You become mature only when meditation has started; otherwise
you remain childish. Your toys may go on changing -- small children are playing
with small toys, and big children, aged children, elderly children, are playing
with big toys -- but there is no qualitative difference.
You can see... sometimes your child will do it. He will stand
on the table when you are sitting at the side on the chair, and he will say,
"Look, Daddy, I am bigger than you." He is standing higher, on the
table, and he says, "Look, I am bigger than you," and you laugh at
him. But what are you doing? When you have more money, just watch how you walk.
You are saying to all the neighbours, "Look! I am bigger than you." Or
when you become a president of a country, or a prime minister, look how you
walk, with what haughtiness, with what ego. You are telling everybody, "I
have defeated you all. I am sitting on the biggest chair." These are the
same games! From your childhood to your old age, you go on playing the same
games. You can play the game of Monopoly, or you can go and play the real game
of monopoly in the share market -- it makes no difference, it is the same game
just played on a bigger scale.
Once you understand it, that this is the root of your
childishness, the outgoing mind.... Small children start reaching for the moon,
and even the biggest scientists are trying to reach the moon -- they have
reached. There is not much difference.
Reaching outside, you may reach other stars but you will
remain childish. Even if you reach the moon, what are you going to do there? You
will be the same! With the same rubbish in your head, with all the holy cow dung
that you go on carrying in your heart, you will be standing on the moon. There
will be no difference at all! You can be a poor man, you can be very rich; you
can be absolutely anonymous, you can be world-famous -- it makes no difference
at all. Unless the mind takes a turn and starts moving inwards, unless mind
takes a totally new dimension and becomes meditation....
Meditation is mind turning towards its own source.
Meditation makes you mature; meditation makes you really a
grown-up. Growing in age is not really becoming a grown-up, because I see people
eighty years old and still playing games, ugly games of power politics -- even
at the age of eighty-two, eighty-three, eighty-four! The sleep seems to be so
deep. When are they going to awaken? When will they think of the inner world?
And death will take all that you have accumulated -- your
power, your money, your prestige. Nothing will be left, not even a trace. Your
whole life will be nullified. Death will come and destroy all that you have
made; death will come and prove that all your palaces were nothing but palaces
made of playing cards.
Maturity is to know something in you which is deathless, to
know something in you which will transcend death -- that is meditation. Mind knows the world:
meditation knows God. Mind is a way to understand the object: meditation is a
way to understand the subject. Mind is a concern with the contents, and
meditation is a concern with the container -- the consciousness. Mind becomes
obsessed with the clouds, and meditation searches for the sky. Clouds come and
go: sky remains, abides.
Search for the inner sky. And if you have found it, then you
will never die. The body will die, the mind will die, but you will never die.
And to know it is to know life. What you call life is not real life because it
is going to die. Only a meditator knows what life is because he has reached the
very source of eternity.
Maturity has a fragrance
