All your pleasures and all your sufferings are related to one phenomenon: you want to preserve the pleasures and you want to drop the sufferings. You are asking the impossible. Then it is difficult – not only difficult, it is impossible. It is not going to happen to you. Whatsoever you do will be futile, no result will come of it.
You create hope out of it – for heaven, the intense blissfulness of a buddha. Listening to me or listening to a Jesus or a Buddha, hope is created. But I am not creating it, you are creating it. You are projecting hope on it. And this is the problem, the complexity: that every hope is food for the ego again. Even this hope of reaching a paradise, a heaven, becoming enlightened, is a hope. And every hope is food for the ego.
Who is trying to become enlightened? The one who is trying to become enlightened is the problem. Nobody ever becomes enlightened. Enlightenment happens, but nobody ever becomes enlightened. When the room is empty, enlightenment happens. When there is nobody to reach enlightenment, enlightenment is there. Because of the language, because of the duality of the language, whatsoever is said about such deep things becomes false.
We say: Gautam Buddha became enlightened. This is false. Gautam Buddha never became enlightened. Gautam Buddha was the un-enlightenment. When he was not there, when he became absent, enlightenment happened. When suddenly one day he realized that he was following an absurd pattern, when he realized that: “I am the problem, so whatsoever I do will create more problems….”
It is not a question of doing right or wrong, this or that. Whatsoever you do will strengthen the ego. Once Buddha realized this – but this realization took many years of effort – when he realized that: “Whatsoever I do will help my ego more and more,” he simply dropped doing. In that moment of realization he simply became a non-doer, absolutely inactive.
Remember, this is the problem: you can even create activity out of your inactivity, or you can create activity just to help inactivity come to you. But then you miss. You can stand still, you can sit silently, but if you are making effort to stand still, your standing is false. You are not standing, you are moving. If you are sitting silently and there is effort, if you are trying to be silent, that silence is false. You are not silent.
When Buddha realized that he was the problem, and that every activity of his gave more substance to the ego, he simply dropped. Then he was not making any effort to create a non-active state. He was not doing at all. Whatsoever was happening was happening. The wind was blowing, and the tree must have been dancing; and then the full moon came, and the whole existence was celebrating. And the breathing coming in, going out, and the blood circulating in the veins, and the heart beating, and the pulse – everything was happening, but he was not doing anything. In this non-doing Gautam Siddhartha disappeared.