Growing old is not of any worth, every animal does it, it needs no intelligence. Growing up is a totally different experience. Growing old is horizontal; growing up is vertical, it leads you to heights, it leads you to depths.
And strangely enough, you will be surprised to know that time is horizontal. One moment passes, another moment comes, another moment, another moment…in a line, a horizontal line. Time is horizontal, and mind is also horizontal. One thought is followed by another thought, and by another thought, and by another thought, but in a line, in a row, a procession, or just a traffic – but it is going horizontal.
Meditation is vertical, it is going beyond mind and beyond time. And perhaps, ultimately you will find that time and mind are equivalent, two names of the same phenomenon – the horizontal procession of thoughts, of moments. Meditation is to stop time and mind both, and suddenly you start rising up in eternity. Eternity is not part of time, and eternity is not a thought; it is an experience.
It is a difficult task to get rid of God and God-oriented religions, and the priests who are supporting this lie by threatening people with murder. These murderers should be exposed, and they should be dethroned. The basic need is a deep understanding of your own divinity. Then there is no need for an external God, and then there is no need for any mediators between you and God.
Meditation is a rebellion, perhaps the most fundamental rebellion against all fictions, against all lies, and against all those who are living on those fictions and lies.
I teach you rebellion, I teach you revolt.
I teach you freedom of your individuality. Destroy all kinds of prisons, destroy all kinds of lies – and you can destroy them only by meditation. Rise beyond time and mind, and you will find not only that you are divine, but the whole existence is divine, life is divine. And you enter into a totally new dimension that has been completely blocked by scriptures, by priests, by God, by heaven and hell, by all kinds of fear, by all kinds of greed.
It is a very unnatural phenomenon that a person goes on growing physically but his mind is stuck somewhere below seven years. It cannot be natural! The mind is kept retarded, otherwise just as your body grows, your physiology grows, your mental age will follow simultaneously. When you are seventy years old, your mental age must be seventy years old. But it is seven years old….
According to me, if this is possible then the opposite is also possible. If a man of seventy years’ age of the body has only the mental age of a seven-year-old child, then the reverse is also possible. A man of seventy may have the mental age of seven hundred years.
Once Emerson was asked, “What is your age?”
And he said, “Three hundred and sixty years.”
The man who had asked could not believe it. Three hundred and sixty years…? He said, “I did not hear, please repeat what you have said.”