Misery comes the moment you become clinging, attached. The moment you put conditions on life – when you say you will live only according to this way, no other way; that life has to fulfill your conditions – then you are choosing misery, because life goes on unconcerned with your conditions. If you have no conditions you can enjoy life infinitely. If you have conditions, because of them you become incapable.

Anand is bliss, aniketa homelessness. Change to orange, so you become a really homeless wanderer.

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I’m experiencing a great deal of fear during meditation.

It has always been there. It is only that you are becoming aware of it through meditation. Try not to avoid it but to accept it, live it. Sometimes sit alone and allow the fear to come up and to go into it fully; delight in it, come to know it through and through.

Everybody feels fear, some more, some less, but it is with everyone because of the reality of death, of which fear is a symptom, a reminder. If you follow fear, you will find it impossible to live. If you fight with fear, you will become divided. It will go by and by and will leave you feeling very peaceful.

It will make you more humble, more prayerful. It will make you more aware of the limitations of life. It will make you more understanding of other people. When you see somebody running in fear you will not condemn him. You will feel for him, you will feel sympathetic.

Once you have understood your fear, you have understood the situation of the whole human mind. Whatsoever you have understood in yourself, you have understood in others also. And that makes you humble, sympathetic, human.

So try for two weeks. Whenever you feel it, allow it so deeply that you are no longer there…only fear exists. After two weeks, come and meditate in front of me. And for these days, just enjoy it so you become capable of using it. It can be used. It is energy, pure energy – don’t waste it. What I am saying is that you should use it and not be used by it – you remain whole.

And that’s the whole art of life: to use everything that life gives you – fear, hate, anger, whatsoever it gives. Whatsoever life gives, there must be some treasure hidden in it. Go into it and you will find the treasure.

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The Enlightenment Intensive group is present. The first to speak is the only person who had left the group before its completion.

I’m afraid that my pride overcame me, and my body was too weak. I became angry and left. I felt guilty but I didn’t return. I felt so much better that I didn’t come back. I just continued to eat and sleep.