How can the peak be in the beginning? How can the peak be in the middle? But if you think your childhood is your peak, as many people think, then of course the whole life will be a suffering because you have attained your peak – now everything will be a declining, coming down. If you think young age is the peak, as many people think, then of course after thirty-five you will become sad, depressed, because every day you will be losing and losing and losing, and gaining nothing. The energy will be lost, you will weaken, diseases will enter into your being, and death will start knocking at the door. The home will disappear, and the hospital will appear. How can you be happy? No, but in the East we have never thought that childhood or youth is the peak. The peak waits for the very end.

And if life flows rightly, by and by you reach higher and higher peaks. Death is the ultimate peak that life attains, the crescendo.

But why are we missing life? Why are we aging and not maturing? Somewhere something has gone wrong, somewhere you have been put on a wrong track – somewhere you have agreed to be put on a wrong track. That agreement has to be broken; that contract has to be burned. That’s what I call sannyas: an understanding that up to now I have lived in a wrong way; I have compromised, not lived really.

When you were small children you compromised. You sold your being. For nothing – what you have gained is simply nothing, just rubbish. For small things you have lost your soul. You have agreed to be somebody else other than yourself; that is where you missed your path. The mother wanted you to become somebody, the father wanted you to become somebody, the society wanted you to become somebody; and you agreed. And by and by you decided not to be yourself. And since then you have been pretending to be somebody else.

You cannot mature because that somebody else cannot mature. It is false. If I wear a mask, the mask cannot mature. It is dead. My face can mature, but not my mask. And only your mask goes on aging. Behind the mask, hiding, you are not growing. You can grow only if you accept yourself; that you are going to be yourself, nobody else.

The rosebush has agreed to become an elephant; the elephant has agreed to become a rosebush. The eagle is worried, almost consulting a psychiatrist, because she wants to become the dog; and the dog is hospitalized because he wants to fly like an eagle. This is what has happened to humanity. The greatest calamity is to agree to be somebody else: you can never mature.

You can never mature like somebody else. You can only be concerned about what people say. What is their opinion? Who are they? You are here to be yourself, you are not here to fulfill somebody else’s expectations; and everybody is trying that. The father may be dead, and you are trying to fulfill a promise you have given to him. And he was trying to fulfill a promise to his own father, and so on, so forth. The foolishness goes to the very beginning.

Try to understand, and take courage and take your life in your own hands. Suddenly you will see an upsurge of energy. The moment you decide, “I am going to be myself and nobody else. Whatsoever the cost, but I am going to be myself,” that very moment you will see a great change. You will feel vital. You will feel energy streaming in you, pulsating.