கர்ம வினை தீர்க்கும் திருக்கோயில்கள்

இந்து சமயக் கோயில்கள்

தென்பாண்டி நாட்டில் அதுவும் குறிப்பாக தாமிரபரணி நதிக்கரையின் இரு ஓரங்களிலும் 274 சிவாலயங்கள் சிறப்புற்று விளங்கி இருந்ததாக பல புராணங்கள் கூறுகின்றன. அத்தகைய புராணங்களில், தாமிரபரணி மகாத்மியம், நவசமுத்திர மகாத்மியம், சிவசைல மகாத்மியம், திருப்புடை மருதூர் மகாத்மியம், திருக்குற்றால தலபுராணம், தென்காசி தலபுராணம், கருவை தலபுராணம், திருச்செந்தூர் புராணம் போன்ற நூல்களில் தென்பாண்டி நாட்டில் உள்ள சிவாலயங்கள் திரி (3), பஞ்ச (5), அஷ்ட (8), நவ (9), தச (10) போன்ற எண்ணிக்கையில் பிரித்து நம் முன்னோர்கள் வழிபட்டுள்ளனர்.

காந்திமதி நெல்லையப்பர் கோவில்

இறைவன் நடராசத் திருமேனி கொண்டு அருட்கூத்து இயற்றுகின்ற தலங்களில் முக்கியமானவையாக ஐந்து தலங்கள் இருக்கின்றன. சிவபெருமானுக்கான ஐம்பெரும் சபைகளில் "தாமிர சபை" என்று போற்றப்படுவது திருநெல்வேலி நெல்லையப்பர் கோயில்தான் ^[3].இக்கோயில் தெற்கிலிருந்து வடக்குப் பக்கமாக 756 அடி நீளமும், மேற்கிலிருந்து கிழக்காக 378 அடி அகலமும் கொண்டதாக இருக்கிறது. மேலும் இது ஆசியாவின் மிகப்பெரிய சிவன் கோயில் என்பதும் இங்கே குறிப்பிடத்தக்கது. இந்தக் கோயிலில் நெல்லையப்பர், காந்திமதியம்மன் என்று இரண்டு சமமான பிரிவுகளில் சுவாமிக்கும் அம்மனுக்கும் தனித்தனிக் கோயில்கள் இருக்கிறது. இந்தக் கோயில்கள் இரண்டும் அழகிய கல் மண்டபம் ஒன்றின் மூலம் இணைக்கப்பட்டுள்ளது இதன் சிறப்பாகும்.

சபை சிவாலயங்கள்

இறைவன் நடராசத் திருமேனி கொண்டு அருட்கூத்து இயற்றுகின்ற தலங்களில் முக்கியமானவை என்று ஐந்து உள்ளது. இந்த ஐம்பெரும் மன்றங்களில் (சபைகள்) இரண்டு மன்றங்கள் திருநெல்வேலி மாவட்டத்தில் அமைந்துள்ளது என்பது குறிப்பிடத்தக்கது.

• சித்ர சபை - திருக்குற்றாலம்
• தாமிர சபை- திருநெல்வேலி

]முப்பீட தலங்கள்

• அம்பாசமுத்திரம் - திருமூலநாதர் திருக்கோயில்
• ஊர்காடு - திருக்கோஷ்டியப்பர் திருக்கோயில்
• வல்லநாடு - திருமூலநாதர் திருக்கோயில் (தற்போது தூத்துக்குடி மாவட்டத்தில் உள்ளது).

பஞ்ச ஆசன தலங்கள்

• ஏர்வாடி - திருவழுந்தீசர் திருக்கோயில்
• களக்காடு - சத்யவாகீசர் திருக்கோயில்
• நான்குநேரி - திருநாகேஷ்வரர் திருக்கோயில்
• விஜயநாராயணம்- மனோன்மணீசர் திருக்கோயில்
• செண்பகராமநல்லூர் - இராமலிங்கர் திருக்கோயில்
• தென்பாண்டி நாட்டின் பஞ்ச பூத தலங்கள்
• சங்கரன்கோயில் - மண் தலம் (ப்ருத்திவி)
• கரிவலம்வந்தநல்லூர் - அக்னி தலம்
• தாருகாபுரம் - நீர் தலம்
• தென்மலை- காற்று தலம்
• தேவதானம் - ஆகாய தலம்

]காசிக்கு சமமான பஞ்ச குரோச தலங்கள்

• சிவசைலம் - சிவசைலப்பர் திருக்கோயில்
• ஆழ்வார்குறிச்சி - வன்னீஸ்வரர் திருக்கோயில்
• கடையம் - வில்வவனநாதர் திருக்கோயில்
• திருப்புடைமருதூர் - நாறும்பூநாதர் திருக்கோயில்
• பாபநாசம் - பாபநாசர் திருக்கோயில்

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Collected Quotes from Albert Einstein

• "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction."
• "Imagination is more important than knowledge."
• "Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love."
• "I want to know God's thoughts; the rest are details."
• "The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax."
• "Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."
• "The only real valuable thing is intuition."
• "A person starts to live when he can live outside himself."
• "I am convinced that He (God) does not play dice."
• "God is subtle but he is not malicious."
• "Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character."
• "I never think of the future. It comes soon enough."
• "The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."
• "Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing."
• "Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind."
• "Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."
• "Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from weak minds."
• "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
• "Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen."
• "Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it."
• "The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."
• "The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education."
• "God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically."
• "The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking."
• "Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal."
• "Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding."
• "The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible."
• "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."
• "Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school."
• "The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing."
• "Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater."
• "Equations are more important to me, because politics is for the present, but an equation is something for eternity."
• "If A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut."
• "Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe."
• "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."
• "Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."
• "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
• "In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep."
• "The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there's no risk of accident for someone who's dead."
• "Too many of us look upon Americans as dollar chasers. This is a cruel libel, even if it is reiterated thoughtlessly by the Americans themselves."
• "Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!"
• "No, this trick won't work...How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?"
• "My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind."
• "Yes, we have to divide up our time like that, between our politics and our equations. But to me our equations are far more important, for politics are only a matter of present concern. A mathematical equation stands forever."
• "The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."
• "Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence."
• "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed."
• "A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeeded be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death."
• "The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge."
• "Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."
• "You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."
• "One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect on me that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year."
• "...one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought."
• "He who joyfully marches to music rank and file, has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action. It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder."
• "A human being is a part of a whole, called by us _universe_, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
• "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts." (Sign hanging in Einstein's office at Princeton)

Osho Quotes on Maturity

Osho Quotes on Maturity

1. To grow old is not to grow up, to become old is not to become mature. Maturity has nothing to do with old age, nothing to do with age at all. Maturity has something to do with becoming more and more conscious, becoming more and more silent and aware, becoming more and more watchful of what you are doing and why, where you are going and why.
2. If you can function right now, here in this moment, through your consciousness, through your being aware, putting aside all that you have known  –  this is what I call functioning through no-knowledge, this is functioning through innocence. And this is maturity.
3. Maturity happens when you start living without hope. Hope is childish. You become mature when you don’t project hope into the future. In fact, you are mature when you don’t have any future; you just live in the moment — because that is the only reality there is.
4. Lose the mind and gain consciousness and you are mature. Die to the past and be born to the present and you are mature. Maturity is living in the present, fully alert and aware of all the beauty and the splendor of existence.
5. The more he goes deeper into himself, the more mature he is. When he has reached the very center of his being, he is perfectly mature. But at that moment the person disappears, only presence remains… The self disappears, only silence remains. Knowledge disappears, only innocence remains. To me, maturity is another name for realization: you have come to the fulfillment of your potential, it has become actual. The seed has come on a long journey, and has blossomed. Maturity has a fragrance. It gives a tremendous beauty to the individual. It gives intelligence, the sharpest possible intelligence. It makes him nothing but love. His action is love, his inaction is love; his life is love, his death is love. He is just a flower of love.
6. When man attains to maturity, he becomes wise; when man comes to fulfillment, then wisdom arises. Wisdom is the essence of man, the fragrance of the lotus flower.
7. Maturity means becoming more conscious; there is no other way to become mature. I am not saying don’t commit mistakes, because that will not help. I am not saying avoid mistakes, no. I am saying whatsoever you want to do, do it, but do it very consciously. Bring your full being in it, so once done you can decide whether it is worth doing again or it is utter nonsense, useless; so once done you know whether it is a real diamond or just a colored stone.
8. The professor only knows questions. He is lost in the jungle of questions. The philosopher remains immature. Maturity is of consciousness, not of intellectuality. It is not of knowledge, it is of innocence.
9. Maturity has nothing to do with age because it has nothing to do with experience; maturity has something to do with responsiveness, freshness, virginity, innocence. So when I use the word ‘mature’ I don’t mean that when you become more experienced you will be more mature. That’s what people usually mean when they use the word  –  I don’t mean that. The more you gather knowledge, the more your mind will become immature; and by the time you are seventy or eighty, you will be completely immature because you will have a stale past to function through. Watch a small child…knowing nothing, having no experience, he functions here and now.
10. Awareness is the method; maturation is the result. Become more aware and you will have more maturity; hence, I teach you awareness and don’t talk about maturity. It is going to happen if you are aware.
11. Zen is not concerned with your childish state of mind. It has no desire to nourish it any more. Its concern is maturity; it wants you to become mature, it wants you to become ripe. Hence it has no idea of God — no father in the sky. It leaves you totally alone because only in aloneness is maturity possible. It leaves you totally in insecurity. It gives you no security, no guarantee. It gives you all kinds of insecurities to move into. And that’s what sannyas is also: a quantum leap into insecurity, a quantum leap into the unknown, because only with that encounter will you become mature. And maturity is freedom, maturity is liberation.
12. To think that you know is to be immature. To function from knowledge, from conclusion, is to be immature. To function from no-knowledge, from no conclusion, from no past, is maturity. Maturity is deep trust in your own consciousness; immaturity is a distrust in your own consciousness. When you distrust your consciousness you trust your knowledge, but that is a substitute and a very poor substitute at that.
13. Maturity has nothing to do with mind because mind means all that you know; mind means your experiences, mind means your past, your rehearsals, your preparations. All these things are implied in the word ‘mind.’ Mind is not something in particular, it is the whole accumulation, all the junk, the whole heap, of your dead past. When I say, ‘Be mature,’ I mean become a no-mind. If you act spontaneously, you will act out of no-mind. If you remain capable of learning, you will remain capable of being a no-mind again and again and again  –  the mind will never be accumulated. If you are capable of remaining alert-and spontaneous, able to be surprised by life and by yourself, you will become by and by more and more interested in the interior-most life, in the core of life. When you see a person, you will not see just the body, your gaze will become penetrating, your gaze will become like an x-ray. It will catch hold of the person  –  of the consciousness there, of the inner light there in the other person.
14. What is immaturity? Whatsoever you are doing, you are doing almost unconsciously. Yes, I say be spontaneous, but I don’t mean be unconscious. I mean be alert and spontaneous. By ‘being spontaneous’ you immediately understand to become a driftwood; so whatsoever happens, whatsoever and wheresoever the mind leads you, you are led by it. You become accidental. Immaturity makes a man accidental; maturity gives man a direction.
15. Nothing has to be renounced. Everything has to be lived with deep awareness, with totality, with understanding, because escape is not a way of growth; hence all the so-called saints who have escaped from life remain psychologically immature. Maturity is in life, in all its bitterness and sweetness, in all its misery and joy, in its nights and days. One has to learn through these polarities to move alert, conscious, so that one can remain balanced between the two, exactly in the middle. That’s what sannyas is. It is not renunciation. It is rejoicing in life, of course with a different quality than ordinary people live it. Ordinary people live unconsciously — a sannyasin tries to live consciously. That’s the only difference, otherwise both live the same life.
16. What kind of religion can there be when there is no sincerity, no authenticity? You cannot even give reasons for your beliefs, and still you go on clinging to them. Look closely and you will find fear behind. A mature person should disconnect himself from anything that is connected with fear. That’s how maturity comes. Just watch all your acts, all your beliefs, and find out whether they are based in reality, in experience, or based in fear. And anything based in fear has to be dropped immediately, without a second thought. It is your armor. I cannot melt it. I can simply show you how you can drop it.
17. Remember the difference between childlike and childish: to be childlike is to be a sage, to be childish is not to be a sage. To be childish means to be immature; it needs much improvement, growth, maturity.
18. The moment you become aware that to be a part of any society, any religion, any culture is to remain miserable, is to remain a prisoner, that very day you start dropping your chains. Maturity is coming. You are gaining your innocence again.
19. People learn how to play safe: just let surfaces meet — hit-and-run love affairs. Before you are caught, run. This is what is happening in the modern world. People have become so juvenile, so childish; they are losing all maturity. Maturity comes only when you are ready to face the pain of your being; maturity comes only when you are ready to take the challenge. And there is no greater challenge than love. To live happily with another person is the greatest challenge in the world. It is very easy to live peacefully alone, it is very difficult to live peacefully with somebody else, because two worlds collide, two worlds meet — totally different worlds. How are they attracted to each other? Because they are totally different, almost opposite, polar opposites. It is very difficult to be peaceful in a relationship, but that is the challenge. If you escape from that, you escape from maturity. If you go into it with all the pain, and still continue going into it, then by and by the pain becomes a blessing, the curse becomes a blessing. By and by, through the conflict, the friction, crystallisation arises. Through the struggle you become more alert, more aware.
20. The greatest maturity is attained by learning the action which is basically inaction, the doing which is not doing at all but a state of nondoing. You remain available; if God calls you, you are ready. You are listening — that is real prayer. When you say something to God, that is not real prayer; you have moved into action, you have become aggressive.
21. Maturity means gaining your lost innocence again, reclaiming your paradise, becoming a child again. Of course it has a difference, because the ordinary child is bound to be corrupted, but when you reclaim your childhood you become incorruptible. Nobody can corrupt you, you become intelligent enough. Now you know what the society has done to you and you are alert and aware, and you will not allow it to happen again. Maturity is a rebirth, a spiritual birth. You are born anew, you are a child again. With fresh eyes you start looking at existence. With love in the heart you approach life. With silence and innocence you penetrate your own innermost core. You are no more just the head. Now you use the head, but it is your servant. First you become the heart, and then you transcend even the heart…. Going beyond thoughts and feelings and becoming a pure isness is maturity. Maturity is the ultimate flowering of meditation.
22. You should learn how to be free from all father-figures. You should learn how to be yourself. You should learn how to be aware and responsible. Then only you start growing. Maturity is always maturity towards freedom. Immaturity is always a sort of dependence and a fear of freedom.

1. To grow old is not to grow up, to become old is not to become mature. Maturity has nothing to do with old age, nothing to do with age at all. Maturity has something to do with becoming more and more conscious, becoming more and more silent and aware, becoming more and more watchful of what you are doing and why, where you are going and why.
2. If you can function right now, here in this moment, through your consciousness, through your being aware, putting aside all that you have known  –  this is what I call functioning through no-knowledge, this is functioning through innocence. And this is maturity.
3. Maturity happens when you start living without hope. Hope is childish. You become mature when you don’t project hope into the future. In fact, you are mature when you don’t have any future; you just live in the moment — because that is the only reality there is.
4. Lose the mind and gain consciousness and you are mature. Die to the past and be born to the present and you are mature. Maturity is living in the present, fully alert and aware of all the beauty and the splendor of existence.
5. The more he goes deeper into himself, the more mature he is. When he has reached the very center of his being, he is perfectly mature. But at that moment the person disappears, only presence remains… The self disappears, only silence remains. Knowledge disappears, only innocence remains. To me, maturity is another name for realization: you have come to the fulfillment of your potential, it has become actual. The seed has come on a long journey, and has blossomed. Maturity has a fragrance. It gives a tremendous beauty to the individual. It gives intelligence, the sharpest possible intelligence. It makes him nothing but love. His action is love, his inaction is love; his life is love, his death is love. He is just a flower of love.
6. When man attains to maturity, he becomes wise; when man comes to fulfillment, then wisdom arises. Wisdom is the essence of man, the fragrance of the lotus flower.
7. Maturity means becoming more conscious; there is no other way to become mature. I am not saying don’t commit mistakes, because that will not help. I am not saying avoid mistakes, no. I am saying whatsoever you want to do, do it, but do it very consciously. Bring your full being in it, so once done you can decide whether it is worth doing again or it is utter nonsense, useless; so once done you know whether it is a real diamond or just a colored stone.
8. The professor only knows questions. He is lost in the jungle of questions. The philosopher remains immature. Maturity is of consciousness, not of intellectuality. It is not of knowledge, it is of innocence.
9. Maturity has nothing to do with age because it has nothing to do with experience; maturity has something to do with responsiveness, freshness, virginity, innocence. So when I use the word ‘mature’ I don’t mean that when you become more experienced you will be more mature. That’s what people usually mean when they use the word  –  I don’t mean that. The more you gather knowledge, the more your mind will become immature; and by the time you are seventy or eighty, you will be completely immature because you will have a stale past to function through. Watch a small child…knowing nothing, having no experience, he functions here and now.
10. Awareness is the method; maturation is the result. Become more aware and you will have more maturity; hence, I teach you awareness and don’t talk about maturity. It is going to happen if you are aware.
11. Zen is not concerned with your childish state of mind. It has no desire to nourish it any more. Its concern is maturity; it wants you to become mature, it wants you to become ripe. Hence it has no idea of God — no father in the sky. It leaves you totally alone because only in aloneness is maturity possible. It leaves you totally in insecurity. It gives you no security, no guarantee. It gives you all kinds of insecurities to move into. And that’s what sannyas is also: a quantum leap into insecurity, a quantum leap into the unknown, because only with that encounter will you become mature. And maturity is freedom, maturity is liberation.
12. To think that you know is to be immature. To function from knowledge, from conclusion, is to be immature. To function from no-knowledge, from no conclusion, from no past, is maturity. Maturity is deep trust in your own consciousness; immaturity is a distrust in your own consciousness. When you distrust your consciousness you trust your knowledge, but that is a substitute and a very poor substitute at that.
13. Maturity has nothing to do with mind because mind means all that you know; mind means your experiences, mind means your past, your rehearsals, your preparations. All these things are implied in the word ‘mind.’ Mind is not something in particular, it is the whole accumulation, all the junk, the whole heap, of your dead past. When I say, ‘Be mature,’ I mean become a no-mind. If you act spontaneously, you will act out of no-mind. If you remain capable of learning, you will remain capable of being a no-mind again and again and again  –  the mind will never be accumulated. If you are capable of remaining alert-and spontaneous, able to be surprised by life and by yourself, you will become by and by more and more interested in the interior-most life, in the core of life. When you see a person, you will not see just the body, your gaze will become penetrating, your gaze will become like an x-ray. It will catch hold of the person  –  of the consciousness there, of the inner light there in the other person.
14. What is immaturity? Whatsoever you are doing, you are doing almost unconsciously. Yes, I say be spontaneous, but I don’t mean be unconscious. I mean be alert and spontaneous. By ‘being spontaneous’ you immediately understand to become a driftwood; so whatsoever happens, whatsoever and wheresoever the mind leads you, you are led by it. You become accidental. Immaturity makes a man accidental; maturity gives man a direction.
15. Nothing has to be renounced. Everything has to be lived with deep awareness, with totality, with understanding, because escape is not a way of growth; hence all the so-called saints who have escaped from life remain psychologically immature. Maturity is in life, in all its bitterness and sweetness, in all its misery and joy, in its nights and days. One has to learn through these polarities to move alert, conscious, so that one can remain balanced between the two, exactly in the middle. That’s what sannyas is. It is not renunciation. It is rejoicing in life, of course with a different quality than ordinary people live it. Ordinary people live unconsciously — a sannyasin tries to live consciously. That’s the only difference, otherwise both live the same life.
16. What kind of religion can there be when there is no sincerity, no authenticity? You cannot even give reasons for your beliefs, and still you go on clinging to them. Look closely and you will find fear behind. A mature person should disconnect himself from anything that is connected with fear. That’s how maturity comes. Just watch all your acts, all your beliefs, and find out whether they are based in reality, in experience, or based in fear. And anything based in fear has to be dropped immediately, without a second thought. It is your armor. I cannot melt it. I can simply show you how you can drop it.
17. Remember the difference between childlike and childish: to be childlike is to be a sage, to be childish is not to be a sage. To be childish means to be immature; it needs much improvement, growth, maturity.
18. The moment you become aware that to be a part of any society, any religion, any culture is to remain miserable, is to remain a prisoner, that very day you start dropping your chains. Maturity is coming. You are gaining your innocence again.
19. People learn how to play safe: just let surfaces meet — hit-and-run love affairs. Before you are caught, run. This is what is happening in the modern world. People have become so juvenile, so childish; they are losing all maturity. Maturity comes only when you are ready to face the pain of your being; maturity comes only when you are ready to take the challenge. And there is no greater challenge than love. To live happily with another person is the greatest challenge in the world. It is very easy to live peacefully alone, it is very difficult to live peacefully with somebody else, because two worlds collide, two worlds meet — totally different worlds. How are they attracted to each other? Because they are totally different, almost opposite, polar opposites. It is very difficult to be peaceful in a relationship, but that is the challenge. If you escape from that, you escape from maturity. If you go into it with all the pain, and still continue going into it, then by and by the pain becomes a blessing, the curse becomes a blessing. By and by, through the conflict, the friction, crystallisation arises. Through the struggle you become more alert, more aware.
20. The greatest maturity is attained by learning the action which is basically inaction, the doing which is not doing at all but a state of nondoing. You remain available; if God calls you, you are ready. You are listening — that is real prayer. When you say something to God, that is not real prayer; you have moved into action, you have become aggressive.
21. Maturity means gaining your lost innocence again, reclaiming your paradise, becoming a child again. Of course it has a difference, because the ordinary child is bound to be corrupted, but when you reclaim your childhood you become incorruptible. Nobody can corrupt you, you become intelligent enough. Now you know what the society has done to you and you are alert and aware, and you will not allow it to happen again. Maturity is a rebirth, a spiritual birth. You are born anew, you are a child again. With fresh eyes you start looking at existence. With love in the heart you approach life. With silence and innocence you penetrate your own innermost core. You are no more just the head. Now you use the head, but it is your servant. First you become the heart, and then you transcend even the heart…. Going beyond thoughts and feelings and becoming a pure isness is maturity. Maturity is the ultimate flowering of meditation.
22. You should learn how to be free from all father-figures. You should learn how to be yourself. You should learn how to be aware and responsible. Then only you start growing. Maturity is always maturity towards freedom. Immaturity is always a sort of dependence and a fear of freedom.