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and the radio and the radiogram and the piano and everything -- but the space has not gone anywhere. Remove the furniture and the space is there; it has always been there. It was hidden by the furniture but it was not destroyed. It has not left the room, not for a single moment. So is your inner emptiness, your nirvana, your nothingness.
Buddha does not give you nirvana as an ideal. Buddha liberates instead of coercing. Buddha teaches you how to live -- not for any goal, not to achieve anything, but to be blissful herenow -- how to live in awareness. Not that awareness is going to give you something -- awareness is not a means to anything; it is the end in itself, the means and the end both. Its value is intrinsic.
Buddha does not teach you otherworldliness. This has to be understood. People are worldly; the priests go on teaching the other world. The other world is also not very otherworldly, it cannot be, because it is just an improved model of the same world. From where can you create the other world? You know only this world. You can improve, you can decorate the other world better, you can remove a few things that are ugly here and you can replace a few things which you think will be beautiful, but it is going to be a creation out of the experience of this world. So your other world is not very different, cannot be. It is a continuity. It comes out of your mind; it is a game of imagination.
You will have beautiful women there -- of course more beautiful than you have here. You will have the same kinds of pleasures there -- maybe more permanent, stable, but they will be the same kinds of pleasures. You will have better food, more tasty -- but you will have food. You will have houses, maybe made of gold -- but they will be houses. You will repeat the whole thing again.
Just go into the scriptures and see how they depict the heaven and you will find the same world improved upon. A few touches here and a few touches there, but it is not in any way otherworldly. That's why I say the otherworldliness of other religions is not very otherworldly; it is this world projected into the future. It is born out of the experience of this world.
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