And the other statement that he repeats again and again is: aes dhammo visuddhya – such is the law of purity, of becoming innocent, pure. What is the law of purity? A simple law: become disidentified with the mind, don’t think of yourself as a mind. Not that Buddha is against the mind, not that he does not want you to use it: he wants you to use it, but not to be used by it. And usually the second is the case: the mind is using you. You have become a slave. The master has become the slave and the slave has become the master. Everything has gone topsy-turvy.

You are standing on your head! Now, how can you walk, how can you move, how can you dance? Have you seen anybody dancing standing on his head? Your life will not be a life of movement anymore if you are standing on your head. Your life will be stagnant, it will become a dirty pool of water. You will start stinking soon. Standing on your head you are crippled, paralyzed.

If you just stand on your legs again… A small change, a very small change, but it brings a radical revolution: immediately you are capable of movement, and movement is life. Not to move is to die.

How do you define death? – when a person cannot move in any possible way. He cannot breathe – that is one kind of movement; he cannot see – that is another kind of movement; he cannot walk, he cannot talk – these are all kinds of movement, different dimensions of movement. Because all movement has ceased we say the man is dead.

The more movement you have, the more life, the livelier you are. Have multidimensional movement. But that is possible only if you stop standing on your head. You have to be put right.

The day you come to me, you come in a topsy-turvy state. Initiation into sannyas means nothing except that I persuade you to stand on your feet and not to go on doing this shirshasana – headstand – your whole life.

Be natural, be part of nature. Don’t brag. Don’t go on puffing up your egos. We are tiny parts, immensely beautiful if we function with the whole, but absolutely ugly if we function against it.

But you have been told by your societies to fight, to struggle, because life is a struggle for survival, because if you don’t fight you will be defeated. And you have to be victorious, and you have to be famous. You have been given great ambitions and all those ambitions have become chains, all those ambitions are keeping you tethered. All those ambitions are the root cause of your mind; they create the mind.

Buddha’s word tanha contains all the meanings of desire, ambition, achievement. These are the nourishments of the mind. If you go on nourishing the mind you are poisoning yourself. And the mind will become bigger and bigger and you will become smaller and smaller. The mind becomes almost like a cancerous growth.

Sannyas means an operation. Buddha transformed thousands of people through sannyas, through initiation. He was a great surgeon.