In India there is a plant, a very beautiful plant. Its name is also very beautiful; its name is chhuimui. It means “very touchy.” Just touch one leaf of the plant and the whole plant immediately closes. All its leaves close; the whole plant looks as if it is completely dead. Just one leaf! It has a small number of leaves, two leaves, and if you just touch one leaf both leaves will close and the whole plant will immediately go into an emergency situation: – some danger! And it takes at least fifteen minutes for it to wait and see whether the danger is gone. Then slowly, slowly it opens its leaves again.

If you are chhuimui – so touchy that the moment life comes close to you, you immediately close up – then for what are you living? You are already dead. People are dead to different degrees: a few are a hundred percent dead, a few are fifty percent, a few are thirty percent. The more religious, the more virtuous, the more moralistic, the more puritan…they don’t have more than five percent life, or even less. The great saints have even shrunk more. They live only one percent – because they can still breathe. Except for that, there is no sign of life.

The fear of death takes you away from life but the reality is that unless you live a hundred percent – or if you can manage it, a little more too – then death is not going to happen to you. You will never experience any death, but only a change of house. Everybody will know that you are dead, but what have you to do with everybody else? You will know that you are alive, and more alive than you ever were, because the body is a hindrance, a cage, an imprisonment.

Mind is so heavy and loaded with garbage. You don’t see that your consciousness is carrying almost a Himalayan load of thousands of years; its back is bent. The moment your consciousness is freed from the body, it comes into the open, into the clearance, under the sky, under the stars. And this freedom is the freedom from all past, because all the past is carried in the body, in the brain.

Consciousness is always new.

But because you are identified with the body, you think that some time you are young, and then you are old and then one day you die. It is your identification with the body that is creating the trouble.

You will have to learn from ABC about life, love, laughter. You have got such a small time span; don’t waste it in fear. Jump into life’s deepest waters. Only life can redeem you from death. What ordinarily seems to be the end of life is not the end of life for those who are awakened. It is the beginning of a totally new life, far greater, far bigger, far more luminous.

Start falling in love: at least you may become ten percent alive. Start enjoying food: you will become a little more alive. Start enjoying the beauty that surrounds the world and you will become more alive.

Keep yourself free from all bondages such as marriage, because I don’t know anything else which comes so very close to death as marriage. Two persons, both are alive, and both are sitting by each other’s side, dead – completely dead. I can say from far away, seeing a couple walking, whether they are husband and wife. If you see their faces, long, saintly, they are husband and wife. If you see them laughing, enjoying, joking, then the wife belongs to someone else – or it may be vice versa: the husband belongs to somebody else.

If you really want to be more and more alive, then come closer in every area of life with intensity and totality.