In Mesopotamia a stone has been found which is six thousand years old. There is an inscription on it. If you read it you will feel that it is the editorial of today’s morning newspaper. The inscription says that this age is the age of sin. Everything has gone wrong. The son doesn’t believe in the father, the wife doesn’t believe in the husband. Darkness has set. Where are those days, the days of the past, those golden days? This is a six thousand-year-old inscription! Lao Tzu says that in the days of the past, in the days of the ancients, everything was beautiful. Then Tao prevailed, then there was nothing wrong, and because there was nothing wrong, no one preached. There was nothing wrong to be changed, transformed, and there was no priest, no preacher, no moral leaders, because everything was so right. Lao Tzu says that in those days, those old days, there was no religion. There was no need because Tao prevailed. Everyone was so religious that there was no need for religion. There were no sages then, because there were no sinners. Everyone was such a sage that, naturally, no one was aware of who was a sage and who was a sinner.

Psychologists say that this past never existed. This past is just the deep memory within every individual of the womb. It existed. Really, Tao was in the womb, and everything was beautiful, everything was as it should be. Completely unaware of the world, the child is moving in bliss. The situation of the child in the womb is just as it is for Vishnu on his sheshnaga. Hindus believe that Vishnu is lying on his couch, a serpent couch, floating on the ocean of bliss. Really, that is the child’s position in the womb. The child floats. The mother’s womb is just like the ocean. And you may be surprised to know that the water in which the child floats in the mother’s womb has the same constituents as the ocean water – very similar, the same salts, everything. It is ocean water, soothing. And the womb always keeps the right temperature for the child. The mother may be shivering with cold, that makes no difference. For the child it is always the same temperature in the womb. He is warm, blissfully floating, with no worries, no anxieties, no responsibilities, alone. He is not aware of the mother; mother doesn’t exist for him. This sanskar, this imprint, is carried on by you. This is the basic reality, how you were before you entered society, and this will be the reality again when you go out of society and die. You will again be alone.

And between these two points of loneliness your life is filled with many events. But those events are accidental. Deep down you remain alone because that is your basic reality. Around that aloneness many things happen: you get married, you become two, then you have children and you become many. Everything goes on happening – but just on the periphery. The deep stratum remains totally alone. That is your reality. You may call this your atma, your essence.

In deep solitude this essence has to be recaptured. So when Buddha says that he has achieved nirvana, really he has achieved this loneliness, this basic reality. Mahavira says he has achieved kaivalya. The very word kaivalya, means loneliness, the alone. Just below the turmoil of events that aloneness is there. It runs through you like a thread running in a mala. The beads are apparent, but the thread is not. But the beads are hanging on the thread, and the beads are many and the thread is one. Really, the mala is a symbol of this reality. The thread is the reality and the beads are just the events which go on hanging on it. And unless you penetrate and come to the basic thread, you will be in anguish, you will be in suffering.