God is the business of the priest

Friends, first the questions from the sannyasins. The first question:

Question 1:

It is not a question of thinking. In fact you think too much. It is a question of how to stop thinking and of seeing directly into every situation that you are facing. If there is no thought, there is no barrier, there is no dust in your eyes; you can see clearly.

And when this clarity is there, you don't have the alternatives of good and bad. With this clarity there is a choiceless consciousness. You simply do what is good - not that you make any effort to do it.

It comes effortlessly to the man of awareness, consciousness, alertness. He simply cannot imagine the bad, the evil. His whole awareness simply points him towards the good.

So your problem is not why there is such a resistance to thinking for yourselves. You cannot think for yourself, because the vision of good is not part of the mind. And you know only the mind, hence the whole problem arises. Because you know only the mind, you don't have clarity. You have hundreds of thoughts moving continuously in your mind. It is a rush hour twenty-four hours; a crowd of thoughts goes on, clouds go on moving so fast that you are completely hidden behind the clouds.

Your eyes are almost blind. Your inner sensitivity is completely covered by your thoughts.

Through the mind you cannot know what is good and what is bad. You have to depend on others.

This dependence is absolutely natural because mind is a dependent phenomenon; it depends on others; its whole knowledge is borrowed.

All that your mind knows has come either from the parents, or from the priest, or from the teachers, or from the society. Just watch, and you will not be able to find a single thought that is original to you.

All is borrowed; mind lives on borrowed knowledge. In every situation it wants somebody to guide it. Your whole life is being guided by others. From the very beginning you are told what is right and what is wrong by your parents. Then your teachers, then your priests, then your neighbors... not that they know, they too have borrowed from others.

This borrowing goes on century after century, generation after generation. Every disease goes on being inherited by the new generation. It is just a replica of the older generation, a reflection, a shadow, but it does not have its own originality. It is because of this you need a god, an ultimate guide. You cannot depend on your parents, because you start seeing as you grow older their falsities, their lies. You start seeing that their advice is not perfect; they are fallible human beings. But the small child has believed in them as if they were infallible. It was not their fault, it was the small child's innocence; it trusted the father, the mother, who loved him. But finally he comes to know as he grows towards a little maturity that what these people say is not necessarily true.

One day I was playing - I must have been five or six years old... A man used to come to see my father, an utterly boring man. And my father was growing tired of him. So he called me and told me, "I see that man is coming; he will waste my time unnecessarily and it is very difficult to get rid of him. I always have to go out, and say to him, 'Now I have some appointment' - unnecessarily I have to go out, just to get rid of him. And sometimes it happens that he says, 'I am coming with you. So on the way we can have a good talk.' And there is no talk, it is a monologue. He talks, and tortures people."

So my father said, "I am going inside. You just remain playing outside. And when he comes, you simply say to him that your father is out."

And my father used to teach me continuously, "Never speak an untruth." So I was shocked. This was contradictory.

So when the man came and asked me, "Where is your father?" I said, "He is in, but he says that he is out."

My father heard this from inside, and the man entered with me, so he could not say anything in front of him. When the man had gone, after two or three hours my father was really angry with me, not with the man.

He said, "I told you to tell him, 'My father is out.'"

I said, "Exactly, I repeated the same thing. I told him the same thing: 'My father says to tell you that he is out. But he is in, the truth is he is in.' You have been teaching me to be true whatever the consequence. So I am ready for the consequence. Any punishment, if you want to give me, give.

But remember, if truth is punished, truth is destroyed. Truth has to be rewarded. Give me some reward, so I can go on speaking the truth whatever happens."

He looked at me and he said, "You are clever."

I said, "That you know already. Just give me some reward. I have spoken the truth."

And he had to give me some reward; he gave me a one rupee note. At that time one rupee was almost equal to twenty-five rupees today. You could live with a one rupee note for almost half a month. And he said, "Go and enjoy whatever you want to purchase."

I said, "You have to remember it. If you tell me to speak a lie, I am going to tell the person that you have told me to. I am not telling a lie. And each time you contradict yourself, you will have to reward me. So stop lying. If you don't want that man, you should tell him directly that you don't have any time and don't like his boring talk because he says the same things again and again. Why are you afraid? Why do you have to tell a lie?"

He said, "The difficulty is, he is my best customer."

My father had a very beautiful clothes shop, and this man was rich. He used to purchase a huge lot for his family, relatives, friends. He was a very generous man - just being boring was his problem.

So my father said, "I have to suffer all the boredom because he is my best customer and I cannot lose him."

I said, "That is your problem, that is not my problem. So you are lying because he is your best customer, and I am going to say this to him."

He said, "Wait!"

I said, "I cannot wait because he must be told immediately that you go on suffering all his boring talk just because he is a good customer - and you will have to give me some reward."

He said, "You are so difficult. You are destroying my best customer. And I will have to give you a reward too. But just don't do that."

But I did it. And I got two rewards, one from that boring man because I told him, "Truth should always be rewarded, so give me some reward because I am destroying one of the best customers of my father."

He hugged me and he gave me two rupees. And I said, "Remember, don't stop buying from my father's shop, but don't bore him either. If you want to talk, you can talk to the walls, to the trees.

The whole world is available. You can just close your room and talk to yourself. And then you will be bored."

And I told my father, "Don't be worried. Look, one rupee I have got from you, two rupees I have got from your customer. Now one more rupee I am owed; you have to give it me, because I have told the truth. But don't be worried. I have made him a better customer and he will never bore you again.

He has promised me."

My father said, "You have done a miracle!" Since that day that man never came, or even if he did come he would stay just for one or two minutes to say hello and he would go away. And he continued to purchase from my father's shop.

And he said to my father, "It is because of your son that I continue. Otherwise I would have felt wounded, but that little boy managed both things. He stopped me boring you and he asked me, requested me, 'Don't stop shopping from my father's shop. He depends on you.' And he got two rupees from me and he was saying such a shocking thing to me. Nobody has ever dared tell me that I am a boring man."

He was the richest man in the village. Everybody was in some way connected with him. People borrowed money from him, people have borrowed lands from him to work on. He was the richest man and the biggest landowner in that village. Everybody was somehow or other obliged to him, so nobody was able to say to him that he was boring.

So he said, "It was a very great shock, but it was true. I know I am boring. I bore myself with my thoughts. That's why I go to others to bore them, just to get rid of my thoughts. If I am bored with my thoughts, I know perfectly well the other person will be bored, but everybody is under an obligation to me. Only this boy has no obligation and is not afraid of the consequences. And he is daring. He asked for the reward. He said to me, 'If you don't reward truth, you are rewarding lies.'"

This is why this society is in such a mad space. Everybody is teaching you to be truthful, and nobody is rewarding you for being truthful, so they create a schizophrenia. The Indian Government has the motto Satyameva jayate - "truth is always victorious." That is their motto.

But every politician goes on lying to the people, giving promises which they know they cannot fulfill.

And in every court is written satyameva jayate, truth is always victorious. But in every court it is not the truth that is victorious, it is the more efficient, more argumentative advocate who wins the case.

It does not matter whether he is in favor of the criminal or against the criminal.

I used to have a vice-chancellor who was one of the biggest law experts in the world. He had three offices, one in London, one in New Delhi, and one in Peking. He was continuously running from one country to another country, and he never lost a single case. All the great cases in which millions of dollars were involved... all the maharajas of this country were his clients; but he was a drunkard.

He was fighting a case in the privy council in London, the highest appeals court for India under the British empire. The supreme court was here but if you wanted to go against the supreme court, the privy council was in London. And he was a privy council man; he was continuously fighting cases in the privy council.

That night he was at a party and drank too much. Next day he had a hangover, and was still a little drunk, but he had to go to the court. The case involved two districts of Rajasthan, Udaipur and Jaipur. Both the maharajas were fighting for a certain bit of land - to which district did it belong? It was thousands of acres of land. And under his hangover he forgot which party he was fighting for, Udaipur or Jaipur.

So he went on criticizing the maharaja of Jaipur; all his arguments were against the maharaja.

Many times his secretary pulled his coat, but he simply wouldn't listen. When it was lunchtime, the court stopped for an hour. Then the secretary said, "You have spoilt the whole case. You are for the maharaja of Jaipur and you are arguing against him. And you have created such a problem because the man who is against the maharaja of Jaipur, who is fighting you, another great expert, is at a loss what to do. All the arguments that he has prepared, you have already put against the maharaja of Jaipur."

Now he was getting over his hangover; he said, "Don't be worried. There is still time."

After lunchtime he said to the court, "Before lunch I gave all the arguments that the opposite party can give. Now I am going to criticize the opposite party, argument by argument, because I am standing here for the maharaja of Jaipur." And he criticized his own arguments so cleverly.

When he told me this... I used to go often to visit him. He loved me very much. He always told me:

"You should join the law department, not philosophy."

I said, "That is not my field." But he loved my arguments.

He said, "It is a loss to the world of law and constitution. You have such arguments that you would become a world-famous legal expert."

I said, "I am going to become a world-notorious illegal expert. Don't be worried about me."

But he loved me, so he told me that incident. It is not a question of truth at all, it is only a question of who is a better arguer.

On the one hand the government and all the religions and all the preachers go on saying, "You should tell the truth." But society does not reward the truth. Just today I have received a threatening letter from a law firm in Madras that I have offended the religious feelings of their clients.

I have told my legal secretary, Anando, to write to them that in the first place there are no religious feelings. A religion is beyond feelings and beyond thoughts and beyond mind. There are only religious superstitions. A man of religion cannot be hurt. He knows the truth. It is the lies that you are living in that are hurt. Truth always hurts lies. So you should tell your clients to be really religious.

Go beyond the mind, go beyond feelings, sentiments, emotions, thoughts and you will not be hurt.

But if you want to come to the court, you can. My whole life I have been fighting in courts on the same point that people's religious feelings are hurt. I have been telling the judges, "If I am true and somebody's feelings are hurt, do you think I have to be punished for it? That man needs psychological treatment. If his religious feelings are so weak, that shows that they are only beliefs.

He does not know what religion is. And if truth hurts people, what do you suggest? Should I start lying?" And the judges would look all around - what to do? They cannot say I should start lying, so they are puzzled.

In the first court case they gave me a choice of the Bible, the Koran or Bhagavad Gita, whichever religion I belonged to. I was asked to take the book - all the books were on the table - and take the oath that I would speak only the truth and nothing else.

I said, "I cannot do that for one reason: all these three books are full of lies. To take an oath on a book which is full of lies is absolutely absurd; you are an intelligent man. Secondly, I cannot take the oath because I always speak the truth. Taking the oath will mean that I won't speak the truth unless I take the oath. The implication is clear. You are telling me that I am an untruthful man. You are insulting me in your court. If I insult you, you will say that the court has been insulted. But you are insulting me by telling me to take the oath. I cannot take the oath because I simply speak the truth.

There is no question of an oath."

He looked at me and he said, "I can understand, but this creates a problem. Without taking the oath, the case cannot start."

I said, "That is not my problem. Who wants to start it? It is the other party that is starting it. I can go home right now."

He said, "I will make an exception for you because you are saying you will speak the truth."

I said, "I am not saying that, I am saying I only speak the truth. And that's the problem. These people are hurt by the truth. I have said that there is no God, and they are believers of God. Now they should prove that there is a God. That is their problem, not my problem. I simply repeat again, there is no God. Now they should prove the existence of God with evidence, with witnesses."

"What do you think?" I asked the judge. "Do you believe in God? Do you have any evidence, any witness who has seen God? Can you say that you have seen God?"

He said, "It seems you are the judge here and I am the criminal."

I said, "Truth is always victorious. It is just behind you. Read it."

The case was dismissed. Hundreds of cases have been dismissed. But the society goes on rewarding a person who consoles you. It does not matter that he is consoling you by a lie.

Once it happened that a man died and his wife was really in despair, crying and crying. And one of my neighbors went to her and said, "Don't be worried, the soul is immortal. Your husband has not died, it is just the body; his soul is immortal and cannot die. So don't unnecessarily be in despair, be sad and cry, there is no need."

I was listening, standing by his side. I thought, "Let me wait. When somebody dies in this fellow's house, then I will go." Two years later his father died. So I went immediately.

My father said, "Where are you going?" I said, "The same place you are going," because he was going to participate in the funeral procession. A neighbor has died and he was an old friend. He said, "He was my old friend, but why are you going?"

I said, "I am going to take care of his son, because that idiot was telling a woman whose husband had died, 'Don't cry, the soul is immortal.' Now I have to see whether he is crying or not."

And he was crying. So I said, "Stop crying. You were telling that poor woman that the soul is immortal. What happened? Your father's soul is not immortal? Stop crying."

He said, "You are a strange person. I am in a deep sadness."

I said, "What happened two years ago? When somebody else's husband died, you told her great and beautiful things. All lies! Your tears prove you were lying. If you were true, there would be no tears. Your father's soul is immortal."

He said, "I know it. But what to do? I feel sad."

I said to him, "That woman also knew it."

All knowledge is borrowed; hence all knowledge that is borrowed is a lie. Deep down you are not in agreement with it. Deep down there is doubt.

So what you are asking is: If we don't have a God, suddenly the problem arises, to whom do we have to look for guidance about what is good and what is bad? And you feel, you think, it is because there is a certain resistance to thinking. No, it is not as you think. It is not a question of resistance to thinking. Thinking cannot solve the problem.

For example, a man has fallen into a well. Now is it good or bad to pull him out? Can you decide that by thinking? You may think it is good to save the man; but if you save the man and tomorrow he commits a murder, then you will be responsible, at least fifty percent responsible, for the murder. If you had not saved the man, there would have been no murder.

There is a religious sect, Terapanth, in India, which says: Don't interfere in anybody's life. If somebody is drowning, you simply move on; don't listen. He is shouting for help, "Save me!" Don't listen, because he is suffering from his past evil acts.

If you interfere, you are committing two crimes. First, you are interfering in his personal life. He was suffering because of his personal evil acts. He has to suffer; you are preventing him. He will have to fall again some day. It is better to let him finish with the past evil acts. And secondly, by saving him you are taking an immense responsibility. He may rape a woman, he may kill somebody. He may turn out to be a thief or anything, and you will be responsible. So you have unnecessarily taken a responsibility on yourself which will disturb your own spiritual growth."

So the followers of Terapanth - the head of the panth is Acharya Tulsi - say, "Don't give any food to a beggar. He is a beggar because he is suffering from his past life's karmas." They don't believe in charity, they don't believe in compassion, they don't believe that you should help anybody who is in trouble. You should keep aloof, otherwise you are taking responsibilities which will become too burdensome for you. The first task is to get rid of your own evil acts and now you are taking on other people's responsibilities. You will never become enlightened. So the people following Acharya Tulsi have become absolutely inhuman; nothing matters.

Thinking cannot decide anything, because something may be good in one situation and the same thing may be bad in a different situation. Sometimes even poison can be medicine, and sometimes even medicine can be poison - you have to understand the changing flux of life.

So by thinking you cannot decide. It is not a question of deciding as a logical conclusion, it is a question of choiceless awareness. You need a mind without thoughts. In other words, you need a no-mind, just a pure silence, so you can see directly into things. And out of that clarity will come the choice on its own; you are not choosing. You will act just as a buddha acts. Your action will have beauty, your action will have truth, your action will have the fragrance of the divine. There is no need for you to choose.

You have to look for guidance because you don't know your inner guide is hidden inside you. You have to find the inner guide, and that's what I call your witness. That's what I call your dharma, that's what I call your intrinsic buddha. You have to awaken that buddha and your life will shower blessings, benediction. Your life will become so radiant with good, with godliness, more than you can possibly conceive.

It is almost like light. Your room is dark, just bring light in. Even a small candle will do, and the whole darkness disappears. And once you have a candle you know where the door is. You don't have to think about it: "Where is the door?" Only blind people think about where the door is. People who have eyes and the light is there, they don't think. Have you ever thought, "Where is the door?"

You simply get up and go out. You never give a single thought to where the door is. You don't start groping for the door or hitting your head against the wall. You simply see, and there is not even a flicker of thought. You simply go out.

Exactly the same is the situation when you are beyond mind. When there are no clouds and the sun is bright in the sky, you don't have to think, "Where is the sun?" When there are clouds covering the sun, you have to think about it.

Your own being is covered with thoughts, emotions, feelings, and they are all mind-products. Just put them aside, and then whatever you do is good - not that you follow certain scriptures, not that you follow certain commandments, not that you follow certain spiritual leaders. You are in your own right the guide of your life. And that is the dignity of man, to be the guide of his own life. That makes man a lion, transforms him from a sheep which is always looking for somebody else to defend it.

But this is not only your problem, this is the problem of almost the whole of humanity. You have been programmed by others as to what is right and what is wrong.

So when there is no God, there is no holy scripture and there is no son of God like Jesus Christ to save you, and there is no meaning in the pope who represents Jesus Christ who is the son of God who does not exist! Can you be a son of someone who does not exist? To be a son of someone who does not exist simply means you are a crackpot - and the pope is representing the crackpot, Jesus Christ. And he goes on saying that he is infallible.

And each pope has contradicted other popes. In these twenty centuries there have been many instances when one pope acted in a certain way and another pope demolished that and changed the rule. Both cannot be right. Both cannot be infallible. Both can be fallible, but both cannot be infallible, one has to be fallible. But if one pope is fallible, then what is the guarantee that other popes will not be fallible?

And the pope is elected. Do you elect a buddha? By election you decide who is a buddha? Then your politicians will become buddhas, and your buddhas will not have any votes, because your buddhas will not go begging for votes. A buddha is unconcerned whether you think him a buddha or not.

The pope is elected. And you will be surprised to know that even Jesus Christ, three hundred years after his death, was elected as a divine being by a conference under the Emperor Constantine. The conference is known as the Niscene Council. It was by election, by voting, that it was decided that Jesus is holy.

You cannot decide by election that Jesus is holy. You cannot decide by election whether Albert Einstein is right or wrong - by election, by people who don't know any mathematics, who don't know any physics. People who don't have any experience of the holy are voting for or against Jesus, whether he is holy or not. After three hundred years, people who have not known Jesus and people who have no idea and no experience of holiness, they are deciding by election!

It was just because of the power of Emperor Constantine; he forced people to vote for Jesus Christ as a holy man. Because they could not go against the emperor, they had to vote. And then the second thing he wanted them to vote on was: although Jesus Christ was holy and was a messiah, he failed in his mission. "I am the real messiah." Constantine said to the conference, "You now vote for me. I am the real messiah and a successful one." He turned the whole Roman empire to Christianity. That's why the Vatican exists in Italy. Italy's old name was the Roman Empire, and under Constantine the whole of the Roman empire was converted to Christianity. Of course he was far more successful than Jesus.

You can't think Jesus was a success. He was crucified, poor fellow. Do you call this success?

Crucifixion? On either side two criminals... even they were laughing. They were crucified, but they had committed crimes so there was no question; they knew that this was absolutely justified.

And Jesus told those two... first, to one he said, "Don't be worried, you will be coming with me to paradise. And I am the son of God so I will help you to enter into paradise." Then he told the other, and both started laughing. They said, "You cannot save yourself! And you are not a criminal, we know. You have not committed any crime, and you are being crucified. You cannot save yourself and you are promising us that you will save us?"

But Constantine forced the council of Niscene to accept him as the real messiah - and certainly Constantine was successful; he converted the whole of the Roman empire to Christianity.

Jesus had only twelve apostles, uneducated, carpenters, fishermen, uncultured - not a single rabbi, not a single learned man was ever his follower. No educated, no cultured people ever gathered around him.

But the viceroy of the Roman empire - Judea was under the Roman empire - Pontius Pilate, heard about him from his wife. Just by chance she was passing when Jesus was preaching to a crowd, so she stopped her chariot. From her chariot she heard Jesus and she loved what he was saying.

Those sayings were beautiful. She told her husband, "This man has something, some quality. I have never heard any man speaking with such authority, such beautiful sayings. And he is uneducated and very young," - he was only thirty years at that time. By thirty-three he was crucified.

So Pontius Pilate could not go as a viceroy to listen to him, but in disguise as a soldier he just passed that way and stood under a tree far away, listening to what this man was saying. And his wife was right.

Pilate was a very educated man, but he had never heard anybody speaking with such authority; such beautiful words from an uneducated man! So he was very favorable to Jesus and wanted somehow to save him from crucifixion, but the Jews were too much against him - not that he had committed any crime, but because he was claiming something which the Jews could not accept. He was claiming, "I am your last prophet for whom you have been waiting for centuries. I have come."

And he was a carpenter's son, and there was even a difficulty believing that he was his own father's son, because he was born just four months after the marriage. That is how the whole story begins about the Virgin Mary and the Holy Ghost. The whole thing was that the girl was already pregnant when she married Joseph the carpenter. It was not the Holy Ghost, it was some unholy neighbor.

And he was not God's son; he was not even the son of his own father!

But if you tell the truth, if you call him "the bastard" then Christians are going to be hurt in their religious feelings. And I am simply telling the truth! They have to prove where the Holy Ghost is, and what is the logic behind calling him holy if he is raping virgin girls?

But people feel hurt because they don't know what authentic religiousness is. You are living with ideas, borrowed, so when God is no longer there, Jesus is no longer there, popes are no longer there, who is going to guide you?

If God is not there, then all your Hindu incarnations of God are phony. When God himself is not there, how can he be incarnated in Krishna, in Ram...?

These are just arch-egoists proclaiming something which they cannot prove. Not a single incarnation of God has been able to prove on what grounds he is calling himself an incarnation. Self-styled, so- called incarnations of God, self-styled prophets and messiahs, they have all created your morality, your religion, and you have been depending on them. And you think from these people can come the truth?

Truth can only arise within you. Nobody else can give it to you. And with truth comes beauty, followed by good. This is the authentic trinity of a truly religious man: truth, beauty, good. These three experiences happen when you enter into your own subjectivity, when you explore the interiority of your being.

You have been living in the porch outside your being; you have never gone in. Once you go in you will find your buddha, your awareness, your choiceless consciousness. Then you don't have to decide what is good and what is wrong. That choiceless consciousness takes you towards the good without any effort. It is effortless.

And because it is effortless it brings you great joy. When there is effort... have you ever thought about it? Effort simply means repression. Otherwise there is no need of any effort. Do you make any effort to feel hungry? Or do you make any effort to feel thirsty? When you are thirsty you know you are thirsty, when you are hungry you know you are hungry.

But you have to make an effort to be celibate. All efforts are futile, against nature. I declare unto you there has never been a single man who was celibate, unless he was impotent. But the impotents don't count.

I say it on the grounds that nobody can go against nature. Those who try to go against nature have to make an effort. All effort is against nature, and all relaxation is in tune with nature. To be in tune is to be religious, to be in tune with the universe. And you don't have to look for any guide. That very tuning turns you into a beautiful flower, fragrant. It is not an effort on your part, it is simply a natural growth.

But all your religions are against nature. It is very strange - and you have never thought about it - but all these religions say God created nature. Yet, if God created nature, then to be against nature means to be against God. It is such a simple argument, it does not need much intelligence. If God has created existence, then to be in tune with existence is the only way of being religious - to be in tune with God's existence.

But, strangely, all religions teach you to be against nature. Fast! But fasting is not natural. Perhaps once in a while, but that too is needed only if you have been unnatural with your stomach. If you have been stuffing unnecessary things in your stomach, once in a while you may need to fast. But if you have been natural, eating only that amount which is needed by your body - not a single thing more - you will never need to fast in your whole life.

All religions teach you not to sleep for eight hours, which is natural. They are teaching you to cut your sleep. Saints sleep only three hours, two hours; the greater the saint, the less the sleep.

One day a woman came to me, the wife of a sardar, a Sikh (AT THIS SARDAR GURUDAYAL SINGH LAUGHS HEARTILY.) It was not the wife of Sardar Gurudayal Singh because he does not believe in wives, he believes in girlfriends.

The wife came to me, and said, "My husband is going bananas."

I said, "What happened to your husband?"

She said, "He has been following a so-called saint who teaches him stupid things, and he follows..."

The saint had told her husband, "First you should start living on pure food."

And what is pure food according to the Hindu mind? - the only pure food is milk. And in fact it is one of the most impure things in the world because it comes out of blood; it is really a transformation of blood. That's why when you drink milk you start looking red. It is an impure thing, the worst thing you could think of. But Hindus believe that drinking milk is the purest thing.

And it is against nature. Have you seen any grown-up animal living on the milk of the mother? Just in the beginning, when the child of any animal cannot digest solid food - it is only a question of weeks - he has to depend on the mother's milk. Once he starts eating solid food, he completely forgets about the mother's milk. It was a temporary phenomenon.

It is only man who goes on drinking milk even when he can digest solid food. And the milk is not from his mother, because the mother cannot manage to give you milk for your whole life. Just four or five years are enough to destroy her breasts. A whole life! You are seventy years old and drinking mother's milk. You will kill the poor woman! She may be already dead, and you are chewing on the dead body... So you are not able to do that, and no other woman will allow you to. Even your own wife will not allow it. Once in a while it is okay... but every day? In the middle of the night you start crying, "I want some milk"? The wife is not a cow... A few wives are, but very rarely!

You are drinking milk from other animals - cows and sheep and goats - and you don't understand the chemistry. The cow's milk is for her children, not for you. You are depriving her children - that is one act against nature. And secondly, her milk is for the bulls. So her milk has immense sexuality, and your saints are drinking milk and trying to be celibate. This is such a contradiction... that they exactly become bulls!

The cow's milk is not for you, it is for a bull. It has the strength to create a bull. So firstly you are depriving her children, which is an act of violence. Secondly, you are drinking something which is not meant for you, and it is going to create exactly the opposite of what you are trying to do. Why the pure food? So that you can be celibate!

So that woman, poor woman, told me, "First, that saint told him to live only on milk, and be celibate.

So his whole sexuality went into his head; the whole day he is just thinking about sex and nothing else."

That is the situation of all your saints' minds. You just need to open a little window in their head and inside you will see Marilyn Monroe standing naked, Sophia Loren standing naked, queues of women... I hope someday we will be able to create windows in the head so people can look.

When you are repressing sex it is going to become cerebral. It will go into the head, because the actual sex center is in the brain. So it will create fantasies, sexual imagination... now you will go to the saint for another bit of advice: "What to do? My whole mind is just whirling with one thought, women." The saint then says you have to cut down your sleep.

So this saint told the poor woman's husband, "Cut your sleep." He was sleeping for only two hours, so now the whole day he felt sleepy. He could not go to work, because the work he was doing was dangerous. He was working in a gun carriage factory. So if he was sleepy he might get killed by the mechanisms all around. He may do something wrong and explode the whole factory, so even his officers told him, "First you get cured of your... the whole day you look sleepy. We won't allow you..."

So he again went to the saint. That's how you keep on going to the guides and the rabbis and the bishops and the priests and the saints. They go on giving you advice which is not a cure, which is really creating more and more diseases. So the saint said to him, "If you are feeling sleepy the whole day it means..." In Hindu philosophy it is called tamas. Your past lives have been of pure darkness; they are surfacing. The darkness is surfacing. Tamas is coming up. So you have to continue the whole day repeating the name of Rama - that is the Hindu God.

So now he continuously repeats, "Rama, Rama, Rama." Even walking on the street he has to repeat it. Now the repetition has become so automatic that he does not hear the horns of the trucks or the buses or the cars. He is so full of his own "Rama, Rama, Rama..."

So the wife was afraid that he would be killed. People had reported to her that he was going straight for a truck, and the truck was honking the horn but he wouldn't listen. So she said, "I have come to you. You have to help. And he does not allow anybody else to sleep, so we are all getting sick. He gets up at three o'clock in the morning. He goes to bed at one o'clock in the night, so up to one o'clock, 'Rama, Rama, Rama...' through the whole house. The children are crying, 'Our examinations are coming close and this man won't let us sleep.' And by three o'clock he's back.

Even the neighbors are coming to say, 'This is too much, we cannot tolerate it. From three o'clock, "Rama, Rama" - and he shouts!'" So she said, "Something has to be done."

I said, "Certainly. You bring him to me."

But he wouldn't listen, because he was continuously repeating, "Rama, Rama," in front of me! I said, "Shut up!"

He said, "But it is the name of God."

I said, "Who told you?"

He said, "My saint."

I said, "He knows exactly that Rama is the name of God?"

He said, "His own master has told him."

I said, "It is just a tale told from one idiot to another idiot... and you are the last in the line. There is nothing holy in it, there is nothing divine in it; it is an ordinary name. There are millions of people in India who have Ram in their name - do you think they are all gods?"

He said, "No."

I said, "What is your name?" And by chance his name was Sardar Ram Singh. "You are an idiot!

You are just repeating your own name."

He said, "I never thought about it."

I said, "You have never thought about anything! What else is your master telling you? Because you are not sleeping well, that's why the whole day you are feeling sleepy. And because you are trying to be celibate, the mind is continuously thinking of sex. And because you are thinking of sex, your master says to you that your food must be impure so drink cow's milk. That will make you more sexual; you become a bull. Soon, Sardar Ram Singh, you will become a bull!"

He said, "My God! So what am I to do?"

I said, "First, stop drinking milk. Just be a normal human being. Yes, you can drink a little bit in your tea in the morning, but not the whole day. How much milk are you drinking? Your body seems so fat."

The wife said, "The whole day he is drinking, to make himself celibate. His job has gone, and whatever small balance he had in an account is wasted in purchasing two cows, and he drinks all the milk of two cows!"

I said, "You brought him at the right time. Soon he would have turned into a bull. He is just on the verge." So I said to him, "Sell those cows and start eating like a human being. And sleep like a human being. And there is no need to repeat 'Ram, Ram...'

"You can do one thing. In the morning, say 'Ram' and then say, 'Ditto - applicable for twenty-four hours.' It is just a small thing. You can write it on a page: Ditto, applied for the twenty-four hours.

Next day again you say one time, 'Ram,' and 'Ditto.'"

He said, "This is a great secret! I was getting bored and tired, and I was getting deaf because I was continuously repeating, repeating, repeating. Even those two hours in sleep I was continuously repeating inside, 'Ram, Ram...'" Because if you are repeating for twenty-two hours then you cannot leave it just for two hours in sleep; it will go on in an undercurrent.

I said, "You will be okay within two weeks. Not much is needed, just be normal and natural. And stop going to that stupid man you think is a saint."

He said, "Then can I come to you?"

I said, "No. You don't need anybody outside; you have to go within yourself. First, for two weeks get saner; then you can come to me and I will tell you how to meditate. And you don't have to meditate the whole day; just one hour before sunrise. And there is no need to shout, because you are not praying for the neighbors, and there is no God to listen howsoever loud you shout. No God is there to listen to it. Have you ever received any answer?"

He said, "No, I have never received any answer, only condemnation from everybody. My children are against me, my wife is against me, all the neighborhood is against me, my boss is against me. I have got into such trouble with this religion..."

I said, "Everybody is in the same situation, more or less."

All religions are driving people bananas.

And they give you advice that seems to be very significant because all the scriptures are repeating it down the ages. It is so ancient you cannot doubt it.

You don't need anybody to tell you what is good and what is wrong. All that you need is an awakening within you of a consciousness which makes you see things as they are. Then there is no question of choice.

Nobody chooses the bad consciously. It is the unconscious, the darkness within you, that chooses the evil.

Consciousness brings light to your whole being; you become full of luminosity. You cannot do anything that is harmful to anybody. You cannot do anything that is harmful to your own body. You become suddenly aware that you are one with this whole universe.

So your actions become good, beautiful, graceful; your words start having a certain poetry, your silence becomes so deep, so blissful, that your bliss starts overflowing to others.

This overflowing of bliss is the only significant sign of a man who is awakened. Just being with that man, just his presence, is enough to give you a taste of the beyond.

But it is not according to anybody else, only according to your own awareness.

And when I say God is dead, all that is left for you is your own consciousness. And your consciousness is part of an oceanic consciousness that surrounds you. Once you become aware of your inside, you will become aware that, all over, that same consciousness is throbbing, dancing.

In the trees, in the rivers, in the mountains, in the oceans, in people's eyes, in their hearts, it is the same song, it is the same dance - and you participate in it. Your participation is good. Your non-participation is bad.

Question 2:

The second question:

Fear invented God.

The priest is as much a victim as you are.

But he is more cunning than you are.

Man's fear of darkness, man's fear of sickness, man's fear of old age, man's fear of death needed somebody to protect him. He could not find any protection anywhere. When you can't find any protection anywhere you have to invent one, as a consolation.

Just today I was listening to a song of one of the great Urdu poets, Mirza Ghalib. A sentence says:

HAMKO MALOOM HAI JANNAT KI HAKIKAT LEKIN DIL KE BAHLANE KO GHALIB KHAYAL ACHCHHA HAI.

We know perfectly well the truth about your paradise, but it is good as a consolation. We know it is not there, we know it is a lie, but to console yourself that after death angels will be there waiting, playing on their harps, "Alleluia," that receiving you at the pearly gates will be Saint Peter, and God will be waiting for you... Ghalib is right. DIL KE BAHLANE... just as a consolation it is a good idea.

The priests know perfectly well, perhaps more than you, that there is no God. But the priest is in the most cunning profession in the world - the worst and the most ugly profession, far worse than prostitution. Prostitution is the product of the priest; it is number two. First comes the priest, then comes the prostitute, and then come all kinds of pathologies in the world.

The priests saw that everybody was afraid and wanted some protection.

So the fear created God, as a security, as an insurance after you die. Otherwise, it seems that after death all is darkness for eternity. What will happen? Where you will be? All your friends will be left behind, your family will be left behind, nobody will come with you, you can carry no money beyond death. Utterly a beggar, naked, just a skeleton, you will be moving into death. And then, for eternity...

It creates a great anxiety - what kind of life will there be after death?

So our fear, our dread, our death created God. The priest immediately saw a good excuse to exploit people. He became the middle agent. You can't see God, so there is every possibility that if there was no priest to continuously persist that there is God - philosophizing, creating theologies, scriptures, temples, statues, rituals, prayers, the whole drama... He stands between you and God, and he says to you, "I have a direct line to God. You don't have a direct line. You tell me, you confess to me your sins, and I will tell God to forgive you."

You cannot see God, obviously. You feel it a great relief that somebody knows, somebody is there who has a direct connection.

And you feel it is cheap. You commit a sin, and you are afraid you will have to suffer in hell, and the priest is there; you just go and confess your sin and the priest says to you, "Put five dollars into the charity box and I will pray for you."

And God is very compassionate; he always forgives. So your sin is forgiven for five dollars - those five dollars are pocketed by the priest; they never reach anywhere else because there is no God to whom he can give those five dollars.

And what will God do with five dollars? He is alone, there is no shopping mall, what will he do with five dollars? And up to now he must have collected billions and trillions of dollars - all useless junk.

What will he do with those dollars, notes and bills? He does not come to the world to purchase things. And I have never heard and never come across in any scripture that there are shopping markets in paradise. Saints don't need anything. In paradise you don't need food, in paradise you don't need anything. Everything is fulfilled; you simply live an eternal life. You are no longer a body, you are just a spirit. And spirits don't need food, don't need water, don't need medicine. The spirit never becomes sick, it never becomes old, it never dies. So what will God do with those five dollars?

But every Sunday the Catholic priest collects a good amount, and all other priests have their own ways. The Hindu priest catches hold of you from the very beginning. Even before the child is born, he is caught hold of by the priest. The Hindu priest even used to tell you in the past on what day, on what night you should make love to your wife, at what time, so you get a really intelligent, holy, saintly child.

And this whole India is a proof that the priest was wrong. I don't see those holy children anywhere.

The child has been got hold of from the very beginning, even from before the beginning. The child is not yet even received by the mother's womb, and he is telling you on what night, at what time...!

I used to stay with one of the oldest M.P.s in India. He was M.P. for sixty years continuously without a gap. He used to be called Father of the Indian Parliament. There are only two persons who remained M.P.s for sixty years. One was my friend, Dr. Seth Govind Das, and the other was Winston Churchill in England, both continuously chosen, without any discontinuity, for sixty years. Dr. Govind Das was a very fanatic Hindu, so I had to suffer from his fanaticism continuously.

I used to stay with him in New Delhi. Whenever I was talking and giving lectures in New Delhi I stayed with him. And he was so fanatic... in India there are many people of that kind, he was not alone. He would ask his priest, when he was going back to his constituency, at what time he should leave the house. He asked the priest, who, consulting all kinds of charts and his birth chart through the scriptures and astrology, would find what was the right moment to get out of the house.

Now the trains don't run according to astrology. So the train was going at twelve o'clock in the night, and his astrologer said, "You have to leave the house at three o'clock in the afternoon." And I had to sit with him on the railway station from three to twelve.

I told him, "This is stupid, if we have to wait here. The best would have been you could have come out of the house at three o'clock and come back through the back door. Unnecessary torture..."

But he said, "No, I have to leave."

I said, "There are millions of Hindus who go on asking the same thing, but still accidents happen in trains. And there may be many Hindus who have consulted the priest, 'This is the right time, a good time for you to travel' - and the train gets drowned in a river, the whole bridge collapses!"

In India bridges collapse like anything, because it is a very religious country, a very spiritual country!

It trusts in God, not in cement. So bridges are made with as small an amount of cement as possible; the larger part is just sand. So it is good, the bridge is good for inaugurating by the prime minister.

That's enough. The first time the train comes, both the train and the bridge go into the river. And all the Hindus in the train must have consulted their astrologers, their priests, "What is the right time?"

In India there should not be any accidents.

I said to Dr. Seth Govind Das, "Why are there accidents? In India there should not be."

He himself was in a car accident. When I went to see him, I said, "What happened to your astrology?"

He said, "At least at this time when I am suffering from multiple fractures you should not start any argument with me."

I said, "This is the right time to make you clear that you have been stupid your whole life. Did you ask the astrologer or not?"

He said, "I asked."

"Then why this accident?"

But people don't have the guts and courage to go against the past, though it may be a completely rotten past. Marriages in India are made by the astrologers. And every marriage is a failure. I have never come across any marriage which was not a failure.

I used to live in a place called Raipur. I was a professor in Raipur, just for six months I lived there.

The city was so out of date that I got tired living with those people. You would find everywhere written on the walls: "If you are suffering from ghosts, then come to me," and the address. "If you are suffering from witches, come to me. If you are suffering from black magic, I am the right man to cure you." The whole city was full of black magic, witches, ghosts.

Just in my neighborhood used to live a very famous astrologer, and he used to fix marriages just by looking at the birth charts. He became friendly with me. I told him that this was not working. "It is not working even in your case." His wife used to beat him.

I said, "What happened? You are such a great astrologer. You are making hundreds of marriages.

Without your confirmation people cannot get married because their stars do not meet." There has to be a certain synchronicity between the stars of both the charts. "What happened? Did you not consult the birth chart of your wife?"

He said, "I did."

"Then what went wrong?"

He said, "Don't harass me. I am already too harassed by my wife. And now you have come into my neighborhood to harass me."

I said, "I will not harass you. I just want to know if you believe in your own astrology."

He was certainly a sincere man. He told me, "Don't tell anybody. It is my profession, but I don't believe in it at all. In fact sometimes it happens that the birth charts do not meet. But the man is rich and he is going to give me at least a hundred rupees if I give him the go-ahead that this marriage is going to be very successful. So sometimes I change the charts. I put in a new chart for the girl which mixes with the boy's chart."

The priest knows perfectly there is no God. He is the only person who knows it perfectly. But it is his profession; he lives by exploiting people. So he goes on persisting that there is a God. God is his business. And when it is a question of business, it is his very livelihood.

And there are millions of priests belonging to different religions. There may be in every country different kinds of priests, but all that they do is to exploit people by giving them consolation: "This marriage is going to be great." And every marriage is a tragedy. I have never come across any comedy.

Just today - because last night I talked about Mickey Mouse Manu and the great beautiful woman Zareen - Zareen has been looking for German glue to get Manu completely in control. She was thinking to glue him to her body, so that poor Manu should follow Zareen wherever she goes and not escape in the name of business to Bombay. Tomorrow morning he is going again.

He has written me a beautiful letter, thanking me and being grateful, but again business... Today they were walking hand in hand on the road. Is it not enough proof that I have some clarity, that I can see things? And I remain in my room, I never go out. Both were happy, like small rats.

People can only be happy if they are not married. Then you have a freedom. Then it is out of freedom you are together, not out of any contract, not out of some business deal, not because of society's enforcement, not because of law but because of love. Just out of love you are together, and when the love fails...

And everything fails, remember. It is a fiction created by the poets that love is eternal. No, the love that you know is not eternal and the love that poets know is not eternal; it fades away. It remains if lovers don't meet.

There have been only three or four pairs in the whole history of man who are great lovers - because they never met. So there was no quarrel, there was no question of their love being disappointing.

The society did not allow them to meet, their parents did not allow them.

In India we have the stories of Laila and Majnu, Shiri and Farhad. The lovers never met because society was against them. They belonged to different castes, different societies, different religions, so there was no possibility of their marriage. They are thought to be great lovers, their love never faded - because it never began! Once it begins the end is not far away.

Every beginning has an end. Even when you are born, death is not far away. Every day it comes closer.

And once you are married, the problem becomes more difficult. Out of freedom you can live together because you know you are living out of freedom; you can move any moment. In great friendliness, with thankfulness to each other: "You gave us such beautiful moments, such beautiful days and nights. We lived in poetry, in music, in songs. These few days and nights were all golden, but now the season is gone, the spring is over, the honeymoon finished. It is better for both of us to separate."

With great gratitude... there is no revenge, there is no hate, there is no reason for anger. Both gave whatever they could to each other; they are richer than they were before. The experience has made them more rich.

But marriage does not allow you to move away. Love finishes, but you have to pretend that you are still loving. And whenever you have to pretend it is a heaviness on the heart. Whenever you pretend, you are phony - you know it, your wife knows it.

When love fades there is no possibility of deceiving each other. Maybe for a few days you can deceive by bringing ice cream every day, but for how long? In fact the moment you start bringing ice cream that is a signal that the old warmth of love is finished, now the coldness is coming!

It is only people like Dale Carnegie... and they can be effective only in America, nowhere else. Dale Carnegie is America's only philosopher. He has sold his book in a quantity second only to the Holy Bible. The book is HOW TO WIN FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE.

And everything is phony in that book. He says, "Every husband, when he is going to the office, should kiss his wife." Whether he loves her or not is not material, but he should kiss and say, "I love you, honey." When he comes home he should again hug, bring a few roses, and say, "Sweetheart, I have been thinking of you the whole day." At least three times a day and three times in the night he should make her aware that he loves her. And the same is true for the wife. Both are following Dale Carnegie; there is no love. And you simply go on saying...

The word 'phony' applies to America more than to any other country. It comes from 'telephone', because on the telephone your voice becomes different, it becomes phoney.

The husband calls the wife once or twice in the day, just to assure her that he loves her. And while he is calling, his secretary is sitting in his lap! This is happening in every office, without exception.

Secretaries are chosen not because they are more efficient than others... When they are brought before the boss for their interview...

I have heard about one. A secretary came in and said that she was very experienced, she had all the certificates and her speed was very good on the typewriter. Another came; she was fresh, younger, but had no experience. Then the third came, then the fourth came; there were at least a dozen. And finally when the manager asked, "Which one have you chosen?" the boss said, "The one who has the biggest tits."

Secretaries are chosen because of tits? But that's how things are.

Once you start feeling encaged in anything you immediately feel to get out of it, it is a prison. Your God, your priests, they are all your imprisoners. They create, they go on creating new prisons for you, of morality, of marriage, of responsibility for the children - all kinds of entanglements and chains for you. The whole purpose is to keep you miserable, because unless you are miserable you do not go to the church. Unless you are miserable you are not going to pray. Only in misery you remember God - you know it! Only when you are suffering you remember God, you think about the Holy Bible, you think about Bhagavadgita, you go to the temple - but only when you are in misery.

Bertrand Russell is absolutely right when he says, "If we can make the whole of humanity happy, religions will disappear." And I absolutely agree with him, but he does not know how to make the whole world happy. I know how to make the whole world happy.

Out of deep meditation bliss arises, and then you are so happy the whole day, the whole night...

without any cause. It is just bubbling inside you. It is your very nature, your dharma. Then you don't need any God and you don't need any priest, and you don't live in any kind of misery or imprisonment. The moment you feel that something has become phony, something has become pseudo, something has become just a mask, you simply drop it. You remain truthful to your own consciousness - that is your only responsibility.

And all else will follow, and your life will be a life of rejoicing. Not only will your life be a rejoicing, your death also will be a rejoicing. Death does not destroy anything. The five elements of the body fall back into their original sources and for the consciousness there are two possibilities: if it has not tasted meditation it will move into another womb; if it has tasted meditation, if it has known its eternity, its immortality, it will move into the cosmos and disappear into this vast existence. And that disappearance is the greatest moment of life. You have become one with the source from where you had arisen. You have gone back and disappeared into it.

Authentic religion does not need any God, does not need any priest, does not need any prayer. All that it needs is an exploration of your inner world.

That exploration I call Zen. In Sanskrit it is dhyan; in Chinese it is ch'an; in Japanese it is zen. But it is the same word. Going inwards, reaching to the very point from where you can look, a door opens into the divine cosmos. Standing on that point, you are a buddha. And your whole life changes; it is a metamorphosis. You have become a new man.

And we need this new man urgently. It has never been so urgent as it is today. The new man is the only hope for a whole humanity. If the new man does not arrive soon, the old man is ready to commit suicide, global suicide.

Question 3:

The third question:

The statement is absolutely right in the sense that if you make somebody a slave, you also become dependent on him. You have to take care of him, you have to take care of his health. You have taken on a great responsibility.

But if the slave has lost his responsibility, he has also lost his freedom; he has also lost his dignity, his humanity. He has become a beast of burden; he is just like a machine. You take care of the machine also. You wash your car, you clean your car, you are always aware if something is wrong that it has to be replaced. Just as you take care of your machines, you take care of your slaves.

So it is true that the master also becomes in a certain way dependent on the slave. But the Christian who told you does not realize the implication of his statement. If God is his master, that means God is his slave. It is his statement; he is saying, "Do you realize that a slave is more free than the master?" So God is less free than you are!

But a less free God becomes inferior to you, a less free God cannot bring freedom to you. He himself is less free. So why bother about a God who is not even equally as free as you, to say nothing about his superiority in freedom - he is less free than you.

But fanatics don't understand logic, don't understand argument. Fanatics are just blind people.

Otherwise, this one would not have said, "This is because the master has all the responsibility and the slave has no cares in the world. We are lucky to have God as our master!" He should have said, "We are lucky to have God as our slave, because he takes all the cares and all the responsibilities; he creates the world and he creates the sin and he creates all kinds of troubles and he creates all kinds of solutions, and he sends his own son to save the world, and he sends prophets upon prophets to fight amongst each other and kill people... He has such a great involvement and business, he is so occupied! And what does he get in return? Just these fanatics."

If there is a God, man is not only a slave, man does not exist, man is a puppet. If God, the way the Christians believe, made man out of mud and then breathed life into him, breathing, man is just a created puppet. All the strings are in the hands of God. Any moment, just as at a certain moment that whimsical God created man...

What was he doing before? One simply has to ask it, because according to Christians he created the world only six thousand years ago. It is absolute nonsense, because in India we have found cities of great culture and civilization - Mohenjo Daro and Harappa, which Christian explorers, Christian scientists were excavating. They could not believe it - God destroyed those cities seven thousand years ago... before God created the world! And in Peking, China, the skeleton of a man has been found called the Peking Man, which is eighty thousand years old.

Certainly the world is far more ancient than your God. Perhaps man created God six thousand years ago - that may be right. But idiots are idiots....

One great scholarly bishop was very much puzzled about the Peking Man, about Harappa and Mohenjo Daro, and about the claim of a man who lived in Poona, a famous scholar, Lokmanya Tilak, that the Hindu Vedas are ninety thousand years old.

And his evidence is such that it cannot be contradicted. His evidence is not logical but scientific, astronomical.

In the Rigveda, a certain constellation of stars is described in absolute detail; this happened, according to scientists, ninety thousand years ago. Unless Rigveda was written by people who had seen that constellation they could not have described it in detail, and since then that constellation has not happened again. Perhaps sometime in the future it may happen, but for ninety thousand years it has not happened. The description is a solid proof that Rigveda was written by people who had seen the constellation; without seeing that constellation there is no way for them to have described which star was in which position. And they have described it so scientifically that there is no possibility of making any improvement on it. When this bishop became aware of all these things...

On the Himalayas, on top of the highest peaks of the Himalayas, sea animals' skeletons have been found. That simply means that at a certain time - perhaps a hundred million years before - there was an ocean in place of the Himalayas. Otherwise, sea animals cannot move from the ocean, pass through the whole of India and go on top of the Himalayas to die there.

The only possibility is - and this is now a scientific fact - the Himalayas arose out of the ocean.

And as they arose out of the ocean, many animal fossils must have remained on these tops. The Himalayas went on being forced up and these fossils were covered in snow. And as this vast range of mountains called the Himalayas rose, the ocean receded.

The Hind Mahasagar, the great Indian Ocean, used to be where the Himalayas are - one hundred million years ago. Those animals prove it, because they are one hundred million years old. There are ways to judge how old a skeleton is, and now those methods are absolutely accurate.

The bishop was mad, because it was all going against the Bible. So he invented a theory - this is why I say a fanatic will not see the truth; he will try to continue his belief in a lie, will make all kinds of excuses. This excuse is certainly worth understanding. The bishop invented a theory that God created the world six thousand years ago as it is told in the Bible, but, as he is all-powerful, he created sea animals and put them on top of the Himalayas. And he created them so that they would appear one hundred million years old. He created the Harappa and Mohenjo Daro ruins making them appear seven thousand years old; the Peking Man as if it is eighty thousand yeas old... just to test the Christians' faith! What a great logic!

God seems to be a con man: "It is just a question of your faith."

But the fact is, this earth is four thousand million years old according to science. And man is at least one million years old, passing through many different stages up to Gautam Buddha, the highest peak of consciousness, the Everest.

This Christian fanatic is saying, "We are lucky to have God as our master." What about God himself?

Is he lucky to have you as his responsibility? If God is responsible for everything, and he should be; if he created the world then he is responsible for Adolf Hitler, the second world war, Hiroshima and Nagasaki... who else? If he is taking care of the world and pulling the strings of people, he pulls the strings of President Truman to drop the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Now, Truman is not responsible - God pulled his strings; what can he do?

When the puppeteer pulls the strings of the puppet, the puppet dances. When the puppeteer pulls differently, the puppet fights. When the puppeteer drops the puppet, it goes down and sleeps. And whenever the puppeteer pulls the strings again, the puppet is back ready to do anything. If God has created the world, then we are all puppets; we don't have any spirituality and we are just dust unto dust.

Is God happy to have all these puppets creating a mess of the world? And he is responsible!

But fanatics don't look at any logic. His argument proves that God is a slave of his own slaves; he is not a master. You are the master; he is taking care of you.

Rather than seeing exactly into the reality of things, people go on creating hypotheses, lies, fictions - imagination, hallucination. Mind has all these capacities.

Unless you are beyond mind, you cannot be certain that what you are seeing is real. Once you are beyond mind, only then are you aware of that which is real. And in that reality no God is found.

Buddha could not find any God. In his ultimate state of enlightenment, he could not find any God and he could not find any beginning of the universe. Mahavira in his ultimate enlightenment could not find any God, and he could not find any creation either. The world, existence, is beginningless and endless. Twenty-three other tirthankaras of the Jainas could not find any God when they were in samadhi. When they were beyond mind, there was no fear, no dread, no death, there was no need of the hypothesis of God. God simply disappeared like a shadow of our mind.

As dreams disappear when you wake up... enlightenment is nothing but waking up and all dreams disappear. And God has been proved a dream by thousands of enlightened people.

God is believed in only by the ignorant. God is believed in only by those who don't have any sense of dignity. The people who have attained to the fulfillment of their potential, who have blossomed like lotus flowers, have all denied God.

There are three religions in the world... one that arose out of Gautam Buddha's inspiration, another that arose out of Adinatha's inspiration, and a third that arose out of Lao Tzu's inspiration, Tao.

These three are the highest peaks ever arrived at, and all three have no God.

Compared to these three, Mohammedanism, Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism are just very childish.

They are good as toys, as consolation, but they don't solve any problem and they don't give you any liberation. They don't take you beyond birth and death. They only make you slaves.

I hate slavery, and my whole effort is to liberate you from all that binds you. Only when you are liberated from all bindings will you have a tremendous beauty, a splendor that even emperors will be jealous of.

The sutra:

OUR

WHEN IMPO TOOK LEAVE OF MA TZU, MA TZU ASKED, "WHERE ARE YOU GOING?"

Ma Tzu is one of the great enlightened masters; and not just great, but also very strange - I have talked about Ma Tzu to you. There is no comparison to Ma Tzu anywhere. His whole behavior is just absolutely unique.

He walked on all fours, just like an animal. Because he was so much in tune with nature, he dropped the idea of standing on two feet. He said, "Standing on two feet has created the mind." That's why animals don't have any religion, don't have any God. Animals are far better; they don't go to any church, they don't bow down to any stone cut into the image of God. Animals simply pass by; donkeys don't care. It is only man who seems to be stupid.

If animals had languages - and there is a suspicion amongst scientists they have; they have symbols, they have certain languages, different kinds, not exactly like human beings - then they must be laughing. In secrecy they must be blinking their eyes to each other, "Look at that fellow who is bowing down before a monkey god!"

Ma Tzu's idea was that the brain developed because man stood on two feet. And there is great understanding in it. The brain cannot develop - science is in agreement with Ma Tzu. The brain cannot develop if you go on moving on all fours, because when you are horizontal, moving like an animal, the brain gets so much blood flow that small, very small invisible nerves cannot grow in the brain. The flood of blood destroys them.

As man stood on two feet, the blood reaching to the head became a very small quantity, because it is going against gravitation. Everything is pulled down and your heart has to pump blood upstairs.

It is a difficult task. That's why only man has heart attacks - not animals; only man is continuously sick and ill, because he is fighting with gravitation all the time. The earth is pulling everything down and you are taking everything up, against gravitation. So it is a struggle.

Ma Tzu moved on all fours just to go beyond mind and be in tune with nature. Everybody laughed.

They said, "This is strange!"

And he looked like a tiger. He had such shiny eyes that he would look at you like a tiger. The disciples who gathered around Ma Tzu were men of great courage, because he used to jump on people, beat them. Ma Tzu devised beating and slapping and jumping on people as methods of meditation! You won't believe it, but he managed to make more people enlightened than even Gautam Buddha, because he had found a secret in it. When he jumped on you, suddenly your mind stopped. You could not think, "What is happening?" You could not figure it out, it had never happened before.

Mind knows only what has happened; mind knows only what you have learned. Nobody has jumped on you, you have seen nobody walking on all fours. When you first see Ma Tzu walking on all fours, your brain is in shock: what is the matter? And then he looks at you as if he is a tiger - that gives you another shock - and then suddenly he grabs you, and he was a very strong man, of course, just like any gorilla, and he sits on your chest and asks you, "Got it?"

And one has to say, "Got it!" because if you don't, he may do something else. He may beat you, slap you, he can do anything. But his very jumping on you stopped your mind functioning. Something absolutely absurd is happening, mind cannot function. Mind is a rational and logical mechanism.

With absurdity it cannot function.

So when Impo told Ma Tzu that he wanted to go, Ma Tzu asked, "Where are you going?"

IMPO REPLIED, "I AM GOING TO SEKITO."

Sekito had become very famous by that time, and many people were coming to Sekito.

MA TZU WARNED, "THE PATH ON THE STONE-HEAD IS SLIPPERY!"

You can go, but remember that fellow Sekito Stonehead... Because he remained always on a rock, sitting on a rock, and he had a shaved head which looked also like rock, he was called "Sekito Stonehead." He was in his own right a unique master. Even Ma Tzu recognized his uniqueness, and when Ma Tzu recognizes, it is a recognition.

Ma Tzu said, "Be careful. The path on the stone-head is very slippery."

IMPO SAID, "I HAVE THE POLE OF AN ACROBAT WITH ME..."

You must have seen people walking on a tightrope. Whenever anybody walks on the tightrope he has to keep a pole in his hand, just to balance. He has to continuously balance otherwise he will fall down from the rope. The whole trick is balancing, and that balancing needs... sometimes you feel you are going more towards the left, then just put the pole towards the right so it balances you.

When you feel you are going towards the right, then turn your pole towards the left. That pole is just a help to keep you balancing between right and left, and you just remain in the middle. Without a pole no acrobat can walk on a tightrope. The pole is the whole secret. It is his support; otherwise, if he moves towards the left and he has nothing to support him and make the weight balanced, he will fall.

This man Impo said, "I HAVE THE POLE OF AN ACROBAT WITH ME." He used to be a tightrope walker, so he said, "Don't be worried. Howsoever slippery the way of Stonehead Sekito, I have the pole with me, I have walked on tightropes. Don't be worried; I will keep my balance impeccably."

"I CAN MAKE A SHOW WITH IT WHENEVER I WANT," AND WITH THAT HE LEFT.

WHEN HE GOT TO SEKITO, IMPO WENT AROUND SEKITO'S ZEN STOOL ONE TIME, SWUNG HIS STICK WITH A SHOUT AND ASKED, "WHAT IS THE DHARMA OF THIS?"

This is an important question. He is asking, "What is the truth of this?" By striking the stick on the stone where Sekito is sitting, he is asking, "What is the nature of thisness?" In Gautam Buddha's language, what is the meaning of tathata, suchness? Buddha's whole teaching can be brought to this one word: suchness, thisness, isness, the present moment. What is the meaning of this present moment?

When he asked, "WHAT IS THE DHARMA OF THIS?" SEKITO SAID, "HOW SAD! HOW SAD!"

Why did he say that? He is saying it because, if you know this, you will not ask the question. And you cannot ask the question if you don't know this.

You see the problem: if you know this - this moment, this suchness, this silence - if you know this, you will not ask the question. And if you don't know this, how can you ask the question without knowing it?

That's why he said: "HOW SAD! HOW SAD!" You know the question only, but you don't understand what you are asking. This question cannot be asked, it can only be experienced. It seems you are a knowledgeable person, you must have read scriptures where it is described. Again and again, Buddha says, "This very moment is all." If you can understand the secret of this moment, you have understood everything of existence, because existence is always in the present. It is never in the past, never in the future. The past is your memory; the future is your imagination. Existence remains always in the present. It has no past, no future.

So if you understand isness, the presence of the present moment, you have understood all the secrets and all the mysteries. There is nothing beyond it.

But he is asking the question as a scholar, not as a meditator. That's why Sekito said, "How sad!

How sad! You know the right question but you don't know the right experience. And without the experience the question becomes meaningless. If you had the experience you would not have asked it, you would have just sat by my side and experienced thisness. It surrounds this mountain.

This silence, this immense tranquility and calmness... you disturbed it by striking your stick on my stone. That was the only disturbance in the silence of the mountain. Otherwise it was so quiet. And I feel so sad for you that you are only a man of the mind, that you don't know the secret of no-mind."

Mind cannot know anything about existence, it can only know through scriptures, statements of others. All its knowledge is borrowed. It cannot know any direct experience, and only direct experience liberates you.

"HOW SAD..." Impo did not have anything to say, he could not figure out what to say. He had never expected that this man would say, "How sad! How sad!" This is not the answer to his question! And now he is feeling embarrassed.

IMPO DIDN'T HAVE ANYTHING TO SAY, BUT HE WENT BACK TO MA TZU AND TOLD HIM THE STORY. MA TZU SAID, "YOU GO AGAIN, AND WHEN SEKITO SAYS, 'HOW SAD,' YOU START CRYING."

Ma Tzu is playing a game, just as Sekito is playing a game. Between both of them they are trying to make him aware of this moment. Now Ma Tzu is saying, "You got into trouble. I had told you from the very beginning that Sekito's path is very slippery. Now you know. You have come back immediately.

Just one question and you forgot your pole! Now go again and ask the same question." This is the strategy of Ma Tzu. He is putting him again into difficulty. He is telling him, "Go and ask the same question, and when Sekito says, 'How sad,' you start crying."

SO IMPO WENT TO SEKITO AGAIN AND ASKED IN THE SAME MANNER, "WHAT IS THE DHARMA OF THIS?"

AT THAT, SEKITO STARTED CRYING.

This was a great device between two masters, who have not talked to each other, who don't know each other, they have never met! But both are enlightened.

This monk does not understand the language of enlightenment. When Ma Tzu sent him back with an answer, he knew perfectly well that Sekito is not going to repeat again, "How sad! How sad!" because no enlightened man ever repeats anything. He responds always freshly to the new situation.

Now, this is a new situation. The first time Impo came without knowing what he was going to say; now he comes knowing perfectly well what he is going to say. This has changed the whole situation.

This man comes now, knowing his old response. But the old response is no longer applicable. And somebody else's answer cannot be your answer.

So Ma Tzu gave him the answer, "You go again. He will say, 'How sad, how sad.'" He knew he would not say that! - "And when he says that, you start crying." He supplied the answer.

But any answer supplied by anyone is of no use, because every moment the enlightened person responds afresh. So when Sekito was asked again, "What is the dharma of this?"...

AT THAT, SEKITO STARTED CRYING.

Now he is saying, "This is too much! I was already sad; now sadness seems not to have affected you. You are still asking the same question! It makes me cry!"

Again the poor Impo is left without any answer, because he was given the answer, "You should cry."

Now Sekito himself is crying, what to do?

IMPO AGAIN WAS LEFT WITHOUT ANY WORD, AND RETURNED TO MA TZU. MA TZU COMMENTED, "I TOLD YOU - THE PATH ON THE STONE-HEAD IS SLIPPERY!"

"Where is your pole? You slipped twice! You make me ashamed!" - that's what Ma Tzu is saying - "Being my disciple, you slipped twice, and you could not answer."

That reminds me about a small story that will help you to understand.

There were two temples in Japan, both antagonistic to each other. One belonged to Shinto, another belonged to Zen. And for centuries they had been quarreling, arguing against each other. Both had masters, and they both had young boys, because the masters were old and they needed somebody to help them, to bring vegetables or cook food. Those small boys helped them.

Both told the small boys, "Don't talk to the other boy of the other temple - never! We have been enemies for centuries, we are not on talking terms."

But boys are boys, and because both were prevented, both were anxious... So one day, going to the market to fetch some vegetables, they met on the road. And one boy asked the other - this was the Shinto boy, coming from the Shinto temple. He asked the Zen boy, "Where are you going?"

And the Zen boy said, "Wherever the wind takes me." He had been listening to his master, all kinds of things, so he had also got the taste of Zen. He said, "Wherever the wind takes me."

The Shinto boy was shocked at this. What to answer? He wanted to make friends, but this boy seemed to be completely uninterested; he had completely cut him short. There was no way for conversation - now what to say? He is saying, "Wherever the wind takes me..."

Very sad, he came to his master and told him, "I did not obey you, I am sorry. I was just inquisitive, curious to know about the other boy. I was feeling alone, and I thought he must be also feeling alone. And your temples may have been for centuries antagonistic, but we are just boys. We can be friends.

"But you were right; it was not good to ask. Certainly those people are dangerous. I asked the boy, 'Where are you going?' and he said, 'Wherever the wind takes me.'"

The master said, "I had warned you. Now tomorrow, you go again and stand at the same place, and when that Zen boy comes, you ask him again: 'Where are you going?' And when he says, 'Wherever the wind takes me,' just ask him, 'If the wind is not blowing, then...?'"

The boy went. He stood at the same place, watched. The Zen boy was coming. He asked him, "Where are you going?" And the boy said, "Wherever the legs take me."

Now he could not answer what the master said, "If the wind is not blowing..." It would be absurd to answer that. He came very sad to the Shinto master and said, "Those people are very strange! That boy changed his whole approach! I asked the same question, but he said, 'Wherever the legs take me.'"

The master said, "I have been warning you. Now you are unnecessarily getting defeated and that means a defeat for our temple. This is not good. You go again! And tomorrow you stand in the same place, and when the boy comes you ask, 'Where are you going?' and when he says 'Wherever the legs take me,' ask him: 'If you were crippled, then would you go anywhere or not?'"

So, utterly happy, the boy went again, stood in the same place, watched. The boy came out of the temple. He asked, "Where are you going?" utterly happy that now he knows the answer.

And the boy said, "I am going to fetch some vegetables." Now the situation again becomes absolutely different. He cannot say, "If you were crippled..." he cannot say, "If the wind is not blowing..." So he returned, very angry, and said to the master, "Those people are strange! Even the boy is strange."

The master said, "I have been telling you, but you won't understand."

The story is exactly the same. The significance is that each moment is so new and so fresh that nothing old is to be repeated. That Zen boy has understood from his master and his constant dialogue with the disciples that nothing can be repeated, because the situation is never the same.

So every moment you have to respond freshly - out of your consciousness, just like a mirror. If a mirror is there and you look into it, you will see your face. And if a monkey looks at it, then the monkey will see his face. If a donkey looks at it, then the donkey will see his face. The mirror is the reflecting medium, it has no opinion. You cannot say that the mirror is very self-contradictory, that it is not consistent: sometimes it shows the face of a man, sometimes the monkey, sometimes the donkey, what kind of mirror is this? One should be consistent! Zen is not consistent with the past, but absolutely consistent with the present. Its consistency is a totally different phenomenon to anything that has happened anywhere in the world. It is unique.

Philosophers are consistent with their past statements. Whatever they have said before, they will continue to be consistent with their answers their whole life, but such a consistency is dead. The day he first made the statement, it died. And he goes on repeating the same statement although the situation goes on changing.

Zen has a consistency not in time, but with existence. It simply watches existence and whatever comes up. It is not made up. When the boy the first time said, "Wherever the wind takes me," that was his response in that moment. Of course next time he cannot repeat it, because the boy must have come with a ready-made answer, and ready-made answers are not applicable in the world of Zen.

Although he is just a boy, he has lived in a Zen atmosphere where he has understood one thing:

never repeat, because existence never repeats. You will not find two persons similar in the whole world. You will not find in a tree two leaves exactly the same; you will not find two roses exactly the same. Existence never repeats. It always creates an original; it does not believe in carbon copies.

Ready-made answers don't function in the atmosphere of Zen.

So each time you can expect a Zen master to be fresh. He is always young and always fresh, and he responds to the situation. He is not concerned with his memory of past answers. He has nothing to do with them. He is always available to the present, just like a mirror.

Buson wrote:

What does he mean by this haiku? Autumn is very beautiful in Japan; hence it comes again and again in haikus. It is one of the most beautiful times of the year. Buson is a Zen master, awakened, enlightened. And when he says, "I leave. I am going - you stay," he is talking to the autumn. The autumn is going and it almost hurts that autumn is going. So he says to the autumn, "You stay. I will go. I am also another autumn; just as you are beautiful, glorious, so am I. Instead of you, I can go, you remain."

It shows tremendous compassion: "Why are you going when I am ready to go in your place? And people love you, they enjoy you. They dance when autumn comes. Don't disturb their joy. As far as going is concerned, I am ready to go."

I LEAVE, YOU STAY - TWO AUTUMNS.

"You are an autumn, I am also an autumn. You have blossomed, I have also blossomed. So there is no problem, I can replace you. You be here."

It is as if you are talking to a roseflower which is going to drop its leaves and disappear. And you feel tremendous compassion for the rose and you say, "Don't go away. I can go away; you remain.

People love you so much. They rejoice when you dance in the wind and in the rain and in the sun.

Everybody loves you. And my time is over. I have blossomed, I have come to my ultimate peak.

There is no further to go. I have come to the end of the road. I can go; you remain."

Only a Zen master can talk this kind of dialogue because he feels in tune with existence. Whether it is spring or autumn or summer or winter it doesn't matter. He feels himself in tune with the universe.

And he would like whatever is beautiful to remain for other people to enjoy. He is ready to go, to disappear into this vast ocean of existence. It is a tremendously stunning haiku.

I LEAVE, YOU STAY - TWO AUTUMNS.

Just as you have a beautiful atmosphere, I am also just the same inside. My autumn has come. So I can leave. There is no need for you to go. People love you so much.

Question 4:

Maneesha's question:

Maneesha, Nietzsche is a great poet and a very unique poet. He writes poetry in prose - a very rare phenomenon. He never wrote poetry, but all his prose is sheer poetry. Every sentence is poetic, symbolic. Whatever he has said is so beautiful, although he never went beyond the mind.

I feel like saying to Nietzsche, as Sekito has said to the inquiring monk, "How sad! How sad!" This man deserved to be a buddha. But just because he was in the West, he could not find the way out of the mind.

You are right, the Christian trinity or the Hindu are not comparable to the trinity of Friedrich Nietzsche:

cheerfulness, daring and love for life. That's what I have been teaching to you.

The Christian trinity is just a fiction. God, the Holy Ghost, and the only begotten son, Jesus Christ, all are fictions. Jesus Christ is ninety-nine percent fiction, one percent reality. Out of this whole trinity only Jesus Christ has one percent of reality as a human being. But all the miracles are invented.

His walking on the water is nonsense; his raising the dead is absurd; his virgin birth, immaculate conception, is illogical, unscientific; his resurrection is a fake and a fraud.

He never died on the cross, so there is no question of a resurrection. He simply escaped from the cave, it was a conspiracy between the Roman governor general, Pontius Pilate, and Jesus' followers. Pontius Pilate himself was feeling bad because crucifying Jesus was not his desire. But he was absolutely helpless.

The tradition was that at every Jewish festival, when criminals who had been sentenced to death were crucified, the Jewish rabbis, particularly the chief priest of the great Jewish temple of Jerusalem, had the right to ask one of the criminals to be released as an act of mercy.

Three persons were going to be crucified. Two were murderers. One was the worst kind of criminal, with seven murders and rapes and all kinds of crimes on his head, and he was a drunkard, though a very strong man, Barabbas. And the second man also was a criminal. Pontius Pilate was hoping that the Jews would ask for Jesus to be released. He was absolutely innocent; he had not committed any crime, he had not done anything illegal. He was absolutely innocent.

But the Jews were very angry because he was proclaiming himself to be the son of God. And the Jews don't believe that God has any family, because once you have a family, there is no end to it.

You have brothers, and you have brothers-in-law, and you have sisters, and you have sisters-in-law, and it goes on and on. Then God will have a wife, then God will have a father and grandfather, and who knows where the line will end? God will become a joint family. Faraway cousins will also claim divinity.

So the Jews don't accept any trinity. God is alone; he has no son and no Holy Ghost. So the Jews were angry that this man was proclaiming himself to be the only begotten son of God. Why "only"?

What happened to God? Did he become impotent? Can't he create, just the way Hindus go on creating?

One dozen children is normal in India. Two dozen seems to be a bit of an achievement. God had only one son, not even a daughter for the son to play with? It is absolutely against the Jewish mind; hence, they could not ask that he should be forgiven.

Pontius Pilate was not a Jew, so he did not understand what the problem was. He was a Roman pagan and they did not believe in any God. So what was the problem? There is no God. And if this man is a little eccentric and thinks himself to be the son of their God, there is no harm in it. The harmless declaration simply shows that he is a little bit out of his mind, eccentric, a banana!

But you don't put bananas on the cross. You enjoy bananas, you don't put them on the cross. This fellow is a little foolish; enjoy him, but he is innocent. Laugh at him, but crucifixion does not seem to be just. So Pontius Pilate was waiting, but the Jews did not ask; on the contrary they all shouted, all the rabbis - and there were two thousand rabbis in the temple. It was the great temple of the Jews which was destroyed. And the archpriest of the temple was almost the king of the Jews - they all shouted in unison, "We want Barabbas to be released."

And Barabbas could not believe it himself. He was also thinking that this young fellow, who was only thirty-three... and he had heard him, he was always talking around the place. He was moving around Jerusalem on his donkey, and whenever he could get an audience he would start talking. He was a street sermonizer - so once in a while Barabbas had heard him talk, and he liked him, the fellow was nice and he was saying beautiful things. He hoped, of course, that he would be released, but when he was told by the Jews, he could not believe it. He was shocked. When he was taken away from the cross he still could not believe that it was real. He looked back again and again, walking towards the pub. And within seven days he had killed another man.

So Pontius Pilate was very willing, and the cave in which Jesus was put was guarded by a Roman guard. The Jews could not do it because it was their Sabbath day, on which day they cannot do anything. The crucifixion happened on Friday, it was an arrangement. The whole credit goes to Pontius Pilate, not to God and resurrection. It was arranged that on Friday - because Saturday is the Sabbath day of the Jews; they don't do anything, everything stops - on the Friday the crucifixion was delayed as much as possible, because until Pontius Pilate comes the crucifixion cannot happen.

He went as late as possible, so the crucifixion happened just after twelve o'clock in the middle of the day. And the Jewish cross is such that if a healthy man is on it, it will take forty-eight hours for him to die - because it is a very slow process, a slow torture.

Blood starts moving from the hands and the legs. Only four nails are used: two in the hands, two in the legs. So slowly the blood oozes out. And blood has a tendency to get dry. It has a chemical element that dries it; if you don't have that chemical then your life is always in danger.

There is a disease called hemophilia where your blood goes on flowing, it does not dry. That was an important factor in the situation before the Russian revolution. The Czar's only son had hemophilia - the only son, who was going to succeed. And this was a problem, because it gave power to Rasputin, a village priest, absolutely uneducated but with some knowledge of hypnotizing people.

He was called again and again; whenever the son started bleeding - any small scratch and the blood cannot stop by itself; it won't dry - Rasputin had to be called immediately. He became so powerful that the czar, the emperor of Russia, was almost dependent on him.

The wife of the czar was just a worshipper of Rasputin, and he was a villager, who knew nothing except a small strategy of hypnotizing people. So he used to hypnotize the boy, and in hypnosis he used to tell him, "Your blood will stop." In hypnosis everything is possible.

Hypnosis is a very powerful method, and he was the only person who could make the blood stop.

No doctors were able to do anything; there is no cure in any medical science.

So it takes forty-eight hours for a person to die on the Jewish cross because the blood goes on again and again drying; people have to remove the dry blood so that fresh blood starts coming again. It takes forty-eight hours, and Jesus was only six hours on the cross - from twelve to six. As the sun was setting he had to be taken off the cross, because on Saturday nothing can continue. Everything stops; even crucifixion has to stop. In six hours a young man of thirty-three cannot die. This is a scientific fact.

And no Jew would be ready to guard, because that would be against his religion; he would be doing some duty, some work. So a Roman was on guard - that was perfect. The stone was removed and Jesus' followers took his body - he was alive, just wounded - they took him out of Judea, which was a very small country, and kept him away for a few days till he was cured. And then they suggested that he should not go back to Judea: "They will crucify you next year, they won't leave you." So he came to India.

He had come to India before - that's why India was known to him - from thirteen years of age to thirty. The Bible has nothing to say about what happened to Jesus in those seventeen years, where he was. He was in India studying, in Nalanda, in Takshsila, and he was in Ladakh and perhaps Tibet.

Buddha had died just five hundred years before; still his fragrance was around. Takshsila and Nalanda were two universities, the ancientmost universities in the world, which were mostly teaching meditation, because Buddha's whole message is meditation.

So he was learning the Eastern approach. These seventeen years are missing, there is no record in the Christian Bible. But there were records in Ladakh, in a Buddhist monastery, of his second visit.

One Russian explorer, a hundred and fifty years ago, saw the records in the Ladakh monastery of Buddhists where Jesus was described exactly: that he visited the monastery, he remained there for three months, that he was a Jew, and he had come from Jerusalem, that he had been crucified but escaped after six hours... everything was there.

And this Russian wrote a book, which is available, in which he describes the whole thing. But as Christians came to know this - and the country was under British rule - they destroyed those pages from the Ladakh monastery in which Jesus' description was given. Just those two pages are missing. And one can see that two pages are missing because all the pages are numbered. And you can see in that Russian explorer's book that exactly those two pages are mentioned with their page number. It was the British empire which destroyed those two pages to make sure that nobody claimed that Jesus was here in India and Ladakh and perhaps Tibet.

But there is a grave in Kashmir, near Pahalgam... it is such a coincidence that there is Moses' grave, and just by the side of it Jesus' grave. Both came to India. Moses came in his old age in search of the lost tribe of the Jews, who had come to Kashmir and settled in Kashmir. He was too old then to go back to Jerusalem, and Kashmir really looked like God's land, it was so beautiful. There is nothing comparable to Kashmir in the whole world.

He remained and died there. Jesus came and he remained long enough... he lived up to one hundred and twelve years of age. Everything is written on his grave. Those two graves are the only graves of Jews in India, because in India there are no Jews. And the inscription is in Hebrew. In India nobody knows Hebrew, and in India only Mohammedans make graves; Hindus burn the body.

But Mohammedans' graves have to be directed towards Kaaba; the head has to be towards Kaaba.

Even when dying, the man cannot be allowed to have his feet towards Kaaba; that would be insulting.

So in all Mohammedan graves the head is directed towards Kaaba. Only these two graves are not directed towards Kaaba because they are not Mohammedan graves. Out of all the graves in India - I have looked in so many cemeteries just to find one grave - only those two graves are not directed towards Kaaba because there were no Jews.

And all other Jews who have settled there since have been forced to become Mohammedans. When Mohammedan rule came over India they turned all the Jews into Mohammedans. Only one Jewish family has been left to take care of those two graves, because Mohammedans respect both Moses and Jesus. So that family, traditionally, generation after generation, has been taking care.

And the name of the nearest village is Pahalgam; in Kashmiri it means the village of the shepherd.

Jesus used to call himself the shepherd, and used to call humanity sheep. So Pahalgam makes sense; it is the village of the shepherd. And just outside Pahalgam are those two graves.

So Jesus never died on the cross and never was resurrected. All that is just fiction created by Christians. No contemporary literature of Jesus' time even mentions his name. You cannot believe it - if a person walks on water, cures people just by touching; if blind people start seeing, the deaf start hearing, the dead become alive, do you think the whole country will not be talking about him?

All the newspapers, all the literature will mention him. Such a man cannot be neglected. But no contemporary literature even mentions his name.

So only one percent seems to be real - the carpenter's son, Jesus Christ - out of the whole trinity.

And the Hindu trinity is not even one percent real. It is absolute fiction. One man has three heads - it will be a constant problem! One wants to go this side, one wants to go that side, the third wants to go another way, and they cannot go anywhere unless all three agree. All three have wives... I am just puzzled, because the body is one, so the sexual mechanism is one, but three heads? And three wives? How are they managing?

This is absolute mythology, an ugly mythology, obscene. And when I say such things then religious feelings are hurt - but what can I do? It is your scriptures which are hurting your religious feelings.

Just bring cases against your religious scriptures - they should be destroyed!

But Nietzsche's trinity is certainly beautiful: cheerfulness, daring and love for life. These can be called the attributes of every sannyasin: cheerfulness, daring and love for life.

Now comes the time of Sardar Gurudayal Singh.

This is the greatest time after such serious discussion. A great laughter is absolutely necessary as an antidote.

Muffin Snuffler is suffering from what appears to be a case of shattered nerves. So after a long spell of heavy drinking and deep depression he finally decides to pay a visit to Doctor Mindbender, the psychiatrist.

The shrink asks Muffin a few questions and begins to get the picture.

"Mister Snuffler," declares Doctor Mindbender, "you are in serious trouble. You are living with some terrible, evil thing - something that is possessing you from morning to night. You must find out what it is and destroy it!"

"Shhhhhh, doctor," whispers Muffin, nervously. "Not so loud - she is sitting out in the waiting room!"

Things are looking bad for the members of the Catholic church. Their image is being damaged by stories of sex and perversion within the ranks of the priesthood. Their so-called celibacy is becoming a worldwide joke.

So Pope the Polack calls his press secretary, Bishop Benny Diction, and orders him to create a cover-up campaign.

"Well, Your Holiness," says Benny, "I have already given this a lot of thought. I am convinced that we need to change our style of dress. Right now, people look at us and all they see is a bunch of dirty habits!"

"Yes," says the pope, "perhaps you are right. So what should we do?"

"Simple!" replies Benny Diction. "What I have in mind is a complete change of image. We will cover the city with posters of a nun in a bikini!"

"What?" cries the Polack pope. "A nun in a bikini? How is that going to promote celibacy in the world?"

"Well," explains Benny Diction, "the model for the photograph is going to be Mother Teresa!"

Big Bertha, the circus fat lady, marries Max the midget, and for a short time everything seems to be going just fine.

But then one day, Big Bertha arrives at Judge Grump's divorce court wanting a divorce on the grounds that her husband is a midget.

"But surely you knew he was a midget before you married him!" exclaims Judge Grump. "Did you not realize the difficulties this marriage would involve?"

"How was I to know?" sobs Bertha. "Everything was great except for the sex."

"Sex?" asks the judge. "What does his being a midget have to do with sex?"

"Well, judge," replies Big Bertha, "when we are nose to nose, his toes are in, and when we are toes to toes, his nose is in! And when he really puts it in, he disappears altogether - and Oh, Your Honor!

I get so lonely!"

Nivedano...

(Drumbeat)

(Gibberish)

Nivedano...

(Drumbeat) Be silent. Close your eyes and feel your body to be completely frozen.

This is the right moment to go inwards.

Gather all your energy, your total consciousness, and rush towards your center of being - with an urgency as if this moment is going to be the last moment of your life. Unless such urgency is there, nobody gets to the center of his being.

Faster and faster... Deeper and deeper...

It all depends on your intensity. The distance is not big.

As you start coming closer to your center, a great silence descends over you, almost like soft rain falling. The coolness you can feel.

A little closer, and you start being surrounded by a great peace, what mystics have called the peace beyond understanding.

Just one step more, and you are at the center.

Suddenly you feel drunk with the divine. A great ecstasy arises in you; you become luminous, all darkness disappears. You are no more. You suddenly realize your original face.

In the East we have used Gautam Buddha's face as the original face of everyone. It is only symbolic.

You are encountering Gautam Buddha, not from the outside but from his innermost source. You have become his very heart.

Just remember one thing, and that is witnessing. That constitutes Buddha's whole being. Call it awareness, call it total consciousness, call it what Buddha used to call sammasati, right remembering, but witnessing is the most important word out of all these.

Just be a witness that you are not the body. Be a witness that you are not the mind. And finally, be a witness that you are only a witness, nothing else.

At this moment you enter into the secretmost part of your center.

This is the beginning of a long pilgrimage, of disappearing into the cosmos. This is the door opening into the cosmos. We are one with the whole.

Just go on witnessing, and everything becomes deeper, deeper, deeper...

To make the witnessing more clear to you, Nivedano...

(Drumbeat)

Relax.

Let go. But go on being a witness.

As your witnessing becomes more and more clear, you start melting like ice in the ocean.

Gautama the Buddha Auditorium is turning into an ocean of consciousness. Ten thousand buddhas have melted into one consciousness, universal consciousness, eternal consciousness, immortal consciousness, consciousness beyond birth and death.

This is your authentic being.

What has disappeared was only a personality. Now, only the essential, existential, experiential has remained. And this existential consciousness is not only yours, it belongs to the cosmos. You are just dewdrops who have fallen from the lotus leaf into the ocean.

Rejoice in it.

You are the most fortunate people in the world. At this moment, when everybody is concerned with trivia, you are exploring the most majestic, the most splendorous experience; the most divine, sacred space you are entering in.

Collect all these experiences - this blissfulness, this witnessing, this silence... This is it. Get hold of it. And persuade the buddha to come with you.

He is your nature, he is your dharma, he is your ultimate secret.

Bring him with you.

These are the three steps of enlightenment: First, the buddha will come behind you as a presence.

You will feel it, it will surround you, it is an energy field; it will change your whole behavior, it will give you a new sense of direction in life. It will give you a new morality, of your own, a spontaneity in existence. It will give you a love for life, a cheerfulness you have not known, and courage. The moment you know you are eternal, all weakness disappears, all inferiority disappears.

On the second step, the buddha comes in front of you - you become the shadow.

On the third step, your shadow withers away. You are no more, only the buddha remains. He is your eternity, he is your truth, he is your beauty, he is your godliness.

Nivedano...

(Drumbeat)

Come back. But come back with the same grace, with the same silence, with the same peacefulness. And sit down for a few seconds just to remember the path you have followed inwards.

It is a golden path.

The center that you have reached, it is not only your center, it is the center of the whole existence.

At the center we all meet. The birds, the trees, the rivers, the mountains, everyone at the center meets. We are different on the circumference but we are one at the center.

And to know this oneness is enlightenment.

This evening has been beautiful on its own, but your intensity, your search, your inward journey, has made it a magical evening - an evening of transformation, of metamorphosis.

Okay, Maneesha?