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thirst for it. It is not far away either -- just a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn and you are face-to-face with it.
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I don't ask you to change your situation: I ask you to change your psychology. Be in the marketplace and yet be not of it; live in the world, but don't allow the world to pollute you, poison you. This is real transformation -- not of the situation but of the spirit.
Henry Thoreau has made a very significant observation, that birds in caves don't sing. They cannot -- there is nothing to sing. They need the open sky and the sun and the moon and the breeze and the trees and the color of the world... then they sing. If birds cannot sing in caves, the human soul cannot sing in caves either. The human soul also needs this tremendous multiplicity, this multi-dimensional existence, to sing. And when a man forgets how to sing, how is he going to pray? Because prayer is nothing but singing at the maximum. Prayer is nothing but singing come to its crescendo.
The old so-called sannyasins who lived in the caves lived like corpses. They were not alive people; they committed a kind of suicide. They lingered on, they were breathing and in a sense they were alive, but that life was more like vegetating than life.
Live totally, live joyously, live alert and conscious, but live in the world, accept its challenges. I am saying it to you because in the Indian mind the old sannyas concept has gone very deep; it is almost in the bones. It is not conscious any more; it has become part of our collective unconscious. The moment you hear the word "sannyas," the idea that arises is of escape. And to escape seems to be easy and cheap, but it is the way of the coward, and a sannyasin cannot be a coward. A sannyasin has to be courageous, a sannyasin has to be a warrior. He has to be in the world, struggling, accepting challenges that come every day, answering. And in those very situations, integration happens; one becomes more and more solid, crystallized.
Life is a school for crystallization, so those who escape life escape from the school itself. And God will be very angry with them, because God sends you
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