Swimming in the river, and early spiritual experiences

The first thing my own father taught me-and the only thing that he ever taught me-was a love for the small river that flows by the side of my town. He taught me just this-swimming in the river. That's all that he ever taught me, but I am tremendously grateful to him because that brought so many changes in my life. Exactly like Siddhartha, I fell in love with the river. Whenever I think of my birthplace I don't remember anything except the river.

The day my father died I only remembered the first day he brought me to the riverbank to teach me swimming. My whole childhood was spent in a close love affair with the river. It was my daily routine to be with the river for at least five to eight hours. From three o'clock in the morning I would be with the river; the sky would be full of stars and the stars reflecting in the river. And it is a beautiful river; its water is so sweet that people have named it Shakkar-shakkar means sugar. It is a beautiful phenomenon.
I have seen it in the darkness of the night with the stars, dancing its course towards the ocean. I have seen it with the early rising sun. I have seen it in the full moon. I have seen it with the sunset. I have seen it sitting by its bank alone or with friends, playing on the flute, dancing on its bank, meditating on its bank, rowing a boat in it or swimming across it. In the rains, in the winter, in the summer….

I can understand Herman Hesse's Siddhartha and his experience with the river. It happened with me: so much transpired, because slowly slowly, the whole existence became a river to me. It lost its solidity; it became liquid, fluid.

And I am immensely grateful to my father. He never taught me mathematics, language, grammar, geography, history. He was never much concerned about my education. He had ten children…and I had seen it happen many times: people would ask, "In what class is your son studying?"-and he would have to ask somebody because he would not know. He was never concerned with any other education. The only education that he gave to me was a communion with the river. He himself was in deep love with the river.
Whenever you are in love with flowing things, moving things, you have a different vision of life. Modern man lives with asphalt roads, cement and concrete buildings. These are nouns, remember, these are not verbs. The skyscrapers don't go on growing; the road remains the same whether it is night or day, whether it is a full-moon night or a night absolutely dark. It doesn't matter to the asphalt road, it does not matter to the cement and concrete buildings.

Man has created a world of nouns and he has become encaged in his own world. He has forgotten the world of the trees, the world of the rivers, the world of the mountains and the stars. There they don't know of any nouns, they have not heard about nouns; they know only verbs. Everything is a process.

God is not a thing but a process. dh0503

In my childhood I used to go early in the morning to the river. It is a small village. The river is very very lazy, as if not flowing at all. And in the morning when the sun is not yet arisen, you cannot see whether it is flowing, it is so lazy and silent. And in the morning when there is nobody, the bathers have not come yet, it is tremendously silent. Even the birds are not singing in the morning-early, no sound, just a soundlessness pervades. And the smell of the mango trees hangs all over the river.

I used to go there, to the furthest corner of the river, just to sit, just to be there. There was no need to do anything, just being there was enough, it was such a beautiful experience to be there. I will take a bath, I will swim, and when the sun will arise I will go to the other shore, to the vast expanse of sand, and dry myself there under the sun, and lie there, and sometimes even go to sleep.

When I came back my mother used to ask, "What have you been doing the whole morning?" I will say, "Nothing," because, actually, I had not been doing anything. And she will say, "How is it possible? Four hours you have not been here, how is it possible that you have not been doing anything? You must have been doing something." And she was right, but I was also not wrong.

I was not doing anything at all. I was just being there with the river, not doing anything, allowing things to happen. If it felt like swimming, remember, if it felt like swimming, I would swim, but that was not a doing on my part, I was not forcing anything. If I felt like going into sleep, I would go. Things were happening, but there was no doer. And my first experiences of satori started near that river: not doing anything, simply being there, millions of things happened.

But she would insist: "You must have been doing something." So I would say, "Okay, I took a bath and I dried myself in the sun," and then she was satisfied. But I was not, because what happened there in the river is not expressed by words: "I took a bath"-it looks so poor and pale. Playing with the river, floating in the river, swimming in the river, was such a deep experience. To say simply, "I took a bath," makes no sense about it; or to just say, "I went there, had a walk on the bank, sat there," conveys nothing.
Even in ordinary life you feel the futility of words. And if you don't feel the futility of words, that shows that you have not been alive at all; that shows that you have lived very superficially. If whatsoever you have been living can be conveyed by words, that means you have not lived at all.

When for the first time something starts happening which is beyond words, life has happened to you, life has knocked at your door. And when the ultimate knocks at your door, you are simply gone beyond words-you become dumb, you cannot say; not even a single word is formed inside. And whatsoever you say looks so pale, so dead, so meaningless, without any significance, that it seems that you are doing injustice to the experience that has happened to you. Remember this, because Mahamudra is the last, the ultimate experience.

Mahamudra means a total orgasm with the universe. suprem01

My own experience in childhood was…the flooded river of my town-nobody used to cross it by swimming when it was flooded. It was a mountainous river. Ordinarily, it was a small river, but in rainy times it was at least one mile wide. The current of the water was tremendous; you could not stand in it. And the water was deep, so there was no way to stand anyway.

I loved it. I waited for the rainy season because it always helped…there would come a moment when I would feel that I was dying, because I was tired and I could not see the other shore, and the waves were high and the current was strong…and there was no way to go back, because now the other shore was as far away. Perhaps I was in the middle; it was the same either way. I would feel so completely tired and the water would take me down with such a force that there would come a time when I would see, "Now there is no possibility of living any more." And that was the moment when I would suddenly see myself above the water and my body in the water. When it happened the first time, it was a very frightening experience. I thought I must have died. I had heard that when you die, the soul goes out of the body: "So I have gone out of the body and I am dead." But I could see the body was still trying to reach the other shore, so I followed the body.

That was the first time I became aware of a connection between your essential being and the body. It is connected just below the navel-two inches below the navel-by something like a silver cord, a silver rope. It is not material, but it shines like silver. Each time I reached the other shore, the moment I reached the other shore my being would enter into the body. The first time it was frightening; then it became a great entertainment.

When I told my parents, they said, "Someday you are going to die in that river. This is enough of a sign. Stop going into the river when it is flooded."
But I said, "I am enjoying it so much…the freedom, no force of gravitation, and seeing one's own body completely away."…

The same experience had happened in the river many times, so there was no fear….
It used to happen automatically that when the body reached the shore, my being would enter into the body. I had no idea how to enter the body; it had always happened of its own accord. transm03

In my childhood days I used to take my friends to the river. There was a small path by the side of the river. To walk on that edge was very dangerous; just one step taken in unconsciousness and you will fall into the river, and that was the place where the river was the deepest. Nobody used to go there, but that was my most loved spot. And I will take all my friends to come along with me to move on that narrow edge. Very few were ever ready to go along with me, but those few had really a beautiful experience. They will all report, "This is strange, how the mind stops!"

I will take my friends to the railway bridge to jump from the bridge into the river. It was dangerous, certainly dangerous; it was prohibited. There was always a policeman standing on the railway bridge because that was the place from where people used to commit suicide. We had to bribe the policeman, that "We are not committing suicide, we have just come to enjoy the jump!" And slowly slowly he became aware that these are the same people-they don't die or anything, they come again, they come again and they are not interested in suicide. In fact, he started loving us and stopped taking bribes. He said, "You can jump-I will not look at that side. Whenever you want you can come."

It was dangerous. The bridge was very high and to jump from there…And before you will reach the river there was a time between-the gap between the bridge and the river-when the mind will suddenly stop.

Those were my first glimpses of meditation; that's how I became more and more interested in meditation. I started inquiring how these moments can be made available without going to the mountains, to the river, to the bridges; how one can allow oneself to move into these spaces without going anywhere, just by closing one's eyes. Once you have tasted, it is not difficult. ggate208

You are asking me: Although you were born almost enlightened, when I listen to your stories of your early life, I never get the impression that you saw yourself as a spiritual seeker. Were you looking for enlightenment, or was enlightenment a by-product of an impeccable resolve to never compromise what you felt to be true?

There are things which cannot be sought directly. The more valuable a thing is, the more indirectly you have to go into it. In fact you have to do something else that simply prepares the situation around you-in which things like enlightenment, truth, can happen.
You cannot go seeking and searching for truth. Where will you go? Kabul? Kulu-Manali? Kathmandu? Goa?…and then back home. All seekers of truth go this route and come back home looking more foolish than before. They have not found anything.

Where will you go to seek the truth? You don't know the way, there is no map, there is no direction available. Nobody knows what, where, when it is possible to realize truth.
The real seeker of truth never seeks truth. On the contrary, he tries to clean himself of all that is untrue, unauthentic, insincere-and when his heart is ready, purified, the guest comes. You cannot find the guest, you cannot go after him. He comes to you; you just have to be prepared. You have to be in a right attitude.

I have never been spiritual in the sense that you understand the word. I have never gone to the temples or the churches, or read scriptures, or followed certain practices to find truth, or worshipped God or prayed to God. That has not been my way at all. So certainly you can say that I was not doing anything spiritual. But to me spirituality has a totally different connotation. It needs an honest individuality. It does not allow any kind of dependence. It creates a freedom for itself, whatever the cost. It is never in the crowd but alone, because the crowd has never found any truth. The truth has been found only in people's aloneness.

So my spirituality has a different meaning from your idea of spirituality. My childhood stories-if you can understand them-will point to all these qualities in some way or other. Nobody can call them spiritual. I call them spiritual, because to me they have given all that man can aspire to.

While listening to my childhood stories you should try to look for some quality in it-not just the story but some intrinsic quality that runs like a thin thread through all of my memoirs. And that thin thread is spiritual.

Spiritual, to me, simply means finding oneself. I never allowed anybody to do this work on my behalf-because nobody can do this work on your behalf; you have to do it yourself. And you cannot do it directly either, you have to create a certain milieu in which it happens. It is a happening; enlightenment, liberation, awakening, realization-all these words point towards absolutely one thing and that is a happening.
That creates a kind of fear in many people: "If it is happening, then what are we supposed to do? Whenever it will happen, it will happen." That is not so. It is a happening, but you can do much to prepare the ground for it to happen.
Preparing the ground may not look spiritual to those who do not understand. But it must be spiritual because the enlightenment has happened.

The end proves that whatever means were used were substantially right. It is the goal that proves that the way that was followed was right. transm10

I was from my very childhood in love with silence. As long as I could manage I would just sit silently. Naturally my family used to think that I was going to be good for nothing-and they were right. I certainly proved good for nothing, but I don't repent it.
It came to such a point that sometimes I would be sitting and my mother would come to me and say something like, "There seems to be nobody in the whole house. I need somebody to go to the market to fetch some vegetables." I was sitting in front of her, and I would say, "If I see somebody I will tell…. "

It was accepted that my presence meant nothing; whether I was there or not, it did not matter. Once or twice they tried and then they found that "it is better to leave him out, and not take any notice of him"-because in the morning they would send me to fetch vegetables, and in the evening I would come to ask, "I have forgotten for what you had sent me, and now the market is closed…" In villages the vegetable markets close by the evening, and the villagers go back to their villages.

My mother said, "It is not your fault, it is our fault. The whole day we have been waiting, but in the first place we should not have asked you. Where have you been?"
I said, "As I went out of the house, just close by there was a very beautiful bodhi tree"-the kind of tree under which Gautam Buddha became awakened. The tree got the name bodhi tree-or in English, bo tree-because of Gautam Buddha. One does not know what it used to be called before Gautam Buddha; it must have had some name, but after Buddha it became associated with his name.

There was a beautiful bodhi tree, and it was so tempting for me. There used to be always such silence, such coolness underneath it, nobody to disturb me, that I could not pass it without sitting under it for some time. And those moments of peace, I think sometimes may have stretched the whole day.

After just a few disappointments they thought, "It is better not to bother him." And I was immensely happy that they had accepted the fact that I am almost non-existent. It gave me tremendous freedom. Nobody expected anything from me. When nobody expects anything from you, you fall into a silence…The world has accepted you; now there is no expectation from you.
When sometimes I was late coming home, they used to search for me in two places. One was the bodhi tree-and because they started searching for me under the bodhi tree, I started climbing the tree and sitting in the top of it. They would come and they would look around and say, "He does not seem to be here."

And I myself would nod; I said, "Yes, that's true. I'm not here."

But I was soon discovered, because somebody saw me climbing and told them, "He has been deceiving you. He is always here, most of the time sitting in the tree"-so I had to go a little further. tahui28