Will there ever come a day when you are finished with the activities of your so-called life, and you can come and say, “Right now I am ready”?
It will never come, because life is full of complexity. It never begins, it never ends. You are always in the middle. It is like reading a novel from the middle. The beginning part is missing and the end part is missing — you know only the middle. That is the mystery of life!
Try some time reading a novel from the middle and you will find that even an ordinary novel becomes very mysterious. Intrigued you will be, and many times you will be tempted to look back, “What is the beginning?” But resist the temptation, go on reading in the middle. That’s how it is. We are always in the middle of life. Life has been there before you ever entered into the stream, and life will be there when you are gone. You will know only a few glimpses in the middle. Life is an eternal continuum. Hence you cannot ever complete things, but you want to avoid.
Live a life of sheer joy and ecstasy — that is the only way to live. Every other way is only to commit a slow suicide. That’s what happens when you are too much interested in goals: today goes by without being lived, and tomorrow remains important — and tomorrow never comes.
Whenever it comes it is today. And you learn a wrong habit of losing that which is and of thinking of something which is not.
Every day it will happen: each tomorrow will come as today, and you will not be interested in it and you will be interested in the tomorrow, and the tomorrow is never going to come. This is how people are simply wasting away. You say, “I keep thinking of my life in terms of a goal or destination, waiting to wake up some day and find myself enlightened.”
Why “some day?” Why not now? Postponing is a way of avoiding. Don’t you want to be enlightened right now? You are afraid of enlightenment, just as everybody else is afraid. But nobody wants to accept that “I am a coward.” Nobody wants to accept the fact that “I would like to sleep a little longer because I am seeing beautiful dreams, colorful dreams.”
Enlightenment is not like money, is not like political power. It is not like anything that you know in life — it is absolutely unlike anything that you have known or will ever know. It is unique in the sense that nothing like it exists in existence.
No other positive method is needed — just an insight that your whole mind is a misery-creating factory, that manufactures misery and nothing else. Once you have seen it through and through, that very seeing becomes a transformation. You simply turn in. You drop the mind, or it drops off its own accord because you have seen the futility of it. And even if for a single moment the mind is not there, enlightenment is there.
A little intelligence, a candle of light inside you watching, silently and seeing what the mind is doing, and slowly your intelligence will become stronger and mind becomes impotent as intelligence grows. Enjoy life. Act, but in a relaxed way. The greatest art in life is to learn how to act in a relaxed way. Action is a must — you cannot live without action.
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