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the office, to do the routine work, to come home, to reproduce children, to get things done. And once you have learned them, you go on repeating the same pattern every day -- it is a mechanical phenomenon. The mechanical life is the mundane life.
To be a sannyasin means to enter into the phenomenon of the sacred. For that more awareness is needed, much more, because it is not something mechanical, something routine. It is now every day. It is moving; from the unknown towards the unknowable; it is dropping the known every day, dying to the known and entering into the unknown. It is an eternal pilgrimage, because every moment is so full of mystery that one has to be very alert, otherwise one will miss. One has to be constantly watchful.
Very few people know the beauty of the stars. Even if they do, they have read it in a poem; it is not their own experience. Very few people know the beauty of the mountains. Even if they do it is because they have looked at albums, pictures, films. Even if they go to the Himalayas, they are much more concerned with taking photographs rather than looking at the reality.
The tourist is a very strange personality: carrying the camera everywhere. His idea is that back home, sitting before the fireplace at ease, he will look at the pictures, at how beautiful the Himalayas were; and when he was in the Himalayas he was concerned with the camera -- loading, unloading and clicking. The camera was not working (laughter)... and something got stuck and.... Who bothers about the Himalayas! That is later on when the album is ready and one sits in the easy chair and relaxes, with the coffee pot by the (much laughter) side and... (The rest of the sentence is drowned in a deluge of laughter.) That's how people are.
This is not the way to experience reality -- it is a way to avoid it. Your pictures cannot contain the beauty... or maybe only a very far far-away echo. They cannot contain the coolness of the breeze, the warmth of the sun. They are bound to be one-dimensional, flat.
Once a friend said to Picasso 'I don't like your paintings. They don't represent reality, they are not realistic.' He said 'Rather, I like
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