To Be Yourself

You always want to be somebody else, you want to imitate the life of somebody else -- you want to imitate the life of Jesus, you want to imitate the life of Buddha, you want to imitate the life of Shankara. You can't do it because you don't know what is there behind. You will end up changing your robes from rose to saffron, saffron to yellow or from yellow to rose, depending upon your particular fancy. How can you ask for a thing which you do not know? How can you search for a thing which you do not know? That is my question. So search has no meaning at all. Only when the search comes to an end what there is will express itself in its own way. You cannot tamper with that. You cannot manipulate that. You cannot manipulate the action of the thing which is there, which has an extraordinary intelligence.

To be yourself is the easiest thing. And you don't want to be in your state. You'd rather be somebody else, imitate the life of somebody else. That's your problem. To be yourself doesn't need any time at all. But you talk of timelessness, which is a mockery. To be yourself, do you need time? To be a good man, to be a marvelously religious man, to be in a state of peace, to be in a state of bliss, naturally you need time. That will always be tomorrow. When tomorrow arrives, you say, "All right, day after tomorrow." That is time, not this metaphysical or philosophical thing, I am not talking about metaphysical time and timeless. There is no such thing as the timeless.

I am making assertions, statements and conclusions -- you will object to them. Take it or leave it. I don't expect you to accept anything that I am saying. You are not in a position to accept or reject it. You can reject it because it does not fit into the particular framework of your philosophy -- Shankara, Gaudapada, Ramanuja, Madhvacharya, God-knows-what -- we have too many of them here. So how can you understand this? The only thing to do is to throw in the towel. Turn your back on the whole business. That is why it takes extraordinary courage, not the courage or the bravado of these people who climb Mount Everest or try to swim across the English Channel, or cross the Pacific or Atlantic, whatever their fancy, on a raft -- that is not what I mean. What I mean is courage.

--U.G.