It is fearful and it is painful, and one has to suffer it. Nothing should be done to avoid it, nothing should be done to divert the mind, nothing should be done to escape form it. One has to suffer it and go through it. This suffering, this pain, is just a good sign that you are near a new birth, because every birth is preceded by pain. It cannot be avoided, and it should not be avoided because it is part of your growth. This pain and this suffering is known traditionally as TAPASHCHARYA, austerity. This is the meaning of TAPAS -- arduous austerity, effort.

But why is this pain there? This should be understood because understanding will help you to go through it, and if you go through it knowingly, you will come out of it more easily, and sooner.

Why is there pain when you are alone? The first thing is that your ego gets ill. Your ego can exist only with others. It has grown in relationship, it cannot exist alone. So if the situation is one in which it can exist no more, it feels suffocated, it feels just on the verge of death. This is the deepest suffering. You feel just as if you are dying, but it is not you who is dying but only the ego which you have taken to be yourself, with which you have become identified. It cannot exist because it has been given to you by others. It is a contribution.

When you leave others you cannot carry it with you. Think of it in this way: when you are in society, people think you are a very good person. This goodness cannot exist when you are lonely and alone because this is what people thought about you. Now those people are there no more. Your image cannot be helped. It has become foundationless. By and by it will disappear and you will feel very bad because you were such a good person and now you are no more. And not only good people will suffer, if you are a bad person that too was given by others to you. That too is a way of getting attention. When many people consider you bad they give you attention. They cannot be indifferent to you, they have to be aware of you. You are somebody, a bad man, dangerous. When you move into loneliness, you become nobody. That bad image will disappear and you were feeding on it, your ego was feeding on it. So bad men and good men are not basically different -- both are gaining their egos. Their mediums differ, but their goals are the same.

The bad depends on others, the good also. They exist in society. The saint and the sinner, they exist in society. Alone you are neither a saint nor a sinner. So in aloneness all that you know about yourself will fall; by and by it will disappear. You can prolong your ego for a certain period -- and that too you will have to do through imagination -- but you cannot prolong it for long. Without society you are uprooted; the soil is not there from where to get food. This is the basic pain. You are no longer sure who you are: you are just a dispersing personality, a dissolving personality. But this is good, because unless this false you disappears, the real cannot emerge. Unless you are completely washed and become again clean, the real cannot emerge.

This false you is occupying the throne. It must be dethroned. By living in solitariness all that is false can go. And all that is given by society is false -- really, all that is given is false, all that is born with you is real. All that is you by yourself, not contributed by someone else, is real, authentic. But the false must go. And the false is a great investment: you have invested so much in it, you have been looking after it so much. All your hopes hang on it. So when it starts dissolving you will feel fearful, afraid, trembling. What are you doing to yourself? You are destroying your whole life, the whole structure.

There will be fear. But you have to go through this fear, only then will you become fearless. I don't say you will become brave, no. I say you will become fearless. Bravery is just part of fear. Howsoever brave you are, the fear is hidden behind. I say fearless. You will not be brave, there is no need to be brave when there is no fear. Bravery and fear both become irrelevant. They are both aspects of the same coin. So your brave men are nothing but you standing on your head -- just in SHIRSHASAN. Your bravery is hidden within you and your fear is on the surface; their fear is hidden within and their bravery is on the surface. So when you are alone you are very brave, when you think about something you are very brave, but when a real situation comes you are fearful. It is said about soldiers, the greatest of them, that before going to the front they are as afraid as anyone.

The inside is trembling, but they will go. They will push this trembling aside into the unconscious; and the more the inner trembling is there, the more they will create a facade that they are brave around them. They will create an armor. You look at that armor -- it looks brave, but deep down they are filled with fear. One becomes fearless only when one has gone through the deepest fear of all -- that is the dissolving of the ego, the dissolving of the image, the dissolving of the personality.

This is death because you don't know if a new life is going to emerge out of it -- during the process you will know only death. Only when you are dead as you are, as the false entity, only then will you know that the death was just a door to immortality. But that will be the end. During the process you are simply dying. Everything that you cherished so much is being taken away from you -- your personality, your ideas, all that you thought was beautiful.

All is leaving you. You are being denuded. All the roles and robes are being taken away. In the process fear will be there, but this fear is basic, necessary, inevitable -- one has to pass through it. You should understand it, but don't try to avoid it, don't try to escape from it because every escape will bring you back again, you will move back into the personality.

Those who go into deep silence and solitude, they always ask me, "There will be fear, so what to do?" I tell them not to do anything, just to live the fear. If trembling comes, tremble, why prevent it? If an inner fear is there, and you are shaking with it, so shake with it. Don't do anything. Allow it to happen. It will go by itself. If you avoid it -- and you can avoid it. You can start chanting Ram, Ram, Ram; you can cling to a mantra so that your mind is diverted. You will be pacified and the fear will not be there -- you have pushed it into the unconscious. It was coming out -- which was good, you were going to be free from it -- it was leaving you and when it leaves you, you will tremble. That is natural because from every cell of the body, of the mind, some energy which has always been there pushed down, is leaving. There will be a shaking, a trembling; it will be just like an earthquake. The whole soul will be disturbed by it but let it be. Don't do anything. That is my advice. Don't even chant the name of Ram. Don't try to do anything with it because all that you can do will again be suppression. Just by allowing it to be, by letting it be, it will leave you -- and when it has left, you will be altogether a different man.

The cyclone has gone and you will now be centered, centered as you never were before. And once you know the art of letting things be, you will know one of the master keys which opens all the inner doors. Then whatsoever the case is, let it be, don't avoid it.

If just for three months you can be in total solitude, in total silence, not fighting with anything, allowing everything to be, whatsoever it is, within three months the old will be gone and the new will be there. But the secret is allowing it to be, howsoever fearful, painful, howsoever apparently dangerous, deathlike. Many moments will come when you will feel as if you will go mad if you don't do something and involuntarily you will start to do something. You may know that nothing can be done, but you will not be in control and you will start to do something.

It is just as if you are moving through a dark street in the night, midnight, and you feel fear because there is no one around and the night is dark and the street is unknown -- so you start whistling. What can whistling do? You know it can do nothing. Then you start singing a song. You know nothing can be done by singing a song, the darkness cannot be dispelled, you will remain alone, but still, it diverts the mind. If you start whistling, just by whistling you gain confidence and you forget the darkness. Your mind moves into whistling and you start feeling good.

Nothing has happened. The street is the same, the darkness is the same, the danger, if there is any, is there, but now you feel more protected. All is the same, but now you are doing something. You can start chanting a name, a mantra, Ram, Ram, that will be a sort of whistling. It will give you strength. But that strength is dangerous, that strength will again become a problem, because that strength is going to be your old ego. You are reviving it again.

Remain a witness, and allow whatsoever happens to happen. Fear has to be faced to go beyond it. Anguish has to be faced to transcend it. And the more authentic the encounter, the more face to face, the more looking at things as they are, the sooner the happening will be there.

It takes time only because your authenticity is not intense. So you may take three days, three months, or three lives -- it depends on the intensity. Really, three minutes can also do -- three seconds can also do. But then you will have to pass through a tremendous hell, with such an intensity that you may not be able to bear it, to tolerate it. If one can face whatsoever is hidden in oneself, it passes, and when it has gone, you are different. Because all that has left you was part of you before, and now it is no longer a part.

So don't ask what to do. There is no need to do anything. Non-doing, witnessing, effortlessly facing whatsoever is, not even making a slight effort, just allowing it to be... remain passive and let it pass. It always passes. When you do something, that is the undoing because then you interfere.

And who will interfere? Who is afraid? The same which is the disease will interfere. The same ego which has to be left behind, will interfere.

I told you that the ego is part of the society. You left the society but you don't want to leave the part that society has given to you. It is rooted in society; it cannot live without society. So either you have to leave it or you have to create a new society in which it can live.

So you can create an alternative society. That is one of the greatest tricks of the mind. It has always been so. You can create a different society. You can create an ashram. Twenty people who think they want to live in solitude can create a monastery -- then the monastery has become an alternative society. So they move from society but they create another society, so basically nothing changes. They remain the same. Rather on the contrary, they may become more egoistic because now they are the chosen few, the elect. They have left the world but they have created another world, and the same pattern of relationship moves again. Then there is the chief, then there are the disciples, then there is a master, and all hierarchy and everything comes in, in miniature form. And then there are good disciples, there are bad disciples, there are successful ones and the unsuccessful ones... so it is the same. In a small group the whole society is there.

That will not do. Now this is happening in the West. A great number of young people are leaving society because they feel that society is rotten, decadent, dying, and they feel it is so decadent that it cannot be changed. This is a very new thing. Young people always think that the society is rotten, but they think it can be changed, transformed, so a revolution is needed. Only in the last stage of a society or civilization does this happen -- people start thinking that nothing can be done, that revolution is nonsense, that society is so dead that no one can revive it, that you cannot change it. So you just drop out of it.

You cannot do anything, the house is on fire -- so you simply escape from it. This is what is happening in the West: hippies, beatniks, yippies, others, all dropping out of society. But they are creating another society, an alternative society. Hippies themselves have become an alternative society.

In ordinary society if you have long hair, others will look at you as if you have gone astray. Something is wrong. In the hippie society if you have short hair, you are wrong! Something is wrong with you. What is the difference?

In ordinary society if you live in a dirty way you are wrong -- you are unmannerly, uncultivated, uneducated, unacceptable. But in a hippie society if you live very cleanly then something is wrong with you. Then you are still clinging to the old mind which said that cleanliness is next to God, God has died a long time ago, now the second thing, cleanliness, has also died. It cannot exist without God.

The same condemnation and the same appreciation is there. You can create an alternative society with just the opposite rules but it makes no difference -- your ego can be fed again. It has been transplanted. A new soil has been formed.

To be solitary means not to create an alternative society. Just move out of society, and then whatsoever society has given you will leave you. It can exist only in a milieu, in the social milieu, it cannot exist out of it. You will have to drop it It will be painful because you are so adjusted to it, everything is so arranged. It has become such a comfort to be adjusted, where everything is convenient. When you change and move alone, you are leaving all comforts, all conveniences, all that society can give -- and when society gives something to you, it also takes something from you: your liberty, your soul.

So it is an exchange -- and when you are trying to get to your soul in its purity you have to stop the bargaining. It will be painful, but if you can pass through it, the highest bliss is just near. Society is not as painful as loneliness; society is tranquillizing; society is convenient, comfortable. But it gives you a sort of sleep. If you move out of it inconvenience is bound to be there. All types of inconveniences will be there. Those inconveniences have to be suffered with the understanding that they are part of solitude, part of regaining yourself.

This is TAPAS, this is austerity, and you will come out of it new, with a new glory and dignity, a new purity and innocence.

There is no need of reconciliation. Aloneness is wholeness. But aloneness doesn't mean individuality. You are an individual because of society. When you are totally alone you will not be an individual.

An individual means a part of a society, a unit of a society. When you are in the crowd you are an individual; when you move out of the crowd not only is the crowd dropping behind, the individual also is dropping behind. That individuality was given to you. Individuality and society are two poles of one phenomenon. Alone you are not an individual; the individual has to exist in a pattern of society. It is just as when I said that alone you are neither good nor bad, alone you are neither sage nor sinner, alone you are neither beautiful nor ugly, alone you are neither wise nor foolish. Both the dualities drop. The dichotomy drops.

The individual exists in society; the individual is the unit of society. Alone you are not an individual, so don't think that you will become an individual when alone. No, you will not be an individual. If there is no society how can you be an individual? You will be there, and that aloneness will be wholeness. The ego will drop, and it is the ego that gives you the feeling of individuality.

Alone doesn't mean that you are an individual, alone means that now the dichotomy of society and individual is no longer there. This will give you wholeness. You are not part of anything now. You have become the whole.

This is difficult to express because in language it appears absurd. You cannot imagine how you will not be an individual if you are alone, because if you think and imagine yourself on a hilltop, sitting alone somewhere in a Himalayan cave, you will think of yourself as an individual -- because you don't know what aloneness is. Aloneness means that all thought, all mind, all individuality that was given by society has been left behind. You will become just a space, an emptiness, nobody. Sitting in a Himalayan cave there will be no one who is sitting, just a space.

In their search they reached Buddha who was sitting under a tree meditating. So they said to him, "You must have seen a young, beautiful, nude girl passing by here because this is the only way and it is a full moon night. So you must have seen a beautiful young girl, nude, passing by. Did you see her?"

Buddha opened his eyes and said, "Someone passed by, but I cannot say whether the one who passed was a woman or a man. I cannot say whether the person who passed was beautiful or ugly. And I cannot say whether the person who passed was clothed or naked. Someone did pass -- I heard the foot-steps."

They were amazed and they said, "This is impossible!" Buddha said, "I would not have believed this myself before. When I was a part of society it would have been impossible, but now that I have left society I have left all the conceptions of society as well. Now only nature happens around me. So I heard the sound of someone passing; there was just a sound which reached into my inner space, that is all. Someone passed."

You become a silent inner space. You are not an individual because you are not a mind. To drop the mind solitude is suggested. And with the mind everything drops. A moment comes when you don't know who you are -- and that is the moment from where real knowledge will start.

A moment comes when you forget completely who you are, and all that you knew before is no longer there, all the old leaves have fallen. Now this is the moment, and now there will be an interval for a time being. This interval will be of much anguish because the old has left and the new has not yet come. When the old leaves drop from the tree, the tree will be naked for a few days, just waiting for the new to emerge. The new leaves are coming, they are on the way, the old have left a place. Now that the place is vacant the new are flowing towards the space and sooner or later they will emerge. But you will have to wait. While meditating in aloneness, society will drop, the mind will drop, the ego will drop and there will be a gap. You will have to pass through that gap also. Now the tree is awaiting for the new leaves to come, but one cannot do anything. What can the tree do? Nothing can be done to bring them sooner, they will take their own course.

It is good that the old have dropped -- because now the place is there. Space is there for the new to emerge. Now there will be no barrier.

So there is an autumn of the inner mind. Leaves will drop. It will be painful. You have lived with those old leaves for so long that you will feel that you are losing something. And then there will be a winter of waiting, an inner winter, when you will be nude -- with no leaves, a naked tree against the sky. And you don't know what is going to happen. Now everything has stopped. Now no bird comes to sing on your branches; now no one comes to sit under you, under your shadow to wait, to relax. Now you are not in any way aware of whether you are dead or whether a new life is going to happen to you. This is the gap, the interval.

Christian mystics have called it the dark night of the soul -- before the sunrise. All artificial lights have been put off. The night has become very dark. And the moment nearest to the sunrise will be the darkest.

So there is a winter of the inner soul when there are no leaves, and no birds sing, and no one comes to wait under you and relax. You feel dead. Everything has stopped. All movement is gone. This has to be passed -- because then there will be spring, new leaves will come, new life, new flowers. A totally new dimension will appear within you.

But remember the autumn, remember the winter -- only then is spring possible. The autumn is also part of the spring -- if you can understand -- it is making the way for the spring to happen. So autumn is not against spring, it is just the beginning of it. And the gap is also necessary, because in the gap you become ready. The old has left. You are not tormented by it now, not burdened by it. You are pregnant -- but pregnancy is waiting, the new child is growing. Before it emerges, manifests itself in the world, it will have to hide deep in the unconscious, because every seed has to go deep into darkness, underneath, hidden. Only then does life happen to it. If you put the seed in the sunlight nothing will happen to it. It needs deep darkness, a womb. So there will be winter while you are pregnant: all movement ceases, you just have to carry the burden, consciously, understandingly, lovingly, hoping, praying, waiting.

And then there will be spring. It has been always so. Man is also a tree.

And remember, aloneness is wholeness, they are not contradictory. Ego is part, ego is fragmented, ego cannot be whole, ego is against the whole. In aloneness ego disappears. You become one with the whole and the boundary disappears. When you are really alone you are the cosmos, you are Brahma.

Do either. Either expand yourself so much that nothing remains unrelated to you, then you will disappear; or be so totally alone that nothing remains related to you, then too you will disappear.

You are in the middle, where something is related and something is not related, where someone is a friend and someone is an enemy, where someone belongs to you and someone doesn't belong to you, where there is a choice. You are in the middle. Move to either extreme. Become related to everyone, to everything that exists and you will disappear. It is so tremendous a phenomenon to be related to everything that you cannot exist, you will be flooded. Your ego is so narrow, it can exist with only a few relationships -- and that in those too it is against something, otherwise it could not exist. If you are friendly to everything that is in the world, you disappear. If you want to exist as an ego you can be friendly; but you must also be inimical to someone. You must love someone and you must hate. Then you can exist between these two contradictions -- the ego can exist. Either love everything that is and you will disappear, or hate it and you will disappear. They look contradictory. They are not. The technique is the same. The technique is the same whether you love all or whether you hate all. The hatred of everything is known in the East as VAIRAGYA, as renunciation. This is hatred of everything, withdrawing your love completely, feeling that everything is useless, not worth anything.

If you can hate so totally you will become total -- then you cannot exist. You can exist only when two contradictions are there: love and hate. Between these two you balance. It is just like a man walking on a rope. He has to balance between right and left. If he moves to the left completely he will fall; if he moves completely to the right he will fall. So whether you move to the right or to the left makes no difference. Choose one. You will fall down from the rope.

If you want to be a man on a rope, you have to balance, sometimes to the left, sometimes to the right. And really the balance is a science. Whenever you lean to the left you will immediately have to lean to the right because the left will create the possibility of falling. To counter-balance it you will have to lean to the right, and when you lean to the right the possibility comes that you can fall. So you will have to lean to the left. That is why you go on moving between love and hate, between friend and enemy, between this and that, like and dislike, attraction and repulsion. You are moving on a rope, continuously. If you don't understand this your life will be a total misunderstanding.

I have been studying many, many people and this is one of the basic problems of all. They love, then they hate, and they cannot understand why they hate when they love also. This is how they balance -- and this balancing gives you the ego, your personality. If you really want to be without the ego, choose either extreme. Move to the left, love, and don't balance it by the right -- you will fall from the rope. Or move to the right, hate, and hate totally, and don't move to the left. You will fall from the rope.

Mahavir says be detached from everything -- that is hate. And Krishna says love. That is why Jains can never understand the message of Krishna. Impossible. And Hindus have not taken any note of Mahavir. They have not even mentioned his name in their scriptures. Not a single mention. They have not even taken note because he says be so unattached from everything that it becomes hatred. Krishna says love, and love so deeply that hate falls completely from the mind. Both are the same. They look contradictory to you. They are not.

Either you lean to the left or to the right -- it makes no difference, you will fall to the ground, you will not be on the rope. That is certain. That rope is the ego or the world, the SANSAR, and you are balancing yourself. Many people love me but I know that sooner or later they will balance and they will hate. And when they hate they get disturbed. They should not get disturbed because that is how they can be on the rope. But the cannot hate long. Again they will have to balance.

In the morning you love, in the evening you hate, in the morning you love again. Unless you are ready to leave the ego the balancing will continue. It can continue infinitely -- infinitely it can continue. The rope is endless. But once you get fed up with the whole game, once you feel that this is nonsense -- balancing each time with hate and love and each time moving to the opposite direction again and again; this is nonsense -- then you can move to one, either love or hate, and drop from the rope. And once you drop from the rope, you are enlightened. The balance is SANSAR, the world.

Yes. It is part of it. Everything in nature wants to return to the source. This is one of the laws. Whatsoever happens in-between is irrelevant, every circle comes to the end or to the very beginning -- to the original source.

Man is born out of the womb. Whenever he is in distress or depression, whenever there is too much responsibility in the world, too much burden, things become heavy, he wants to return back to the womb. Hence this attraction, lust, to enter the woman. You cannot enter, you cannot become a child again, so the sexual act becomes a symbolic act. The penetration becomes symbolic. You are again in the womb. That is why sex is so relaxing, so soothing. All the tensions are gone, your mind is unburdened. In this moment at least you are ecstatic. It is a catharsis: you are purged of much dirt.

So sex becomes a release, a relaxation. And the woman becomes a womb. This is part of the attraction, part of the lust. You may not be aware of it, but all that we have created for comfort is womb-like. In a room, closed, at body temperature, silent, you can relax easily. It is womb-like. And if all the qualities of the womb are there, in your sleeping room, you will sleep deeply. Even a clock on the wall helps you. It goes on tick-tock, tick-tock. It is the same as the heart of the mother going tick-tock, tick-tock, for the child in the womb. He goes on listening to it. The tick-tock rhythm is helpful; the mattress, the pillows, all the things we use are really womb-like. Now scientists are of the mind that sooner or later we will make exactly womb-like sleeping chambers, exactly the same, because they will give you the deepest sleep possible.

The ultimate conception of nirvana is also womb-like. In the womb the child is so free, free of all responsibilities. He never comes to know any desire. Before the desire is there it is fulfilled. That is what Hindus call KALPAVRIKSHA. In heaven there are trees under which you sit and when a desire comes to your mind, immediately it is fulfilled. There is no gap, no time gap, between desire, demand, and supply. There is no time gap. When the desire is there it is fulfilled.

This is happening in the womb, it is KALPAVRIKSHA, the wish-fulfilling tree. A child never becomes aware that he is hungry -- before there is hunger, it is fulfilled. The child never becomes aware that he is thirsty -- before there is thirst, the thirst is fulfilled. He never becomes aware of any strife, any strain; he is silently served by the cosmos around him. Psychologists say that that is why the child in the womb cannot be conscious. Because for consciousness, strife is needed, struggle is needed. Consciousness grows only when there is demand, then a time gap, and then supply. That time gap makes you conscious. If there is no time gap, if whatsoever you need is fulfilled immediately, you will fall asleep. So the child is asleep for nine months together -- not for a single moment does he become alert. There is no need to be alert. All needs are fulfilled. There is no pain, no suffering, no tension, so alertness is not possible.

The child sleeps, and when he is born it is such a shock that Freud says that no one ever recovers from it. It is traumatic. It remains like a wound in you. And I think he is right. When the child is born it is a shock! He is thrown out of the Garden of Eden, out of paradise. Everything was so beautiful -- it was so beautiful that he was asleep. It was so comfortable that there was no need to be awake for even a single moment. It was a dream land, and now he has been thrown out forcibly. There is every possibility that the unconsciousness of the child struggles to remain in the womb. It is difficult to say whether it is so or not, but there is every possibility that the unconsciousness of the child struggles to remain in the womb. He creates every difficulty in coming out. Hence the pain and the struggle. He is being thrown out, expelled. And the first moment out of the womb is bound to be the greatest suffering that the child will ever suffer again. Even death will not be such a suffering. Because in the first moment on his own he will have to breathe -- and the world has started with all its worries. Now he will be the center and he will be responsible and he will have to carry his own burden. He is thrown out of the mother. He will have to breathe and to cry when he is hungry. And now nothing is certain: whether when he is hungry he will be fulfilled or not, is not certain. It will depend. He has become dependent. Now for every need he has to struggle. But then we provide every comfort for our children, in every way, so the shock is not so much, not too much. The mother goes on fulfilling his needs immediately.

Because of this the child comes to feel that he is the center of the world and the whole world has to follow him. Just a cry and the whole world has to fall at his feet. This gives a very egoistic beginning. So every child is very egoistic. And then other shocks are bound to follow because this is only the first birth, just the beginning of births. Those who know human phenomena deeply say that the whole life is a continuous birth. There are many births. A day will come when the mother will refuse to breast-feed the child. Now he has to depend on foods. He has to chew it. Responsibility grows. Now the food has to be chewed, digested. The milk was something else. The child was not doing anything, simply sucking. He was a sucker.

Every day responsibilities will grow and he will be thrown away, away from the mother. And the further away he is thrown, the more the world surrounds him. The world is hostile -- the womb was never hostile, it was so friendly,. The world is not friendly: there is competition, and everyone is interested in himself and no one is interested in you. The world is not your mother.

When a child moves to the school he is moving into a hostile world, with traumas and traumas and many shocks. And it goes on. The ultimate break happens when the child falls in love with a woman. He is becoming grown up. This is the last break with the mother; now the last link is broken. But still this man-child will go on behaving as if his wife is his mother. She is not. She is interested in herself, and he is interested in himself. Both are interested in themselves. They are egos. And every husband goes on trying to get the wife to behave like his mother. That is the struggle. She cannot behave like that -- she has her own interests. The mother was totally devoted.

So every man is frustrated with his wife because no wife can be a mother. It is not a question of good and bad wives -- no wife can be a mother. Every man is frustrated. I have not yet seen a man who is not frustrated with his wife. It seems impossible not to be frustrated because the desire is so impossible.

But the husband feels good when he enters the woman, the wife. Again he is in the womb. This is a symbolic penetration. In those few moments he forgets all the worries, the world, everything. He is again a child. Look at a man deep in love with his wife, or beloved -- his face will look like a child. All the tensions have gone. So it is not just coincidence that when in love the wife will call the husband `baby'.

But they were deep in love, just lying together, and the man was a baby at that moment. In all ways mind is seeking a womb-like state again, but you cannot enter the womb, even in a sexual act. You just seem to be.

The only possibility of entering the womb again is not physical, it is psychological, or, on deeper layers, spiritual. If you can be one with the cosmos you will be in the womb again, and this is something which cannot be taken away from you. Then the whole existence becomes a mother. So to me, those religions that have said that God is not a father but a mother, are more scientific. Those who have called their God `father' are not so scientific. Because a father is not a very essential thing. It is just accidental. `Father' has not always existed. The word `mother' is very very much older than `father'. Even the word `uncle' is older than `father'. Because five thousand years back there was no marriage -- groups lived together. The child knew his mother but he didn't know who the father was, so all the male members of the group were uncles. `Uncle' is an older word than `father.' All the males were uncles because there was no certainty who the father was.

Father is a later arrival. When one male dominated a woman and pushed away all the other males, father came into being. And it is not certain whether it is going to remain, because the family is dispersing. It is not something eternal, just institutional. The father seems to be going; in the future he cannot say. For father there is no hope! He will drop. Uncles will again become important. Mother is basic; father is social and can be discarded. It depends on the institution, on the way society thinks. But mother cannot be discarded. So those religions that think of God as the Mother are really deeper -- when you enter God the mother, and become one with it, you have entered the eternal womb. Now there will be no pain, there will be no suffering. Now you will never be thrown out.

When I say that we are concerned with the thread, with the essence, the foundational, the real, by `we' I don't mean you. You as you are, no. But you as you can be, yes. You are double, and that which you are right now is not the real. It is just a false thing, just an image which can be discarded easily. The real you is that which can be known only when all the masks are thrown away. So when I say `we' are concerned with the thread, I include you in your reality -- not as egos, but as souls. You are two: one as you appear to be and one as you are. The appearance is concerned with events, concerned with beads, the superficial. The inner, the one that you are, is not concerned with events: it is not concerned with time at all. It is concerned with the eternal.

The enlightened one laughed and said, "I am not touching your feet. I am touching the feet of the essential, of the soul that is hidden within you. That is already enlightened. You may know it, later on, and when you know, remember. One day you will come to know the reality before which I have bowed down. You don't know it right now, your own treasure you don't know, but I know my treasure and the moment I have known my treasure, I have known everybody else's treasure."

The enlightened one said to Buddha, "The moment I became enlightened I knew the essential reality of all. You can go on deluding yourself, that is up to you, but I can penetrate and I can see the purest light within you. Remember me when you realize it."

And when Buddha became enlightened in his next life, he said to his disciples, "I didn't understand what that awakened one was saying. It was a mystery. But now I can see what he meant. Now the appearance has come. And whatsoever I am now I was at the moment also. He must have bowed to this."

So when I say `we', I include you in your possibility, not in your appearance. Your appearance is just a dream. But you are not aware of it because if you become aware that you are dreaming, the dream has ceased. You are not aware of the real you. If you become aware, the appearance will disappear.

I am aware. So you can understand my difficulty -- I see you as enlightened ones. You are already that. You are just playing the game of being ignorant, just trying to deceive yourself, but whatsoever you do makes no difference to the innermost reality. It remains innocent, pure, absolutely pure. You are here. If I look at your surface, you have to be taught many things. But if I look to your inner, there is no need to teach you anything, there is no need to do anything. That is what I mean when I say, "We are concerned with the thread, the essence, not with the beads, the events, the outer."

Remember this. Some day when you become enlightened you will know what my meaning was when I said `we', and who was included. It is certain that you are not included as you are here, just before me, the appearance, no -- but as you have always been and as you will always be when this curtain is thrown away, when these clouds disappear and the sun rises. I can see the sun behind the clouds.