Your mind has become expert in destroying you, because your life consists of simple things. The whole existence is simple, but man’s mind has been cultivated, conditioned, educated, programmed in such a way that the simplest thing becomes crooked. The moment it reaches to your mind it is no longer simple. The mind starts interpreting it, finding things in it which are not there, ignoring things which are there.

And you think that you have heard whatever I have been telling you? It is not so. I have been telling you one thing, and you have been hearing something else because your hearing is not direct. There is a mediator – your mind. It functions in many ways as a censor, it does not allow many things to enter inside you.

You will be surprised to know how much the mind prevents – ninety-eight percent. It allows in only two percent of what is being said to you, and that too not in its purity. First it pollutes it by its own interpretations, by its own past experiences, conditionings, and by the time it comes to have the sense that it has understood, what was said and what was heard are poles apart.

Gautam Buddha used to tell a story…it is strange that all great masters have depended on stories. There is some reason for it: the mind relaxes when it is a question of a story; when it is just a joke the mind relaxes. There is no need to be tense and serious, just a story is being told, you can relax. But when something like love or freedom or silence is being explained, you are tense. That’s why the masters have to use simple stories. Perhaps by the end of the story they can manage it so a small message enters in from the back door while you are still relaxed.

Gautam Buddha used to say – it was his custom after his evening talk – he used to say to his disciples, “Now go and do the last thing before you go to sleep.” That last thing was the meditation.

One day it happened that a prostitute was listening and a thief was also in the audience. When Buddha said, “Now it is time for you to go and do the last thing before you go to sleep,” all the sannyasins went to meditate. The thief simply became awakened – “What am I doing here?” This was the time to do his business. The prostitute looked around and felt that Buddha was really very perceptive, because when Buddha had said that, he was looking at her. She bowed down in gratitude because she was reminded, “Go to do your business before you go to sleep.”

A simple statement, but three types of people heard three meanings. In fact there must have been more meanings, because to somebody meditation must have been a joy, to somebody else meditation must have been something one has to do; and then the meaning differs. To all those meditators the message was the same, but what was heard by them could not have been the same.

All my life I have never taught anything complex to anybody. Life is already too complex, and I don’t want to burden you more. But I have been more misunderstood than perhaps anybody else in this whole century, for the simple reason that I am saying simple things which nobody says. I am talking about the obvious which everybody has forgotten, which has been taken for granted. Nobody talks about it.