Remember always that the ultimate value is meditation, so anything you do, do meditatively; and all things can be done in a meditative way.
Parents appreciate the child who agrees; they condemn the child who disagrees.
Every child is so helpless – just to survive he has to be political, he has to accept whatsoever the parents are saying.
Freedom is the basic thing. Consciousness grows in freedom and starts dying, becomes paralyzed and crippled, when things are forced. And up to now, this has been done. This is the greatest crime that parents have always committed against children. They go on forcing the child.
The world is not religious because religion is imposed upon us. The parents are in a hurry to impose; the church, the state, the country – everybody is in a hurry to impose a certain religion on the child. How foolish! How stupid! Religion needs maturity, great understanding, before one can choose.
Live each moment as if you were going to die the next, and then there will be a great intensity and a great passion. You will be aflame with life. That being aflame is what being divine is to me.
Intelligence is the capacity to be in the present. The more you are in the past or are in the future, the less intelligent you are. Intelligence is the capacity to be here-now, to be in this moment and nowhere else. Then you are awake.
When you are in the present without thinking, you are for the first time spiritual.
This is the sleep: being absent, being not present to the present moment, being somewhere else.
The reality consists only of now, the present. It has nothing to do with the past and nothing to do with the future. It is so concentrated in this moment that if you can be in this moment, all that you are seeking and searching will be fulfilled. This moment is the door to the divine.
Be in relaxation a few moments. It can be any kind of situations – swimming in the river, relax with the river, or sunning on the beach, relax with the sun – anything. Life is full of opportunities.
Religion is not a result of something that you practice. Religion enters in you any moment you relax. Religion is a flowering of relaxation, not a result of practicing. Remember the difference because when you practice you become more tense.
Nobody asked you about being born, nobody is going to ask you when the time comes for you to be taken away. Then why be worried? Birth happened to you; death will happen to you; who are you to come in between?
Life exists without rules; games cannot exist without rules. So real religion is always without rules; only false religion has rules, because false religion is a game.
Be happy! and meditation will follow. Be happy, and religion will follow. Happiness is a basic condition. People become religious only when they are unhappy – then their religion is pseudo. Try to understand why you are unhappy.
Science is concerned about quantity; religion is concerned about quality. Religion is concerned with the art of how to live life and how to die life.
Sadness is not necessarily something bad. Don’t judge it as a bad or negative quality.
Only people who want to be somewhere, somebody, have to suffer the sadness of failure. But a person who never wants to be anybody, never wants to be anywhere else, cannot suffer the sadness of failure – he is always successful, just like me.
Remember, if you have not known sadness together with happiness you have not known anything yet. Then your happiness is superficial; your sadness is also superficial. Then you have been living on the surface; then you have known only the waves; you have not known the depth of the ocean that you are.
Why do people hanker for the home? – security, safety. But in the name of security and safety, they don’t make homes, they make prisons – and they are the jailed and they are the jailers, but because they have the keys in their own hands, they think they are free.