EgO

To be ordinary is the greatest virtue -- because when you are just ordinary, nothing to claim, of this world or that, the ego disappears. The ego feeds on imbalance, the ego feeds on extremes. The ego lives on the polarities -- in the middle it disappears. And in every area, in every direction of life, remember this: just stop in the middle and soon you will find the mind has stopped, the ego has stopped. Nothing to claim, it disappears. And when it disappears you have become virtuous. Now the door is open for the divine. In the middle you meet him; at the extremes you miss.

Hell is for all extraordinary people. They may be in politics, in art, literature -- wherever they are, hell is for all geniuses, for all extraordinary people, all egoists. Ego is the hell, it gives you suffering -- because unnecessarily you start conflicting with everything. You are never at ease, unease becomes your style of life; with the ego you will always be at unease. Ego is a discomfort; it is a nail in the shoe, it continuously pinches, but you want to be extraordinary.

FrustratioN

Because there is so much expectation. Expect, and there will be frustration. Don’t expect, and there will be no frustration. Frustration is a byproduct: the more you expect, the more you create your own frustration. So frustration is not really the problem, it is the result. Expectation is the problem.

Frustration is just a shadow which follows expectation. If you don’t expect even for a single moment, if you are in a state of mind where there is no expectation, then it is simple. You ask a question and the answer comes; there is a fulfillment. But if you ask with any expectations you will be frustrated by the answer.

Everything we do, we do with expectations. If I love someone, an expectation enters without my even knowing it. I begin to expect love in return. I have not yet loved, I have not grown into love yet, but the expectation has come and now it will destroy the whole thing. Love creates more frustration than anything else in the world because, with love, you are in a utopia of expectation. You have not even been on the journey yet and already you have begun to think of the return home.

The more you expect love, the more difficult it will be for love to flow back to you. If you expect love from someone the other will feel it as bondage; it will be a duty for him, something which he has to do. And when love is a duty it cannot fulfill anyone because love as a duty is dead.

Love can only be play, not a duty. Love is freedom and duty is bondage, a heavy burden that one has to carry. And when you have to carry something, the beauty of it is lost. The freshness, the poetry, everything is lost, and the other will immediately feel that it is only something dead which has been given. Love with expectation and you have killed love. It is abortive – your love will be a dead child. Then there will be frustration.

It is very difficult to find a person who is not frustrated. And if you find such a person, know that he is a religious person. It makes no difference what the object, the cause, the source of frustration may be. One can be frustrated because of power, because of prestige, because of wealth. One can be frustrated because of love. One can even be frustrated because of God.

You want God to come to you. You begin to meditate and expectation comes in. I have seen people who meditate for fifteen minutes each day for seven days, and then they come to me and say, ”I am meditating and I have still not realized the divine. The whole effort seems to be useless.” They have devoted fifteen minutes to meditation for seven days and still God is nowhere to be seen. ”I am still no nearer to God, so what should I do now?” Even in the search for the divine we have expectations.

Expectation is the poison. That’s why there is frustration; it has to be so. Realize the falsity, the poisonousness of the expecting mind. By and by, if you can become aware of it, the expectations will drop and there will be no frustration.

So don’t ask the question, ”Why is there so much frustration in the world?” Ask ”Why am I so frustrated?” Then the whole dimension changes. When someone wonders why the world is so frustrated, there is again an expectation that the world could be less frustrated. But whether the world is frustrated or not, you will remain frustrated.

Isn't Tantra a way of IndulgencE?

IT IS NOT. It is the ONLY way to get out of indulgence. It is the only way to get out of sexuality. No other way has ever been helpful for man; all other ways have made man more and more sexual. Sex has not disappeared. The religions have made it only more poisoned. It is still there – in a poisoned form. Yes, guilt has arisen in man, but sex has not disappeared. It CANNOT disappear because it is a biological-reality. It is existential; it cannot simply disappear by repressing it. It can disappear only when you become so alien that you can release the energy encapsulated in sexuality – not by repression is the energy released, but by understanding.

And once the energy is released, out of the mud the lotus.... The lotus has to come UP out of the mud, it has to go higher, and repression takes it deeper into the mud. It goes on repressing it. What you have done up to now, the whole humanity, is repressing sex in the mud of the unconscious. Go on repressing it, sit on top of it; don’t allow it to move; kill it by fasting, by discipline, by going to a cave in the Himalayas, by moving to a monastery where a woman is not allowed. There are monasteries where a woman has never entered for hundreds of years; there are monasteries where only nuns have lived and a man has never entered. These are ways of repressing. AND they create more and more sexuality and more and more dreams of indulgence.

No, Tantra is not a way of indulgence. It is the only way of freedom. Tantra says: Whatsoever is has to be understood and through understanding changes occur of their own accord. So listening to me or listening to Saraha, don’t start thinking that Saraha is supporting your indulgence. You will be in bad shape if you accept that.

Indulgence is suicidal – as suicidal as repression. These are the two extremes that Buddha says to avoid. One extreme is repression, the other extreme is indulgence. Just be in the middle; neither be repressive, nor be indulgent. Just be in the middle, watchful, alert, aware. It is your life! Neither does it have to be repressed, nor does it have to be wasted – it has to be understood. It is your life – take care of it! love it! befriend it! If you can befriend your life, it will reveal many mysteries to you, it will take you to the very door of God.

But Tantra is not indulgence at all. The repressive people have always thought that Tantra is indulgence; their minds are so much obsessed. For example: a man who goes to a monastery and lives there without ever seeing a woman, how can he believe that Saraha is not indulging when he lives with a woman? Not only lives but practises strange things: sitting before the woman naked, the woman is naked, and he goes on watching the woman; or even while making love to the woman he goes on watching.

Now, you cannot watch his watching; you can see only that he is making love to a woman. And if you are repressive, your whole repressed sexuality will bubble up. You must start going mad! And you will project all that you have repressed in yourself on Saraha – and Saraha is not doing anything like that; he is moving in a totally different dimension. He is not really interested in the body: he wants to see what this sexuality is; he wants to see what this appeal of orgasm is; he wants to see what exactly orgasm is; he wants to be meditative in that peak moment, so that he can find the clue and the key... maybe there is the key to open the door of the Divine.

In fact, it is there. God has hidden the key in your sexuality. On the one hand, through your sex, life survives; that is only partial use of your sex energy. On another hand, if you move with full awareness in your sex energy, you will find that you have come across a key that can help you to enter into eternal life. One small aspect of sex is that your children will live. The other aspect, a higher aspect, is that you can live in eternity. Sex energy is life energy.

Ordinarily we don’t move further than the porch, we never go into the palace. Saraha is trying to go into the palace. Now, the people who came to the king, they must have been suppressed people as all people are suppressed. The politician and the priest HAVE to teach suppression,. because it is only through suppression that people are driven insane. And you can rule insane people more easily than sane people. And when people are insane in their sex energy, they start moving in other directions – money they will start moving towards, or power, or prestige. They have to show their sex energy somewhere or other; it is boiling there – they have to release it in some way or other. So money-madness or power-addiction, they become their releases.

This whole society is sex-obsessed. If sex-obsession disappears from the world, people will not be money-mad. Who will bother about money? And people will not be bothered by power. Nobody will like to become a president or a prime minister – for what?! Life is so tremendously beautiful in its ordinariness, it is so superb in its ordinariness, why should one want to become somebody? By being nobody it is so delicious – nothing is missing. But if you destroy people’s sexuality and make them repressed, so much is missing that they are always hankering: somewhere there must be joy – here it is missing.

Sex is one of the activities given by nature and God in which you are thrown again and again to the present moment. Ordinarily you are never in the present – except when you are making love, and then too for a few seconds only. Tantra says one has to understand sex, to decode sex. If sex is so vital that life comes out of it, then there must be something more to it. That something more is the key towards Divinity, towards God.

MusiC

In fact, the greatest music in the world is nothing but an echo of the inner music. Whenever a musician comes closer to that music, great music is born. Only very few have reached close to it: a Tansen, a Baiju Bawara, a Beethoven, a Mozart, a Wagner. Only very few have come close to it, but whenever some music comes close to it, resembles it, it has something great in it. The modern trends in music are far away from it: they are more noisy, less musical. Jazz and other music is more sexual, less spiritual. They are loud. They keep your mind occupied, certainly; they are so loud that you have to remain occupied.

MarriagE

There is a tremendous desire and longing for love, but love needs great awareness. Only then can it reach its highest climax -- and that highest climax IS marriage. It has nothing to do with law. It is a merging of two hearts into totality. It is the functioning of two persons in synchronicity -- that is marriage.
One should marry only when one is wise enough. Marriage is not for young people. For young people is to fool around. Marriage is for those who have experienced life in many ways, who have seen all the colors, the whole spectrum of it, and are now ready to settle.

MasterpiecE

There has never been a person like you before, there is not anybody else like you right now in the whole world, and there will never be anybody like you. Just see how much respect God has paid to you. You are a masterpiece — unrepeatable, incomparable, utterly unique. Even the hardest heart, the rock-like heart, will start melting in gratitude.