If you can just remain in this understanding and awareness: in this space between your real being – consciousness – and your past – accumulated being, the ego – then the ego becomes just an outer layer, just a boundary line. And in the center is pure consciousness. Remain in it. It will be very uneasy: it will be very inconvenient and arduous, because we have never remained so. We always run to the periphery, always become identified with the periphery. We live on the periphery and never in the center. The periphery is the ego – because all events happen on the periphery, on the circumference.

The circumference is the point from where you are in touch with others. If I love you, it happens on the periphery – because only my periphery can be in touch and in contact with your periphery. Everything in this world happens on the periphery, on the boundary line. So we always remain on the boundary line. That is the field of activity – but the being is always in the center. So, if you can remain in this gap, in this space, and if you can see yourself – not on the periphery but in the center – and can become aware of the periphery as the dead past, as the boundary line, as a surface, as the body…. I am not talking about this physical body. Really, the ego is the body.

So, if there is this space – not intellectually comprehended, not logically understood but existentially felt – it will be inconvenient. You will become uneasy, as if you are dying, because you have always remained on the periphery. That has been your life. So if you go back to the center it will be just like dying, because the periphery has become your life. You do not know any other life. You will feel it like sinking, dying, suffocated. And the mind will say: “Go back to the periphery. Life is there.”

But on the periphery there is no life – only action. There is only doing – not being. On the periphery there is only doing, not being. That is why if you have not to do anything, that not doing becomes so difficult that you cannot remain with it. You begin to do something: you may read the newspaper, you may put on the radio, you may do anything. Or if there is nothing to do, then you may go to sleep and begin to dream. But remaining in non-doing is the most arduous thing. Not for a single moment are you in non-doing. And the being is only revealed to those who can remain in the non-doing, who can remain in the center, who can remain with this space between the periphery and the center.

That is what is meant by negative cooperation: your cooperation is needed in a negative way. You are not to do something, you are to remain in non-doing. And then the explosion takes place.

It happens to you. And when it has happened, you will always be in the center. It does not mean that you will not be able to do anything – you will be able to do, but the quality of action will be altogether different. Now a different kind of love will be possible from the center, a different kind of activity will be possible from the center. Now love will not be an act, but a state of mind. It will not be that sometimes you love and sometimes you do not love. No, it will become your very existence. You will be loving. And every action and every relationship will have a different quality, a different meaning, a different depth. Through this explosion you will be totally unidentified with the mind, with the ego, with the body, with the periphery – totally.