Finding Potential Within

River Ganga, Haridwar, India

When you are silent your potential speaks to you, whispers to you. And those whisperings are absolutely categorical – there are no ifs and buts. The heart knows nothing of its and buts, it simply says that this is your destiny: become a painter or a poet or a sculptor or a dancer or a musician. It simply says to you that this is how you will be fulfilled. It starts directing you. The function of the master is to help you to be silent so that you can hear your own inner whisperings and then your life starts moving through an inner discipline. So I don’t give you any outer discipline. I help you to rediscover your insight; then you are free, then you move in freedom. So sannyas is not a bondage, it is not a cult, it is not a creed. It is a declaration of freedom. It is a declaration of individuality. It is a declaration of love and creativity.

The truly religious person will live his ordinary life with immense joy and ecstasy. he will not call it ordinary. He will live it with extraordinary sensitivity. It is a gift from the whole, it is a gift from the beyond; it has to be respected, loved, appreciated. And it is really an immense gift. All these trees and the birds and the people and the rivers and the mountains and the stars and this vast sky, all this eternity… it seems really strange, sick, that somebody can be serious in this celebrating existence.

But seriousness has been praised, and because it has been praised people have tried to be serious. They have repressed their cheerfulness, they have repressed their dances, they have made themselves cripples, they have paralyzed their being in every possible way. They have cut themselves so that they can fit into the pattern of being a respectable saint.

To me this has been a calamity. Religious have been committing a great crime against man, and it is time it should be corrected. It is already late. This is the only world, and we have to live now and here. We are not sacrifice now and here for some fantasy of a heaven or a paradise or a moksha. Each moment functions as a mother for the next moment. Condemning it is dangerous. Appreciate it, love it, rejoice in it.