Chapter 02
[NOTE: This is a typed tape transcript and has not been edited or published, as of August 1992. It is for reference use only.]
Q: BHAGWAN, WHAT PURPOSE DOES YOUR PHILOSOPHY OR RELIGION GIVE FOR LIFE -- FOR THE EXISTENCE OF ANYTHING AT ALL?
A: First it is not right to make religion and philosophy synonymous. They are two totally different things.
Philosophy is thinking about life, its purpose, its goal, but it is only thinking.
Religion is living it, not thinking.
The difference is as great as: you are thinking about food, delicious food, and that you are eating it. Thinking cannot quench your hunger -- it is only eating that is going to help.
Philosophy is a futile exercise of the mind -- it leads nowhere.
Secondly, the moment you divide philosophy and religion the question takes a different shape. Now it becomes: what is the purpose of your religion?
The very idea of purpose is valid in a philosophical investigation. That idea does not belong to religion at all.
Religion is living. Living totally, living intensely, without any purpose because purpose is always in the future and living is always in the present. If you have a purpose to live your life is divided between present and future -- you cannot be total. And without being total you cannot experience what life is.
The only way to be total is to forget all about purpose. It is a meaningless question. It leads only to a logical regress. If it is said that `A' is the purpose of life then the question will remain `what is the purpose of A?' The question is not dissolved. If `B' is the purpose of `A' then the question will simply shift from A to B.
Finally and ultimately, one has to understand that there is no purpose to life or to existence... and there is no need either.
It is perfectly beautiful to have no purpose and live totally, enjoy totally, relax in the moment totally. It will take you to the peaks of ecstasy -- but that is not the purpose of life, it is just a byproduct of total living.
It is a little bit difficult. It will lead -- I repeat again -- to ultimate ecstasy. But that is not the goal. If you make it a goal you will never reach it. It is not a purpose. If you make it a purpose then you are cut off from it forever because purpose and goal all exist in future and you have to live in the present.
And present and future never meet.
So you have divided yourself into two halves which are not going to meet. So I will not say that ecstasy is the purpose or the goal. I will say, `when you live intensely, totally in the present, without any purpose and without any goal, ecstasy happens as a byproduct of total living.'
Q: BHAGWAN, WHY DOES SUFFERING EXIST IN THE WORLD?
A: The suffering exists in the world because of purposes, goals and things like that. The suffering simply means you are split, torn apart -- you are in such a situation that you can never be one whole, you can never be an organic unity.
Suffering disappears the moment you drop purposes, goals -- ends. And you start living moment to moment. There is no tomorrow and there is no future.
Time means now.
And space means here.
All suffering disappears.
But because the so-called leaders of the world, thinkers, philosophers, theologians -- they are all giving you great ideals to be achieved, great goals to be reached; they have managed humanity to suffer forever. Those ideals, those goals, those ends are the causes of suffering and your so-called great religious political, social leaders are the criminals who have created the whole phenomenon of dividing man.
But it has been done with such sophistication, perhaps they themselves are not aware what they are doing. They may be suffering themselves.
Q: BHAGWAN, WHAT IS THE GOAL OF YOUR RELIGION OR PHILOSOPHY, NIRVANA OR HEAVEN ET CETERA? CAN YOU DESCRIBE THIS GOAL OR ULTIMATE REALITY?
A: There is no goal. The question of describing it does not arise. There is certainly a byproduct of total living which can be indicated at.
It is absolute contentment, fulfillment, coming to one's realization of all the potentials that were in the seed form, now they are all have come to be flowers.
A great fragrance, a tremendous insight and clarity into things, absolute silence and peace, no desire, nowhere to go... everything is so calm and quiet there is no question, no word at all -- it is a wordless blissfulness.
But it is not a goal that I am describing.
I hate the word goal.
It is good when you are playing football, then you can have goal and goalkeepers, but don't make life a game of football. Life is not a game. This has created a great problem for human beings because whenever somebody has lived totally they had seen the beauty, the rejoicing, the peacefulness, the tremendous quality of contentment. Seeing this they have made it a goal. They thought that this is the goal to be achieved. And this was only a byproduct.
But for the outsiders it became a goal and they started striving for contentment, for desirelessness, for fulfilment, for silence, for peace, for ecstasy, for nirvana...
and those people have never reached. Not a single person who has made these things as goals has ever reached. It is enough proof that in the whole history of humanity not a single exception exists.
The people who have reached are those who never bothered about goals, who never bothered about reaching somewhere, they were simple people, loving people, loved life for its own sake, no other purpose.
And to love life for its own sake can be described my way of life.
Q: BHAGWAN, HOW DID THE UNIVERSE COME TO EXIST, AND WHY?
A: It never came to exist, it has always been there. So the question: how it came to exist does not arise.
And because it has always been there, the question of why is also irrelevant.
Whom to ask? How to find?
It has always been there, and it will be always there. It is simply there.
These questions are invented by your so-called philosophers which if reduced to reality are more foolosophers than philosophers. Because they can't see a simple point, a simple logical point, that if you say how the existence came into being, any answer is not going to satisfy.
Each answer will create the same question again.
It will lead you to an absurdity in logical terms. Seeing that every question will bring an answer, but the question will not move even a single inch, you can go on finding other answers -- the question remains the same.
It simply shows that the question is wrong. Otherwise some answer would have been suitable. And you cannot conceive any answer that can be suitable about:
how this existence, why this existence?
Hence the people who had a clarity -- not thinkers, thinkers are the most clouded people, they don't have any clarity. But people of meditation who had absolute clarity, no thinking, they could see immediately which question is relevant and which question is irrelevant.
Even to answer an irrelevant question is not good because that shows that you are not clear, that you cannot see clearly that your answer will again help the same question to crop up. So I seem(*) existence find it(*) it have not. It has always been here. It has never been created. It will always be here.
The forms may change but the essential reality into those forms continues. It is a continuum -- absolute continuum.
This also helps you to get rid of god which is a heavy burden -- a pain in the neck. The idea of god helps nobody and tortures millions of people. Devil has never tortured so many people. But the idea of god has made people torture themselves. And the idea of god is simply invented, invented because of these questions.
I could see it even as a small child because just by the side of my house there was a temple, a Hindu temple and people were worshipping and priests were worshipping and I used to play in that temple and ask the priest, that "What kind of game is this that you go on playing? Because there is nobody, just a stone sculptured in the shape of a man; and you are praying and you are kneeling down and tears are flowing, great emotion, great sentimentality and I don't see a single tear on the other side. On the other side there is nobody, just a stone."
And they will say, "Don't say things like that. It is not a stone. It is God who created the world. Without God the world cannot exist. Something is necessarily needed. If it exists, then there must be a creator."
And finally they prohibited me to enter in the temple. Because I asked them, that "If that is true, then who created God, because he exists according to you. So you must have the guts to ask, `Who created God?'" And they were so angry that they simply, virtually threw me out of the temple and told me never to come in. I said, "But this is not the answer. It simply shows you don't have any answer and if God can exist without being created then what is wrong in the existence to exist without being created."
If you have to accept at some point that a thing can be without any creator then why go into unnecessary hypotheses. Then why not remain with the reality which is not a hypothesis?
Q: BHAGWAN, WHAT LIES BEYOND DEATH? WHAT IS IT THAT EXISTS -- THE SOUL, ATMAN -- CAN YOU DESCRIBE IT?
A: There is no death, only a change of form.
Everything continues....
The water that is constituting you, almost eighty percent or more, goes to the water. The mud that is constituting you, goes to the mud.
All the elements that constitute you go to their original sources. Your consciousness moves on into a new body. You can call it soul, you can call it atman.
The old body was no more capable as a house to be lived in so you simply move in a new house and you continue moving into new houses till any kind of desire remains in you.
The moment all desires disappear, the moment you live so totally that all desires are consumed by your living, that you simply live without any desire, without any ambition, without any goal, then the material elements move into material elements and your consciousness moves into the universal consciousness.
Nothing dies.
Only combinations disperse.
And they constitute another body for you. Existence is very compassionate -- it goes on giving you new bodies, new forms, until you have learned the lesson.
And the lesson is to live so totally that there is no space for any desire. Then you are allowed to be part of the universal consciousness.
This universal consciousness is not separate from existence. It is part, intrinsic part of existence. Existence is one. Matter and consciousness are two extremes of one energy. Matter is a certain combination of the same energy as consciousness.
It is the same cloth out of which all kinds of clothes are made -- your shirts, your caps, your pyjamas, everything. According to your need.
But the cloth, the basic reality, is one.
And death is just a misconception, a misunderstanding.
It always happen to others. That's the reason why you are having a misunderstanding.
It is always somebody else who dies. You never die. So the question arises `what is death?' And the moment you will die, if you are living with all kinds of desires, unfulfilled ambitions, then the possibility is the process of death will happen but you will be unconscious. That too is the compassion of existence.
Just like a surgeon will give you anesthesia before surgery, existence gives you a coma before it separates your elements and changes the whole structure and gives you a new being, a new form.
But nothing dies.
Death is as much a lie as God is.
So when I first read Frederick Nietzsche's statement that `God is dead' I said that this is such a small statement but having too biggest lies in it -- God and death.
Q: BHAGWAN, HOW DO YOU EXPLAIN THE NEED AND EXISTENCE OF SO MANY RELIGIONS?
A: There are so many religions because there are so many imaginative people in the world. If there was clarity in people's minds, there would not be a single religion. Then religion would not be needed at all.
It is the imagination that creates religions.
Because these questions haunt the mind of anybody who does not know anything beyond the mind. The mind is full of questions, curiosities -- it wants some answers. Even if they are false, it is a solace. Not to have any answers is very difficult.
To accept one's ignorance is against man's ego.
So it would rather accept any stupid answer rather than say that "I don't know"...
it hurts. It wants to claim that it knows. It covers up all the questions that are haunting him -- who created the world, why he created the world, when he created the world?
Now it is just a question of your imagination how you manage to answer these questions. Each religion has its own imagination. That is the only difference between all religions. They are not based in truth because truth cannot have so many religions.
It is different climates, different people, different ages, and different imaginations.
For example, there are tribes, ancient tribes, which have remained still attached to their old pattern, they have not changed, they are still dominated by women not by men. The matriarchal aboriginals; their god is a woman, obviously...
because if the society is dominated by women how can a man be god?
And in fact, the god is the imagination of the woman, the powerful one. The woman is the priestess, the woman decides all the rituals. Naturally the god is a woman.
And then there are societies which are made by man, dominated by man... they cannot accept God as a woman. God has to be a man. Simply the male chauvinist, but a natural imagination.
Whoever is in power will decide who is the god.
Different cultures, different societies and different religions have different ideas of their heaven, their hell, and it is all imaginative.
I have seen in India in the temples, there used to be -- I don't know whether they still are there or have been removed -- but in my childhood I have seen in temples maps hanging showing where is hell, where is heaven, where is God's house, where is Devil's house.... And these people who had made these maps had no idea of the map of the world, in which we live, because you cannot imagine it you have to know it otherwise soon your imagination will be proved false.
They did not have any map of the world, but they had maps of heaven and hell -- exact. And nobody can challenge, because there is no way to prove it or disprove it. But they all had descriptions which show something of themselves, not about heaven and hell.
The Tibetan hell is eternally ice cold -- there is a rare hell, because all the hells are full of fire and people are being burned. But in Tibetan hell it is eternal ice that never melts and you are thrown into the ice. Because Tibet has suffered so much from ice, finding some fire in hell would be impossible -- you cannot find any fire there.
Yes in their heaven, it is warm, fire is available, it never gets cold, because it is their climate that is giving them a certain imagination.
The Indian heaven is not warm, it is almost air-conditioned. They had no word like air-conditioner in those ancient days, but the description is that just as in the early morning cool air blows, the whole day it is the same -- the cool air. India has suffered much from heat, naturally for saints cool air is needed and fire is needed for sinners.
These are all man made conceptions. All the religions are rooted in imagination, in dreaming. They are nothing to do with facts, nothing to do with truth. That's why there are so many. There are three hundred religions in the world. Perhaps it is impossible to imagine anything more... three hundred religions may have exhausted all possibilities of imaginations, that's why the number has stopped there. But they are all false. Their manyness is a proof of their falsity.
Q: BHAGWAN, WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF RELIGION DID NOT EXIST?
A: It will be just far out....
Life would be a real joy, without any guilt.
People will be more authentic, more sincere, in living and in every aspect of their being.
Religion has made them hypocrites. It has given them masks to bear. It has hidden their original faces.
If there was no religion people will have their originality, their original faces, their sincerity, their uniqueness. And they will be playful about everything, there will be no seriousness. All seriousness is created by religions....
Asking questions which are absurd, then answering those questions, then forcing people, conditioning people to accept those false answers for false questions -- they have destroyed humanity tremendously. They have destroyed your freedom, they have destroyed your joy, they have destroyed your laughter, they have destroyed as much as nobody else.... These religions have been a curse, not a blessing.
If there were no religions life will be a real blessing and my whole effort is that there should be no religions and man should be left alone with his reality and the reality of existence, without all these pretenders, prophets, saviors, messiahs....
It will bring a great newness to a life which seems to be dull, a freshness to a life which these people have made a sin. It will bring songs to people's heart, it will be possible again to dance under the stars for no reason at all... just because it is so beautiful to dance, so beautiful to sing, so beautiful to love, so beautiful to live.
The burden on the heart put by these religions is Himalayan.
It is a miracle that man has still survived... somehow, he goes on creeping under the burden, but he has survived.
But it is only survival, it is not life.
Q: BHAGWAN, ANOTHER QUESTION: WHAT IS IMPORTANT TO YOU?
A: It depends on each moment.
I cannot give a wholesale answer to it because that means again I am proposing a philosophy, again making a religion that `this is important for me and this will be important for me tomorrow too.'
It changes....
While I am taking a bath, the shower is important.
While I am talking to you, talking to you is important.
While I am eating, eating is important.
While I am sleeping, sleeping is important.
So it is very difficult for me. Everything is important at the time I am doing it...
and I don't do unimportant things.
Okay. Good Maneesha.