can you become a soulmate?
If you can become just friendly with each other, that is more than can be expected from the present man. If you can be understanding of each other’s frailties, weaknesses, that is more than can be expected.
If you can drop the old superstitions, that once a woman or a man loves you, they have to love you forever … Love is very fragile. It is just like a flower: beautiful, but very delicate. In the morning it blossoms; by the evening it is gone, its petals are scattered. That was a beauty in the morning; by the evening it has become a grave. Life is a changing, continuously changing phenomenon.
When I say a great understanding is needed, the old idea of permanent relationship under any concept has to be dropped. You have to live moment to moment, you have to live each moment as if it is the last moment. So don’t waste it in quarreling, in nagging or in fighting. Perhaps you will not find the next moment even for an apology.
One of the mystics, Sarmad, used to tell his disciples every night, „We are going to sleep for the last time. Please forgive me. As a master I may have been hard to you. I had to be because I loved you and I wanted a transformation to happen. And I don’t know whether in the morning I will wake up again, so I’m asking for your forgiveness.“ Each night he would go to bed as if it was the last night — and one day it is going to be true, one night will be the last night and you will never wake up again.
And each morning he would wake up as if it was a new beginning; he had accepted death in the night before, now this was a rebirth. He looks tremendously grateful towards existence: one day more to live, one day more the sun, the wind, the trees, the birds, one day more of friends, one day more of love. But not more than that.
The very idea of having a permanent, lifelong relationship helps you to postpone that which is essential and go on doing things which are absolutely nonessential; not only nonessential but idiotic.
People are fighting about such small things that they themselves, in their saner moments, laugh about it. I have heard about a couple who were getting married in the government registrar’s office. The man signed — the woman had signed before him. As she saw the man’s signature, she immediately told the registrar, „I want a divorce.“ The registrar said, „What has happened? You are getting married, you have just signed the marriage papers.“
She said, „Yes, I have signed but things have gone sour already. Just look at the paper. I have signed in small letters and he has signed in such big letters, to show me who he is. This is the beginning of trouble — I don’t want to get into it.“ The bigger letters already declare the supremacy, superiority of the man.
You can change words — I would like to change your consciousness.
The idea of permanent relationship was wrong, but it has been imposed on you by poets, by priests, by everybody. And I am not saying that two persons cannot live in deep friendship for their whole life. They can, but it should not be a conditioning, but just a flowering of friendship, open. Any day one partner can say, „I am grateful for all the beautiful moments you have given to me, but now our paths separate. In sadness … but I will remember you always. I don’t want life with you to create a hell. Then all that was beautiful will be destroyed, even the memory of it will be destroyed. Just a friendliness is enough.“
My vision of a new society is that of small communes, not of big cities. A commune consisting of not more than five thousand people, so that people can know each other very easily. And the commune should take the whole responsibility for the children, and nobody should be allowed to have children unless the commune needs them. That decision will be of the commune. And now all scientific techniques are available. The society can decide what it needs — engineers, doctors, scientists, poets, mystics. Now it is scientifically possible to choose what kind of a child you are going to give birth to, you just have to drop your old superstition that the child has to be yours.
Just as you have blood banks, you should have sperm banks in every hospital. And scientists are able now to figure out about every living sperm; they can read it, what it is going to be. Up to now we have lived a very accidental life, and perhaps the world is so full of stupid and retarded people because of that.
When two persons make love, the man releases in one lovemaking almost a million living sperm, and a great politics starts because they all run fast to reach the mother’s egg. Only one will be able to enter. The mother’s egg is made in such a way that it remains open until a living male sperm has entered it. The moment the sperm enters, it closes. It rarely happens that two cells reach simultaneously — that’s why twins are born — or sometimes three, or sometimes four; but these are exceptions.
That small passage is a long journey for the small sperm. According to its size it is almost two miles long, and a great struggle … a million people trying to reach to become the president! My understanding is that the wiser ones will stand to the side and let the idiots go ahead.
Rabindranath was the thirteenth child of his parents. If there had been birth control, Rabindranath would not have ever been born. And even without birth control there are very few people who produce thirteen children. If the parents had stopped at one dozen, which would have been more logical and a more rounded figure, Rabindranath would have been out of the game, you would never have heard of that man and his greatness.
But science has become able, within these last ten years, to read the whole future of a single sperm: whether it is going to become a scientist, whether it is going to become a poet or a doctor or a philosopher or a mystic or a dancer or a musician. Its potential can be read. Its life pattern, in minute detail, can be read: whether it will be a healthy child or a sick child, whether it will die after six months or after a hundred years. To go on doing the old accidental thing and producing children, not knowing whom you are bringing into the world — whether you are giving birth to an Adolf Hitler or a Benito Mussolini or a Joseph Stalin or a Ronald Reagan … you don’t have any idea. It is a very blind game.
Love should be only of friendship. And if society has a need and the medical profession proves your wife to be the right vehicle for bringing a child into the world, then from their sperm bank they can find the right sperm and inject it. You can go on making love; that is a separate affair.
There has been the pill, but it was not a hundred percent foolproof. Sometimes you are not thinking that you are going to make love and you don’t take the pill, and suddenly your lover turns up and you take the risk. They chance it — it is not always that one becomes pregnant. Now they have come up with two other pills. One is to be taken after you have made love — that is a hundred percent effective — and for the second one the woman is not needed, just the man can take a pill. They have come up with a pill for men, too. Then the woman need not take any pill. Your love becomes pure fun, pure joy, without any responsibility and burden.
And the woman should be educated, should be given all the opportunities to become an independent individual, financially and in every other respect, so that she is no longer dependent on you. An independent woman and an independent man, just out of friendship feel good to be with each other. As long as they feel good they remain together. The moment they feel things are going wrong, there is no need to prolong the affair. They can say good bye with gratitude towards each other. No law is needed, no government permission, no social sanction is needed — because who are these people to interfere in your life?
Yes, society can only have a concern about the children because that is going to be the future society. Society cannot allow you to produce Adolf Hitlers. But society has not done anything to prevent it. And this can be prevented.
There is no need of calling it marriage or soulmates or any great words … just hot air! Use simple words. You feel friendly towards someone and you feel joyous to be with the person. As long as you feel joyous it is valid. The moment trouble arises, you can separate. Marriage has created so much ugliness in the world, that you cannot conceive.
First, it has given accidental generations which are not produced out of understanding, out of a scientific approach, but just like animals, under the force, the blind force of biology; otherwise we can have so many beautiful people around. And the world does not consist only of a beautiful moon and beautiful stars, its greatest beauty is a beautiful person: physically, mentally, spiritually.

Socrates: Mystery of Love

The Rebellious Spirit, Chapter 30

Question 1

IN PLATO’S ‚THE SYMPOSIUM‘ SOCRATES SAYS THAT, „A MAN WHO PRACTISES THE MYSTERIES OF LOVE WILL BE IN CONTACT NOT WITH A REFLECTION, BUT WITH TRUTH ITSELF. TO KNOW THIS BLESSING OF HUMAN NATURE, ONE CAN FIND NO BETTER HELPER THAN LOVE.“
PLEASE COMMENT.

Milarepa, I have been commenting my whole life on love, in thousands of different ways. But the message is the same. Just one most fundamental thing has to be remembered, that is: it is not the love that you think is love. Neither Socrates is speaking about it, nor I am speaking about it.
The love you know is nothing but a biological urge, it depends on your chemistry and your hormones. It can be changed very easily, by a small change in your chemistry — and the love that you thought is the ultimate truth will simply disappear.
You have been calling lust, love. This distinction should be remembered. Socrates says, „a man who practises the mysteries of love….“ Lust has no mysteries, it is a plain biological game. Every animal, every bird, every tree knows about it. Certainly, the love which has mysteries is going to be totally different from the love with which you are ordinarily acquainted. „A man who practises the mysteries of love will be in contact not with the reflection, but with truth itself.“
This love that can become a contact with truth itself arises only out of your consciousness; not out of your body, but out of your innermost being.
Lust arises out of your body. Love arises out of your consciousness. But people don’t know their consciousness, and the misunderstanding goes on and on — their bodily lust is taken for love.
Very few people in the world have known love. Those are the people who have become so silent, so peaceful… and out of that silence and peace they come in contact with their innermost being, their soul. Once you are in contact with your soul, your love becomes not a relationship, but simply a shadow to you. Wherever you move, with whomsoever you move, you are loving.
Right now, what you call love is addressed to someone, and confined to someone; and love is not a phenomenon that can be confined. You can have it in your open hands, but you cannot have it in your fist. The moment your hands are closed — they are empty. The moment they are open — the whole of existence is available to you.
Socrates is right: one who knows love also knows truth, because they are only two names of one experience. And if you have not known the truth, remember that you have not known love either. „To know this blessing of human nature, one can find no better helper than love.“
There is only one thing I would like to say about Socrates: his whole approach was logical and argumentative. His method is known as Socratic dialogue. It is a very lengthy process, like psychoanalysis. He will discuss and discuss, and destroy all your false arguments and false ideas. This was his contention, which has a truth in it: When all false ideas are demolished, that which remains behind and cannot be argued about, is your being. And from that being arises the fragrance of love.
But Socrates knew nothing of meditation. He came to know truth through the long, unnecessary route of arguments. He was one of the best arguers the world has produced; there is no parallel. But what he was doing by argument cannot become a universal phenomenon; the path is long, and unnecessarily long.
The false can disappear if you sit silently, whenever you have time, and just watch your thoughts. No need to argue, no need to fight, no need to push them out, just watch — as if you are seeing something on the TV-screen.
The East has known a greater miracle than Socrates. Socrates was not acquainted with the East at all. And the obvious reason was: he has found love, he has found truth — and he never thought that there could be a shortcut. His process is torturous. If you read the dialogues of Socrates you will feel that the process is long, and each argument creates new problems — new problems create new arguments… he is fighting with shadows.
But it was not his fault. In his time Athens was one of the most sophisticated, intellectual cities in the world. He was unaware that exactly at the same time Buddha was teaching meditation in India, Lao Tzu was teaching meditation in China, Mahavira was teaching meditation…. It was at exactly the same time, twenty-five centuries ago.
Socrates had inherited logic from his forefathers; Greece was full of sophists. Sophists were strange people, their philosophy was that there is no truth, there is no untruth — it all depends who has the better argument. If you can argue better, than your opponent, you are right. And if you come across another person who can argue better than you, then you are wrong.
So it was only the gymnastics of argument that Socrates inherited. He changed the whole process: Sophistry became philosophy. The word `philo‘ means love, and `sophia‘ means wisdom. Sophistry was simply argumentativeness. He did a great job, but it almost always happens — the people you are fighting with, even if you are victorious, leave a great impact on you.
Just by fighting with them you have to use their own methods; otherwise you cannot fight. If one country is piling up nuclear weapons, then those who fight them have to pile up nuclear weapons. Because Socrates was continually fighting with the sophists…. He wanted to destroy this idea that better argument is all, that there is no truth and there is no untruth — and he succeeded. He was a discontinuity with his past. But the people he had been fighting, he had to fight with arguments. So although the Sophists were defeated, the argumentativeness remained with Socrates himself.
He used it in a better way. He used it in discovering the truth. But he was absolutely unaware that in another part of the world, in the East, in China, in India, people had a different inheritance: almost ten thousand years of sitting silently and doing nothing.
And as silence descends on you, as thoughts start leaving, and all disturbances disappear, and the lake of your consciousness becomes almost a mirror:
You know you are the truth;

You know you are love;

You know you are divine.
In a single step — from mind to no-mind — all the treasures, all the mysteries of love, life, truth, blissfulness, open their doors. There is no need to argue against the false.
My contention is: even to argue against the false is to give some credit to the false, and that has been the eastern contention for thousands of years. You don’t argue with your shadow: Don’t come with me today, I don’t like you, when I don’t want you, why do you go on following me? You don’t run away from your shadow — because the shadow will run too.
A Sufi story says: „A man was afraid of his shadow, because he had read in a book that death was almost like a shadow — that when it comes, it comes like a shadow. And it became such an obsession in his mind, that he became afraid even of ordinary shadows.
He would run, and he would do everything… he would try to fight — and he was a warrior! But even your sword cannot do any harm to a shadow — the shadow does not exist. He was so tired that he asked a mystic, „What to do with the shadow? I have done everything that can be done, but nothing happens. I have broken my sword. I have been running so much to avoid it that my feet are oozing blood.“
The mystic laughed, he said, „You do one thing. Under that tree, just sit down, and then tell me, where is your shadow?“
Under the tree there was much shadow. To have a shadow you need the sun, the light. But when he went under the tree, and sat there and looked all around, there was no shadow. He said, „What a miracle you have done! You have not even moved from your place, and my shadow is gone.“ The mystic said, „Your very approach was unnecessary. To fight with the false is to give credibility to the false. In your fight you have accepted that the false also has some reality.“
The East has never fought with the mind; it has found a totally different method. Its method is just to be a watcher on the hills.
Let everything pass.
Don’t judge, don’t condemn, don’t evaluate.
You are only a mirror; these are not your functions. You simply reflect — and they will all pass. If you don’t take any note of them, if you can ignore them, they will stop coming to you; they don’t want to be uninvited guests. Perhaps because of the old habit, for a few days they may continue; but you will be able to see that the traffic is becoming less and less; otherwise it is twenty-four-hour rush hour.
Once the mind is silent, empty, spacious, you have found the golden key, the master key, which opens all the mysteries of love, of truth, of eternal life.
Socrates‘ idea is basically right, but about his method I do not agree. His method is unnecessary. If you are going to come home, why run miles away and then come back home? You are already there. Just close your eyes and be silent, and relax. But the conclusion is right: „A man who practises the mysteries of love will be in contact, not with a reflection, but with truth itself. To know this blessing of human nature, one can find no better helper than love.“
Either you can start by increasing your love, expanding your love… but where will you expand it? Your mind is standing like a China wall all around you. First that China wall has to disappear — and that is the function of meditation.
Socrates could have been for the West their Gautam Buddha, and the whole history of the West would have been totally different. He has created the basic path for the western mind: argument. And argument by and by, rather than discovering love, has discovered atom bombs, nuclear weapons, science, technology.
The East has not been able to discover these things because it has never given any credit to argumentation, to reason. Its whole concentration has been on expanding consciousness — and to give it space, it has to get rid of the mind. Once the mind is not there you don’t have any boundaries, even the sky is not the boundary. You are all over the place. This feeling of being all over the place is love; and knowing it, that it is arising from the very center of your being, is truth.
But, Milarepa, Socrates is not talking in California. He is not talking to so-called lovers all over the world. He is talking to a few disciples who have come in search of truth. He helped a few people; he could not help many, for the simple reason that with everybody the process was so long.
But the East has been fortunate to discover a single-step pilgrimage: from mind to no-mind — and you have arrived home.
You have always been there. You have never left it for a single moment! Just, your mind has been wandering all over the world, but you have never been anywhere else; you are exactly where you should be.
If the wandering of the mind stops, suddenly — the revelation.