Transcendence From Being A Bundle Of Desires to Total Desire: The Path to Desirelessness

• Man is a bundle of desires. There is no end to human wants. When one want is satisfied, another crops up to take its place. The never-ending cycle of wants goes on and on. He always hankers after more and more goods and services. This state of unlimited wants puts us under tremendous stress fueled by impulsive behavior patterns.
• If we try to find fulfillment in material objects, we will always end up feeling empty. True happiness is not rooted in material things, but in the small treasures we often take for granted - quality time with someone who has always. been there motivating you to expand your consciousness, your hobbies, and your artistic expressions. 
• Whatever we say and mean by life is just a journey toward death. If you can understand that your whole life is just a journey and nothing else, then you are less interested in life and more interested in death. And once someone becomes more interested in death, he can go deep into the very depths of life; otherwise, he is just going to remain on the surface.
• But we are not interested in death at all: rather, we escape the facts, we are continuously escaping the facts. Death is there, and every moment we are dying. Death is not something far away, it is here and now: we are dying. But while we are dying we go on being concerned about life. This concern with life, this over concern with life, is just an escape, just a fear. Death is there, deep inside — growing.
• Change the emphasis, turn your attention around. If you become concerned with death, your life comes to be revealed to you for the first time, because the moment you become at ease with death you have gained a life that cannot die. The moment you have known death, you have known that life which is eternal.
• Death is the door from the superficial life, the so-called life, the trivial. There is a door. If you pass through the door you reach another life — deeper, eternal, without death, deathless. So from so- called life, which is really nothing but dying, one has to pass through the door of death; only then does one achieve a life that is really existential and active — without death in it.
• But one should pass this door very consciously. We have been dying so many times, but whenever someone dies he becomes unconscious; you are so afraid of death that the moment death comes to you, you become unconscious. You pass through the door in an unconscious state of mind. Then you are born again, and the whole nonsense begins again, and again you are not concerned with death.
• One who is concerned with death rather than with life begins to pass the door consciously. This is what is meant by meditation: to pass the door of death consciously. To die consciously is meditation.
• But you cannot wait for death; you need not, because death is always there: it is a door that exists inside you. It is not something that is going to happen in the future, it is not something outside of you that you have to reach, it is inside you, a door
• The moment you accept the fact of death and begin to feel it, to live it, to be aware of it, you begin to drop through the inner door. The door opens, and through the door of death you begin to have glimpses of an eternal life. Only through death can one have glimpses of eternal life; there is no other way. So really, all that is known as meditation is just a voluntary death, just a deepening inside, a drowning inside, a sinking inside; just a going away from the surface toward the depths.
• Of course, the depths are dark. The moment you leave the surface you will feel you are dying, because you have identified the surface of life with yourself. It is not that the surface waves are just surface waves; you have become identified with them, you are the surface. So when you leave the surface, it is not only that you leave the surface; you leave yourself, your identity — the past, the mind, the memory. All that you were, you have to leave; that is why meditation appears to be a death. You are dying, and only if you are ready to die this voluntary death — to go deep beyond yourself, to leave the self and transcend the surface — do you come to the reality, which is eternal.
• So for one who is ready to die, this very readiness becomes the transcendence; this very readiness is the religiousness. When we say someone is worldly, it means he is more concerned with life than with death. Rather, that he is absolutely concerned with life and not at all concerned with death. A worldly person is one to whom death comes in the end; and when it comes, he is unconscious.
• A religious man is one who is dying every moment. Death is not in the end; it is the very process of life. A religious man is one who is more concerned with death than with life, because he feels that whatever is known as life is going to be taken away. It is being taken away; every moment you are losing it. Life is just like sand in an hourglass: every moment the sand is being lost, and you cannot do anything about it. The process is natural; nothing can be done, it is irreversible.
• Time is something which cannot be retained, which cannot be prevented, which cannot be reversed.
• It is one-dimensional: there is no going back. And ultimately the very process of time is death, because you are losing time, you are dying. One day all the sand is lost and you are empty — just an empty self with no time left. So you die.
• Be more concerned with death — and time. It is right here and now, by the corner — present every moment. Once you begin to look for it, you become aware of it. It is here, you were just overlooking the fact; not even overlooking the fact, escaping it. So enter into death, jump into it. This is the arduousness of meditation, this is the austerity of it: one has to jump into death.
• To go on loving life is a deep lust, and to be ready to die somehow looks unnatural. Of course, death is one of the most natural things, but it looks unnatural to be ready to die.
• This is how the paradox, how the dialectics of existence works: if you are ready to die, this very readiness makes you undying; but if you are not ready to die, this very unreadiness, this overattachment and lust for living, makes you a dying phenomenon.
• When we assume any attitude, we always reach the opposite. This is the deep dialectics of existence. The expected never comes; the longed-for is never achieved; the desire is never fulfilled.
• The more you desire it, the more you lose it. Whatever the dimension may be, it makes no difference; the law remains the same. If you ask too much of anything, by the very asking you lose it.
• If someone asks for love he will not get love, because the very asking makes him unlovely, ugly; the very fact of asking becomes the barrier. No one can love you if you are asking for love. No one can love you. You can be loved only when there is no asking; the very fact of not asking makes you beautiful, makes you relaxed.
• It is just like when you close your fist and you lose the air that was in the open fist. In an open fist all the air is there, but the moment you close your fist, in the very closing you are losing the air. You may think that when you have closed your fist you will have possessed the air, but the moment you try to possess it you lose it. With an open fist all the air is there and you are the master. With a closed fist you are the loser: you have lost everything; you have no air in your hand at all.
• And the more closed the fist, the less is the possibility of air being there. But this is how the mind works, this is the absurdity of the mind; if you feel that the air is not there, you close your fist even more. Logic says, “Close it better; you have lost all the air. You have lost it because you did not close your fist so well. You have not really closed your fist as you should; somewhere you are at fault. You have closed your fist wrong; that is why air has escaped. So close it more, close it more,” and in the very closing you are losing. But this is how it happens.
• If I love someone, I become possessive; I begin to close in. The more I close in, the more love is lost. The mind says, “Arrange to be even closer,” and it makes more arrangements, but somewhere there is a leakage. That is why love is being lost. The more I close in, the more I lose. Only with an open hand can love be possessed; only with an open hand, only with a nonclosing mind, can love become a flowering. And this happens with everything.
• If you love life too much, you become closed; you become like a dead person even while you are alive. So a person who is filled with lust for life is a dead person; he is already dead, just a corpse.
• The more he feels to be just a corpse, the more he yearns to be alive — but he does not know the dialectics. The very longing is poisonous. A person who does not long for life at all — a person like Buddha, with no lust for life — lives ardently. He flowers into aliveness perfectly, totally.
• The day Buddha died someone said to him, “Now you are dying. We will be missing you so much, for ages and ages, for lives and lives.”
• Buddha said, “But I died a long time ago. For forty years I have not been aware that I am alive. The day I achieved knowing, enlightenment, I died.”
• But he was so alive! And he was really alive only after he “died.” The day he achieved inner enlightenment he died outwardly, but then he became very alive. Then he was so relaxed and so spontaneous. Then he was without fear — without fear of death.
• Fear of death is the only fear. It may take any shape, but that is the basic fear. Once you are ready — once you have died — there is no fear. And only in a nonfearing existence can life come to its total flowering.
• Even then, death comes; Buddha dies. But death happens only to us, not to him, because one who has passed death’s door has an eternal continuity, a timeless continuity.
• So do not be concerned with life at all, not even your own life. And if you are not interested in life, then you cannot desire even death, because desire is life. If you become interested in, and desirous of, death, you are again desiring life — because you cannot desire death really. To desire death is an impossibility. How can you desire death? Desire itself means life.
• So when I say, “Do not be interested in life too much,” I do not mean, “Be interested in death.” When I say, “Do not be interested in life,” then you become aware of a fact… which is death. But you cannot desire it; it is not a desire really.
• When I talk about an open fist, it will be good to understand: you have to close your fist, but you do not have to open it. Opening is not an effort at all; you just do not close it, and it opens. Opening is not an effort; it is not something positive that has to be done. In fact, if you are making an effort to open your fist it will just be a closing in reverse. It may look like an opening, but it is simply the reverse of closing.
• Real opening only means no closing — simply no closing; it is a negative phenomenon. If you are not closing your fist, then the fist is open. Now, even if it is closed it is open. The internal closing has dropped, so even if it is closed now — half-closed or whatever — it is open, because the internal closing is not there.
• In the same way, a life that is not desiring is not desiring the opposite. Nondesiring is not the opposite of desiring. If it is the opposite, then you have begun to desire again. Rather, nondesiring is just the absence of desiring.
• You must feel the distinction. When we say “nondesiring” in words, it becomes the opposite. But nondesiring is not the opposite of desiring; it is simply the absence of desiring, not the opposite. If you make it the opposite, you begin to desire again — you are desiring nondesire — and when this happens, you are back in the same circle.
• But this is what happens. A person who has become frustrated in life begins to desire death. It again becomes a desire. He is not desiring death; he is desiring something else other than his life. So even a person who is filled with a lust for life can commit suicide, but this suicide is not nondesiring; it is really desiring something else. This is a very interesting point, one of the ultimate points of the whole search. If you turn to the opposite thing, then you are in the wheel again, in the vicious circle again. And you will never be out of it. But this happens.
• A person renounces life, goes to the forest, or in search of the divine, or in search of liberation or whatever. But now again desire is there. He has simply changed the object of desire, not desire itself. The object now is not wealth; it has become God. The object is not this world; it has become that world. But the object remains; the desiring is the same, the thirst is the same — and the tension and the anguish will be the same. The whole process will simply be repeated again with a new object. You can go on changing the objects of your desire for lives and lives, but you will remain the same because the desiring will be the same.
• So when I say “nondesiring,” I mean the absence of desiring: not the futility of the object, but the futility of desiring itself. It is not the realization that this world is nonsense, because then you will desire the other world. It is not that life is useless so now you must desire death, annihilation, cessation, nirvana. No, I mean the futility of desiring itself. The very desiring drops. No object is replaced, substituted; desire just becomes absent. And this absence, this very absence, becomes life eternal.
• But that is a happening: it is not because of your desire. It is a spontaneous outcome of nondesiring, it is not a consequential result. This happens… but you cannot make this happening your desire. If you do, you miss the point.
• When the hand is open, the fist is open, all the air is there and you are the master of it all. But if you want to open your fist in order to become the master of the air, you will not be able to open it, because the very effort, in an inner sense, will be a closing. This mastery of the air is not really a result of your effort, but rather, a natural happening when there is no effort.
• If I simply try not to possess you so that love can flower, this “trying not to possess” will become an effort. An effort can only possess: even in nonpossession it will be a possession; I will constantly be aware that I do not possess you. In essence I am saying, “Love me more because I am not trying to possess you.” Then I wonder why the love is not coming.
• Someone was here. He had been making every effort toward meditation for at least ten years, but was reaching nowhere. I told him, “You have made enough effort — sincerely, seriously. Now do not make any effort. Just sit down, without any effort.”
• Then he asked me, “Can I reach meditation with this method, with ‘no effort’?”
• I told him, “If you are still asking for the result, then a very subtle effort will continuously be there.
• You will not be just sitting; you cannot just sit if there are any desires. The desire will be a subtle movement in you, and the movement will continue. You may be sitting like a stone or like a buddha, but still within the stone will be moving. Desire is movement.”
• You cannot remain just sitting if there is a desire. It may appear as if you are, everyone may say that you are just sitting, but you cannot be just sitting; you can just sit only when desiring is absent. To “just sit” is not a new desire, just an absence; all desiring has become a futility.
• You are not frustrated with life because of objects. Religious people go on telling others that there is nothing in women, there is nothing in the world, there is nothing in sex, there is nothing in power.
• But these are all objects. They are still saying there is nothing in these objects: they are not saying there is nothing in desiring itself.
• You can change objects and you can create new objects of desire. Even eternal life can become an object; again, the circle sets in — the fact of desiring. You have desired everything, you have desired too much.
• If you can feel this very fact of desiring — that desiring is futile, meaningless — then you will not create another object to desire; then desiring ceases. Become aware of it and it ceases. Then there is an absence, and this absence is silent because there is no desire.
• With desire you cannot be silent; desire is the real noise. Even if you have no thoughts — if you have a controlled mind and you can stop thinking — a deeper desire will continue, because you are stopping this very thinking only to achieve something. A subtle noise will be there. Somewhere inside someone will be looking and asking whether the desired something has been achieved or not.
• “Thoughts have been stopped. Where is divine realization, where is God, where is enlightenment?”
• But desiring itself will become futile if you can become aware of this.
• The whole trick of the mind is that you always become aware that some object has become futile.
• Then you change the object, and in changing the object the desire continues to take hold of your consciousness. It always happens that when this house becomes useless then another house becomes attractive; when this man becomes unattractive, repulsive, then another man becomes attractive. This goes on; and the moment you become aware of the futility of what you are desiring, the mind goes on to some other objects.
• When this happens, the gap is lost. When something becomes futile, useless, unattractive, remain in the gap…. Be aware of whether the object has become futile or whether it is desiring itself that is futile. And if you can feel the very futility of desire, suddenly something drops in you. Suddenly you are transformed to a new level of consciousness. This is a nothingness, an absence, a negativity; no new circle begins.
• In this moment, you are out of the wheel of samsara, the world. But you cannot make it an object of your desire to be out of the wheel. Do you feel the distinction? You cannot make desirelessness an object.

WASN’T BUDDHA’S DESIRE FOR REALIZATION A DESIRE?

• Yes, it was a desire; Buddha had the desire. When Buddha said, “I will not leave this place. I am not going to leave unless I achieve enlightenment,” it was a desire. And with this desire, a vicious circle set in. Even for Buddha it set in.
• Buddha could not achieve enlightenment for a long time because of this desire. Because of it, he searched and searched for six years. He did everything that was possible to be done, that could be done. He did everything, but he did not get even an inch nearer; he remained the same, even more frustrated. He had left the world, renounced everything for the sake of realization, and nothing had come of it. For six years continuously every effort was made, but nothing came of it.
• Then one day, near Bodh Gaya, he came to take a bath in the Niranjana — the river there. He was so weak because of so much fasting that he could not come out of the river. He just remained there by the root of a tree. He was so weak that he could not step out of the river. The thought came to his mind that if he had become so weak that he could not even cross a small river, then how could he cross the greater ocean of existence? So on that particular day, even the desire to achieve realization became futile. He said, “Enough!”
• He came out of the water and sat under a tree, the bodhi tree. That particular night the very desiring to achieve became futile. He had desired the world and found that it was just a dream, and not only a dream — a nightmare. For six years continuously he had desired enlightenment, and that too proved to be only a dream. And not only a dream: it proved to be an even deeper nightmare.
• He was completely frustrated; there was nothing left to desire. He had known the world very well — he had known it very well — and he could not go back to it; there was nothing for him there. He had known the effort of so-called religions, of all the religions that were prominent in India; he had practiced all of their techniques, and nothing had come of it. There was nothing else to try now, no motivation remained, so he just dropped down on the ground near the bodhi tree and for the whole night he remained there — without any desire. There was nothing left to desire; desiring itself had become futile.
• In the morning, when he awakened, the last star was setting. He looked at the star and for the first time in his life his eyes were without any mist, because he was without any desire. The last star was setting, and as the star set, something in him withered with it: the self, because the self cannot exist without desiring. And he became enlightened.
• This enlightenment came at a moment when there was no desire. And it had been prevented by six years of desiring. Really, the phenomenon happens only when you are out of the circle. So even Buddha, because of desiring enlightenment, had to wander uselessly for six years. This moment of transformation — this jumping out of the circle, out of the wheel of life — only comes, only happens, when there is no desire. Buddha said, “I achieved it when there was no achieving mind; I found it when there was no search. This happened only when there was no effort.”
• This, again, becomes a very difficult thing to understand, because with the mind we cannot understand anything which is effortless. Mind means effort. The mind can tackle anything, can maneuver anything which can be “done,” but the mind cannot ever conceive of something which “happens,” and cannot be done. The faculty of the mind is to do something; it is an instrument for doing. The very faculty of mind is to achieve something, to gain some desire.
• Just as it is impossible to hear with the eyes or to see with the hands, it is impossible for the mind to conceive or to feel that which happens when you are not doing anything. The mind has no memory of such a thing. It knows only things that can be done and that cannot be done; it knows only things in which it succeeds and in which it fails. But it has not known anything which happens when nothing is done. So what to do?
• Start with a desire. That desire is not going to lead you to the point of the happening, but that desire can lead you to the futility of that desire. One has to begin with desire; it is impossible to begin with no desire. If you could begin with no desire, then the happening would happen this very moment; then no technique, no method, would be needed. If you could begin with no desire, this very moment it happens. But that is impossible.
• You cannot begin with no desiring. The mind will make this nondesiring also a desired object. The mind will say, “Okay, I will try not to desire.” It will say, “Really, it looks fascinating. I will try to do something so that this no desiring happens.” But the mind is bound to have some desire. It can begin only with desire, but it may not end in desire.
• One has to begin with desiring something that cannot be achieved by desiring. But if you are aware of this fact — if you are aware of the fact that you are desiring something that cannot be desired — it helps. This awareness of the fact helps; now, any moment, you can take the jump. And when you take the jump, there will be no desiring.
• You have desired the world; now desire the divine. That is how one has to begin. The beginning is wrong, but you have to begin that way because of this built-in process of the mind. This is the only way to change it.
• For example, I tell you that you cannot go through the wall to get to the outside; you have to go through the door. And when I say, through the door, “door” means only the place where there is no wall. So when I say you have to go through the “no wall” to the outside, it is because you cannot go through the wall. The wall cannot be the door, and if you try to get out through the wall you will be frustrated.
• But you have not known anything like a door. You have never been outside, so how can you know that there is a door? You have always been in this room — the room of the mind, the room of desires.
• You have always been in this room, so you have known only this wall, you have not known the door.
• Even if the door is there, it has appeared to you as a part of the wall; it has been a wall to you.
• Unless you open it, you cannot know it is a door.
• So I say to you, “You cannot go outside through the wall. You cannot do anything with a wall; it will not lead you outside. You need the door.” But you do not know anything about the door; you know only the wall. Even the door appears to you to be part of the wall. Then what is to be done?
• I say, “Try from anywhere, but begin.” You will be frustrated. You will go around the whole room, try every nook and corner — everywhere. You will be frustrated because the wall cannot open, but the door is somewhere, and you may stumble upon it. That is the only way: begin with the wall, because that is the only beginning possible. Begin with the wall, and you will stumble upon the door. It is a fact that there is a door, that the door is not a wall, and that you cannot pass through the wall, you have to pass through the door. This very fact will make the stumbling easier. Really, whenever you are frustrated with the wall, the door becomes more of a possibility, more of a potential. Your search becomes deeper through this.
• Mind is desiring. The mind cannot do anything without desire. You cannot transcend the mind through desiring, because the mind is the desiring. So the mind has to desire even that which is found only when there is no desire. But begin with the wall. Know desire, and you will stumble upon the door. Even Buddha had to begin with a desire, but no one told him — the fact was not known to him — that the door opens only when there is no desire.
• As I understand it, struggling with desire is the disease. Giving up the struggle is the freedom. That is the only real death: when you just give up. If you can just lie down and die with no struggle to live, without even an indication of struggle, that death can become a realization. If you just lie down and accept — with no movement inside, with no desire, with no help to be found, with no way to be sought — if you just lie down and accept, that acceptance will be a great thing.
• It is not so easy. Even if you are lying down, the struggle is still there. You may be exhausted: that is another thing. That is not acceptance, that is not readiness; somewhere in the mind you are still struggling. But, really, to lie down and die with no struggle makes death become ecstasy. Death becomes samadhi; death becomes realization. And then you say, “Of course!”
• You may not have the desire to go out of this room. The desire to come out can come only in two ways. The first is that somehow you have had a glimpse of something of the outside from a hole in the wall or from the window — somewhere you have had a glimpse; or, somehow, in some mysterious way, in some moment, the door opened and you had a glimpse. This happens and goes on happening: in some mysterious moment the door opens for just a single moment like a flash of light and then closes again. You have tasted something of the outside; now the desire comes.
• The desire comes: you are in the dark and there is a sudden flash of light. In a moment, in a single, simultaneous moment, everything becomes clear; the darkness is not there. And then again the darkness is there; everything is lost, but now you cannot be the same again. This has become part of your experience.
• In some moments of silence, in some moments of love, in some moments of suffering, in some moments of sudden accidents, the door suddenly opens and you have a taste. These things cannot be arranged; they are accidents. They cannot be arranged. When someone is in love, a door opens for a moment; this opening is really a happening. In deep love, somehow your desire ceases. The very moment is enough; there is no desire for the future. If I love someone, then in that very moment of love the mind is not. This moment is eternity. For me, now, in this moment, there is no future — I am not concerned with the future at all — and there is no past. I am not bothered about it. The whole thought process has stopped at this moment of existence. Everything has stopped, and suddenly, in this nondesiring moment, a door opens.
• So love has many glimpses of the divine. If you have really been in love, even for a moment, then you cannot remain “in this room” for long. Then you have tasted something that is of the beyond.
• But again the mind begins to play tricks. It says, “This moment has happened because of this person whom I love. I must possess this person forever, otherwise this thing will not happen again.” And the more you possess, the more you become concerned with the future. Then this moment will not come again. Even with this same person it is not going to come again, because with expectation the mind is again tense. The moment happened when there were no expectations. And then the lovers go on condemning each other — “You are not loving me as much as you did before” — because the moment is not happening.
• This moment, this glimpse, is not in anyone’s hand, and the lover cannot do anything about it.
• Whatever he tries to do will just be a destruction of the whole thing. He cannot do, because it was not his doing at all; it was just a spontaneous phenomenon. It happened, and the door opened.
• It can happen in many ways. Someone you love has died and the death has struck like a dagger in your mind. The past and future are separated: death has become like a dagger in you. The whole past has stopped and, in your deep suffering, there is no future; everything stops. You may get a taste of the divine, of the “outside.” But then your mind again begins to play tricks. It begins to weep, it begins to do something; it begins to think that “I am feeling suffering because someone has died.”
• It becomes concerned with the other.
• But if, at the moment of death, you can remain just in the moment, then it sometimes happens; then you can glimpse something of the beyond. In some accident, it can happen. In a motor accident, it can happen. Things stop suddenly. Time stops. You cannot desire because there is no time/space to desire in. Your car is falling from a height; as it falls, you cannot remember the past, you cannot desire for the future. The moment has become all. In this moment, it can happen.
• So there are two ways through which the desire to go beyond is created. The first is that somehow you have had a taste of the beyond. But this cannot be planned: you have it or you don’t have it.
• Still, once you have had this taste you begin to desire it. The desire can become a hindrance — it becomes a hindrance — but still, that is how things begin; first you have to desire nondesiring.
• Or it happens in another way. The other way is that you have no taste of the beyond — none! You have not known the beyond at all, but this room has become a suffering; you cannot tolerate it anymore. You do not know the beyond at all, but whatever it may be, you are ready to choose it, even though it is unknown, because this room, this very room, has become a misery, a hell. You do not know what is beyond — whether there is anything or not, whether the beyond exists or not — but you cannot remain in this room anymore; this room has become a suffering, a hell. Then you try — then you begin to desire the unknown, the beyond. Then again there is desire: the desire to escape from here. But you have to begin with a desire for that which cannot be desired, for that which cannot be attained by desiring.
• Remember this fact continuously: go on doing whatever you are doing, constantly remembering that by doing alone it cannot be achieved. And there are so many methods to help you to do this. One is to remember that you cannot get it; only God can give it to you. This is simply a way to make you aware that your efforts are meaningless; only grace will do it. This is one way. It is just saying the same thing in a more metaphorical way, in a language that can be understood more easily: that you cannot do anything.
• But that does not mean that you are not to do anything. You should do everything — but remember, it is not going to happen simply by your doing. Something happens to you, something unknown; grace descends upon you. Your efforts will make you more receptive to the grace, that’s all; but it is not as a direct result of your efforts that grace descends upon you.
• This is how religious people have been trying to express this same phenomenon. A Buddha, or a type with a mind like Buddha’s, will express it more scientifically. Buddha would not have used the word grace, because he would have said that you will even long for grace, desire grace. One can even desire grace, and go to the temple and cry and weep and ask for divine grace. So Buddha said, “It will not work. There is no such thing as grace. When you are in a nondesiring state of mind, it happens.”
• So it depends. It depends! It may be meaningful for someone as long as he understands that grace cannot be asked for, cannot be requested, cannot be demanded, cannot be persuaded — because if you can persuade then it is not grace; it has become part of your effort. Nothing can be done about grace; you just have to wait. If you can understand that grace comes only in waiting and you do not have to do anything, then go on doing anything and everything, knowing very well that nothing is going to happen by your doing — it will happen only in a nondoing moment. Then, the very concept of grace can be helpful. But if you begin to ask for grace and pray for grace, it will not happen at all.
• Then it is better to remember that we are in a vicious circle which has to be broken from somewhere.
• Begin by desiring, begin by doing. Remember constantly the fact that it cannot be done, and go on doing.
• Take an example: you are not feeling sleep descending on you. What to do? — sleep is not coming.
• Really, you cannot do anything, because the very doing will be a disturbance. If you do something then, because of the doing sleep will not come. Sleep needs a nondoing mind; it descends upon you only when you are not doing anything. But tell a person who is sleepless not to do anything and sleep will come, and then his very lying in the bed will be a tension. “Not to do anything” will become a doing. Tell him, “Relax and sleep will come,” and he will try to relax, but it will be an effort and with effort there is no relaxation. Then what to do?
• I use another method. I tell him to do everything he can do to bring sleep. “Do anything you want to do: jump, run, whatever you like. Do everything you can do.” I tell him, “It is not going to come by your doing — but do!”
• The very doing soon becomes futile. He runs, he goes on doing many automatic problems, he solves puzzles, he repeats mantras, he goes on doing — and I say, “Do it wholeheartedly.” I know very well that the happening is not going to come about by his doing, but then the doing will be exhausted and he will feel that it is just nonsense. In that moment, when doing has become futile, suddenly he will be asleep. This sleep has not come because of his doing at all, but the doing has helped in a way; it has helped because it made him aware that it was futile.
• So go on desiring, doing something for the beyond, constantly remembering it is not going to come by your effort. But do not stop these efforts, because your efforts are going to help in a way. They will make you so frustrated with the very fact of desiring that suddenly you will sit down and you will be just sitting, not doing, and the thing happens! And there is the jump — the explosion.
• So I do something very contradictory: I know that with no technique can it be possible, and still I go on devising techniques. I know that you cannot do anything, and still I insist, “Do something!”
• Do you understand me?

• Embrace Your Desires And Move Into Them With Awareness
• The greatest barrier to enlightenment is the longing for it, because a mind that longs and desires is always tense. It has a subtle anxiety around it; it is never at ease. How can you be at ease if you have to go somewhere, reach somewhere? You may be sitting, but you are on the move. Visibly you may be resting, but invisibly you are restless. Drop all nonsense. Nobody has ever been able to attain enlightenment through desire. That’s why all Buddhas insist: become desireless.
• It is easy to drop the desires of the worldly things, very easy. In fact it is absolutely foolish to cling to them. Only stupid people cling to worldly things, because anybody can see that they are going to be taken away from you.
• No, it is not difficult to drop worldly desires, but when you drop worldly desires, immediately, the mind creates the other-worldly desires: moksha, nirvana, enlightenment, God. Now you hanker for these. The situation remains the same — you remain in desire. The object is irrelevant: the real thing: whether you desire or not. The real thing is not what do you desire. All your spiritual — so-called spiritual — teachers misguide you because they go on saying, “Change the object of desire. Don’t desire worldly things; desire God.” But I say to you that if you desire God, God himself has become a worldly thing. To me this is the definition of the world: whatsoever can be desired is the world.
• Any moment when there is no desire, not even a flicker of it — no trembling, no wavering — and consciousness is unclouded — no smoke of desire, only the flame of consciousness, the fire of consciousness…. And suddenly you start laughing, suddenly you understand that that which you were seeking was always within you. That is the meaning of Jesus when he goes on insisting, “The kingdom of God is within you.” If it were “without” it could be desired; if it were “without” it could be reached from some path. It is you! That’s why I say I have got no path to offer you. I can only share my understanding with you.
• “The energy called desire has been condemned for centuries. Almost all the so-called saints have been against it, because desire is life and they were all life-negative. Desire is the very source of all that you see, and they were against all that which is visible. They wanted to sacrifice the visible at the feet of the invisible; they wanted to cut the roots of desire so there would no longer be any possibility of life.
• “A tremendously great urge to commit total suicide has dominated humanity down the ages.
• “I have a totally different concept of desire. First, desire itself is God. Desire without any object, desire without being goal-oriented, unmotivated desire, pure desire, is God. The energy called desire is the same energy as God.
• “Desire has not to be destroyed, it has to be purified. Desire has not to be dropped, it has to be transformed. Your very being is desire; to be against it is to be against yourself and against all. To be against it is to be against the flowers and the birds and the sun and the moon. To be against it is against all creativity. Desire is creativity.
• “The Eastern scriptures are perfectly right when they say that God created the world because a great desire arose in him — a desire to create, a desire to manifest, a desire to make many from one, a desire to expand. But these are only metaphors; God is not separate from desire. Desire means a longing, a great longing, to expand, to become huge, to be enormous — as huge as the sky.
• “Just watch people, watch desires, and you will understand what I mean. Even in your ordinary desires, the basic thing is present. In fact what the man who wants to have more and more money really wants is not money but expansion, because money can help you expand. You can have a bigger house, you can have a bigger garden, you can have this, you can have that — your territory will be bigger, your freedom will be bigger. With more money you will have more alternatives to choose from.
• The man who is after money may not know why he is after the money. He may himself think and believe that he loves money, but that is only on the surface of his consciousness. Go deeper into his unconscious, help him to meditate, and you will be surprised and he will be surprised to find that the desire for money is not really the desire for money, it is the desire to expand.
• “And the same is the case with all other desires. Men want more power, more fame, longer life, better health, but what are they desiring in these different things? The same, exactly the same: they want to be more. They don’t want to remain confined, they don’t want to be limited. It hurts to feel that you are definable, because if you are definable then you are just an object, a thing, a commodity. It hurts that you have limitations, because to have limitations means to be imprisoned.
• “But all these objects of desire, sooner or later, disappoint. Money becomes possible one day, and yet expansion has not happened; you may have a little more freedom of choice, but that does not satisfy. The desire was for the infinite, and money cannot purchase the infinite. Yes, you have more power, you are more well-known, but that doesn’t really matter in the long run. Millions of people have lived on this earth and were very famous, and now nobody even knows their names. Everything has disappeared into dust — dust into dust, not even traces are left. Where is Alexander the Great? What is he? Would you like to be a dead Alexander the Great or an alive beggar? Ask yourself, and your being will say it is better to be alive and be a beggar than to be dead and be an Alexander.
• “If you watch carefully, money, power, prestige — nothing satisfies. On the contrary, they make you more discontented. Why? — because when you were poor there was a hope that one day the money was going to happen and all would be settled and settled forever, and then you would relax and enjoy. Now that has happened, and there seems to be no sign of any relaxation. In fact, you are more tense than before, you are more anxiety-ridden than before.
• “Money has brought a few blessings, but in the same measure it has brought many curses too. You can have a bigger house, but now you will have less peace. You can have a bigger bank balance, but you will also have a bigger madness, anxiety, neurosis, psychosis. Money has brought a few things which are good; in the wake of it many other things have arrived which are not good at all. And if you look at the whole thing, the whole effort has been a sheer wastage. And now you cannot have even the hope that the poor man can have.
• The rich man becomes hopeless. He knows now the money will go on increasing and nothing is going to happen — just death, only death. He has tasted all kinds of things; now he only feels a tastelessness. A kind of death has already happened, because he cannot conceive of how to fulfill that desire for expansion.
• “But desire in itself is not wrong. The desire for money, the desire for power, the desire for prestige, are wrong objects for desire — let it be very clear. By having wrong objects of desire, desire itself does not become wrong. You can have a sword and you can kill somebody — that does not make the sword something wrong. You can also save somebody with the same sword. Poison can kill and poison can become medicine too. In the right hands, poison is nectar; in the wrong hands, nectar is poison.
• “This is the essential wisdom of all the buddhas of all the ages. What the priests say is one thing; what the buddhas have brought to the world is totally different, it is diametrically opposite.
• “Desire has to be purified and transformed, because it is your energy — you don’t have any other energy. How to transform desire? One way, the ordinary way, the mediocre way, is to change the object. Don’t go after money, start going after God. You are frustrated with money — become religious, go to the church, to the temple, to the mosque. Let your desire have a new object called God, which is as illusory as the object called money, even more illusory, because what do you know about God? Money at least is something visible, objective; you have known it, you have seen it. What do you know of God? You have only heard the word. God remains a word unless experienced. God remains an empty word unless you pour some content into it through your own existential experience.
• People, when they are frustrated with worldly desires, start changing the object: they start making otherworldly objects of desire — heaven, paradise, and all the joys of heaven. But it is the same trick, the mind is again befooling you. This is not the way of the intelligent person, this is the way of the stupid.
• “What is intelligence? Intelligence means the insight that no object can fulfill your desire. No object, I say, and I say it categorically, no object can ever fulfill your desire. Your desire is divine. Your desire is as big as the sky — even the sky is not a limit to it. No object can fill it. Then what is to be done? The intelligent person stops desiring objects. He makes his desire pure of all objects — worldly, otherworldly. He starts living his desire in its purity, moment to moment. He is full of desire, full of overflowing energy. His ordinary life becomes so intense, so passionate, that whatsoever he touches will be transformed. The baser metal will become gold, and the dead tree will come to bloom again.
• “…You can move from small objects to bigger and bigger objects, but still your desire, your life, will not feel fulfilled. It cannot feel fulfilled unless it is really infinite, not in conceptions but in experience, and unless you taste the infinity of existence. Desire is beautiful, there is nothing wrong in it — only free it from objects. With freedom from objects, desire is divine.”