The word spaciousness will make you glad that at last the rotten furniture of your mind has been thrown out – now you can rearrange your inner house. And in fact, spaciousness has a silence about it – naturally, because there is nothing to create noise. Silence can be misinterpreted as sadness…. There are very delicate lines that one has to understand. Language can be a great problem.

Silence and sadness have something in common – the depth, the peace – but sadness is empty, and silence is spaciousness; and to be spacious is one of the great achievements. Because now you can invite the guest, the unknown, the unknowable: you have become a temple.

There is a temple in Japan which is absolutely empty – not even a statue of Buddha inside. But emptiness in Buddhism does not have a negative connotation; it is a spaciousness. That temple attracts pilgrims from thousands of miles away, and there is nothing in the temple. But just to sit in that spaciousness helps you to become part of it – it becomes a meditation.

So change your words. Don’t call it great sadness; call it great spaciousness. For the first time you have entered your inner sky; those barriers of prejudices and negativity are all gone.

You say, “I have been touched by your great love and the compassion of your sannyasins.” Don’t just be touched, drown in it! You are not going to lose anything by drowning in love, and compassion, and joy, and song and dance. Your spaciousness will become alive.

You say, “But still I keep fighting again and again.” Don’t fight, because if you fight you are giving energy to the enemy. Jesus is right when he says, “Love your enemies” – that is a great alchemical secret. If you don’t fight, you don’t nourish the enemy. If you fight, two things happen: you nourish the enemy, and you have to remain at the same level as the enemy.

I have been telling my people: You can have friendship with anyone, but if you want to have enemies, choose very well. Choose some enemy who is higher than you, better than you, holier than you. Just by becoming his enemy you will have to attain all these qualities – because you cannot fight with an enemy who is on the housetop, while you are crawling on the ground; you will have to come up to the same level.

But I can understand your problem. It is not your personal problem; it is the problem of the mind as such. The mind has a function if you are miserable, but if you are blissful the mind has no function. The mind has a function if you are full of negative attitudes, but if you are full of affirmations, trust, love, ecstasy, the mind has no function.

The mind is basically the very source of all your negativities. When the negativities disappear, the mind also disappears, and one feels afraid. The mind tries hard to remain in its position; it has been your master for so long that it is not easy for it to leave you alone. It will come back again and again; and if you fight with it, you are still giving it recognition.