Your innocence is your own experience

 

There is a value of innocence in life. Remember those moments as a child when you were very happy? Then you were innocent.

In those moments when you were in deep love, you were innocent. In those moments when you felt very good, relaxed, you were innocent. It is a quality in you.

Love, beauty, truth are all beyond proof. Nobody can prove them. Nobody can prove God is. If someone tries to prove that God is, they are doing something disastrous.

Whatever you can prove, you can disprove also. God is beyond our proof and disproof. God is an experience. Your God only you can know. Your beauty only you can see.

Can anyone else have your experience of beauty? Impossible. It is the same with innocence. Your innocence is your innate experience.

Walking the path from intimacy to dispassion

 

When true intimacy, the feeling of wanting to love more, give more, gets turned around, then it says, “I have loved enough. What did I get in return? I have loved so much what did I get? I have not been cared for”. These demands will start. 

When you switch your direction, the struggle begins. True intimacy is recognising the flow of the current and joyfully floating with it. The current is there. You don’t have to stroke. You don’t have to move your hand and feet. It carries you and you float. Effortlessly. Taking everything for granted is true intimacy.

Observe your mind. What is happening in there? Constantly likes and dislikes. Wanting and not wanting, I want this, I don’t want this. Constant debate, fluctuation, cynicism, criticism, apathy, dejection. Do you see all these fluctuations? Are you aware of these things happening in the mind? For a while, throw off everything. Just sit. What is happening?

That is dispassion, centering. In true intimacy there is dispassion. Have you observed after laughing a lot and being very excited that excitement cannot be held in your mind? It feels awful. You want to throw off the excitement and just be quiet for a while. Have you had this experience? Wisdom dawns the day you recognise that joy is painful.

 

Your dispassion begins on that day when you notice joy is disturbing, exciting. You want to be a little quiet and calm. We have lost that sensitivity. That is why there is so much craving for joy, for something bigger”. Something must be better for me, something must give me more happiness”.

This is feverishness. We move from one feverishness to another. The pain of sorrow is feverishness. The pain of joy is feverishness. So you move from this feverishness to that feverishness and from that feverishness to this feverishness. It is a constant struggle.

Dispassion is that delicate balance that is beyond both joy and sorrow. In dispassion any great joy can come up and it will not shake you. That is enlightenment. Even if you are offered the heavens, you won’t move an inch from your seat. That is attainment. Dispassion is the secret. You can lean techniques and you can learn to meditate.

You can learn many things, but dispassion you cannot learn. It can only blossom in your life in time or with the presence of your teacher, your master. There is no other way dispassion can blossom. You cannot get in books. Only experience will teach you. The highest wisdom that can ever be achieved on this planet is dispassion. Anything can be shaken, but not dispassion.

Anything can be bought, but not dispassion. If you are dispassionate, if you are centered, nothing whatsoever can shake you. The only rich one is the one who is dispassionate. Otherwise you can be tempted, you can be shaken.

If someone offers you two million dollars and tells you, “Do this, do that” you will move from your position. But that person can’t move one who is dispassionate. Suppose someone comes and says to you, “You tell this lie and I’ll give you 2 million dollars”. Just imagine what you would do. Think of it. Your mind will put forward hundred and one justifications for whatever you will do.

 

You’ll say, “Okay, So what. I’ll say this and it may be for good and if I get two million dollars, I’ll use it for the benefit of the whole humankind. I don’t want it for myself, but I can do some good work for the whole world”. 

A prostitute was once asked by a priest to tell some lies about Kabir, the saint in India. She was a very conscientious woman and she wouldn’t speak a lie. They told her, “You do nothing. When Kabir gives satsang, you go to him and hug him. Say, “Oh, my dear, it have not met you in all these days’. You just say this”. So people tempted her and made her say this for 2 gold coins. When she did that, Kabir said, “Oh, I have been waiting for you. I have been here all the time. Where have you been?” Now this threw many people off their balance.

Kabir was a man who gave sermons, satsangs every night, so beautiful, so wonderful. The Brahma jnana knowledge was dawning on earth in a weaver, someone who was not literate, an innocent man. Many people left Kabir after this incident because their intimacy was just with the words, it was not true intimacy and had arisen because of passion.

Your passion is the cause of your rebellious mood and disinterestedness. The moment you become dispassionate, there is nothing but love. There is nothing but intimacy.

Many flavours of love, intimacy

 

In true intimacy all modes and all moods are involved, are included. What I mean by love is not always goody-goody and saying nice things. It is sometimes saying unpleasant things too. That is also love.

Getting angry sometimes is also love. Love is fighting, too. It is all modes. Many years back, when I was travelling abroad, I got a phone call from India. They said, “Come back quickly. When you return, we will lock you up and not let you go”. They were literally fighting with me on the phone. They wanted me home in the months of April, May, all the months. That is also out of love. Demand, with awareness, is also out of love.

You are trying to swim against the current. Still, the current is so huge, so big, you float in the same direction. You are struggling in the opposite direction, but you are moving in the same direction.

Do you see that? Everything in you is arising out of love only, because love is there. Intimacy is recognising this direction and being with the direction, feeling that you are totally loved.

If you doubt whether you are being loved or not, your capacity to love goes down. You will stop loving. You demand love, but how much have you been giving, contributing?

If you feel you have been contributing enough, loving enough, then you are not loving enough, because in love you always feel inadequacy. Any amount you do, you feel that it is inadequate. True intimacy always feels “I have not loved enough. I have not done enough”.

The biggest obstacle to true intimacy - your mind

 

Take it for granted that everybody in creation, everything in creation loves you, because everything has come out of love and goes back to love and remains in love.

Then you are with the flow of current. You are with the flow of river. If you don’t see that, then you are against the current. The you will not be loving. When somebody is swimming against the current, what does it mean? The whole creation is moving towards love. It is in love. But the one who is swimming against the current is not in love.

You are already intimate. How intimate can you be? You cannot be any more intimate. Your wanting to be intimate, wanting to have more intimacy, is the block. In looking out there for intimacy, you are swimming against the current. That brings you strain, frustration, anger. In creation everything is intimate, everything feels experiences intimacy.

Everything other than human beings, that is. The human mind which is stressed and tense only judges, discriminates, love this, doesn’t love that. The mind makes a hundred boundaries, ifs and buts, doubts, and then removes itself from existence. This removal from the flow of existence is called separation. Oneness with existences is intimacy.

What is true intimacy?

 

True intimacy is one-sided and non-judgmental. It starts from inside. The test for truth is to kick it. What is true will come back to you. If it comes back to you, it is yours. What goes away with a kick was never yours. 

The nature of everything in creation is to come back home. Everything goes back to its origin. A plant comes from the soil and it goes back to the soil. Water comes up from the ocean and it goes back to the ocean. Coming back to the source is the nature of everything in creation. We are innocent when we are born. When we become very old, we become like that again, innocent.

A child has little capacity to comprehend and communicate. When it goes through life and becomes an old man, it completes the circle, whether by choice or not by choice. Those who live long enough become like a child again. If you have ever spoken to people who are 95 or 100 years old, you will feel that they are like children now. They can’t understand or communicate. Like children they get stuck on one thing.

They say something and they stick to it. Children say, “Pa, pa, pa, pa”. In same way old people also repeat. When children do it, it is more joyful, although sometimes the mother gets angry at the children. But when old people do it you feel frustrated because your way of looking at a child and an old man is totally different. Your expectation from both of them is totally different.

So your own expectations cause irritations in you. Your own judgements cause irritations in you. True intimacy is non-judgmental. It is not looking at whether the old person loves you or not, whether the other person loves you or not, whether the other person treats you well or not. That is none of your business. If I want to be intimate with somebody, I take it for granted that they feel they love me. When you doubt whether the other person loves you or not, then your love for the other person goes down.

There is no way you can know the love of another person. If you base your perception only on the expression of love, you are mis-lead. Someone may say, “Oh, you are so wonderful, I love you so much”. And if you think that they mean that, or if you think someone who doesn’t say, “Oh I love you so much”, doesn’t love you, then you are mistaken. Action does not always represent the truth of the state of being.

In true intimacy you stop looking at the act and you Start being in love. So if you have determined to love somebody, do not even think whether they love you are not. You love them. That is enough. If they kick you to see whether the love in you is true or not, then you should have more happiness. Then, also you give love back. True love is coming back to the self. That is true intimacy.

Understanding aversions and cravings

 

I wouldn't say you are always connected to the earth, I would say you are part of this earth. Have you ever thought, as you sat at your dining table and took a loaf of bread in your hand, "This is my body? This bread that is going inside me will become the cells in my body. This bread is my future body. It is just a matter of some time?" 

You have a cup of milk in front of you. Have you ever thought, "This is part of my body? This milk is going to be my blood? Is it not true? When Jesus started the mass, he told people This is my flesh. This is my blood".

He meant, "This entire creation is my body". Feel one with everything. The food you eat, you are part of already! Before eating it, you are part of it. That is your flesh already. Jesus told them, "Don't lament. Don't think I am just in this body. This bread is my body. All the food in the world is my body because this food becomes my body".

What is the big thing about the body? When this body goes, another body will come because the food is there always. The food creates the body. If you eat food with all awareness, I am you. This consciousness, awareness that is me, that you feel is so beautiful is in you too. You don't lack a thing that I have.

This body is not my flesh. This bread is my flesh. This flesh is this bread. Know the difference between physical body and the flesh, and this entire world becomes your body.

That is cosmic consciousness. All are mine. It is all like my own finger. Everybody is part of me. When you know everyone is part of you, then all your cravings disappear, all your aversions disappear. Your cravings come because you think you don't have. Your aversions come because you don't want to have what you think you have. 

Do you see the irony of it? When you know everything already belongs to you, your cravings subside. When you know whatever you are averse to is part of you, then aversion disappears. And total synthesis happens and unity dawns. Even the word unity is not the right word. That also indicates a duality. If you can say one, there have to be two. 

So I say, language is inadequate to express any truth about existence. It is better to keep silent. This understanding of cravings and aversions applied to the situation of daily life becomes a valuable spiritual practice.