Awareness means to listen to me unfocused - alert of course, not fallen asleep, but alert to these birds, their chirping, alert to the wind that passes through the trees, alert to everything that is happening. Concentration excludes much, includes little. Awareness excludes nothing, includes all. Awareness is a state of no-mind. You are, yet you are not focused. You are just a mirror reflecting all, echoing all; see the beauty of it and the silence and the stillness.

Buddah says once you understand that you are lost and you have to find your own way and there is no help coming, you become responsible. Prayer is irresponsible. To pray is just to avoid responsibility, to pray is to be lazy. To pray is just an escape. Buddha says effort is needed. It is an insult to pray.

Today it may seem that your anger is very strong, how can meditation break it? But it breaks - it has always broken. Rock is very strong and meditation is very delicate, but this is the mystery of life - the continuity of the delicate can break the strongest and the hardest.

The experience of life is very bitter. it is sweet only in imagination. In its reality it is very bitter. He escaped from the palace and the women and the riches and the luxury and everything.

In the West the whole Western tradition of religion and psychology propounds, preaches, persuades people to have strong egos - because unless you have a strong ego, how can you survive? Life is a struggle; if you are egoless you will be destroyed. Then who will resist? Who will fight? Who will compete? And life is a continuous competition. Western psychology says: Attain to the ego, be strong in it.

There have been many poets who have lived at the fifth center of creativity and never gone ahead - many painters, many dancers, many singers who created great art, but never moved to the third eye. And there have been mystics who have remained with the third eye, knowing their own inner beauty; it is so fulfilling that they thought they had arrived. Somebody is needed to tell you that there is still something more ahead; otherwise, in your ignorance, what you will do is almost unpredictable.

Where does the ego get its energy? The ego feeds off your desire to be something else. You are poor and you want to be rich - the ego is absorbing energy, its life-breath. You are ignorant and you want to become a wise one - the ego is absorbing energy. You are a wretched nobody and you want to become powerful - the ego is absorbing energy.