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chess. If you ask them 'What are you doing?' they say 'We are killing time.' Now this is just absurd. Time is killing you! Who are you befooling that you are killing time? Who has ever heard of anybody being able to kill time? Time kills everybody.
It is said of Diogenes that one day Alexander came to see him and he was very much puzzled. Diogenes was sitting there in a cemetery. He had a pile of bones and he was searching for something. Alexander asked 'What are you doing?' He said 'I am looking for the royal bones of your ancestor'. Alexander said 'You are just mad. You always do something mad. Now bones are bones -- you cannot make any distinction between the bones of a beggar and a king.'
Diogenes said 'Then you are not so stupid as I used to think. If bones are not different then nothing is different. Then why do you go on befooling yourself that you are a king? Death will reduce everything to equality; nobody will be a king and nobody will be a beggar. Before that happens don't waste this opportunity. Look in and find something that goes beyond the body, that which goes beyond the bone, and the blood and the marrow.'
Meditation needs courage, it needs fearlessness and it also need strength. In fact everybody is born with a great strength but our lives are such that we have a thousand holes and the strength goes on leaking out. We are like a bucket with many holes and you put the bucket in the well: when it is under the water it is full of water and as you start pulling it out all the water starts flowing. By the time it reaches your hands it is empty. The meditator has to close all these holes, he has to preserve energy, he has to live a life very consciously so that nothing is wasted.
And if you watch you will be surprised; almost ninety per cent of your work is sheer wastage, you could have avoided it. And if you can drop the unnecessary ninety per cent then the ten per cent which is necessary is not a wastage. It nourishes you, it makes you stronger, it gives you power, some integrity, some centering.
A sannyasins life has to be a continuous elimination of the non-essential so only the essential is left, then meditation
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