Step 1: Daily Watching
“Start being aware with day-to-day, routine actions, and while you are doing your routine actions, remain relaxed.
“There is no need to be tense. When you are washing your floor, what is the need to be tense? Or when you are cooking the food, what is the need to be tense? There is not a single time in life that requires your tension. It is just your unawareness and your impatience.
“I have not found – and I have lived in all kind of ways, with all kinds of people. I have always been puzzled: why are they tense? It seems tension has nothing to do with anything outside you, it has something to do within you. Outside you always find an excuse only because it looks so idiotic to be tense without any reason. Just to rationalize, you find some reason outside yourself to explain why you are tense.
“But tension is not outside you, it is in your wrong style of life.
Step 2: Accept yourself
“You are living in competition – that will create tension. You are living in continuous comparison – which will create tension. You are always thinking either of the past or of the future, and missing the present that is the only reality – that will create tension.
“It is a question of simple understanding; there is no need of any competition with anybody. You are yourself, and as you are, you are perfectly good.
“Accept yourself. This is the way existence wants you to be. Some trees are taller; some trees are smaller. But the smaller trees are not tense – neither are the taller trees full of ego. Existence needs variety. Somebody is stronger than you; somebody is more intelligent than you – but in something, you also must be more talented than anybody else.
“Just find your own talent. Nature never sends any single individual without some unique gift. Just a little search…. perhaps you can play on the flute better than the president of the country can be a president – you are a better flautist than he is a president.
“There is no question of any comparison. Comparison leads people astray. Competition keeps them continuously tense, and because their life is empty, they never live in the moment. All they do is to think of the past, which is no more, or project in the future, which is not yet….Whatever qualities and whatever talents you have, use them to the fullest,…
“And the energy that is involved in tensions will start becoming your grace, your beauty.
“Then life will not be just an ordinary, routine, day-to-day existence, but a dance from cradle to grave. And existence will be immensely enriched by your grace, by your relaxation, by your silence, by your awareness.
“You will not leave the world without contributing something valuable to it. But people are always looking at others, at what others are doing – somebody is playing the flute and you cannot, and immediately there is misery; somebody is painting and you cannot, and there is misery.
Step 3: Be an Artist of Love
“Whatever you are doing, do it with such love, with such care that the smallest thing in the world becomes a piece of art. It will bring great joy to you. And it will create a world without competition, without comparison; it will give dignity to all people. It will restore their pride, which religions have destroyed.
“Any act done with totality becomes your prayer.”
