When you become centered, suddenly there is great freedom because you know you are not the mind and you are not the body.
Half of humanity has been accepting the inner world but denying the outer world.
Real health has to happen somewhere inside you, in your subjectivity, in your consciousness, because consciousness knows no birth, no death. It is eternal. To be healthy in consciousness means: first, to be awake; second, to be harmonious; third, to be ecstatic; and fourth, to be compassionate.
The idea of vegetarianism is of immense value; it is based on great reverence for life.
I don’t teach vegetarianism; it is a by-product of meditation. Wherever meditation has happened, people have become vegetarian, always, for thousands of years.
Vegetarianism should not be anything moral or religious. It is a question of aesthetics: one’s sensitivity, one’s respect, one’s reverence for life.
Vegetarianism is a conscious effort, a deliberate effort, to get out of the heaviness that keeps you tethered to the earth so that you can fly – so that the flight from the alone to the alone becomes possible.
Life in its infinite forms exists as one organic unity. We are part of it: the part should feel reverence for the whole. That is the idea of vegetarianism. It simply means: don’t destroy life. It simply means: life is God – avoid destroying it, otherwise you will be destroying the very ecology.
That is the ultimate synthesis – when Zorba becomes a Buddha. I am trying to create here not Zorba the Greek but Zorba the Buddha.
Zorba is beautiful, but something is missing. The earth is his, but the heaven is missing. He is earthly, rooted, like a giant cedar, but he has no wings. He cannot fly into the sky. He has roots but no wings.
The experience of life is very bitter. it is sweet only in imagination. In its reality it is very bitter. He escaped from the palace and the women and the riches and the luxury and everything.
Live in this world, because this world gives a ripening, maturity, integrity. The challenges of this world give you a centering, an awareness. And that awareness becomes the ladder. Then you can move from Zorba to Buddha.
The other world is hidden in this world. The Buddha is asleep in the Zorba. It has to be awakened. And nobody can awaken you except life itself.
I am here to help you to be total wherever you are; in whatsoever state you are – live that state totally. It is only in living a thing totally that one transcends it.
Except for our bodies there are no other temples in the world.
Meditation is the only magic that can help you to be free from the mind, can help you to be free from yourself, your past and all the burden of the past.
If you want to possess things – money; if you want to possess yourself – meditation. And if you possess yourself, money loses all meaning.
Your mind is a constant traffic of thoughts, and it is always rush hour, day in, day out. Meditation means to watch the movement of thoughts in the mind.
Meditation is nothing but coming to terms with your inner emptiness: recognizing it, not escaping; living through it, not escaping; being through it, not escaping. Then suddenly the emptiness becomes the fullness of life.
Your love will deepen as your meditation deepens, and vice-versa: as your meditation blossoms, your love will also blossom.