the world, its soul.
Sannyas has to be returned to sansara,
fearless and unattached:
in the world yet not of it,
in the crowds, yet alone!
And the world has to be brought to sannyas too,
fearless and unattached.
Then sannyas will be a real sannyas
and not an escape from the world.
It will be sannyas and in the world.
Only then can that bridge of gold be built
joining the seen with the unseen,
the form with the formless.
Commit yourself to this great work,
join in the building of this great bridge!
100. Love.
Even the impossible is not impossible if resolution is there,
and even the possible becomes impossible
if one lacks will.
The world we live in is our own creation.
The time gap between sowing
and reaping creates confusion.
Because cause and effect are so separated the mind fails to understand
what would otherwise be obvious.
Nothing is fragmented or disconnected.
The missing links are always there if you look deeply.
Understanding the life process opens the door to peace.
The light lies close by, waiting for the seeker.
101. Love.
I am glad to receive your letter.
You have the strength within
but you don’t know about it.
To find it you need a catalyst.
The day you realize all this you will laugh,
but until then I am prepared to be your catalyst.
I am already laughing and just waiting
for the day you can join
in this cosmic laughter.
See! Krishna is laughing! Buddha is laughing!
Listen! The earth and heaven are laughing!
But man is weeping for he doesn’t know what he is.
What a joke! What a game!
Emperors go on begging
and fish in the ocean are thirsty!
102. Love.
Existence is a play of sun and shade
of hope and despair,
of happiness and sorrow,
of life and death.
So existence is duality –
a tension of opposite poles,
a music of contrary notes.
To know it,
to recognize it,
to experience it as such,
is to go beyond it.
This transcendence is the real sadhana,
the real achievement.
The key to this transcendence
is the witness state.
Bid good-bye to the doer,
live in the witness state.
Watch the drama.
Don’t drown in it,
rather be drowned in observing.
Then happiness and sorrow,
birth and death,
remain just a play;
they do not affect you,
they cannot affect you.
All error, all ignorance, comes from identification.
103. Love.
I received your letter.
It is good to know that your mother’s death
has made you consider your own.
One has to go through the awareness of death
to reach deathlessness.
The thrust of death goes deep
but the mind cunningly goes on evading it.
Don’t evade it,
don’t console yourself –
any kind of consolation is a suicide.
Let yourself feel the wound of death completely:
wake up and live with it!
This will be hard
but revolution always is.
Death is,
it is there always,
but we forget about it.
Every day death is there,
every moment.
104. Love.
I received your letter.
So many questions!
To answer them I would have to write a book
bigger than the Mahabharata!
But even then you would not get your answers
because some questions others can never answer –
your answers lie deep within your own life.
And some questions have no answers
because they are wrong questions
for which no answers can be found.
As the search continues
these questions always gradually drop away.
Then there are some questions which are right questions
but have no answers at all.
They have to be experienced deep within oneself.
105. Love.
Do not desire bliss
because that desire gets in the way.
Live life unchained to desire
and without an eye on a goal.
Live free!
Live from moment to moment!
And don’t be afraid, be free of fear
because there is nothing to lose –
and nothing to gain
– and the moment you realize this
the totality of life is attained.
But never approach the gates of life as a beggar,
never go begging,
for those gates never open to beggars!
106. Love.
It brings me happiness to bear witness to your new birth.
You have worked for it over many lives
and now the boat flows rightly,
I can rest assured about you.
Once I made you a promise
and this is now fulfilled.
It is your turn to fulfill your part of the promise;
make sure you don’t miss the chance.
Time