Patience is the greatest religious quality

1. The disciple who can wait will find all his questions answered at the right moment. But waiting is a great quality: it is deep patience, it is great trust. The mind cannot wait, it is always in a hurry. It knows nothing about patience; hence it goes on piling questions upon questions without getting the answer.
2. Sabar comes from sabr: it means infinite patience. Those who are in search will need infinite patience. Patience is the greatest religious quality; if you have patience nothing else is needed. Patience is enough, enough unto itself. Patience means hope, trust, and without any hurry, without any impatience. Impatience simply shows that you are not trustful. Impatience simply shows that you want to impose yourself upon the will of God, that you want it right now. You don’t want him to work on his own. Impatience means, “My will is greater than your will.” Patience means, “I surrender my will to your will. Let you be my will, so whenever I am ripe, whenever — if it takes an eternity it is okay — I will trust, I will hope. I will not lose my heart, I will not be disheartened.”
3. All meditation is waiting. All prayer is infinite patience. The whole of religion consists in not allowing the mind to create more problems for you. So many things, simple things which even animals enjoy, which even trees enjoy, man cannot enjoy — because immediately they become problems, and how can you enjoy a problem?
4. The journey is vast, and you cannot be in a hurry. If you are in a hurry you will never be able to move to the other shore. The journey is timeless; great patience is needed, infinite patience is needed. NIRVANA cannot be something instant.
5. Remember one thing: don’t do anything in the moment of anger — wait. Just give it a little time and wait… and you will be surprised. And one day you will understand that if you can wait enough, anger itself becomes compassion. It is a wheel; it is moving on its own — YOU are in a hurry. Just as night becomes day if you can wait a little, in the same way, anger becomes compassion if you can wait a little. The same energy — just patience has to be added to it, nothing else. You try it.
6. Speed is one of the great diseases of the modern man, because it has made impossible many things which can happen only in patience. Love grows in patience, but you are so speedy, only divorce can grow out of it. With your speed, love is non-existential. It needs patience.
7. On your part great patience is needed, and a trust that the whole existence is in support of all those who are trying to grow spiritually. It is not you who are trying to grow spiritually; it is existence who, through you, is trying to reach to its utmost heights.
8. Patience is very alert, patience is very active, patience is very expectant. If you are waiting for somebody — a friend is to call — you may be sitting just by the door, but you are very attentive, alert. Any noise on the road, any car passing by, and immediately you start looking: maybe the friend has come? The wind on your doors, and suddenly you are alert: maybe he has knocked…. Dead leaves in the garden moving hither and thither, and you come out of your home; maybe he has come…. Patience is as active as that. It is a waiting. It is not dull, it is very radiant. It is not unconscious; it is not like a stupor. It is like a flame burning bright. One waits. One can wait infinitely, but one waits, expectant, active, alert, watchful.
9. Remain joyous, wait with great love. Everything takes its own time, impatience makes no sense. Patience is the way of existence. Remain relaxed, because the more excited you become the farther away is the goal. The experience is going to happen only when you are utterly silent, just a pool of silence… your whole energy so relaxed, as if it is absent. When you have become just a zero you become a womb. And out of this nothingness is born your original, your authentic reality.
10. The master is of the quality of the ocean and the disciple is still a drop — the finite meeting the infinite. Much patience is needed, infinite patience is needed. Hurry won’t help.
11. People are in a hurry, and religion is such a tree that it needs patience. It needs infinite patience. It needs no-hurry. If you are in a hurry, you will miss what religion is. Why has this so great hurry been created in the modern life? From where has it come? Because in such a hurry you can, at the most, play with things; you can at the most play with objects. Subjectivity needs long patience, a waiting. It grows, but not in a hurry. It is not a seasonal flower. You cannot get it and within a month it is flowering. It takes time. It is the eternal tree of life. You cannot do it in a hurry.
12. If you are in a hurry, if you are in haste, you will never know the taste of meditation. The taste of meditation needs great patience, INFINITE patience. Meditation is simple, but you have become so complex that to relax it will take time. It is not the meditation that is taking time — let me remind you again — it is your complex mind. It has to be brought down to a rest, to a relaxed state. THAT takes time.
13. A seeker trusts, he hopes; he can wait, he can wait infinitely. He has patience and he goes on seeking. Not that every step leads to the goal, sometimes he is moving in just the opposite direction. But even moving in the opposite direction one learns; even erring is a part of learning. Nobody can learn if they are very much afraid of being in error. If one is very much afraid that he may go astray, then there is no possibility of traveling.
14. Impatience also shows that you are not trusting your dreams, you are not trusting your totality of longing. Patience simply means: I will wait, whatever time it takes for the spring to come — but I will not wait patiently; I will wait with a heart throbbing, desiring, waiting… each moment, day in, day out. Waiting for the ship is a very total action on your part — because the action is total, your trust is total.
15. One cannot predict when it will come. Only one thing can be said categorically, that if you are impatient it will not come. The more impatient you are for it, the less is the possibility, and if you are patient, it is bound to come. The more patient you are, the closer it is. If your patience is absolute, then it can happen right this very moment. But everything depends on patience. Patience is prayer and patience is trust and patience is love.
16. If you can wait with joy there will not be much need to wait for long, if you cannot wait with joy you may have to wait for many lives — because the divine can happen to you only when your waiting is ecstatic, filled with joy. Just look at a woman waiting for her lover: she has faith, she has ecstasy — the eyes and the infinite patience and the happiness. Wait like a lover, only then is your waiting meaningful. Don’t wait listlessly, because if you are so listless your lover may come but will not find you worthy to be with. Only your joy can become the invitation. Wait blissfully, ecstatically, and then I say to you that you will not need more waiting. There will be no need, it can happen this very moment. If your joy is total this very moment there is no need to wait. The divine will descend in you — you have fulfilled the condition. And this I call the condition: waiting with infinite patience, but ecstatically. This is the condition. Fulfill this and a single moment will not be lost.
17. When the moment is ripe, it happens. It is not your doing — it is a grace; it comes from god. That’s why in the old scriptures it has been called revelation. That is exactly the meaning of paragyan: it is revealed to you — not that you uncover it; it comes of its own accord… a gift, a grace. So become mote and more passive. That’s what meditation is all about: sitting silently, just sitting, doing nothing, waiting for the unknown to come… waiting with great love, longing and patience… waiting as if it is going to come this very moment, but yet ready to wait even if it comes in eternity. That is the paradox of a longing trust, a waiting heart.
18. Patience is nothing but a fragrance of trust. The night is dark but one trusts that the dawn is coming. Each moment it is coming closer and closer. Maybe the night is actually becoming darker. In fact it becomes darker before the dawn comes, so the actual may not be helpful to the possible. The actual may be saying, ‘What are you doing? What are you waiting for? The night is getting darker than ever before. The dawn must be going further away and the distance is growing greater. This is simple logic: the night is getting darker so the dawn cannot be very close. You are losing track! There is no point in waiting any more. ‘
19. Once a person is blissful he is blissful forever. But the quality that has to be learned is of awaiting, of patience, of trusting that whenever the time is ripe it is bound to happen, it is inevitable. This is what I call trust — and trust is the essential core of sannyas.
20. Your mind is constant!y hijacking you from the present moment — either Into the past or into the future, but it never allows you to be now, to be here. By infinite patience is meant that “I trust, I am not worried. I am not rushing for tomorrow. I will rest in this moment. I will allow this moment its totality. I will explore this moment with my totality.” Then immediately, without even a second in between, something wells up within you, something overwhelms you: a kind of music, a kind of melody, a feeling of well-being, as if everything is as it should be, you are at home, nothing is needed, all is perfect. That feeling is bliss — that everything else as it is, is right; it is absolutely okay, it cannot be better. That feeling is bliss, but that feeling is possible only when you relax, are patient, unhurried. And that’s what meditation is all about. Sannyas is nothing but a style of life, of living moment to moment, without hankering for the future… just living the present so totally that the mind has no time, no space, to go anywhere else… so absorbed, so utterly involved, drunk, with the present.
21. Bliss is something that comes to you from the beyond — not created by you but only received. One has to learn how to wait for it; one has to learn the art of waiting. Patience, infinite patience, is needed.
22. Bliss is always something that comes from the beyond; it is always a gift, never an achievement. You cannot be ambitious for it; you can only pray. You cannot desire it; you can only wait. If your waiting is total and your patience is infinite it comes in its own time. And when it comes of its own accord it transforms your whole being. When somehow you manage to bring it, it never comes in the first place, and what comes in its place is something false, manufactured by the mind. Apparently it is bliss, but only apparently: deep inside the torment continues, the nightmare continues. You remain sitting on the volcano; it can empty any moment. But when real peace, real bliss, real silence, descends from the beyond — not that you bring it, but when it comes, showers on you, slowly slowly penetrates and permeates your whole being — you are transformed, you are no more the same person. The old is gone and gone forever. The new has come, and the new knows no death, the new is eternal.