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CHAPTER 4
The Flight of the Alone to the Alone
28 April 1978 am in Buddha Hall
The first question Question 1
IT ALL SEEMS SO SIMPLE – I JUST CAN’T UNDERSTAND IT. I KEEP GRASPING AT IT AND IT ELUDES ME, A MUSIC THAT CAN ALMOST BE SMELT, A TASTE THAT CAN ALMOST BE FELT. SOMETIMES I AM ON THE VERY THRESHOLD; OTHER TIMES IT’S NOT IN A MILLION YEARS, NOT FOR ME.
KRISHNA PRABHU, IT IS SIMPLE, hence it is impossible to understand it. If it was complex, understanding would be possible. Only a complex thing can be understood, because a complex thing can be analyzed, divided, broken into parts. A simple thing is indivisible; you cannot analyze it, you cannot dissect it. It is simply there; it is impossible to understand it.
That’s why all that is simple eludes knowledge. God is simple, that’s why science cannot know him. Love is simple, that’s why science can have no idea what it is. Whenever you come across a simple thing you have to drop the effort to understand it; only then can you understand it. A totally new kind of understanding will be needed – an understanding of the heart, which does not analyze, which does not dissect.
See: science dissects, analyzes, divides. It goes on trying to find the smaller and the smaller part – it reaches to the atom, to the electron, and it goes on dividing. It will never know about the whole, it will know only about the parts. And once it comes against a part which cannot be divided, again it is elusive.
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Now, science knows nothing about the electrons yet, because they can’t be divided yet. Once you divide them you will know – you will know how they are composed, of what they are composed. But then again you are facing something else – the new division – and that eludes knowledge.
Religion moves in a totally different way. It does not go to the part, it goes to the whole. ‘God’ means the whole – the undivided whole, the totality of all. How can you understand God? In the very effort to understand, you have become separate from it; God is no more total. The one who is trying to understand is separate – division has started, you are on the way to science. The known and the knower have become separate; the first division has happened. Now it is a process AD INFINITUM.
God can be known only if you remain in an undivided relatedness with the whole. You don’t become a knower, you don’t become an observer. You don’t stand out of it – you can’t. You ARE in it, you ARE it – how can you know it? You can BE it! And that is a totally different kind of knowing, a different kind of understanding – the understanding that arises out of being.
You cannot know love from the outside, but you can be love – and then you will know. But that knowing will not be part of your head. The head will still remain ignorant; you will know, but you will not be able to translate it into the language that the head can understand.
You ask me: IT ALL SEEMS SO SIMPLE...
Not that it SEEMS simple, it IS simple! But you have been taught again and again that if something is simple you will be able to understand it immediately. That is absolute nonsense. The simple is impossible to understand. The simple is elusive; there is no meeting between the effort to understand and between that which is simple. Either the simple has to be denied... If you say that it doesn’t exist then you are okay, then the problem has been dropped.
That’s what science has been doing: “There is no God, there is no soul, there is no love.” Deny all those simple things, then you can at least have your peace of mind; there is nothing left which haunts you. Science denies God just in self-defence – otherwise God stands there like an impossible problem. And the scientist cannot become a knower if even God has not been understood. And God cannot be understood. The simple way is: say that there is no God, so there is no question of understanding. Then you are at ease.
Religion says: God is, only God is. In fact to say ‘God is’ is repetitive, because God means is-ness. All that is, is God; God is not a separate entity. This is-ness, just THIS, is God. How can you understand it? You have to drop understanding, you have to become ignorant. If you approach God with your knowledge, knowledgeability, you will go on missing. You have to drop all your knowledge. You have to allow your scriptures to disappear, your doctrines to depart; say goodbye to them, and for ever.
And suddenly, the moment you are in a state of no-knowledge, that is the state of meditation – the state of no-knowledge, the state of innocence.
Blessed are the ignorant. Why? Because only they can know. Jesus goes on saying to his disciples, “Unless you are like small children you will not enter into my kingdom of God.” Why small children? Innocent, ignorant, non-knowledgeable. Carrying nothing in the mind, just empty, with no ideas, no thoughts to project – not in any way trying to understand.
Innocence gives you wonder, creates awe. You simply feel a great Aha! like a tidal wave arising in your being. Body, mind, soul, all are involved in this Aha! All has stopped. You are there – not as a knower, you are dissolved as a knower. And then the knowing happens, because then the being happens. Then you are in tune with the whole.
That harmony, that rhythm, that togetherness with the whole, is what religion calls understanding. You are not to be an observer – in fact you are not to be at all. Then the simple is understood. And the simple is great, and the simple has splendour.
You say: IT ALL SEEMS SO SIMPLE – I JUST CAN’T UNDERSTAND IT.
True. You can’t, nobody can. Drop the effort – that effort will tire you. And when one becomes too tired doing something impossible, one starts denying it. If you cannot know, you cannot know, you cannot know... a moment comes when it is too much to tolerate it. The question becomes heavy on your heart. For sheer self-defence you start saying, “It is not there. If it was there then I would have understood it. Because I cannot understand it, it cannot be there. It is. pseudo-puzzle. God is not there – a created problem.”
Then you can rest. You can go back to sleep, you can walk again, you can again live your mediocre life. It is the cowards who deny God – cowards because they cannot gather courage to be ignorant enough to know the simple.
I have heard:
The farmer had just returned from a drive in his carriage. His dog, who had been running alongside, threw himself on the grass, his sides heaving with his heavy panting. “It is not the road that tires him,” explained the farmer, “but his zig-zagging. We have ridden for about five miles, but the dog has covered twenty-five miles. There was not a cat he did not chase, not a dog he did not bark at, not a driveway he did not investigate. Straight travelling did not tire him, only the zig-zagging did.”
Philosophy is zig-zagging. Religion is straight.
Jesus says, “My way is straight and narrow.” Religion is the shortest possible way between two points – between the knower and the known, the shortest possible way. It joins the knower and the known DIRECTLY, without any zig-zagging. Philosophy zig-zags, and zig-zags so much that finally it loses all track of the goal.
What is the shortest distance between two points? Love is the shortest distance between two points – two alive points, two beings, two existences. Love is the shortest distance, knowledge the longest.
And that’s why religion has a totally different dimension in relating to existence. Those who have become accustomed to zig-zagging – analyzing, interpreting, philosophizing – they will go on chasing every cat, every dog, they will go on exploring every driveway, and they will be tiring themselves and reaching nowhere. They don’t have any sense of direction.
The simple man, the innocent man, simply goes straight.
And Jesus also says, “The way is straight and NARROW.” Why narrow? It is so narrow that it cannot contain your ego. Only you can go – but you will have to leave your ego outside, outside the door. It is so narrow, two persons cannot walk together. You cannot take your child with you, you cannot take your aging mother with you, you cannot take your beloved with you.
Even a Buddha cannot take you with him. Buddhas only point the way – because two persons cannot walk on it, it is so narrow. One has to go alone: the flight of the alone to the alone. And so alone that not even your ego is with you, and so alone that not even your mind is with you, and so utterly alone that not even your SELF is with you.
You go into it as absolute silence, as a disappearing person, as an appearing presence.
IT ALL SEEMS SO SIMPLE – I JUST CAN’T UNDERSTAND IT. I KEEP GRASPING AT IT AND IT ELUDES ME...
That’s why it eludes you. Not that it is elusive; that is not its nature. It appears to elude you, Krishna Prabhu, because you are trying to grasp it. You create the elusiveness in it by your grasping.
There are things which cannot be grasped. You cannot grasp the sky in your hand – or can you? You cannot grasp it in your fist; if you try you will miss. The more the fist becomes strong, closed, the less sky it will have in it. Open the fist and you have the whole sky available.
But mind is very much a miser, a hoarder. It always hoards; it immediately closes up on things. If you know something you immediately close up on it, you immediately reduce it to knowledge. That’s why knowing is constantly being reduced to knowledge – and the moment you reduce knowing to knowledge you have killed it. Then you have only a dead bird in your hands – it cannot fly into the sky; then you will never see it again on its wings.
Knowing is alive, a bird on the wing. Knowledge is a killed bird – it is in your hands, but you can only have the dead body. The soul has flown, and that was the real thing, the essential thing. You have missed the real and you are hoarding the unreal. But that’s our way, that’s what we do with everything. Knowing is immediately reduced to knowledge.
Leave your knowing as knowing! Existence consists not of nouns but of verbs. All nouns are false: no noun is true, can be true. There is no tree, there are only treeing phenomena. There is no river, only riverings.
When you say, “This is a man,” what are you saying? You are reducing a verb to a noun – because the man is growing! It is a growth, it is a process. It is not the same even for two seconds, it is a flow. You say, “This is my friend” – but the time that you take in saying “This is my friend” may be enough to turn him into your enemy.
You say ‘love’? There is no love, only loving. See life and you will be surprised: there is no life, only living.
Reduce all nouns to verbs and you will have a far clearer perspective of life. But no verb can be grasped. Nouns can be grasped; because of the miserly mind, man lives through nouns and has forgotten verbs.
And this miserliness penetrates into everything you do. Why grasp? You see a beautiful flower and immediately you are on the way to pluck it. WHY? It was beautiful on the stem, alive, rooted in God. And you killed it. And are you thinking you are going to give it to your girlfriend? You are presenting death to your girlfriend! Or do you think you are going to put this flower at the feet of the god in the temple? That god is dead, this flower is dead, and between these TWO deaths you are dead. The flower was already offered to God on the bush – it was WITH God, you took it away from God to offer it to a stone. Why this immediate desire to pluck the flower?
I have heard: A friend was visiting George Bernard Shaw. He was very much against people plucking flowers from his garden – he had put notice-boards all over the garden: “Don’t Pluck Flowers.” The friend asked, “Don’t you love flowers? Don’t you like flowers being arranged on your table?”
Bernard Shaw said, “I love flowers, that’s why. I love children too, but I would not like anybody to cut off their heads and arrange those heads on my table.”
The idea of the ego is always to kill and destroy. Why? Because once a thing is destroyed you are in control. You can control only dead things. That’s why people worship dead gods in the temples, and they worship dead masters.
When Buddha is alive they will not worship him, they will worship Krishna. When Buddha is gone they will worship Buddha, they will not worship Christ. When Christ is gone they will worship Christ, they will not worship Kabir – and so on and so forth. Once a master is gone, great shrines are raised in his name and people start worshipping him. But while he is alive they stone him to death, they crucify him, they reject him, they deny him. Why? Why are you so much interested in death?
With death you become masters. With an alive master you cannot be in control, he will be in control. With an alive flower the flower is in control, not you; once plucked, you are in control. Then you can go on doing any stupid nonsense – you can call it IKEBANA and you can go on arranging flowers and you can go on learning flower arrangement, and that is all nonsense.
You have destroyed the flower, now you are feeling guilty. Hence IKEBANA – it is out of guilt. Now you are trying somehow to pretend that you are creating beauty again. There is deep guilt – you have destroyed beauty. It was perfectly beautiful on the bush, on the stem, in the wind, with the sun.
But the mind has a constant desire to grasp. Watch this miserliness. I have heard:
A rich old miser became critically ill and the doctor prescribed a medicine with the following warning: “If after taking the medicine you perspire, it is a sign that you will recover. If you don’t perspire, only God can help.”
The miser took the medicine, but failed to perspire. It seemed that the rich man was about to die.
“Let us call on him,” said the mayor to the elders of the town. “Perhaps he will now repent his ways and leave something for the church.”
They visited him, and found him in a repentant mood. They brought paper and ink and the mayor got ready to write. “The church,” he said, “is badly in need of repairs.”
“A hundred dollars for the church,” said the miser, and groaned. “The widows and orphans fund is depleted,” said the mayor.
“A hundred... wait a minute, wait a minute!” the miser cried suddenly. “Cross it out! I’m perspiring! I’m perspiring!”
The mind is always clinging to things. It may be money, it may be meditation. It may be knowledge, it may be love. Watch that the mind always wants to grasp, hold things in hand.
Now, you cannot hold God in your hand. You can hold a flower, you can pluck a flower, but you cannot hold God in your hand. God is too big for that. God means totality. How can you hold this totality in your hand? One has to approach in a different way – one has to surrender oneself into God’s hands. Rather than grasping God, you have to pray to be grasped by him.
You cannot hold the ocean in your hands, but you can drop into the ocean and disappear. That’s the way to be it.
I KEEP GRASPING AT IT AND IT ELUDES ME, A MUSIC THAT CAN ALMOST BE SMELT, A TASTE THAT CAN ALMOST BE FELT.
If you go on grasping that will remain so, and for ever. You will always be just on the verge, and missing. It will be a music that can ALMOST be smelt – but an almost smelt music has not been heard at all. And almost is almost; it is just a way of deluding oneself. Either you have it or you don’t have it – you can’t say, “I ALMOST have it.” You are alive or you are not alive – you cannot say, “I am almost alive.” You cannot say, “I am almost in love.” Either this or that – it is either/or, and there is no middle way. You will always be on the threshold and missing.
Stop grasping at it, drop that very effort to grasp. Allow it to enter into you, be open to it, be vulnerable. Let him grasp you, let him possess you – don’t try to possess him.
SOMETIMES I AM ON THE VERY THRESHOLD; OTHER TIMES IT’S NOT IN A MILLION YEARS, NOT FOR ME.
And you will be on this see-saw. Again and again you will think you are on the threshold – just one step more and the bird will be in your hands. But that one step will remain impossible. And then of course you feel frustrated – how long can you remain in hope, just standing on the threshold? You become tired. When you become tired, it is a million years away from you... Again you start striving, again one day you will feel it is just on the threshold. This way it will remain – this is how seekers go on missing.
Seeking is not the way to find God. If you want to find him, stop seeking, and find. Stop seeking, and he is found immediately, instantly – not even a single moment is lost. Why? Because in the very effort of seeking him you are forgetting one thing, that he is already in you. The sought is in the
seeker – but the seeker cannot see it, he is engrossed too much in his seeking. He is running after it, he is searching for it – his search keeps him so occupied, so engaged, that he cannot look inside and see who is there.
God is already in you, God is already the case. Just stop seeking. And that is the greatest message of Zen: Stop seeking. “Sitting silently, doing nothing, the spring comes and the grass grows by itself.” Zen does not give you any seeking, it takes all seeking away from you. Seekers are the losers! because in their very search they go on looking at distant lands. They go on looking at stars – they don’t look within themselves.
And do you know? There is an ancient parable:
In the beginning when God created the world, he used to live on MG Road. But then he became tired, because people were continuously nagging him. In the middle of the night the phone would start ringing, and complaints.…
“Why have you not done this?” and “Why have you done this, and what is the reason for it?” Naturally he got tired.
He asked his counsellors, “Help me. I would like to go somewhere and hide from people.” He confessed, “In creating man I have committed my greatest mistake.” Do you know? since then he has not created anything else; he is still repenting. That was his last – he became so afraid of man that he stopped being a creator.
They suggested, “You can go to the Himalayas, nobody will come there.” And he said, “You don’t know, within just a few seconds”... and millions of light years are just a few seconds for God – a different time scale. For one who lives in eternity, millions of light years are just moments. He said, “Within moments, you don’t know, a man will be there – Hillary. And Tensing will be there, and they will reach Everest and find me. And once they have found me then the whole MG Road – then people will start moving there. That won’t help.”
Somebody suggested, “Then why don’t you go to the moon?” He said, “Just a few seconds more, and people will reach there. They are going to reach everywhere!”
Then an old adviser came close to him and whispered something in his ear. And he was very happy and he said “This is the right thing to do.” The mall had whispered in his ear, “My suggestion is: why don’t you hide in man himself? There he will never go. He will go to the mountains, he will go to Everest, he will go to the moon and to Mars and he will go to the planets and stars – he will go everywhere. One thing he will never suspect is that you can be hiding within his own soul.”
God agreed. And since then he has been hiding in you, And you have been searching for him on Everest, on the moon, on the stars, in the scriptures, in the temples, in the mosques, in the churches... Go on searching and you will not find him.
A seeker never finds. Seeking is a sure way of missing. Then who finds him? One who relaxes, one who drops all seeking – just dives deep into one’s own being, sits there silently, starts moving towards the bottom, to the very ground of one’s own being. Sitting in your deepest core, you find him. There is no need to go anywhere.
If you are a seeker, and Krishna Prabhu seems to be a seeker... SOMETIMES I AM ON THE VERY THRESHOLD...
Yes, it will happen again and again. Again and again you will think, “Now! This time I am going to make it, it is going to happen.” And it will never happen. Then again frustration and the dark night of the soul will follow. Many times you will see that you have almost made it, ninety-nine percent made it – but it will never be a hundred percent. And unless it is a hundred percent it is not at all. ‘Almost’ means nothing, ‘approximately’ means nothing. That ONE step is as far away as millions of light years, because it cannot be taken.
So after each euphoria, elation, ecstasy, after each feeling of “Now I have arrived,” there will be great depression. You will fall back into a dark hole. Again you will have to grope, again you will have to reach that threshold, and again you will fall.
This has been continuing for so many lives – you are not new here. You have been playing this game for millions of lives: coming closer, coming closer, coming closer, and you feel the ecstasy, now you are just there... and all is missed again, you are falling far away, far away, again disappearing. This wheel goes on moving.
You have to jump out of this wheel. He is not out, so you can never come close to him. If he was far away from you then there would be a possibility sometimes to come close, and there would be a possibility to cross the threshold and reach him and hold him. He is not out, he is your innermost core. He is the beat of your heart and the vitality of your breath and the redness of your blood. He is the pulsation of your being. How can you be just on the threshold?
You have to forget all these thresholds and you have to forget all these distances. And remember always: to be close is also to be distant. Closeness is a kind of distance; you are not yet it.
I teach you the way of non-seeking. I teach you to relax. I teach you to forget all about God and just be yourself.
And one day suddenly, like a great surprise, comes the benediction. The second question
Question 2
WHO IS MORE STUPID – MAN OR WOMAN?
PREM PUNEETA, I have heard an anecdote:
A man was saying to his woman, “Why has God made you women so beautiful?” The woman said, “So that you men can fall in love with us.”
The man then said, “Then why did he make you so stupid?” And the woman said, “So that we can also fall in love with you.”
But in reality, stupidity has no sex. It is found in all kinds and all shapes and all sizes. The third question
Question 3
WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LEARNING AND COLLECTING KNOWLEDGE?
GREAT DIFFERENCE IS THERE. They are polar opposites, diametrically opposite to each other.
Learning is never knowledge, learning is knowing. Knowledge is never learning, it is a pretension of learning. knowledge is pseudo, borrowed. You become a parrot, you become an imitator. You become a computer, you function as a memory machine – you don’t know exactly what you think you know, you simply repeat it. And you can become very clever in repeating, very skillful, but s ill you remain a parrot.
Learning is to encounter truth on your own. Knowledge is borrowed, knowledge is from others.
If you listen to Ikkyu and you learn his beautiful sutras – and you can learn them by heart and you can repeat them; not only repeat them, you can even try to follow them – you can create a character according to them. You can live them too, but still it is borrowed. Not only will your knowledge be false and plastic, your character will also be plastic and borrowed, enforced.
Deep down you will remain the same; nothing will have changed. You will have become richer as far as information is concerned, but you will not be transformed by it. No information ever transforms anybody.
Knowledge is the collection and accumulation of information. Learning is the availability to be transformed. Knowledge always goes to dead masters, learning is always in search of living masters – because you can learn only through a living phenomenon. There is no way to learn from a dead phenomenon; it is cheap.
A disciple with a Zen master has to pass through a thousand and one pains. And you simply read the whole story within minutes, but it took him thirty years to become enlightened. And those thirty years of agony and ecstasy, those thirty years of falling in love with the master and hating him from the very guts – of moving closer to him and going far away from him, of falling into his being, and yet fighting with him – those thirty years of constant meditation and love, of great effort, and finally of knowing the futility of all effort; of great seeking and search, and finally coming to realize that no seeking is needed – but one comes to it the hard way.
Then one day those thirty years of ripening and maturity bring an integration. One blooms. The satori happens. One understands, one sees.
You simply read it on one page of a book, and this becomes knowledge to you. And sometimes you can say things.…
Once it happened, a young man lived with me for three years, and he was in deep love with the Zen approach. And whenever he would see a story – and there are thousands – where the master hits
the disciple on the face or strikes him with his stick, the young man would bring the story to me and he would say, “How cute!”
One day I slapped him hard. And he was angry, and he forgot all those stories. And he said, “Are you mad or something? Why did you hit me? And I had not done anything!”
And I asked him, “Now say ‘How cute!’”
Then it doesn’t look cute. Knowledge is cheap, you don’t pay anything for it. Learning is hard, arduous; you have to pay for it. Inch by inch, you have to die into it. Knowledge is accumulation, learning is not really accumulation at all – on the contrary, it is just a reverse process.
The master goes on taking things away from you. He does not give you something to be added to your personality, he takes all the props of your personality. And one day suddenly you find yourself collapsing...
One can allow that collapse only if there has arisen a great trust. And when you have collapsed, then like a phoenix the new being arrives. Remember always, the new being is not any change in the old being. The new being is absolutely new, it is not a change in the old being. The old is dead and the new has arrived; they are discontinuous.
The real change only happens through death. Unless death has happened you will only be accumulating, decorating, giving finishing touches to your personality. Yes, you will change little bits here and there, but that will be nothing much. Changing paintings from one wall to another, or painting the walls with a new colour, renovating the ruins, changing the carpet or arranging the furniture in a new style... But basically, fundamentally, you remain the same. These changes are not learning.
A learner is one who is ready to die. If you are after knowledge you are a student. If you are a learner you are a disciple. And it is so easy to be a student, it is so difficult to be a disciple. One goes on missing...
Just the other night, it happened. A beautiful woman came just a few days before, and started feeling a great urge to become a sannyasin, the urge to become a disciple. Then she was coming to take sannyas but could not enter because of her body smell or something. Next day she changed her mind. She said, “I am happy that I could not enter, otherwise I would have become a sannyasin. And I cannot wear orange clothes all the time in my work; it will look so weird, ridiculous, people will laugh.”
Now you cannot pay even that much. It is not much! People laugh at you even without your orange clothes – don’t be worried about that; they laugh all the same. Just as you laugh at them, they laugh at you. That’s how people manage to laugh a little bit – otherwise life is so bad, such an agony, a nightmare, if they don’t laugh at each other they will commit suicide. It helps; just laughing at each other they feel unburdened. Seeing the ridiculousness of life, they can manage to laugh a little bit. It gives them heart to live again tomorrow.
Man can live without the Bible and without the Gita, but man cannot live without jokes – those small jokes are far more important. And have you ever noticed the fact that the Jews have the best jokes
in the world? Why? Because they have suffered the most. They HAD to create jokes, otherwise they would have committed suicide long before. Those jokes have kept them alive. They have been tortured, down the ages; they have lived against odds. What has helped them to go on living? Do you think it is the Old Testament?
Do you think it is the Talmud?
No. It is their capacity to laugh. It is their capacity to continue having a sense of humour that has kept them alive. That’s why they have the best jokes in the world.
Hindus don’t have jokes. They have lived a very very convenient life – jokes were not needed; life was comfortable, convenient. When life is too much to bear, one has to create something or other to have a little laughter to unburden oneself.
People are already laughing at you – they have to laugh. it is their survival; they cannot survive without it. So don’t feel offended when people laugh at you, not at all. They are not really laughing at you, they are simply finding any excuse to laugh – you are as good as anybody else. If you are not in orange they will find something else. And I don’t think you are so perfect that they cannot find anything else about you to laugh at.
But just a small price, that they will laugh, and one can drop the idea of becoming a sannyasin.
Just see how cheap we want transformation. We want it to be handed to us, bottle-fed. We want it to just be given to us, injected – digested by somebody else. Then it becomes knowledge. Buddha has said something, Krishna has said something, Christ has said something – you can just learn those words, you can become a chatterbox. And it doesn’t matter what that chatter is – worldly or other-worldly, it is chatter all the same. Because you have not experienced anything on your own.
The first honesty for a man who really wants to know truth is to know perfectly well “what I know on my own”, and “what I know only as borrowed.” And whatsoever is borrowed, throw it! It is all crap. It is better to be ignorant on your own – because that is true, authentic, sincere – than to be knowledgeable on somebody else’s experience. And who knows whether that experience was true or not? Who knows? – that man may himself have been repeating others’ experiences.
Unless you know by yourself, there is no way.
You ask me: WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LEARNING AND COLLECTING KNOWLEDGE?
Prem Nath, the difference is great, as great as it can be. Learning needs courage, learning needs a transformation in your consciousness – a death and a resurrection. Knowledge needs nothing, just a little capacity to memorize – and any mediocre person can do that. Knowledge needs no intelligence, only memory. Learning needs intelligence.
And these are two different things. Intelligence is a quality of your soul, and memory is just a brain mechanism. Memory is just a bio-computer – the computer can do it far better than your bio- computer has been doing up to now. Sooner or later, people will be carrying small computers in
their pockets rather than reading books, going to the university – that is really all out of date now. There is no future for schools and universities; the computer will destroy them all.
What is the point of knowing history? You can have a small computer in your pocket and you can inquire whenever there is a need; you can just inquire of the computer.
You can ask when Napoleon the Great was born, what date, what day, with which women he fell in love – you can inquire about everything. A computer can carry millions of pieces of information in just a small box. All the information that you are carrying, a computer can carry better. What is the need? This is a very, very bullock-cart way – twenty-five years studying in a college, school, university. And what is really being done there? You are being fed with knowledge; your bio-computer is being trained.
Sooner or later, you will be able to purchase a ready-made, trained bio-computer and it will answer! That day is going to be a great revolutionary day in human history, because from that day it will be simple to know what the difference is between learning and knowledge. A man who carries a computer is a man of knowledge, and a man who has his own EXPERIENCE of life is a wise man.
And remember, a computer can give you information but cannot give you experience. You can ask the computer: “What is love?” and the computer can report all that has been said about love. But that will not give you the experience of love; experience you can only have on your own. You will have to fall in love and know it – no computer can give it to you.
The computer can give all the information ABOUT God, but to know about God is not to know God. To know God is totally different. It is an encounter: it is personal, intimate, immediate.
And you can see it. The knowledgeable man almost always behaves stupidly. He has to behave so, because his knowledge is borrowed; he cannot behave intelligently. Pundits are the most stupid people in the world.
Two men were walking. One was holding a closed umbrella – he was a great pundit, a professor of philosophy. Suddenly it began to rain. “Open your umbrella, quickly,” said one man to the other.
“It won’t help at all,” came the answer.
“What do you mean, it won’t help? It will protect us from the rain.” “It is no use, the umbrella is full of holes like a sieve.”
“Then why did you take it in the first place?
And the professor said, “Because I didn’t think it was going to rain.”
The man who carries information is just doing things like that. He does not know how to use it, he does not know why he is carrying it in the first place. He does not know anything. He has been given the information by his parents, by the teachers and priests, and he has been carrying it without even becoming aware why he is carrying it all.
Just look in your head, how many things you are carrying. For what? Those problems don’t exist any more, and you are carrying the solutions of those problems. You have become mature, and still you are carrying the advice your mother gave to you when you were a child. Now you are no more a child, you can forget all about it – and it will be good, it will create a space in your head. Otherwise it has become a junkyard.
Just listen sometimes, silently sitting – still your mother’s voice is heard. Your father says things to you and you still have to follow them, and if you don’t follow them you feel guilty! because you are betraying your father. And the father, the poor father, is dead and he does not know anything of what he has done to the son. In fact he has not done anything; his father has done it to him, he has done it to you, and so on and so forth.
Many times sannyasins come to me, particularly women, and they say, “We want to have children.” And all that I see... They think that they are asking for children because they are in such a great loving space. Not at all – when I look into them, all that I see is that they are wanting to have revenge on their mothers. Whatsoever their mothers have done to them, now they want children so they can do it to them. Otherwise how will they get rid of it?
Children are so dependent on you, you can do anything to them. They cannot retaliate, they cannot say no. And you are hankering, full of knowledge that your mother has given to you – your head is heavy with it, and you want somebody into whom you can pour all that nonsense. And you will feel very relieved; women feel very relieved when they have children.
What relief comes? It is a catharsis, a vomit. It is very rarely that out of love you think of a child, because you don’t know what love is. How can you think out of love? You have never loved! But all that you need is a helpless dependent child who will always look up to you, and you will always be the boss and you can mould and pummel and manufacture the child to your heart’s desire. That is the only way you can take revenge on your mother; there is no other way.
I have heard a story; it happened in the court of the great Akbar. He had a very wise man, Birbal, with him. They were standing and talking about something, and Birbal said something and Akbar became so angry that he hit him hard on the face, slapped him, before the court. Birbal was red with rage, but to hit back would be too costly. But if you don’t do anything, that looks too humiliating. So he hit somebody else who was standing by his side – he hit him back.
And the man said, “But why are you hitting me?” Birbal said, “Hand it on to somebody else.”
That’s how things happen. Now, your mother has hit you hard – you are still crying. You want to hit somebody, you want to hand it all over; you will be relieved.
Your parents are still alive in you. Your teachers, primary-school teachers – who knew nothing much, otherwise why should they have been primary-school teachers? – they are still alive and dominating you. Your college professors, they knew nothing, they were as borrowed as you are.
It is very rare to find a man who knows himself. Just imitators are all around, and you are still carrying their wisdom that they have given to you. They never LIVED their wisdom, and you are trying to live
it; you also cannot live it. When you cannot live it you feel guilty, if you live it you feel unnatural: you are in a predicament.
This is the predicament every human being is in. If you follow whatsoever has been told to you to do, it is unnatural; it never makes you happy, it never gives you joy. Only one thing is good about it, it never makes you feel guilty – but it makes you sad, it makes you depressed. If you don’t follow it then you feel guilty – that too brings a kind of sadness.
Have you not watched it in your life? It is so difficult to be happy – why? Because happiness and guilt have become associated in you. So whenever you feel happy you feel something wrong must be there, you must be doing something wrong. Look inside yourself! into your files, and you will immediately come across a parental voice: “Don’t do this.” That’s why you are feeling guilty. Happiness has never been allowed to you in your childhood. You don’t allow it to yourself either.
My whole work here consists of this thing: to help you to allow happiness to yourself, to prepare you so that you can give the gift of happiness to yourself. God has given it to you, but your parents have disturbed it.
And don’t feel angry at them – because they were also victims of THEIR parents. It is a vicious circle; it is a very very long circle, it has been going on down the ages. Don’t feel angry, but get rid of them! Drop their voices. Start living your life.
A man of knowledge never lives his own life. A man of learning starts living his own life, he learns by living his own life. Yes, he is ready sometimes to commit mistakes; it is good to commit mistakes sometimes, that is the only way to learn. The man of knowledge never commits mistakes – but he has committed the greatest mistake, the mistake of always remaining borrowed.
And these men of knowledge are very dangerous, because they go on pouring their knowledge into each other. It is a strange phenomenon. When you feel too burdened you need somebody so that you can pour out your knowledge and feel a little unburdened.
I have heard:
A merchant went to a farmer to get a pound of butter. The farmer insisted on swapping the butter for a pair of woollen socks. When the merchant reported this to his wife, she said, “I’ll unravel some wool from our bedspread and knit him a pair of socks.” When it was finished, the pair of socks was exchanged for a pound of butter.
When the merchant needed more butter, his wife once again unravelled more of the bedspread and knit more socks, which were exchanged for butter. Finally, she had only enough wool for one sock. The merchant took the sock to the farmer and asked for a half pound of butter for it.
“Nothing doing,” replied the farmer. “I give you a full pound. You see, I really don’t wear the socks. My wife unravels the wool and uses it for knitting a bedspread, and there’s just enough in this one sock to finish it.”
That’s how it goes on – this stupid society.
Avoid knowledge and plunge into learning. The last question
Question 4
WHY AM I SO AFRAID OF YOU?
IT IS A GOOD SIGN: the beginning of a relationship with me. It is natural to be afraid of me, because I am going to be a death to you. I am going to destroy you. Utterly. Only then can I help you. Only then can you have a new life, a new being, a new beginning.
So fear is natural. In spite of the fear, go on coming closer and closer to me. Don’t listen to the fear. The fear is simply saying that whatsoever you have had up to now will be taken away: “Escape!” You have a certain amount of knowledge, it will be taken away. The fear is simply an indication from the head, a signal from the computer, saying, “Escape from this place. This man is dangerous, he can destroy your knowledge. And then you will have to learn from ABC, know well, and all that you have done up to now will be a sheer wastage. Listening to this man is dangerous – he will make you feel that all that you have is useless, and sooner or later you will have to renounce it. Before it happens, escape! Avoid this man!”
You have a certain character, a certain morality, and I am bent upon destroying it – because I don’t believe in morality. I believe in consciousness, not in conscience; conscience is again borrowed, like knowledge. Consciousness is learning.
I would like you to live according to your consciousness. That is the good life for me, the true life, authentic, spontaneous. It never does any harm to anybody – it cannot. But the life of conscience is a bad life; even if you are moral, even if you go on doing good, you are only a do-gooder. And you harm. And you harm in such subtle ways that you are not aware, and neither do your victims ever become aware of what you have been doing to them.
I will take your morality. I will give you religion, but I will take your morality away – because for a moral person it is very difficult; to have the experience of religion is almost impossible for him. A moral person lives according to the society; he never rebels. And religion is only for those who are ready to rebel. A moral person lives only like a sheep, with the crowd; whatsoever the crowd says is right he says is right, and whatsoever the crowd says is wrong he says is wrong.
Just watch. Are you a part of the crowd? Or do you have some consciousness of your own too? If the crowd is going to destroy, you are ready to destroy. If the Hindu crowd is going to destroy a Mohammedan mosque you are ready to destroy it, because you are a Hindu and whatsoever the Hindu crowd is doing is right. If the Mohammedan crowd is going to kill Hindus you are ready to kill Hindus.
Down the ages, the so-called religious people have been such great murderers. They talk about love and they create hate and nothing else. They talk about peace and they create war. Look at the hypocrisy! They come with Bibles in their hands, but soon those Bibles turn into swords. Those Bibles are just facades – behind is hiding the imperialist, the one who wants to dominate the
whole world. In the name of God they are simply trying to impose their ego on the world. And then egos fight. It is not a question of the Hindu fighting the Mohammedan or the Christian fighting the Mohammedan, it is the fight of so many egos.
Watch: whenever a crowd is doing something, can you think on your own? Your religions are crowds, your nations ate crowds. If India is fighting China, then all Indians are with the Indian government, right or wrong – it is the motherland, right or wrong. And all Chinese are with the Chinese government, right or wrong.
Nobody thinks on their own.
My whole approach is to make you CONSCIOUS of what you are doing, how you are doing it. Are you being just a coward and a sheep and a follower in the crowd? Or are you thinking on your own? I will take away all your mob-psychologies. Fear arises, because that is where you have always belonged. Suddenly you will be left alone. If you are not a Christian you will not know who you are. Great fear shakes you, quakes you. If you are not a Catholic who are you? If you are not an Indian then you lose your identity. A great crisis of identity arises in you – that is the fear.
And you are always afraid of truth – because you live through lies, and when truth arises you start seeing your lies. It becomes difficult, it becomes almost impossible to carry them any more; you have to drop them. But you have invested your whole life in them.
A wealthy landowner burst into his home one day and, in a voice filled with despair, cried to his startled wife, “Marushka, there is a terrible rumour in town – the Messiah is coming!”
“So what’s terrible?” asked the wife. “I think it’s wonderful! Why are you frightened?”
“I have good reason to be afraid,” he whimpered. “We have a fine dairy herd, a barn full of grain, and our orchards are laden with fruit. Now we will have to give up everything and follow Him!”
“Compose yourself,” said the wife soothingly. “The Lord our God is good. He knows how much suffering we Jews have had to endure. We had a Pharaoh, a Haman – always somebody; but our dear Lord got rid of them all. Just have faith, my dear husband. He will get rid of the Messiah also!”
It creates great fear if you hear the Messiah has come. Then what about all the investments that you have made? And you will have to give up everything and follow him. Who wants a Messiah to come? People always like the idea that he will come some day, but not today – some day far away, distant, then they can tolerate the idea that he will come.
That’s why when Christ declared: “I am the Messiah you have been waiting for!” the Jews could not trust him. They said, “You can’t be. He will come, certainly, but you are not that.”
And there is logic in it. The logic is: people only WAIT for the Messiah, they don’t REALLY want him to come. Waiting is good, it makes one feel good – “I am religious and I am waiting for the Messiah. And when he comes I am going to renounce everything.” And deep down one hopes that he will never come. He has not come up to now; he will never come. On the surface one pretends that he will come, deep down one knows that he will never come. And one thing is always there: even if he comes we can always say, “You are not the Messiah.”
They had been waiting for centuries, and when Jesus declared, “I am the Messiah,” they were angry. This man was destroying their whole game of waiting. Waiting is so beautiful; nothing ever changes, one goes on waiting and one goes on doing whatsoever one wants to do. And suddenly this man comes and he says, “I am the Messiah – now follow me. Come, follow me!”
And they are afraid. Their crops are ready and their orchards are full of fruit. “Is this the time for the Messiah to come? And the business is going so good...” And one is chasing a woman and he is just on the right track and it is only a few days time and she will be his – and this is the time for the Messiah to come? “Come and follow me”? Can’t you wait a little?
Great fear arises. Out of that fear they killed Jesus. Just to defend themselves they killed Jesus – just to defend their fruits which were ripe, and the woman who was just going to be in their hand, and the man who was just going to succeed. This was not the right time for the Messiah to come. It is never the right time.
A Messiah is acceptable in the future, always in the future, never in the present – or in the past, but never in the present. The Jews had to deny Jesus. They said, “He will come, but you are not the Messiah.” Christians say he WAS the Messiah, but now he is in the past, now there is no fear.
I am saying to you: I am the Messiah herenow. It creates fear, it creates great anguish and anxiety: “So what to do? And the fruits are ripe, and success is just within reach. And this man has come to disturb all, and he says, ‘Come, follow me.’”
That’s why you are afraid. Everybody is afraid. Remember always, the courageous person is not one who has no fear – no, there exists no man like that, who has no fear. The courageous man is one who goes in spite of the fear. He feels the fear, but the pull of love is greater than the pull of the fear. He chooses love rather than the fear.
The courageous man is also afraid. Don’t think that only you are afraid; everybody is afraid, it is natural. And don’t wait for the time when there will be no fear, and then you will follow! That time will never come. You have to follow in spite of the fear. And if you follow, soon you will see, the deeper you move into love, the energy that was involved in the fear is released from the fear and becomes love energy.
And when all fear is transformed into love, that fire is sannyas, that fire is disciplehood. That fire purifies one. Passing through that fire of love, one becomes pure gold.
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