Our joy, our laughter, our love, our silence, our meditation, are a far bigger force than nuclear weapons. They can try, they can kill our bodies; they cannot kill our spirit. And the moment they kill our bodies they are really getting into greater danger, because then our spirits are free to go around the world, with no visa, no passport, no green card. Taoism is preparing you for that.
Taoists have nothing to do with politics.
Taoists are the only group of people in the whole world which is apolitical.
You are living in the dark valley of your unconscious. You are fast asleep.
If you want to be friends, then awake.
You have to be responsible for yourself. You have to become your own savior.
Be independent.
Be free of mind.
Be centered.
Experience the ecstasy, the vast experience of ultimate blissfulness.
Then only can you be friends.
We are tortured by these popes, shankaracharyas, imams, rabbis. It is time that man is freed from all these fetters. You have to be yourself.
Imitators are phony. Imitators are bound to be unnatural, because they are going against their potential.
Nature produces each individual as unique. In twenty-five centuries, how many Buddhist monks have been trying to become Gautam Buddha? Not a single one has succeeded. For two thousand years, how many Christian monks have been trying to become Jesus Christ? None of them has succeeded. And the same is the story around the earth in all the religions.
Still we are blind; we can't see a simple fact, that Jesus, Buddha, Moses, Mohammed -- or anybody, known or unknown -- is unique, unrepeatable.
Nature does not like carbon copies. Nature loves original faces.
Taoistic effort is to take away all the barriers so that you can discover your original face; to remove all the masks so that you can discover who, in reality, you are. And the moment you realize yourself, that will be the moment of your gratitude towards taoism.

In ancient China, the keeper of the Imperial Library, Lao Tzu, was famous for his wisdom. Perceiving the growing corruption of the government, he left for the countryside. On his way, the guard at the city gates asked Lao Tzu to write out the essence of his understanding to benefit future generations. Lao Tzu wrote the Tao Te Ching, left, and was never heard of again.
The Tao Te Ching (also called "The Tao", "The Dao" or the "Dao De Jing"), by Lao Tzu, is one of the most influential books in history. It is the source of famous Chinese sayings such as "Those who know do not speak, those who speak, do not know" and "Even a 1,000 mile journey starts with a single step".

If the people are free of avarice and desire,
even the most cunning grifter has no opportunity to corrupt them.
-Lao Tzu

It seems there was once a man that who loved dragons so much, he put dragon pictures and sculptures all over his house. The Dragon King was very impressed, so he sent one of his dragons down to say hello to the man and thank him for his efforts. The dragon politely knocked on the front door. When the dragon-lover opened the door, he promptly died of a heart attack!
The moral is, of course, to ensure you can act as well as you can speak.

If you don't trust people,
people will not trust you.

A disciple is something completely different from a follower. What is discipline? Discipline is learning. The root word of discipline comes from learning. It is nothing to do with self control, no. A disciple is one who is ready to learn; a disciple is one who is ready to absorb; a disciple is one who is open, receptive; a disciple is one who is ready to become a womb. He is not antagonistic, he is not fighting and arguing. He is trying to understand, and when you try to understand, the head stops functioning. Because the head can do two things: it can either fight or it can follow. It can either be a blind follower or a blind enemy, but it can never be a disciple.
A disciple is totally different because he is not head-oriented; a disciple is heart-oriented. He loves the discipline, absorbs it, and then goes on his own way.
It is a very indirect, very delicate thing. It is not direct. You cannot just look at the master and do whatsoever he is doing -- then you will become a follower. You cannot learn the words and start repeating them -- then you will become a follower, then the effort has been in the head, and the head is the problem.
Whenever you are not fighting and not in search of somebody to imitate, your consciousness falls from the head to the heart. Then you are open, then you are simply in love. That is what is meant by SHRADDHA, faith, trust. It is neither belief nor disbelief.
Don't think that trust or faith is belief, it is not. Belief is in the head, disbelief is in the head, trust is in the heart. It has nothing to do with belief or disbelief. Believing or not believing is not a concern at all; you simply love.
You see a rose flower. Do you believe in it or do you disbelieve in it? You don't do anything, you simply look at it. Nobody is a follower, nobody is against. The sun rises in the morning. What do you do? Are you a believer or a disbeliever or do you follow the path of the sun the whole day because you are a follower? Either way you will go mad. You simply enjoy, you absorb the morning, the freshness of it, the youngness, the newness -- with the sun everything is becoming alive. You enjoy the very life and become more alive through it. You look at a rose and something of the rose reaches to your heart. Outside the rose is flowering, inside, the heart starts flowering. You reach a man of tao, a Lao Tzu, a Lieh Tzu, a Chuang Tzu. What do you do? Do exactly as you would do with a rose or with a sunrise. No need to follow, no need not to follow, just absorb.
Jesus's last words to his disciples were: Eat me, let me be your drink and your food, let me flow in your blood, absorb me. When he says 'eat me', that means absorb me, digest me; don't follow outwardly, digest me, and then you will have your own inner light.

The man of tao is not an idealist, he believes in the real. And in fact you need not believe in the real; it is so. Belief is needed only for the ideal. For the real, what belief is needed? The sun rises -- you don't say, 'I believe in the sunrise.' And the birds are singing -- you don't say, 'I believe in the birds.' You believe in God because you can't see God, because God is not a reality. The man of tao doesn't believe in Tao, because for him Tao is as much a reality as the sunrise and these birds singing and these flowers and these trees and these people, you.
The man of tao doesn't believe in God. Belief presupposes that you don't know; belief presupposes ignorance. The very word 'belief' makes one thing certain -- that it is not real. The man of tao is all for reality. That's what is meant with believe in the real. The man of tao doesn't put any ideal in contrast with reality.
Down the ages, the ideal has been the most subtle trick to manipulate man -- because the ideal creates guilt. You continuously think you are not coming up to the mark -- you are falling short, you are below the level, you are not as you should be. And this becomes a rock on your heart. It cripples you, it paralyzes you. It does not allow you to move in freedom, it does not allow you to dance.
How can you celebrate life when there are so many ideals everywhere? And everywhere you feel limited -- those limitations are created by the ideals. Whatsoever you do is never perfect. So whatsoever you do, it never makes you happy. In fact, whenever you do something it makes you unhappy -- again you have proved your imperfection. Again you failed, again there is guilt, again there is condemnation, again you hate yourself. Each act brings more hatred, each act brings more and more self condemnation, rejection.
And if you don't love yourself, you are virtually dead -- worse than being dead! If you don't love yourself, nobody is going to love you. How can anybody love you if you don't love yourself?
And the idealist cannot love himself; he is very hard, he is a masochist. And when a person is a masochist, when a person goes on torturing himself in the name of ideals -- 'I should be like this'... and he is not, so he tortures himself. And he goes on pulling himself towards this impossible ideal. And all those ideals are impossible -- their very nature is such, they cannot be fulfilled. That is the whole trick; if they can be fulfilled, they won't be ideals.
The ideal is by inner necessity unfulfillable; it is not possible to achieve it. Hence, it remains a dangling carrot in front of your eyes. And the donkey goes on moving... and the carrot goes on dangling. It is illusory. It is like the horizon far away -- you go on moving, but you never reach; the horizon also goes on moving.