Chapter 04

[NOTE: This is a typed tape transcript and has not been edited. The first part of this discourse has not been published, as of August 1992. It is for reference use only. The second part of this discourse is in the book: Light on the Path, Chapter 34.]

QUESTION: BHAGWAN, HOW CAN WE GET RID OF THE PROGRAMMING OF ORGANIZED RELIGIONS?

ANSWER: The process of deprogramming is one of the most simple. Just you have to watch the ideologies, philosophies, religions, that you are carrying in your mind -- are not your own experiences. That's the distinction to be made:

what is not your own experience, you have been programmed. Otherwise how you got it?

You are a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan. How you got to be a Christian? You have never explored. You don't have any personal experience.

Your heart will immediately say to you, that "I am absolutely innocent of all these things." Your mind has been programmed.

And to understand what is programmed, is to understand what is false in you, what is borrowed in you, what has been forced upon you. This very awareness is enough. The ideas are not clinging to you. You are clinging to those ideas.

So it is not a question how to get rid of them. It is a question how not to go on holding them. And the moment you see the falsity, you will drop them. To know something as false and borrowed, is enough to drop it.

And once you have dropped all that is borrowed in you, you are again innocent, a tabula rasa, a clean sheet on which nothing is written. And I don't want to write anything on it. I want you to experience and write yourself. You are the only person who has the right to ink in (?anything) on your being.

This is the most essential freedom. All other freedoms are just so-so. And this essential freedom is not given to man. Political freedom is given and social freedom is given, but they are not real freedoms. To programmed people, there is no freedom, because they will be using the freedom according to the program which is their bondage.

So the first and the most important thing is to get unburdened of the bondage.

And the simple distinction about everything -- you have to go all over your mental luggage and ask, "Do you know god? Have you experienced anything of god?" If not, then whether god exists or not does not matter. It is not your experience. It has no relevance to you.

And once you are a clean slate, you can go on an adventurous journey of discovering what is the truth. But before one knows what is the truth, one has to know what is false. Because you are so much surrounded with the false, that you will not be able to know the truth. That is the purpose of deprogramming: to help you clean yourself of all borrowed knowledge enforced on you in your childhood, in your innocent moments of life when you were not capable to doubt and question -- but now you are capable to question and doubt. So whatever your parents, your teachers, your churches, your priests have done -- you have to undo it.

And it is such a simple process to undo it: just like a snake slipping out of his old skin. He never looks back. You just go on watching each idea, and you will find they are all false because none of them is yours -- so there is no fear, no problem that you can get confused. What is yours and what is not yours is such a simple process, that everybody is capable of.

Q: BHAGWAN, YOU HAVE SAID THAT PEOPLE NEED TO EXPERIENCE MATERIAL WEALTH IN THEIR LIVES BEFORE SPIRITUAL GROWTH CAN HAPPEN. WHY THEN DO SO MANY PEOPLE IN WEALTHY, DEVELOPED COUNTRIES, SUFFER FROM MENTAL DISEASES?

A: The cause is the religions. The wealthy people in the West get bored with their riches. They are finished with their wealth, but they don't know where to go.

And what their religions provide is false, it leads to madness. The false cannot lead you to health. It is dangerous.

The false may be a consolation to the poor, because he is not yet finished with materialism. So the false religion, the churches, can console the poor, that "You will have all these things in the future life, in paradise, just be patient, just keep quiet. Don't be discontent. This is a fire-test by god. Pass through it calmly, coolly." But this cannot be a consolation to a wealthy man, because whatever your paradise provides, more than that they already have.

This is the cause of their madness. They need some real, authentic spirituality, which is not available to them. And your religions prevent them from moving in directions where they can find it.

Your religions program their minds, that they go on clinging to Christianity or Judaism or any other -ism, not knowing that except truth there is no health and there is no wholeness and there is no freedom. And the truth is found in meditation, not in prayers, not in churches, not in the BIBLE, not in the KORAN.

It is found when you are silent, utterly silent. In that purity of awareness begins a totally new kind of life, ecstatic.

Full of joy and light. Full of blessings and benediction. So it is very clear why in the West so many wealthy people are going mad. The Christianity or Judaism are responsible. If the wealthy people go mad in the East, then Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Mohammedanism -- these will be responsible.

The search for truth is individual, and your churches don't allow you individuality. They don't allow you to move alone. Their whole emphasis is to be in the crowd. And the wealthy man is finished and bored with the crowd. He has known all that the crowd can give, money can purchase. He has known everything that men or women can give. That is finished.

And you don't allow him any exit.

The pressure of remaining in a situation which is absolutely nothing but discontent, and you don't allow him to move from there. You want him still to be Christian, still to be a Hindu. You are driving him mad. All the churches of the world are responsible. They have consoled the poor to remain poor and they are preventing the rich to go on an individual pilgrimage.

They are creating hell for both. Of course the hell for the rich is bigger, because there is no consolation for him. Whatever they have to offer in paradise, he has lived it so it can't be a consolation, it can't be a hope. His material success has destroyed any possibility of hope in your so-called paradises, heavens. Now he has to live hopelessly, in the same church, in the same crowd. He has to be a hypocrite. How long he can manage the tension? Sooner or later he breaks down.

All that is needed is that he should get out of the church, out of the crowd, and out of the programming that those churches have done on him so he can be alone. And he can move on his own in search of truth. This world does not provide any truth, any blissfulness. And the religions of this world are only talking, of the same pleasures in the next world. For the wealthy it has not meaning.

He knows that even in paradise he will be discontented.

And to live in a hopeless state, where you cannot find any exit, naturally is going to create a nervous breakdown. One of Jean-Paul Sartre's books has the name `No Exit', and the book describes hell. It is not the old hell, where you are burnt into fire and you are cut into pieces and tortured. No, there is nothing of it. It is a contemporary hell. The only thing hellish is that there is no exit.

People are sitting in a room. They don't know why. They don't know how long they have to sit here. They don't have any way to go out. They are bored with each other's faces. They have talked everything they knew about. Everything is finished, all communication is dropped. They are in a state of getting mad.

And that is the situation of the wealthy man in the West. What I have said is absolutely true. This is the moment, if the man has courage enough to move out of the mob mind and takes the responsibility of freedom and searches for truth, searches for masters who can help personally and intimately -- he will become a new man, rather than becoming a madman.

Q: BHAGWAN, FOR YEARS, THERE HAVE BEEN GROWTH AND CONSCIOUSNESS MOVEMENTS. WHAT IS GROWTH AND CONSCIOUSNESS REALLY ABOUT? IS CONSCIOUSNESS SOMETHING EVERYONE HAS AND CAN DEVELOP -- OR DO SOME HAVE IT, AND SOME DON'T?

A: First: it was George Gurdjieff who for the first time in the whole history of man stated that everybody does not have the consciousness. Few have. The majority is without consciousness.

It was simply a device. It is not a statement of truth. Because all ancient mystics have been saying, that everybody has consciousness. All that is to be done is to discover it, to become aware of it. They were stating the truth. But people are in such an unconscious state that they will misuse even a statement which contains truth -- and they have misused.

Because two possibilities are there: if everybody has consciousness, and the only difference is that few people become aware of it, and that is what growth means.

That is what consciousness is all about: becoming conscious of your consciousness. And then you start growing in a new dimension, which has never been available to you.

Ordinarily you grow only mentally, physically. The body gets old. The mind gets more and more knowledgeable. And these two are available to everybody. But the real growth begins when you start becoming aware of your potential of consciousness. Then you are moving from the individual to the universal, from the mortal to the immortal, from death to eternal life.

Because all the mystics have said it, people became very satisfied with the statement, that "The only difference is that we are not aware. A Gautam Buddha is aware. So we can become aware any moment. There is no hurry about it. There are much more important things that you have to do first. This can be done any time. There are things which you can do only today, but this is something that you can do tomorrow, day-after-tomorrow; in this life, in another life. There are thousands of lives available, so you can do it anytime."

That gave them a dangerous safety. Gurdjieff has to hit hard, to make people aware, that "Forget all that nonsense. Only very few people have consciousness.

And unless you strive for it, you can't have it. So it is not to be postponed. Each moment is valuable, and it is the most important thing in life. There is nothing for which you can postpone it." In fact he wanted to create an urgency about it, and he had to lie. But his lie is out of compassion, seeing that people have made the truth a dangerous buffer. It protects them from growing spiritually, because they can always say, "There is not much problem. Consciousness I have got. Just I have to be conscious about it, so any day I can do it. And eternity is available."

Gurdjieff was very perceptive, that whatever the mystics have been saying, was true but they have never looked what was the result. They wanted everybody to know, that "You have consciousness. There is no need to be worried about it, you can grow it." They were simply stating a fact, without seeing what is going to be the effect on the sleepy people. In their sleep they will think, "There is no hurry, we can sleep a little more. It does not make much difference whether you wake up today or tomorrow. Right now sleep seem so beautiful, so why disturb it?"

Gurdjieff was the first man to become aware that to tell the truth to the sleepy people is a dangerous thing. They need to be shaken, shocked -- and this is one of the greatest shocks, even to hear it: that you may not have any consciousness at all, that this death will be simply death, nothing will be remaining out of it. You will be simply dying totally. You are nothing but body and mind. You don't have any eternal element in you. Because you have not produced it. It is not given by birth, that is Gurdjieff's point. To insist, that "You are not given from the birth.

You have to work for it and work hard, and you have to attain it before death.

Otherwise your death will be complete death. So don't wait for another life!"

And he really created panic in many intelligent people, because the man was of great power, of tremendous understanding. He knew what has to be done with a sleepy man better than anybody else. All these mystics were nice guys. He was not. They were simply saying what was true. It is not enough to say the truth.

Unless you bring people to the truth, your statements have no truth. If they prevent people from coming to truth, then you may be thinking you are saying the truth, but you are preventing millions of people from attaining it. Who is responsible for it? So Gurdjieff gave a totally new turn. People were shocked, because they have never heard, that "You don't have any souls. All people don't have. You have to create it. Then you can have it. It is your greatest creativity, greatest effort. So only very few people out of millions will be surviving death.

Others will be dying like dogs, nothing will be surviving."

He was emphatically trying to wake you up, that "Stop postponing. You don't have it. And postponement is dangerous. Tomorrow you may not be here, so today is all that you have got. Create it -- before death knocks on your doors. Do everything to create it."

So I support him perfectly -- knowing that he is lying. But his lying is far more compassionate, more understanding of man, than all the mystics of the past who have been telling the truth. But they were just nice people, good people, who never lie, but without taking in consideration what their statements are going to do to people. Gurdjieff was very much concerned, not much concerned what he says, much concerned what effect it creates in you. If that effect brings you closer to truth, then he was ready to say anything.

Very few people have understood Gurdjieff. The followers think he is telling the truth. The people who are against him see that he is telling certainly a lie because all the mystics cannot be wrong, and he is the only man who is saying such a thing. A single man against the whole history of mystics, of different races, different countries -- who have all emphasized, that "You are born as consciousness." -- and he is simply denying them all.

But both have misunderstood him. Neither the critics can see his compassion, nor the followers can see that he is lying, but his lie is to produce a certain effect.

He was a very scientific man.

So I agree with him and I disagree with him. I know everybody has the soul. It has not to be created, and there is no way to create it. If you don't have it, you don't have it.

You can discover it only, you cannot create it. And that discovery can be helped by Gurdjieff's statement. If you are shaken, and you cannot sleep anymore, knowing that you may not have the soul at all -- because you have not encountered. One thing is certain. You are not aware, so you cannot deny him.

You know your mind. You know your body, but you don't know the knower, who knows the mind, who knows the body -- but he is there. Knowing the mind, knowing the body is enough proof that there is a third entity in you, which knows these both. And it is from the very birth. In fact, if you listen to children, in the beginning all the children of all the races use third person for themselves.

They don't say, "I am thirsty." They say, "The baby is thirsty." Or whatever is their name, that "Pinky is thirsty." They use the third person. It is strange. It is universal. Not a single baby starts by using, that "I am thirsty."

What will be the reason of it? The reason is that the innocent child is yet not programmed. He knows it perfectly well, that he is not thirsty, because he is aware in a certain way of his consciousness, and he is identified with his consciousness. The ego has not been created yet. And he knows, that "I'm not thirsty." Because when he thinks of thirst, he thinks, "The body is thirsty. The mind is feeling the thirst." Not so analytically, so logically, but in some innocent way every baby is aware, that there is something within him: his reality -- which is never thirsty, never hungry. It is always the body, which he calls the baby, or whatever name the people have given to him. He also uses the name as if he is outside that personality.

Soon he will be losing that innocence. We won't allow him to remain that innocent. We will, by the time he is three of four years old, force him to say, that "I am thirsty."

And the day he starts saying, "I am thirsty," he is getting into a tremendously long journey of falsehoods. Soon he will get identified with the body and the mind, and will forget his real identity.

So when Gurdjieff said to people, that "You don't have any soul", nobody stood up to say to him, that "What are you talking about?" Nobody was capable. They have heard only that everybody has a soul. But what to do with Gurdjieff? He is challenging, that "You don't have a soul. Unless you create, you can't have it. You have deserve it, why you should have it by the birth? What you have done to get it?"

So I agree with him as a device, but I disagree with him because that is not a statement of truth.

And you are asking, "What is growth and what is consciousness movement?" It is basically to understand that within you there is a line running into eternity. If you get disidentified with the mind and the body, you will suddenly become aware of a luminous eternity. That is the discovery of consciousness. And then growth happens.

Then you don't simply grow old. You grow up. You mature. Then you don't go on collecting thoughts, and thinking that you are becoming a great intellectual.

No, then you grow in intelligence, not in intellectuality. You become more perceptive, more alert, more aware. You start seeing things which you have never seen before, within yourself and without you too.

There is a radical transformation of your whole personality. The personality disappears and individuality appears. All that is false in you goes on dropping, like dry leaves, dead leaves falling from the trees.

And fresh, young, new leaves start coming out of the tree.

You are always young, once you have discovered your consciousness. You are always fresh. You are always joyful. You have become part of the eternal dance of existence.

I call it growth.

Q: BHAGWAN, WHAT IS SPIRITUALITY?

A: The old concept has been, that spirituality is something against materialism.

To renounce the pleasures of matter, of body, of mind has been defined as spirituality. To me it is nonsense.

Spirituality is to be disidentified with everything that you can see, that can be an object to you -- so that finally you remain only the subject. Pure subjectivity is spirituality. It has nothing to do with renouncing anything. In fact, the spiritual being will be able to enjoy everything more intensely, more totally than the materialist. The materialist is very poor. All the religions have condemned the poor materialist. He has nothing worth condemning. His life is superficial.

Spirituality is life in depth, in ultimate depth. You are centered at your very being. But you can go on living on the circumference, moving freely anywhere -- still remaining at the center. Your identity is at the center. You know who you are. Then there is no problem, if you enjoy food, if you enjoy clothes, if you enjoy a beautiful house, if you enjoy music, painting. There is no problem. There is no need to renounce it.

Old spirituality has killed so much of creativity in man, that some day if man becomes aware of what the old spirituality has done, all your saints will be condemned as the greatest criminals -- for the simple reason because they have prevented all creativity. Condemned it as materialism.

They tried to live a juiceless life, and they enforced on other people also to live in the same way. Spirituality was something like living in a corpse.

To me spirituality is living totally, intensely, burning your torch on both the ends. Still remaining aware of your center, never losing for a single moment the awareness of who you are. Then it doesn't matter where you are.

If you remember who you are, it does not matter where you are. You will be in absolute bliss.

Q: BHAGWAN, WHY ARE PEOPLE SPACING OUT INSTEAD OF IN?

A: Because spacing out is simple. It can be done through chemical means, through drugs, through alcohol, through LSD, through marijuana, through hashish. It is simple, because the question is just eating something or smoking something, and you space out. But no drug can take you in. They are from the outside, they can take you outside. They can create a very beautiful hallucination. And once you have tasted that beautiful hallucination, then you want it more and more -- because the reality is so mundane.

Your forefathers, your past, has destroyed all beauty, all joy in the ordinary world. They have not enhanced it. So when you go on a drug trip, you create an individual dreamworld which is beautiful. And to come back from it, this world seems even more dull and dead than before. Now you have a comparison.

Going in needs effort. No chemicals can help. Going in means you have to become meditative. You have to make tremendous effort to become aware.

Certainly once you get in, you will be surprised, that whatever you were getting by spacing out was just hallucination. You were wasting your time. Spacing out was hallucination and the world outside was dull, but when you get in through meditation, -- that is the only way that leads inwards -- it transforms your whole vision. The ordinary, mundane reality becomes so beautiful. You don't need to go to any paradise. The very motivation for paradise disappears. This very moment it is here.

The ordinary flowers and the ordinary birds singing in the morning, it is so celestial, so sacred. Looked from your innermost core, this world becomes so magnificent, so marvellous, that you cannot conceive anything can be better than this. And once you are in, all those drugs look stupid, because you were just dreaming and deceiving yourself. But they are simple and cheap.

Spacing in is costly. You have to pay for it, by your effort, by your constant effort in spite of many failures. It is a real growth. It takes time. But it is worth, millions times more worth than the whole world -- because it will give you a new vision, which transforms this ordinary world into an extraordinary ecstasy.

Q: BHAGWAN, WHAT CAN A LIVING BUDDHA OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY GIVE TO PEOPLE?

A: The buddha can always give the same thing. Centuries don't matter. He can teach you how to space in.

Q: BHAGWAN, YOU ARE GOING ON A WORLD TOUR. WHAT WILL YOUR MESSAGE BE?

A: My message is, that we have to create a world without the boundary of nations, without the boundary of religions -- only then we will be for the first time civilized. Otherwise we are carrying barbarious past in beautiful garbs.

My effort will be to expose our barbariousness, in nationalism, in different groups, calling them religions; in different political ideologies, creating hopes for man for an utopia.

And these things they have been doing for thousands of years, and nothing materializes. It is time that we drop all the boundaries, all the distinctions of color and race, and bring the whole humanity as one, undivided whole. That will be the beginning of civilization.

So my whole effort is to expose all hypocrisy, and to bring to people's mind, that how we have been deceived and how we are deceiving ourselves.

If it can be explained to people directly, I trust immensely in the hidden intelligence of humanity. They will drop all this, because if they can be shown the relationship between the national boundaries, religious boundaries -- that they have been nothing but destructive, murderous, creating more and more wars. They are still doing the same, and perhaps this time they may destroy the whole life on the earth.

And it has taken millions of years, from the time life existed only in the ocean as fish, millions of years have taken nature to bring evolution to man. Of course nature cannot go beyond that. But few people have tried and have transcended nature too, and these are the people I call the awakened ones, the enlightened ones. Perhaps it is only the planet in the whole universe, where a man like Gautam Buddha has existed. To destroy life is not just destroying life on this planet. It is destroying a tremendously great adventure of existence, because all these stars, millions of stars, have millions of planets like earth.

It is suspected that at least on fifty thousand planets, there may be some kind of life. But no scientist is capable to say certainly that on any planet, life has reached higher than on this planet. This small earth is the most precious planet in the immense universe, and it cannot be destroyed by a few idiots -- they may be religious, they may be political.

And the question is to create a public opinion against any kind of war, but wars can be basically stopped only if we drop all the limits. Otherwise such insane things go on happening.

Just the other day I was seeing a report, that in European Common Market they have accumulated so much surplus food, that just to destroy it, it will take three to four billion dollars, to destroy it! It is not the cost of the food. To drown it in the ocean will take three to four billion dollars.

And they are going to do it. They will not give it to Ethiopia, where thousands of people continue to die every day. They will not give it to Nepal. They will not give it to India, where millions of people are waiting at any moment to starve and die. Why they will not give it to anyone? They don't feel any responsibility.

Their whole problem is economic, not human. They don't want to lower the price of their goods. Otherwise their markets will collapse, and they cannot give those things free. And why they should give? This is the problem basically deep down, because giving it to Ethiopia is not in a state to purchase.

If they give to some other country which is purchasing goods from them, then certainly their prices will come down and their whole economic structure will fall. But giving to Ethiopia will not affect. Giving to Nepal will not affect, because these poor people are not purchasing anyway. They don't have any purchasing power.

But nobody feels. Ethiopia is Mohammedan. Why Christians should bother about it? Let them die. That makes the population of Christianity bigger than the Mohammedan. If Hindus start dying in India, why the Christians should give their food to them -- although it is surplus and they are going to throw it in the ocean. If the Hindus die in India, there is a possibility that the Christians in India will become the rulers.

Now Christianity is the third greatest religion in India. But they will not be the people to die in starvation, because they are well-supported by the Western Christian countries. The people who will be dying will be the Mohammedans and Hindus.

There is a possibility that so many Hindus and Mohammedans will die that Christianity will become the major religion in India. And let them die, let them start to die, then it is easier to convert them. Just giving them food is enough to convert them to Christianity.

And if they are adamant, then it is better to get rid of them. Christianity becomes the major religion, India becomes a Christian country. So again Christians are the rulers of the country.

Unless we stop all these limits, which make us human, behave with other human beings in such an ugly way -- there is not much hope. The only hope is that we can convince the new generation, to get out of the prisons of nations, religions, political ideologies, and create one world, one earth, one humanity.