You Are Not the Person Who Hopes. You Are the Awareness That Watches It.

Did you know scientists once ran a strange test on blindfolded children? So, they rubbed a harmless, safe leaf on the children's arms, but told them that it was a poison leaf; and very quickly, every single child developed a real, painful, and red rashes. Next, the scientists rubbed the actual dangerous poison leaves on the children's other arm, but told them it was just a safe leaf; and almost none of them got a rash. So, their mind created a painful physical reality out of nothing and completely ignored the real threat. This is exactly how we live our lives with hope and despair. We scream in pain from snakes that are actually just ropes, suffering deeply from things that do not even exist actually. you tremble when you think about tomorrow, and you cry over what happened yesterday. And we all act as if hope and despair are things that happen to us from the outside. They do not, actually. They exist only because you do not know who you really are. What is hope? It is a golden handcuff. And what is despair? It is an iron handcuff. You foolishly think that if you can just get rid of the iron one, you will be free while wearing the gold. But a prisoner in the gold room is still a prisoner. And this is the truth. You see, bondage is when the mind wants something, grieves about something, or rejects something, or holds on to something, or is pleased about something, or is displeased about something. You live between hope and despair because you refuse to stay in the only place that actually exists, which is the right now. You see, hope is a dream of the future that is not there or not here. And despair is anger over a past that is already dead. You are drowning in an actual mirage, actually screaming that the water is not, or the water is too hot, or the water is too cold, when there is actually no water there at all. Let's look at why we are all miserable. Who is the one who hopes? Is it your ego? The fake "I" you have mistaken for your true self. The ego always feels incomplete. It looks at this moment, decides it is not enough, and invents a fantasy called hope to save itself. But hope is a liar. It promises you happiness tomorrow if you give up your peace today. And when tomorrow comes, and it does not as perfectly as you wanted—it does not appear perfectly as you wanted—so you fall straight into despair. Do you see the joke of our life? You run head first into a thorn bush and then scream that the world is hurting you. On the other day, the person was asking me, "I'm doing so much good to the world. Why is the world being bad to me?" And I said to him, "You know, wanting or expecting the world to be good to you is like going to a lion and saying, 'I don't eat you, therefore you must not eat me.' That's very narrow-minded stuff, because the world will eat you whether you're God or devil. It's a parasite. It does not have an intention to pull you down. Its intention is to feed on whatever you give to it. You give good, it will feed on to it. You give bad, it will still feed on to it. But you are the one, stainless awareness. You are the self-aware reality on which the entire drama of life is happening. Your bondage is this: that you see manifestation as something separate from yourself. You think you are a single wave, so you are terrified of crashing. You hope to become a bigger wave, and you despair when you get smaller. If you realized you are the ocean itself, what could you possibly hope for? What could you lose? The ocean doesn't wish for water. You are already complete. Yet you beg for a few spirituality, which is nothing but coins that are fallen down on the roads of your kingdom. See this for yourself. You are the absolute, unblemished, fathomable, ridiculously purely the self-aware reality. And it is on you the entire drama of life and death is happening. Imagine walking into a dark room. You see a coiled rope on the floor, mistaken, and you mistake it for a snake. And then you jump back in terror. Your heart races. You hope for a stick to kill it, and you search for a stone to throw it on it and destroy it and things like that. And you despair that it will bite you and kill you. Does your hope change what is actually on the floor? Does your fear make the snake real? Then someone brings a light, let us say, into the room, and then you see it was rope all along. The snake vanishes. But did it actually leave the room, or did it even live in the first place? No, it was never there. You created the snake in your own dark mind. Your whole life, struggle with a snake. Is this actually the world that you see? It is nothing but your creation. Hope is your plan to tame the snake. Despair is your fear of its bite. But there is no snake. There is only the rope actually. The things you want, the identity you protect, the failures you cry about—they are all made up. Recognize that what has form is false, and what is formless is changeless. And that is the absolute truth. You are not your body. You are not your mind. You are not the person who failed. And you are not the person who wants to succeed. You are the quiet, absolute, ridiculously self-aware reality on which the person who is existing, and silence and noise, all these things are appearing. So why do you pretend to be the actor on stage when you are the light illuminating the theater itself? I might be poetic, but this is the truth. You see, priests tell you to pray, teachers tell you to do good deeds, therapists tell you to manage your emotions and things like that. They're all just telling you how to rearrange the furniture inside your prison. Sir, I am telling you to walk out and open the door. You ask, "How do I stop hoping?" or "How do I beat despair?" Look at how silly that is. You want to use effort to reach a state of no effort. You want to do something to realize that you don't need to do anything. That is like a nice saying: "If I follow enough method, I will reach silence." The more noise follows a method, it will only make more noise. You do not belong to any caste or stage of life. You are not perceived by the senses. You are the absolute, unattached, formless, self-aware reality on which the entire drama of the world is happening. Turn your mind within and see this for yourself, and be done with this world. Don't be childish, begging for a few spiritual experiences. Grow up. Let us all not behead God by remaining devotees. Let us befriend God by becoming like Him or like Her. The moment you say, "I must practice being detached," you have just created a new ego—the spiritual ego—which will now hope for enlightenment and despair when it gets distracted. Stop searching. Stop trying to fix what was never broken. If you want to be free, drop the idea that you are the one doing everything. Do you move the sun? Do you make your own heartbeat? The universe runs by itself. You are just a space in which it happens. You see, then there is a fire. We don't assume that there is a "fire-er" which is producing heat, right? When there is a wave, we don't assume that there is a manager of the wave which is producing waves. When we see a mirror, we don't assume that there is another "mirror-er" behind it reflecting it. So then, why do you think there has to be a thinker to think? Are you seeing what I'm saying? Everything happens on its own. We believe that. But we do not want to believe that there is only thinking within us. But we assume that there has to be a thinker for a thought. A thinker is not required. It needs only thinking to have thought. Did you get what I'm saying? We don't assume that a fire has another fire to produce heat. We don't assume that a wave has a master to produce waves. We don't assume that a mirror needs another mirror to reflect. But we assume that our mind needs a thinker to think. We assume that there has to be a doer for an action. We assume that there has to be someone to do a thing. It doesn't work like that. When you realize this, hope dies—you know, not because you are sad or anything like that, but because you are already full. Despair dies because you have no fake self left to defend. Freedom is not a place you go after you die. It is not a reward for years of unwanted meditation and spirituality. It is an immediate realization. It is the seeing that the prisoner, the prison, and the guard of the prison were all part of the same dream. Why wait? Why put off your freedom for even one more second? Are you waiting for your mind to become completely quiet? That is like a person saying, "If the waves reduce, I will jump into the ocean." The mind is like a river. It will always flow. You don't wait for the river to dry up before you cross it. You just step across. If you untie yourself from the body and rest quietly in your own self, you will see—you will at this very moment become happy, peaceful, and free from bondage. At this very moment, not tomorrow, not when you meet some guru sitting in some ashram and eating food in someone else's money, and not visiting India and traveling to holy places, and not visiting people who have met silence. Those are all narrow-minded stuff. You are already liberated from day one. And this is the truth, whether you like it or not.