But this new has nothing to do with your past, your will, your direction, your impulse. It is to act spontaneously. It is not reaction but response. All that is done out of the past is old, so that one can of oneself do nothing new. To see this is to be done with the old and with the past and with yourself. That is all we can do. But it is everything, it is all. Upon the ending of the old, the new may follow, it may not. It does not matter. The very wish for the new is an old wish. Then one is utterly open. Even to ask for the new is an old wish.

A buddha is not even asking for the new. There is no desire for anything, that “It should be like this.” If there is desire you will manage it like that, you will impose yourself upon it. See life desirelessly. See life without any conditions. See life as it is – yatha bhutam – and you will be continuously renewed, rejuvenated.

That is the real meaning of resurrection. If you understand this you will be free from memory, psychological memory that is. Memory is a dead thing. Memory is not truth and cannot ever be, because truth is always alive, truth is life; memory is persistence of that which is no more. It is living in a ghost world, but it contains us, it is our prison. In fact, it is us. Memory creates the knot, the complex called “I,” the ego. And naturally this false entity called “I” is continuously afraid of death. That’s why you are afraid of the new.

This “I” is afraid, not really you. The being has no fear, but the ego has fear because the ego is very very afraid of dying. It is artificial, it is arbitrary, it is put together. It can fall apart any moment. And when the new enters there is fear. The ego is afraid, it may fall apart. Somehow it has been managing to keep itself together, to keep itself in one piece, and now something new comes – it will be a shattering thing. That’s why you don’t accept the new with joy. The ego cannot accept its own death with joy – how can it accept its own death with joy?

Unless you have understood that you are not the ego, you will not be able to receive the new. Once you have seen that the ego is your past memory and nothing else, that you are not your memory, that memory is just like a biocomputer, that it is a machine, a mechanism, utilitarian, but you are beyond it…. You are consciousness, not memory. Memory is a content in consciousness, you are consciousness itself.

For example, you see somebody walking on the road. You remember the face but you can’t remember the name. If you are the memory you should remember the name too. But you say, “I recognize the face but I don’t remember the name.” Then you start looking in your memory, you go inside your memory, you look to this side, to that side, and suddenly the name bubbles up and you say, “Yes, this is his name.” Memory is your record. You are the one who is looking into the record, you are not the memory itself.

And it happens many times that if you become too tense about remembering something it becomes difficult to remember it, because the very tension, the very strain upon your being does not allow the memory to release its information to you. You try and try to remember somebody’s name and it doesn’t come, even though you say it is just on the tip of the tongue. You know that you know, but still the name is not coming.