Prabhaker

Meditation needs great work. It is arduous, it is an uphill task. To remain non-meditative is easy in a way. You have not to do anything about it, you are already non-meditative, everybody is born non-meditative. But to become meditative really needs great courage, great determination, great patience, because to go beyond the mind is the most complicated phenomenon. We don't know anything except the mind.

There are no smileys in these posts, can I assume these posts are serious ?

Love happens, when your meditation is not an activity. When meditation is not a separate process. when meditation is simply the name for life lived with awareness. An individual is awakened the day when he begins to live meditatively. So understand well that meditation is not just one of life’s innumerable activities. It is not just one link in the chain of man’s endless doings. If you are living twenty-three hours a day without awareness, and only one hour with awareness, then you will never attain it. It is very arduous to attain.

When mystics talk about bliss, they are not referring towards happiness. In Indian languages we have different words for bliss and happiness.

You can force your mind to be still by practice. You can start living in isolation, do minimal physical activity, when there is nothing to agitate your mind, naturally you will feel silence, you will experience a difference. This meditation can be disturbed easily.

Bliss is not happiness, happiness has excitement in it, bliss is serene, cool , calm. Bliss is ecstasy without excitement.

When you meditation does not brings blissfulness and love, it is not true meditation. It is easy to meditate if you don’t want to be blissful — it is very easy to meditate. If you want just to be blissful and you don’t want to be in meditation, that too is easy. The rarest combination is meditation plus bliss. Meditation minus bliss is easy; bliss minus meditation is easy. But meditation minus bliss is not true meditation and bliss minus meditation is not true bliss either. They are true only when they are together. Many people have tried to meditate without bliss because it is simple, less complex. You have to take only one work upon yourself: that you have to still your mind. And you can force your mind to be stilled, but you will become sad, you will have a long face. You can meditate, force yourself to be silent, but you will the real thing. And you can also try to be blissful; that means you can pretend, you can practice, you can rehearse bliss. You can always try to be blissful, smiling, at least looking happy. Slowly slowly, it becomes so practiced. You can practice it. You can practice blissfulness too, but a practiced blissfulness is false. Anything practiced is false, remember it — never forget it. Things have to be spontaneous and natural, not practiced, not cultivated. Cultivated blissfulness is only a mask. You are smiling, but the smile is not in the heart. You are showing joy, but you are not joyous. Bliss PLUS meditation. It is difficult of course, arduous, to manage both. Why? — because they seem to be polar opposites. Meditation means silence and bliss means dance. Meditation means stillness and bliss means a song. Meditation means escaping from the world and bliss means sharing with the world. Meditation you can do in a Himalayan cave, but to be blissful you will have to come back to the world. Bliss needs to be shared; it exists only in sharing. It can’t exist when you are alone, it disappears. It is a communion. Meditation can exist in aloneness and bliss can exist in togetherness. But when both exist then you have to learn a totally new way of life.

If we collect the opinions of the all blind men and put all those opinions together, and say, "This is the right thing. I have made the synthesis, this is the truth." This is not the way to find the truth. By putting all blind men's opinions together, you don't arrive at the real elephant. The real elephant needs EYES to be seen. Blind men are feeling parts of the elephant. And the elephant of life is really huge, enormous.

I was talking about silence of mind. You learn a meditation technique to make your mind more silent. When meditation happens , it happens in silence of mind. If you mind is chattering , and you are watching your thoughts, it means meditation has not happened to you. You are still doing a technique to grow towards meditation.

When I was living in society I have uncountable friends, but now I live alone.

Truth liberates. Nothing else liberates. If truth can't give you freedom, blissfulness, love, it is a deception.

I have experienced life in all possible ways, I have seen all heaven and hell of life, that's why I am seeking eternal truth.

Jesus must be rolling over in his grave !

I hope, one day you will learn.

Why celibacy ? Is their God a sadist ?

Then why prophets, popes, priests, nuns, monks remained unmarried, were they not intelligent enough to live happily in a married life ? or their God becomes unhappy when they live happily ?

@Loreena Nobody has courage to speak the truth, marriage is a social need, so nobody speaks about it honestly. Society don't want rebels,society wants slaves, which can be manipulated easily.

Because enlightenment is a death,and we are not ready to die, it is not a physical death every-time , but it is always a psychological death.

If love is dies, then what remains ? Then marriage is a permanent kind of prostitution; deep down, it is not different. Hence marriage and prostitution have both existed together.If you go into it, it is marriage that has created prostitution. And prostitution will never disappear from the world unless marriage disappears; it is the shadow of marriage. In fact prostitutes have been saving marriage. It is a safety measure so the man can go once in a while, just for a change, to any other woman, a prostitute, and save his marriage and its permanency.

Marriage is a hell, but sometimes people need it. What to do? So I have to tell them to get into marriage. They need to pass through the hell of it, and they cannot understand the hell of it unless they pass through it. I am not saying that in marriage love cannot grow; it can grow, but there is no necessity for it. I am not saying that in love marriage cannot grow; it can grow, but there is no necessity, no logical necessity in it.

Sex can be a need, love can be a need, living in a bondage using law, court, police can't be a need.

Marriage is something against nature. Marriage is an imposition, an invention of man – certainly out of necessity, but now even that necessity is out of date. It was a necessary evil in the past, but now it can be dropped. And it should be dropped: man has suffered enough for it, more than enough. It is an ugly institution for the simple reason that love cannot be legalized. Love and law are contradictory phenomena. Love is creative, marriage is destructive. But love is not dependable: this moment it may be there and the next moment gone. And man wants permanent things; he is obsessed with permanent things. He wants security, safety, he wants to cling. Hence love is not reliable, so he created marriage. Once two persons are tied together freedom is lost and anger arises. When freedom is lost everything becomes ugly. Love means that freedom remains intact: marriage means that freedom has been dropped. You have bargained for permanence, for security, and you have paid for it with freedom. Jesus. Mahavira, Lao Tzu Chuang Tzu, they all remained unmarried. Buddha left his family , they lived blissfully, I think there was no internet two thousand years ago.

@Sidi Only long distance relationship can work. The happiest lovers are those who never meet. One of the great poets of India, Rabindranath Tagore, has written a book. THE LAST POEM is the name of the book, but it is not a book of poetry; it is a novel. The hero and heroine are in deep love, they want to get married, but the uniqueness of it is that the heroine has agreed to marry him only on one condition: that they will not live in the same house. They are very rich people and the woman suggests, "You can make a house on the other side of the lake. We will not invite each other; we will be meeting accidentally. Once in a while I may be boating, you may be boating; or I may be walking around the lake or you may be walking, but I want it to be accidental - and once in a while, not every day. I want to long for it, I want to wait for it, and I don't want to destroy it by having too much of it. I love you." The man cannot understand. He says, "This is nonsense. If you love me... what you are suggesting, no lover has ever suggested. Lovers don't want to be separate even for a single moment. And what kind of love is this? - that I will be living far away on the other side of the lake. It is miles distant and you cannot invite me, I cannot invite you. We are married but we have to meet like strangers once in a while by chance, not by arrangement." The woman said, "If you cannot understand it, then I am not for you." What the woman is saying is perfectly true. If every lover had understood it, life would have been a very joyful experience. But lovers cling; they want to be together twenty-four hours a day. And they destroy something beautiful because they don't give a rest. It becomes a burden rather than a joy.

Every seeker is in this situation: you don't know what you are seeking, you don't know what the goal is, you don't know where you are going, why you are going. A deep urge is there, that is right: a deep thirst is there, that is right. But you have never tasted that for which this thirst exists. You move, you grope -- when suddenly it happens, you will be troubled. Jesus said : When he finds he will become agitated, when he become agitated, he will be astounded, and he will reign over the all. Either we can trust Jesus and other masters, or we can turn our back and escape. It is a great gamble. When we grow spiritually, and don't escape from sufferings, we transcend them. Life becomes more and more blissful. So, we can trust enlightened masters that infinity contains blissfulness, not suffering.

In life, only mad people ask for perfection. The perfectionist is another name for someone who is getting ready to become mad. Relax into your being. Don’t have any ideals, don’t try to make something out of yourself, don’t try to improve upon God. You are perfect as you are. Perfectionism is a neurosis. It is an illness. And the more you try to become perfect, the more frustrated you will become. The goal of perfection has led the whole of humanity towards madness; the earth has almost become a madhouse. A perfectionist is not only a perfectionist about himself, he is about others also. A man who is hard on himself is bound to be hard on others. His demands are impossible. Man has been conditioned down the centuries for goals, destinations, purposes, meanings -- that's how man has lived hitherto, with the goal-oriented ideology. That's why you go on thinking in terms of goal or destination. It is not you: it is the society that goes on thinking in you, through you; it is your parents, it is your priests, it is your politicians, it is your pedagogues, who go on thinking through you, and you are identified with them. You don't know that you are separate. The more utilitarian a person is, the less he is fulfilled, the less he is blissful. The more utilitarian the approach- the more one is in business life-the less he is living, the less he is ecstatic. The part of the mind that cannot be made useful in the utilitarian world has been denied. The utilitarian life is necessary but at a great cost: you have lost the festivity of life. Life becomes a festivity, a celebration, if all your potentialities come to a flowering; then life is a ceremony. Spirituality means transforming life into a celebration. The dimension of spirituality is the dimension of the festive, the nonutilitarian. Death is the culmination of life. In death the whole life is summed up, in death you arrive. Let me tell you in this way: whatsoever your life is, death reveals only that. If you have been miserable in life, death reveals misery. Death is a great revealer. If you have been happy in your life, death reveals happiness.