Life can be lived in two ways. If you live unconsciously you simply die; if you live consciously you attain to more and more life. Death will come, but it never comes to a mature man, it comes only to a man who has been aging and getting old. A mature one never dies, because he will learn even through death. Even death is going to be an experience to be intensely lived, and watched, allowed.

A mature man never dies. In fact before a mature man, on the rock of maturity, death struggles and shatters itself, commits suicide. Death dies, but never a mature man – that is the message of all the awakened ones: that you are deathless. They have known it, they have lived their death. They have watched, and they have found that it can surround you but you remain aloof, you remain far away. Death happens near you but it never happens to you.

Deathless is your being, blissful is your being, divine is your being, but those experiences you cannot cram in the mind and in the memory. You have to pass through life and attain them.

Much suffering is there, much pain is there. And because of pain and suffering people like to live stupidly – it has to be understood why so many people insist that they should live in a hypnosis; why Buddhas and Christs go on telling people to be awake, and nobody listens. There must be some deep involvement in hypnosis, there must be some deep investment. What is the investment?

The mechanism has to be understood, otherwise you will listen to me and you will never become aware You will listen and you will make it a part of your knowledge that: Yes, this man says be aware and it is good to be aware. And those who attain to awareness become mature…. But you yourself will not attain to it, it will remain a knowledge. You may communicate your knowledge to others, but nobody is helped that way.

Why? Have you asked this question ever? Why don’t you attain to awareness? If it leads to the infinite bliss, to the attainment of satchitananda, to absolute truth – then why not be aware? Why do you insist on being sleepy?

There is some investment – and this is the investment: if you become aware, there is suffering. If you become aware, you become aware of pain, and the pain is so much that you would like to take a tranquilizer and be asleep.

This sleepiness in life works as a protection against pain. But this is the trouble – if you are asleep against pain, you are asleep against pleasure also.

Think of it as if there are two faucets: on one is written “pain” and on another is written “pleasure.” You would like to close the faucet on which pain is written, and you would like to open the faucet on which pleasure is written. But this is the game – if you close the faucet “pain,” the pleasure immediately closes, because behind both there is only one faucet on which “awareness” is written. Either both remain open or both remain closed, because both are two faces of the same phenomenon, two aspects.

And this is the whole contradiction of mind: mind wants to be more and more happy; happiness is possible if you are aware. And then mind wants to be less and less in pain, but less and less pain is possible only if you are unaware.