... moving in circles. Zen says: In the first place, why be identified with any form? Rather than trying to make anger non-anger, violence non-violence, greed non-greed, why not get out of the identification in the first place? Watch the anger; don't get identified with it. Suddenly you are neither angry nor non-angry, neither violent nor non-violent - you are the watcher. The violence and the non-violence...

... violent. You can make every effort to be non-violent, thinking that by being non-violent you will become religious; by becoming non-violent you will come closer to the divine. You are cruel, and you may make every effort to be compassionate. You can do it, and nothing will change and you will remain the same. Your cruelty will become a part of your compassion - and that is more dangerous. Your violence...

... will become a part of your non-violence - that is more subtle. You will be violently non-v iolent. Your non-violence will have all the madness of violence, and through your compassion you will be cruel. You can even kill through your compassion; people have killed. There are so many religious wars - they are fought in the mood of compassion. You can kill very compassionately, very non-violently...

... flower. Non-violence is the acme of beauty; violence is the nadir of ugliness. [Someone quipped, "But we like flowers: that is why we pluck them!"] Love is opposed to the act of plucking flowers. Love and plucking of flowers can not co-exist. Plucking is not symbolic of love, but of cruelty. It is symbolic of our authoritarian nature; we want to possess whatever seems beautiful, regardless of...

...; it knows not the language of receiving - to say nothing of the language of robbing. And please note that this is an axiom applicable to all aspects of life. Those who know not this truth, look upon their cruelty and violence as a form of love. Though they do not realise it, their hatred lies latent in their so-called love. And where they lay claim to a sense of beauty, their outward aesthetics is...

... real gain; accumulation is only the means of hiding one's lack, and thereby deceiving oneself. And self-deception is self-destruction. This self-deception is universal; and because of it, though there is phenomenal worldwide increase in the number of ideas, there is, at the same time, marked decrease in the ability to think. Seldom do we come across an independent thinker. Question 18: QUESTION: BUT...

... is violence - kill the violence within you and become nonviolent, cultivate nonviolence. Always do the opposite and force the opposite to become your pattern. This is the soldier's way - a small teaching. Tantra is the great teaching - the supreme. What does tantra say? Tantra says: don't create any conflict within yourself. Accept both, and through the acceptance of both, a transcendence happens...

..., not victory but transcendence. In yoga there are victories, in tantra there are none. In tantra... simply transcendence. Not that you become nonviolent against violence, you simply go beyond both, you simply become a THIRD phenomenon - a witness. I was sitting once in a butcher's shop. He was a very good man and I used to go to visit him. It was evening and he was just going to close the shop when a...

... fix. And tantra puts the whole existence itself in a fix. Tantra says, "I will take both of them." There are not two. Hate is nothing but another aspect of love. Anger is nothing but another aspect of compassion, and violence is nothing but another face of nonviolence. Tantra says, "Tell you what, I will take both of them. I accept both." And suddenly through this acceptance...

... there is a transcendence, because there are not two. Violence and nonviolence are not two. Anger and compassion are not two. Love and hate are not two. That's why you know, you observe, but you are so unconscious that you don't recognize the fact. Your love changes into hate within a second. How is it possible if they are two? Not even a second is needed: this moment you love, and next moment you hate...

... can have grace in it? - only a life of compassion, love, gratitude; only a life that is responsible, a life that cares for others. Now, you can be non-violent, but it is not necessary that your non-violence will be a grace. I have seen so many Jain monks: they are non-violent, but very ungraceful; the beauty is missing. And the fruit is the proof of the tree... and there is no other proof. If they...

... were nonviolent there would arise a tremendous beauty: their eyes would show it, their very vibe would show it. There would be a constant soundless music around them - but it is not there. Everything seems to be dull and dead. They are nonviolent, but their non-violence is not graceful. It has not happened spontaneously, it has been forced. Their non-violence has a violent element in it; it has been...

... violently forced. They have tried hard to become non- violent, they have managed somehow to become non-violent, but the non- violence is not like a natural flowering, it is cultivated. The Buddhist word shila is very beautiful; it means graceful. There can be two types of stillness. You can force yourself according to Yoga methods, you can learn a certain posture. By and by, you can manage to force your...

... body into that posture. First it will be uncomfortable; by and by the body adjusts. The body has tremendous capacity to adjust to any situation. Then you can force your body to sit unmoving. And if you go on doing it, by and by, after a few months you will become like a Buddha-statue. But that will be violence, and there will be no grace in it. Deep down you will be boiling; deep down there will be...

... an effort means you are fighting with yourself. A part of you is for and a part of you is against - hence the effort. You can achieve much, remember. In this world, particularly, you can achieve much through effort because effort is aggression, effort is violence, effort is competition. But in the other world nothing can be achieved through effort, and those who start with effort finally have also...

... for him, it is not a choice, he has not made any distinction. Remember, it is always greedy persons who are against greed, sexual persons who are against sex, angry persons who are against anger, violent persons who are against voilence. Then what do they do? They create an opposite goal. If you are violent, non-violence will become the goal. And how can a violent man become non- voilent? What will...

... he do? There is only one possibility, he will be violent towards himself, that's all. What else can he do? A violent man... how can he be non-violent? An angry person... how can he be without anger? And if an angry person cultivates non-anger, in his non-anger there will also be anger because you cannot cultivate anything without you entering it. The anger will enter the non-anger; the violence...

... will enter the non violence. If you look around, if you watch rightly, you cannot find more violent people than those who have non violence as their goal. And you cannot find more sexual, pervertedly sexual people than those who have BRAHMACHARYA, celibacy, as their goal. Chuang Tzu says: Don't make distinctions, otherwise you will be divided. Once divided, you are two, split. A person who is split...

... gentle. The power of this energy is compassion, affection. This energy is not like the sun but cool like the moon. It is an energy, yet it is cool. And where the sun and the moon become one, where hardness and mildness unite, where violence and humility meet, there both Rama and Seeta are. This is a very deep discovery of Hindu thought that is beyond the understanding of many; Christians, Muslims...

... whole story and made him stand absolutely alone. We can see the violence in Mahavir but not tenderness. If one side of life is missing, Jain thought cannot get very far. It did not give rise to any culture or civilization, but remained only an ideology. You cannot find even one town in which only this ideology prevails, for if a town contained only Jains who would be the cobbler? Who would be a...

... female. The male alone has violence, not gentleness. All qualities of gentleness are feminine; even words describing them bear the feminine gender in Hindi, like compassion, affection, kindness, pity - as it should be. When man reaches the supreme state there is a unity within him of the male and female. He is violent and he is also mild, gentle. The sun and the moon combine within him: he is full of...

... moon, and the sun was lost. The Hindu makes a point to stand Seeta with Rama, Radha with Krishna. When the name is spoken it is always 'Seetaram' and 'Radhakrishna'. Because the woman is the giver of life, she is the first and the man is placed second. Violence is second; compassion is first. When there is untapped violence hidden behind compassion its beauty is boundless. And when the energy lies...

... did was to think that they were not to injure anybody, so they stopped injuring everybody and started injuring themselves; that was easier. The violence turns upon oneself, the sadist becomes the masochist, but nothing basically changes. You were angry with others, now you are angry with yourself; you were trying to dominate others, now you are trying to dominate yourself. You wanted to kill others...

..., now you are committing suicide, a slow kind of suicide. For twenty-five centuries in India the followers of Mahavira have been doing that: injuring themselves. So the whole teaching went down the drain. And that's a natural possibility. If one is violent and tries not to be violent, then where will the violence go? It has to have some outlet; it turns upon oneself. Ahimsa simply means reverence for...

... a thousand and one things, one has to prove one's ego in many ways and one has to be really violent. One has to use all sorts of means, good and bad, because the only goal is to be victorious; nothing else matters. So the worldly victory is political: it depends on violence, it depends on destruction. It depends on others' miseries. You cannot be victorious in the world without creating much...

.... Science forced matter. Science is aggressive. Einstein is reported to have said, "If I am born again, I would not want to be a scientist. Rather, I would like to be a plumber. Whatsoever I have done is destructive. Whatsoever I have revealed, my whole life is wasted. It seems that I may be one of the persons responsible for the destruction of the whole humanity." His last days were of deep...

.... We have more destructive forces now than is needed to destroy the earth seven times more. We can destroy seven earths like this; this is nothing. And we are developing more and more destructive powers. For what? Why is there so much hankering after death and destruction? Einstein says that it was foolish on the part of scientists to force nature to reveal certain secrets for which man was not yet...