The Time Is Short

[NOTE: This discourse is published in the book: The Last Testament, Volume 1, as Chapter 17.]

ANSWER: My vision is so new, so revolutionary, that if you are all massacred for it, it will not be a surprise to me. I am fighting against the whole past of humanity. Nobody has ever done that. Christians were fighting with the Jews, Mohammedans were fighting with the Hindus, Jainas were fighting with the Buddhists; but this is happening for the first time -- one single man standing against the whole history of man. And you are choosing to be with such a man.

Your participation, your devotion, your love, are towards a very dangerous man.

But I don't see that the whole past -- it is vast and big -- can destroy what I am saying.

The past is not in my favor. I don't want it to be in my favor, I want to destroy it from the very roots. But the future is mine, the future is yours, and the future is far greater than the whole past. The forces of the future are far bigger than all the forces of the past, because the past is dead. Life knows no past. It is in the present and always moving into the future.

People will be against you. People will condemn you, particularly those who are trying to materialize my vision. Don't care a bit about their criticism and their condemnation. They are just on the verge of their graves. They have failed. They have been promising man for thousands of years and all their promises have proved false. Man has remained poor, sick, starving, a slave to so many things, imprisoned, chained. They have driven man almost to madness. They have completely failed.

Naturally, they will be offended by your small successes. They have not even been able to achieve small victories. Just your very presence is offensive to them for the simple reason that you are rejoicing, enjoying, loving, and they have never loved, they have never enjoyed. They have always been guilty, feeling the burden of so many sins. How can they dance? When you see their situation, you will be able to forgive them for their condemnation. They have missed their life, and you are not missing a single moment.

They are jealous of you. Their condemnation and criticism arise out of their jealousy. When everybody else is depressed, you are dancing. You are taking a risk. Those depressed people will not allow you to dance. They will try to prevent you. They will start telling others that you are mad.

I have heard a story about a faraway mountain land where a community of blind people lived. Nobody was born blind, but there was a certain fly whose bite made the person immediately blind. Every child was born with eyes, but those flies were there all around. It was impossible to escape from those flies. All the older people, the adults, the mothers and fathers, could not do anything -- they were all blind. The whole community was blind.

The fly affected only a certain age-group, below five years of age. Five years is a long time for a child, and the fly was all around. Within those five years... any moment. In fact, within six months every child was blind; those flies were not waiting for five years.

For the first time, a stranger came into the community from faraway lands. He was an adventurer. Seeing from the hilltop thousands of blind people, he could not believe his own eyes. He felt immensely sorry for them. He forgot about his further exploration in the mountains and he remained with those people. He wanted to help them somehow. He wanted to find what had happened. It is acceptable that in thousands of people there may be one man blind -- that he knew -- but in thousands of people not a single man with eyes? -- it was a great challenge for him. He wanted to find out what was the matter, what had happened.

Soon he was able to find out that every child was born with eyes, and every child became blind within six months. He discovered the fly, too, which was a common fly. But while he was doing this research, why these poor people had all gone blind, he fell in love with a blind girl. She was immensely beautiful. He had seen beauty before, but this girl's beauty was a category in itself, incomparable.

Although she was blind, she looked like a marble statue made not by any amateur, but by some Leonardo da Vinci.

The girl was still unmarried. A great problem arose in the community, because never before had it happened that anybody from their community had married somebody, particularly a stranger -- and more emphatically, a man who is mad because he thinks he has eyes. But they were simple mountain people, they did not want to make these two young people miserable.

The community agreed that the man could marry the girl, but first he had to become blind. Then he would be one of them, no more a stranger. First he had to drop that madness that he had eyes -- who had ever heard about eyes? -- if he was not willing to drop that insane idea, then the marriage was not possible. He was not only a stranger, he was insane too. The man so loved the girl that he destroyed his eyes. In his life, for the first time, love became blind. For love he became blind.

Why could those people not accept that he had eyes? It was against the egos of the whole community. They were blind and he had eyes. He was somebody special, so either he was mad, imagining, hallucinating about eyes, or perhaps he had eyes. But then he could not be tolerated, allowed to continue to have eyes, because he would remain a stranger, an outsider, and the very idea that he had eyes made everyone feel inferior. The day he destroyed his eyes and said, "I have dropped that idea of being a man with eyes," there was great rejoicing, dancing, singing.

This is the situation. This is my situation. This is your situation. On your own accord you have become part of my caravan. I had started alone; then people went on coming, and the caravan went on becoming bigger, and bigger, and bigger. Now we are a reality the world cannot tolerate. They will condemn you, they will curse you, they will criticize you -- but they cannot destroy you for the simple reason that they are mere ghosts of the past.

They are not living people. They can make much noise, but you just have to remember that they are dead and that the future does not belong to them. They can look backwards into the past. They can sing songs of glory about Jesus, Moses, Mohammed, Mahavira, but they don't have any eyes for the future. They don't have even eyes for the present. And to have eyes for the past is absolutely meaningless, because the past is no more. It is dead, it is a long, long graveyard.

And suddenly you come and start dancing and singing and celebrating. It hurts their egos. It makes them feel inferior. When they have missed joy, how dare you dance and sing? And for what? They know only one thing, that you can be happy. But for happiness you need a certain cause... and I am teaching you that happiness is your nature. You don't need any cause.

It is not that when you win a lottery of one million dollars, you give a big party, wine and women and dance. This will be understood. I am saying you need not win any lottery, you need no cause to be blissful. Blissfulness is your very nature.

Sadness needs a certain cause. Bliss is free of all causality. Once you have understood it, you become a participant in a new way of life, a way so new that it is discontinuous with the past.

But you have to understand that all those poor people who have missed are going to be angry with you. In their criticism, in their condemnation, there is nothing but jealousy, anger. They cannot believe that you can be right, because for millions of years they have lived the life of sadness and sorrow and suddenly a few strangers arrive on the earth as if from another planet and start doing

things which have never been done. They would like to destroy you so they feel comfortable; they would like that you are not. They will feel a certain satisfaction that whatever they are is the only reality, that there is no other reality.

But they cannot destroy you for the simple reason that you are living. You are vital energy and they are spent cartridges. They can shoot you with their guns, but their guns are full of spent cartridges. They cannot destroy you. Life is so strong and death is so weak. Joy is so strong and sadness is just a shadow. You are undefeatable.

When they condemn you, enjoy that, too. When they criticize you, sing a song as a response to their criticism, and don't pay much attention to them. Ignore them.

Anyway, they are going down, drowning. Don't waste your time arguing with drowning people. You continue your dance, and you go on spreading your dance. Religion, in the authentic, true sense, is here.

You may not be aware that you are participating in something which is so important that nothing like it has ever happened before. And because you are capable, intelligent, you can forgive them. Not to let them feel inferior, you can forgive them, knowing that they are on their deathbed and you are just starting to grow and live and flower. There is no comparison.

One journalist has asked if my commune can live in coexistence with the neighbors. In the first place, there are no neighbors, we are alone on the earth.

Ghosts are not neighbors, graveyards are not neighborhoods. Those dead people, although they are still breathing, are not alive. Just to breathe is not enough to claim life. Much more is needed.

Just to breathe is to vegetate -- even trees are breathing. Being able to walk is not much; animals and even a few trees can walk. In Africa, trees walk miles away from their place of origin to find new sources of water. Of course it is a very slow journey, but they go on spreading their roots, and slowly go on moving miles away to where they can find water, miles away to where they can find open sky, the sun.

Yes, these people we are surrounded with are breathing, walking, eating, doing all kinds of things which any robot is capable of doing. Any mechanical device will be able to do all that these people are doing, but no robot can feel joy without any cause. No robot can be meditative and experience silence, ecstasy, blissfulness. What coexistence can there be between living, overflowing people and the dead? -- or the nearly dead, which is even worse. If you are dead, at least a misery is finished, a long tragedy has come to an end; but nearly dead, almost dead, life is not there but the tragedy continues. They have enough energy for misery. Misery does not need much energy. You cannot say that you are so weak you cannot be miserable. Can you say that? -- that I am feeling so weak today that I cannot feel miserable?

Misery needs no energy. It is easy, cheap, costs nothing. But to be blissful, to be dancing and singing, to be a joy to yourself and others, certainly you need energy, more energy than is needed only for survival. If a tree gets enough

energy just to survive, it will not flower. No fruits will come for the simple reason that flowering is an overflowing of energy. The tree has so many colors within it, so much fragrance that it cannot contain it anymore. It has to be shared with existence, with the sun, with the moon, with the wind, with the birds. That's how flowers come and open up. That's how it gives you fruits -- it has so much life energy that it can give.

These people who condemn you because you have become a participant with a man who is against the whole past of man, just forgive them. They do not know that they are being foolish. Rather than wasting their energy in condemnation and criticism, they should come closer to you, know you better, feel you deeper; because if this ecstasy is possible to you, it is possible to them also. Howsoever late, it is still possible.

There is a proverb in India: if you get lost in the morning but somehow manage to come back home by the evening, you are not lost. These people you are surrounded by are coming closer and closer to evening, but they are still far away from home. And if they could not find home in the sunlight, it cannot be conceived that they can find home when the sun has set and the darkness of night covers the earth.

That darkness is not far away. Its name is the third world war. Every moment we are coming closer to it. That is going to be the night, unending, perhaps forever and forever. It is going to destroy all that is living and all possibility for life to exist on this planet. It has happened on other planets; it is now a recognized scientific fact that there are planets which give indications that some day life had existed there. How it disappeared nobody knows, but soon we will know how it disappears.

But there is time still, even if the sun is setting, there is time still. Those people, if they are intelligent, will come and try to mix with you, so that they can understand where they got lost, where they missed the right path.

So remember, those who are intelligent are going to become participants in this caravan. Those who are retarded will criticize you, condemn you. Ignore them.

They are already stepping into their graves, soon they will disappear. They don't have any vision for the future, they don't have any solution for the problems that the past has created.

Every day more and more problems are being created by their past, and not a single solution. We don't have any problems from the past, any hangups. And we can see clearly that all their problems can be solved. But they are blind and deaf; they cannot listen, they cannot see. Perhaps they don't want to see, they don't want to listen because that will make them feel more inferior. They want to continue to feel that they are superior beings, that the problems are bad, the problems are insoluble, but they are doing their best. If the problems still remain, what can they do?

I want to say to you that those problems are their creations. With one hand they go on creating the problem, with the other they go on trying to solve it. Their

right hand knows not what their left hand is doing. I have not come across a single problem which cannot be solved right now. But they have their vested interests -- and if the problem is solved, then what will happen to their vested interests? So they go on talking about solving the problem -- poverty, war, disease, death -- but just talking, and they have been talking for thousands of years. Their philosophers have been thinking, creating great treatises, but what is the outcome? What is the outcome of that whole genius of the past? How have Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Bradley, Bosake helped to solve any human problems?

Has Mohammed, or Jesus, or Buddha, or Mahavira been able to give any solution so that man can live at peace?

No. On the contrary, they all created more problems, they added more problems.

The older ones were there, they created new ones with their so-called solutions.

It is really very surprising and amazing to see into the past and to see the people who have been adored in the past, respected like gods. And what is their contribution? Nobody asks.

What has Krishna given to the world? Nothing at all. Yes, a few problems, certainly. He has given the idea to the Hindus that they are the right people, that everybody else is wrong in the world. Hindus think they are the purest race, everybody else is impure. Hindus go on saying that it is a great blessing, that they are fortunate to be born as Hindus. To be born as Christians or Mohammedans would have been a condemnation from the very beginning.

Unless you have committed some great sins in the past, how can you become a born Mohammedan, a born Christian? All the virtuous people are born brahmins, Hindus.

But the same kind of idea is given by these so-called geniuses to everybody. Jesus says to Christians the same stupid thing: You are the very promise, all God's hopes are with you. Everybody has gone wrong, now only you can help people to come to the right path. Moses says to the Jews: You are the chosen people of God. You are born to rule over the world.

Now, what is the difference between Moses and Adolf Hitler? From where did he get this idea that German Nordics are the purest Aryan race in the world and they have, by their very birth, the right to rule over the world? Adolf Hitler must have got it from Moses. Perhaps that's why he killed one million Jews.

You will be wondering what the relation is between them. It is very simple. What Hitler is claiming is also being claimed by Moses. Those claims are going to be clashed against each other -- either the Jews are to rule the world, or the German Nordics. Both cannot rule the world, both cannot be the purest and the highest race. Something had to be decided, and he decided. By killing one million Jews, he made it clear to them who is higher, more powerful, stronger.

Religious leaders, political leaders, they are all sailing in the same boat. I see man's whole past as utterly impotent. It has not contributed more beauty to the world, more joy to beings, more health, more happiness. It has not been creative.

It has been simply destructive. I am totally against it.

It has been asked by very scholarly professors, "As you are a rational person, how can you say that everything in the past is wrong? Something must be right, too. There must be something that is good in Buddha's approach, something good in Jesus' approach. You may not agree with their total message, but to deny the total message -- not of one person, one country, one culture, not of one civilization, but of all the civilizations, all the cultures, all the prophets, all the messiahs, all the religions!"

This professor was the professor of Buddhism in Benares University. His name was Bhikshu Jagdish Kashyap -- he said, "You are a rational man. I cannot see how you can say this." I said to him that just because I am a rational man I can say it, and also can prove it.

Yes, there are things in Buddha which look beautiful. There are words of Jesus which look beautiful. But remember one thing: Jesus is one organic whole, his good words cannot be separated from his bad deeds. Buddha has to be taken as a whole, because whatsoever he says and does is interconnected. You cannot just cut pieces from different people, the good ones, the nice ones, and make a living culture out of it. That is impossible. In the first place, the moment you take a small piece from Mohammed, it is already dead. It was alive in the Mohammedan context. Once it loses that context it has no meaning at all.

For example, Jesus says: Blessed are those who are the last in this world, because they will be the first in my kingdom of God. A beautiful sentence. To find something wrong with such a beautiful sentence is difficult. Even enemies of Jesus cannot do that.

I am not an enemy, neither am I a friend. I am simply looking with open eyes, with no emotional antagonism, favoritism. He says: Blessed are those who are the last. But how many people can be the last? If the whole humanity is standing in a queue, one man will be the last; and if humanity is standing in a circle, then it will be impossible to find who is the last. And how do you determine? What is the criterion to decide who is the last?-the beggar?

Buddha was a beggar. Do you have the guts to say that he is the last? He had nothing but his begging bowl, that was his only possession, but you cannot say he is the last. He was so magnificent a person that you can only put him as the first -- this world or that does not matter. And Jesus is saying this thing without considering how long humanity has existed. How many people would have been the last in each generation? And why were they last in the first place? They had no intelligence, they had no strength, they had no guts to move. These will be the first in the kingdom of God? -- then in the kingdom of God only idiots will be found, and those who are intelligent, geniuses, they will be thrown into hell because they were never the last.

A beautiful sentence, but if you start thinking and dissecting it, you find that you will have to accept Jesus' whole theology. Only in that context can that sentence have any meaning.

Buddha says beautiful things but also says stupid things. Now, I cannot conceive of a man doing both things together. On the one hand he says that men and women are equal; on the other hand he is not willing to initiate women into sannyas. Now what to make of it? If they are equal, then why are you preventing the equal people equal opportunity?

Certainly they are not equal. Your action proves they are not equal. You initiate the most idiotic man and you are not willing to initiate the most intelligent woman. Then, when you say men and women are equal, it seems to be just a political, diplomatic statement. It has no value. You yourself have canceled it completely.

I have looked into the past, I have tried my best to find something. It is always connected with something which is ugly. Now the Hindu god Rama is a beautiful person, if you are not very alert. If you are very alert, you will find that this man is an enemy of humanity. His wife was stolen by another king. Three years he had to fight to get the wife back. Poets and Hindu saints praise him because he respected womanhood so much that he fought for three years.

Otherwise, in those days, who bothered? Every king had many wives, who cares if one is lost? It looks right, the man must be very respectful towards women.

But the same man when he is victorious, when he takes out his wife Sita from the imprisonment of the enemy king, the first words that he says destroy him completely. He says: Listen, woman -- he is not even saying, My dear, my darling. Three years of separation, and the word he uses is derogatory -- "Listen, woman, I have not fought this war for you. I have fought this war for my own prestige, for my kingdom's prestige, for my forefathers' prestige. It is not a question of you, so don't get a big head because Rama fought for you for three years."

These are ugly words. And then he is known to have forced the woman to pass through fire to prove that she is pure, that she has not made love to the enemy king. In the first place, it is such a stupid idea that the fire will judge whether the woman is pure or not.

You can try it. Do a small experiment. Speak something absolutely truthfully.

Speak something which cannot be in any way untrue. Say the time in your clock at this moment, and put your hand just on a candle flame to see whether you are true or not. And you will know that the candle flame does not bother whether your clock is there or not, whether you are saying the truth or untruth. It is going to burn you. Then try a lie, anything that cannot be true in any possible way, that two and two make five, and put your hand on the flame. See whether it burns you more, less, or the same. Fire has its own laws.

Now, putting this poor woman who has been three years in prison waiting to see her husband, crying and weeping... this is the welcome. And I do not understand how she becomes impure even if she has made love. On what grounds is she impure? And, secondly, Rama himself was three years without his wife. He also should have walked through fire to prove his purity. That he does not do. This is

strange, that only the woman has to be pure, and man need not bother about such small things. You ask the wife to be pure, at least you should have the courage to go through the same test.

The story is beautiful. Sita passes through the fire, is not burned by the fire. It cannot be an historical fact, but just for argument's sake we accept that she survived the fire. But it did not make Rama any more respectful towards her.

When they reached their capital, one washerman, just one washerman, condemned -- that too in his privacy -- his wife, because she had not been home the whole night. In the morning when she came, he was angry, started beating her, and told her, "This won't do. Where have you been the whole night? With whom? And remember, I am not Rama that I will accept you. One night is enough, now get out of here. I am not Rama, who accepted Sita after three years."

The message was brought to Rama by one of his people who was passing and heard the washerman's statement, that one man in the capital was shouting loudly, "I am not Rama. I cannot tolerate such things" -- and this was enough.

What happened about the fire test? Rama renounced Sita again, and sent her back into the forest, into an ashram. He abandoned her. And Hindus go on saying that this must be something right, unless there is nothing right. Then people like Mahatma Gandhi continuously worshipped Rama. His last words were, "Ah, Rama!" when he was shot dead. But the way Rama behaved with his wife was just ugly, inhuman. She was pregnant, and she was thrown into the forest, abandoned. For what? Again it was a question of prestige.

One man has suspected her integrity.... I don't see the point. If he thought that it was a question of prestige, he should have gone with Sita to the forest and renounced the kingdom -- "I don't care about the kingdom, I love the woman. I love her purity. I put her under the fire test, now what more I can do?" But no, the kingdom was too precious. The prestige of the family was too precious, and just one idiot washerman was enough to make a statement and Sita was abandoned.

Now, whatsoever good things this man may have said and done -- I have looked into everything minutely, and I have tried to find something good that can be taken out -- I am puzzled, because with that good thing so many things are joined absolutely. You choose it, you choose all that which is connected with it organically.

It is not a hasty judgment on my part that I abandon the whole past of humanity.

For almost forty years I have been continuously trying to be fair and to find something that can be saved. But I'm sorry to say to you that there is nothing. It is far better to start humanity anew, from the very scratch, fresh.

Naturally, you will be in danger. I am in danger. I have put myself in danger, this is my responsibility. You have become my participant; that is not my responsibility, that is your responsibility. I have made it clear to you that being with me is dangerous. Still you choose to be with me. It is your responsibility.

I don't want to take your responsibility, because with responsibility goes your freedom, too. That's how things are connected. You will feel good if I say, "I will take your responsibility, don't be worried." You will feel good, not knowing that your freedom is finished. Now I am the Master and you are simply a follower. I have reduced you into a certain inferiority. No, I cannot do that.

I am a master of myself, but you are not my followers. My mastery does not depend on your following. It depends on my experience. Even if all the followers are gone, I will still be the same Master. You are not my followers. I emphasize it again and again that you are my fellow travelers, that I am doing something risky, that I am walking on the razor's edge. And you have chosen to be with me, with full responsibility and freedom. Then you are not inferior and I am not superior.

I want to destroy all kinds of inequalities in the world. They are all the same -- man is higher, the woman is lower; the white man is higher, the black man is lower; the Master is higher, the disciple is lower. I want a very simple fact to be recognized: Everybody is unique, incomparable. Nobody is higher, nobody is lower.

Let the whole world condemn; the victory is going to be ours, because we are the people of the rising sun and they are hanging around the sunset. Soon they will disappear into the darkness and be lost forever. And the sooner it happens, the better. But you have a vast future ahead of you, a tremendous opportunity to create man again, because the old man has failed, and the new man is needed urgently. We are living in one of the hottest times. There has never been such an emergency before. The time is short and the job is immense. But, if you are intelligent, silent, blissful, it can be done.

And it can be done without any hardship. It can be done almost as if it is fun, and I don't want you to be serious. I want to create the new man in a very nonserious way, playfully. The old man was serious. I don't want even that connection with the new man. The new man must be playful, nonserious. No God, no hell, no heaven, nobody to impose what is right and what is wrong except your own awareness to decide and then to accept the consequences.

I love one of the statements of a Baul fakir -- baul means a mad man. His name was Chandidas. He says, Sabar upar manus satya, tahar upar nahin. "Above all is the truth of man, and above that there is nothing." No God, no heaven, no hell.

He was condemned as a madman, and he was saying one of the basic fundamentals. You will be condemned, you will be cursed, you will be criticized, but you cannot be defeated, because the time is with you. The future is with you.

Only the new man can survive. The old man is almost fading away. Say goodbye to the old man, he has done enough nuisance on the earth. It is time that the new man takes over and does not repeat the old mistakes.

Q: BELOVED BHAGWAN, THE MIND IS AN EXPLOITER OF EVERY SITUATION. EVEN THE MOST BEAUTIFUL SITUATION OF BEING AROUND

YOU IS EXPLOITED IN TERMS OF HIGHER AND LOWER, SPECIAL AND NON-SPECIAL, MORE MEDITATIVE AND LESS MEDITATIVE, CLOSER AND NOT CLOSE. HOW CAN AVOID THESE EXPLOITATIONS?

A: There is not much difficulty in it. Simply drop the whole idea.

I am teaching you every day that there is nothing higher, nothing lower. It is simply man's ego creating if not money, if not politics, then meditation. The ego can exploit any situation, but it will play the same game. One is higher in meditation, the other is lower in meditation. One is an older sannyasin, senior -- as if it is a government bureaucracy -- and the other one is a new fellow. You can tolerate him, but he is not to be considered much, not to be taken seriously. It is the same ego, you just have to watch.

It is the same ego. Whenever it creates any comparison and brings the qualities of higher and lower and judgments, immediately cut its head, then and there. Take a deep breath and drop it. Exhale it! And it is only a question of a few days and the wrong habit disappears. It is only a wrong habit, nothing to be worried about, a hangover from the old society where everything is compared, everything is put in a certain hierarchic system.

You have come from the old society with much junk from the old society within you. Be alert and go on cleansing yourself of the old, of the past, of all you have brought with you. Become emptier, become cleaner. And it feels so beautiful. It feels so ecstatic that I can only be silent about it. I cannot say anything about it.

The Last Testament, Vol 1