During these days of meditation, consciously keep yourselves free from the past and the future. Accept that they do not exist. Only the moment at hand, the moment you are in, exists. You have to live in it and to live it totally.

Tonight go to sleep as soundly as though your whole past has been dropped. Die to the past. And in the morning wake up as a new man in a new morning. Don’t let the same one who went to bed get up. Let him go to sleep for good. Let the one who is ever-new and ever-fresh awake instead.

Keep this living in the present continuously in your remembrance around the clock, and keep aware so that mechanical thinking about the past and future does not start up. To remain watchful is enough for this. If you remain watchful, it cannot be triggered. Consciousness destroys the habit.

The second sutra is: Live naturally. Man’s entire behavior is artificial and formal. We always keep ourselves wrapped in a phony cloak and because of this covering we gradually forget our own reality. You have to shed this false skin and throw it away. We have gathered here not to stage a drama but to know and to realize ourselves. Just as actors in a play remove their costumes and make up and put them aside after the performance, in these five days, you must remove your false masks and throw them away. Let that which is original and natural in you come out – and live in it. Meditation grows only in a simple and natural life.

During these days of meditation, know that you hold no position, you are not special, you have no status. Take away all these masks. You are simply you, an ordinary human being with no name, no status, no class, no family, no caste – just a nameless person, a very ordinary individual. You have to live like this. And remember this is also our actual reality.

The third sutra is: Live alone. A life of meditation takes birth in complete aloneness, when one is all alone. But generally man is never alone. He is always surrounded by others. And when he is not in a crowd outwardly, he is in a crowd inwardly. This crowd has to be dispersed.

Do not allow the crowd to gather within you. And on the outside also live by yourself as if you are all alone at this camp. You don’t have to maintain relations with anyone else. In the midst of these countless relationships you have forgotten yourselves. All these relationships – that you are someone’s enemy or friend, father or son, wife or husband – have so engulfed you that you are unable to know yourself in your own individuality.

Have you ever tried to imagine who you are, away from these relationships of yours? Have you ever discarded the garb of these relationships and seen yourself without them? Differentiate yourself from all these relationships and know that you are not the son of your father and mother, not the husband of your wife, not the father of your children, not the friend of your friends, not the enemy of your enemies – and what remains is your real being. That remaining entity is what you are in yourself. During these days you have to live alone in that being.