Once you become aware of your own body and its movements, you will be surprised that you are not your body. This is something of a basic principle, that if you can watch something then you are not it. You are the watcher, not the watched. You are the observer, not the observed. How can you be both?
This moment! - this here-now - is forgotten when you start thinking in terms of achieving something. When the achieving mind arises, you lose contact with the paradise you are in.
If you are ready to be intimate, you will encourage the other person also to be intimate. Your unpretentious simplicity will allow the other also to enjoy simplicity, innocence, trust, love, openness.
Learn to laugh. Seriousness is a sin, and it is a disease. Laughter has tremendous beauty, a lightness. It will bring lightness to you, and it will give you wings to fly. And life is so full of opportunities. You just need the sensitivity. And create chances for other people to laugh. Laughter should be one of the most valued, cherished qualities of human beings - because only man can laugh, no animals are capable of it. Because it is human, it must be of the highest order. To repress it is to destroy a human quality.
The fragrance of the heart is made up of the qualities and virtues of our spirit. Most of us have learned how to keep our heart closed in a world that would trample all over us if we let it. Being open hearted today seems to require tremendous courage.
To be an individual is the hardest thing in the world, because nobody likes you to be an individual. Everybody wants to kill your individuality and to make a sheep out of you. Nobody wants you to be on your own.
Then ego goes on growing, because the society needs you as an ego, not as a Self. The Self is irrelevant for the society; your periphery is meaningful. And there are many problems. The ego can be taught and the ego can be made docile and the ego can be forced to be obedient. The ego can be made to adjust, but not the Self. The Self cannot be taught, the Self cannot be forced. The Self is intrinsically rebellious, individual. It cannot be made a part of society.
Reality has no security and that is its beauty. Life has no security and that is its beauty. Because there is no security, there is adventure. Because the future is unknown, nobody knows what is going to happen the next moment. That's why there is challenge, growth, adventure. If you miss adventure, you miss all. If your life is not that of an adventure, of a search into the unknown, then you are living in vain.
Falling in love you remain a child; rising in love you mature. By and by love becomes not a relationship, it becomes a state of your being. Not that you are in love - now you are love.
Meditation means undoing what the society has done to you. It has reduced you to a machine; you have to de-automatise yourself, you have to become a man again. You have to come out of this state of unconsciousness, of mechanicalness. You have to come out of this sleep. It is possible only through meditation. There is no other way, there has never been, there will never be. The only way to reduce a man to a machine is take away his consciousness force him to function unconsciously. And just the opposite is the way of meditation: give him back his consciousness.
When a monk goes away from the world, he goes fighting with it. it is not a relaxed going. His whole being is pulled towards the world. He struggles against it. He becomes divided. Half of his being is for the world and half has become greedy for the other. He is torn apart. A monk is basically a schizophrenic, a split person, divided into the lower and the higher. And the lower goes on pulling him, and the lower becomes more and more attractive the more it is repressed. And because he has not lived the lower, he cannot get into the higher.
Enlightenment is finding that there is nothing to find. Enlightenment is to come to know that there is nowhere to go. Enlightenment is the understanding that this is all, that this is perfect, that this is it. Enlightenment is not an achievement, it is an understanding that there is nothing to achieve, nowhere to go. You are already there - you have never been away. You cannot be away from there. God has never been missed. Maybe you have forgotten, that's all. Maybe you have fallen asleep, that's all.
If you feel you are the body type, then running can be very beautiful for you: a four, five mile run every day. And make it a meditation. It will transform you completely.
Where does the ego get its energy? The ego feeds off your desire to be something else. You are poor and you want to be rich - the ego is absorbing energy, its life-breath. You are ignorant and you want to become a wise one - the ego is absorbing energy. You are a wretched nobody and you want to become powerful - the ego is absorbing energy.
We are afraid of love because Love is a small death. Love requires that we should surrender, and we don't want to surrender at all. We would like the OTHER to surrender, we would like the other to be a slave. But the same is the desire from the other side: man wants the woman to be a slave; and of course the woman also wants the same, the SAME desire is there. Their methods of enslaving each other may be different, but the desire is the same.