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Ekon wrote:

WHO SHALL HALT THE SWAN IN ITS FLIGHT?

OR LIFE IN ITS FLOW?

I have been telling you: everything is moving so fast -- and there is nobody who is capable of preventing a swan in its flight.

The great swans live deep in the Himalayas, in the highest lake in the world, Mansarovar.

Mansarovar remains frozen for nine months of the year, you can drive a car on it. It is a lake miles and miles long, but the snow becomes hard as stone.

The swans leave -- they have to leave because there is no water to drink, no fish to eat, they cannot penetrate the thick layer of hard snow -- and three thousand miles they fly over the Himalayas and come to small lakes, rivers, around North India. It is a very mysterious phenomenon.

In those nine months ... nature has such balance, such harmony, that those nine months are the months for their mating also. So they mate and they lay the eggs, but before the eggs open and their children come out, nine months are over. Now Mansarovar will be melting. They fly again, leaving the eggs in the plains of North India, a three-thousand- mile flight -- thousands and thousands of swans disappearing into the Himalayas.

The miracle is, when the parents are gone, then the eggs open and those small swans immediately start moving towards Mansarovar. They don't have any map, no guide, no parents to tell them which is exactly the same route the parents have taken for millions of years. Every year the miracle happens: those small swans start flying three thousand miles high above the Himalayan peaks where the snow has never melted since eternity, and they take the same route and they reach to the same Mansarovar lake.

And people think nature has no intelligence!

Nature has tremendous wisdom, just we have forgotten to listen to it. The only way for you to listen to nature is by going deeper into yourself, because there are roots which are spread into existence. Those roots still understand the language of existence.

Far away from the roots, you are hung up in the head. You don't know anything about the wisdom of existence. That's why you ask questions which are not needed at all. You need only one thing: to find a connecting link with existence, and all questions disappear.

My new symbol is going to be a flying swan.

WHO SHALL HALT THE SWAN IN ITS FLIGHT OR LIFE IN ITS FLOW? -- but people try hard.

Just look at women ...! They halt again and again, although life goes on, it does not listen.

A sixteen-year-old woman will take almost three years to become seventeen, and as the age grows the gap becomes bigger. Never ask a woman her age. Always tell a woman, "You look very young!"

Even if the woman has one foot in the grave and another foot in the church, still you have to say, "You look so young, so fresh, so radiant" -- and even an old, dying woman will have a blush of youth on her face! Sometimes I think perhaps even a dead woman, if persuaded rightly, will start blushing -- I just think, I have not tried! -- but there is every possibility of it being true.

At the age of thirty-six -- that is the finding of the psychologists -- women stop, because now this is very dangerous. To go beyond thirty-six ... it will take almost four years to become thirty-seven! Now things are dangerous ahead. A woman becomes forty with great difficulty, great reluctance, because the dangerous time is coming when people will start telling her, "You look much younger!"

Nobody tells that to a young woman, there is no point. A young woman is young.

Whenever somebody tells you, "You are looking very young," take it for granted -- Avirbhava! -- that you have gone beyond; people are being very nice to you. People try ...

but nobody succeeds.

One has to become old, and when you are becoming old reluctantly, old age becomes ugly. When you are becoming old joyously, old age has a beauty of its own, a grandeur of its own, a ripeness, a maturity, a centering. Young people have nothing compared to the experienced, who have lived life and who know it is all just a game.

The moment a person comes to the point where the whole life is just a game, his old age is so beautiful, so graceful; no young person can be compared to it. His white hairs will look like white snow -- just on the highest peak of the mountains. He will die with joy.

He has lived his life, now he is entering into a new phase -- death. He will not be reluctant.

If he was not reluctant for old age, he will not be reluctant for death. If he accepted old age joyously, he will accept death also dancingly. He will go with death dancing.

If a man can go joyously with death, there is no death for him, he enters into eternal life.

Then there is no birth, no death. He has gone beyond the circle of birth and death.

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