A real master teaches you unlearning.
I am here just to be a midwife. That’s what Socrates used to say – that a master is just a midwife. I can help, I can protect, I can guide, that’s all. The actual phenomenon, the transformation, is going to happen to you. Suffering will be there, because no birth is possible without suffering. Much anguish will come up, because you have accumulated it and it has to be thrown. A deep cleansing and catharsis will be needed.
A real master teaches you unlearning; it is never learning. You have come to me to unlearn whatsoever you know, never learning. You have come to me learned, so whatsoever you know, please drop it. Become ignorant, become like a child. Only the heart of a child can knock at the doors of the divine, and only the heart of a child is heard. Your prayers cannot be heard; they are cunning. Only a child, only a heart which doesn’t know can be.
To be close to a master is death, your ego will have to go. The ego thinks, starts thinking, “I must escape before something happens; before I am lost, I must escape.” The ego will continuously tell you to escape. The ego will find rationalizations; it will find faults in me just to help you escape; it will convince you in every way that this is the wrong man. Love is deathlike, and no love is as deathlike as loving a master.
But when you come to a master you cannot dominate him, you cannot fight with him. So fear is deeper because of that, because you cannot create any politics. Either you have to escape or merge, no other alternative is there. If you escape, from your very deep source of being you hear you are doing wrong; if you escape you will have to come back. If you come closer, the mind says: Where are you going? If you go closer still you may be burned. And it is right, the ego is right: The flame is there and if you come closer you will be burned. Conflict will be created; inner tension, anguish will be created. You can delay, that’s all, sooner or later you will have to merge; no river can escape the ocean. Once you have come closer you have come, and there is no way to go back. No way exists for going back.
A master is a mother, he is not a father. With a father you are related only intellectually, with a mother your relation is total. You have been part of your mother, you belong to her totally. The same is the case with a master in the reverse order. You have come out of the mother, you will go into the master. It is a returning back to the source.
Be ready to die; only then can you be reborn into an altogether different dimension. That dimension is the dimension of the divine. Don’t protect yourself — your protection is your undoing; don’t try to safeguard. Near a master be insecure because he is your security. Be unsafe, leave everything to him and wait for his hit; any moment it can descend on you. But if you have not surrendered it will not descend, because no master is interested in hitting you, no master is interested in killing you. Masters are interested only in making you fully enlightened, and that can happen only when your death and your awareness meet — a very difficult, very rare combination.
Your mind goes on changing, and if your mind is a liar, don’t go to any palmist; the palmist will be deceived. But you cannot deceive a master because he never reads your palm, he never looks at your forehead, he is not worried about your stars; he looks deep in you. He knows the exact moment of your death, and if you surrender the death can be used.
In Zen it has been one of the oldest traditions that whenever a disciple is hit, the whole monastery becomes happy, and the disciple is received as something special. The master has hit him; the disciple has been chosen. People wait for years to be hit by the master. They pray, they ask the master, “When will we be capable?” or, “When will we be fortunate enough to be hit? When will your stick, your staff, descend upon us?”
You cannot deceive a master. And if you can deceive a master, then that master is not a master at all.
A master is one who has become enlightened, but one desire is left. That desire is not a trouble in becoming enlightened — to help others helps to become enlightened.
In the East, masters have used it as a psychoanalytic device. When a person comes to a master, the first thing to see is his aura — because that will decide everything. He starts analyzing his aura because that is very indicative. That shows about the deepest layers of his mind, conscious and unconscious both.
Truth cannot be given; it is already in you. It can be called forth, it can be provoked. A context can be created, a certain space can be created in which it rises in you and is no more asleep, becomes awakened. The function of the Master is far more complex than you think. It would have been far easier, simpler, if truth could be conveyed. It cannot be conveyed, hence indirect ways and means have to be devised.
EVERY master has his own unique way. Every master has his unique method to express whatsoever he has attained — it was laughter for Hotei. He went from one town to another, travelling continuously all his life — laughing.
A MASTER IS ONE who can create devices for everybody. A master is one who has no fixed device.
Let me repeat it: You possess only that which you have given; you never possess that which you have hoarded — you become a master of something which you share. Share! unconditionally — because everything is going to be taken from you anyway; death is going to take everything from you.
I have no ideology to teach to you. I am not a teacher at all. That’s the difference between a teacher and a master. A teacher has an ideology; he tries to condition your mind; he wants to give you certain concepts. A master simply wants to uncondition your mind; he does not want to give you any concepts; he wants to give you clarity of vision.
