Mind is a kind of insanity

Question 1:

Milarepa, violence can never be a part of the rebellious spirit for the simple reason that violence is the whole past of humanity - and the rebel wants to discontinue with the past. Violence has been the way of life for millennia. Directly or indirectly we have lived under violence. Our armies, our police, our jails, our judges, our wars, our so-called great religions, all have lived in violence. And violence, reduced to its essentials, is irreverent towards life.

To me the religious man, the religious consciousness, is nothing but a deep reverence for life itself, because there is no God beyond life, there is no paradise beyond consciousness. Violence is a violation of both life and consciousness - it is destructive.

The rebel is a creator; his whole philosophy is that of creativity. We have lived in destructiveness far too long, and what is the achievement? That's why I have made a clear-cut distinction between the rebel and the reactionary. I have also made a distinction between the rebel and the revolutionary.

The reactionary is the lowest category. He can never disconnect himself from the past. The past is his orientation, he reacts against it. But whether you are for it or against it, it remains your reference, your context.

The revolutionary is a little higher than the reactionary. He does not only react, he also has dreams of the future, he has his utopias. But as far as violence is concerned, the revolutionary down the ages has thought that right ends can be attained through wrong means.

I refute that contention. Right ends can be achieved only through right means. Through violence you cannot achieve a peaceful, silent, loving humanity. The violence will be in the roots, it will poison your whole superstructure.

The rebel has to be nonviolent out of sheer necessity. Unless he is nonviolent, he cannot be the vehicle of a peaceful, warless, classless humanity.

If you sow the seeds of violence, you cannot expect and hope that the flowers will not be affected by violence. Those flowers will come out of the seeds you have sown. So each violent revolution has created another violent society, another violent culture. It is disgraceful to see that we still need armies, that we still need nuclear weapons. It is undignified to see that we need the policeman, the court and the jail. A better humanity, a more conscious man, will get rid of all this nonsense that surrounds us and pollutes our whole being.

The rebel cannot be half-hearted. He cannot be a chooser; he cannot choose a few things from the past, and not choose a few other things. Past as a whole has to be completely denied. Only then can we get rid of barbariousness in humanity - cruelty, violence and a deep-rooted disrespect for life and existence.

My approach is that of reverence for life.

The rebel will be ready to die, but he will not be ready to kill. It is the pride of man to die for a cause; it is animalistic to kill someone, however great the cause may be. By killing, you have spoiled it completely. And looking practically, the rebel is an individual against the whole world; even if he chooses to be violent, he will be crushed. The enemy - the past - has much more violent powers in its hands.

The rebel has to trust in love, has to trust in meditativeness, has to be aware of his immortality - that even if his body is crucified he remains untouched. Here I am not talking only about political rebellion. I am talking about the individual rebel - a spiritual phenomenon, not a political entity. And no spirituality can accept violence as a means to attain the end.

Violence is simply out of the question as far as my rebellion, my rebel, is concerned. He cannot destroy, we have destroyed enough. He cannot kill, we have killed enough. It is time to stop this whole idiotic way of life. We have to come out of this darkness into the light. Even if it costs you your life it is perfectly good... because my rebel will be basically a meditator.

I am not conceiving of my rebel without meditation - that is his essential experience. And once you understand that you are immortal, who is worried about being killed? And if millions of meditators are ready to open their chests before the guns of the old and the rotten past, there is a possibility:

perhaps it may also bring a change of heart in those people who have these destructive weapons in their hands.

Rebellion has not been tried on a vast scale. Just with the effort of millions of people meditating, loving silence and peace, and destroying all kinds of discriminations which create violence, we will be making the space, the gap, the discontinuity that can save man and life on this planet.

Question 2:

Arhata, the mind can only create suffering - to create joy is beyond its capacity, because joy simply means rising above mind. Mind cannot rise above itself. It would be as foolish as if you were pulling yourself up by your shoestrings. The very structure of the mind is not made by you, and it is not made by existence.

You bring a blank check; whatever is written on that blank check is by others. They teach you competitiveness, they teach you guilt, they teach you jealousy, they teach you fear. They prepare the whole ground for suffering and anguish and anxiety. You have to go beyond the writings of others.

Your mind is nothing but a by-product of the society in which you are born, it is the society speaking through you. It is not you - you are hidden behind the mind.

Unless you enter behind, or go beyond, you will not know what joy is. Joy is your nature, but the mind will not allow you to live according to your nature. The mind will interfere on every step. As mind exists today, there is no possibility for it to be a creator of joy.

But the new man may be courageous enough to leave the children in absolute freedom, help them to be on their own, help them to search whatever they want, give them questions but not give them answers, give them a quest but not give them goals. Then there is a possibility, in the future, that mind may not obstruct you from going beyond it. It cannot create joy even then, but it can allow you to move beyond without any hindrance. That is the best it can do; and beyond it you are joy, you are bliss, you are truth.

Mind is a kind of insanity because it is carrying so many impressions which are conflicting, contradictory. It has got impressions from your mother, and also from your father; and they were both fighting continuously, and they both have given their minds and heritage to you. It has got impressions from the neighbors, it has got impressions from so many teachers in the school, in the college, in the university. It is a crowd of unrelated, irrelevant, inconsistent thoughts - it does not have any organic unity. It is a miracle that somehow you go on keeping yourself together.

It would have been a great thing if God had also created a small window in your head so anybody could look inside... what is going on? And then you would have found that everybody is mad. People are holding in their madness; sometimes it becomes too much and they lose control.

According to psychologists, the madman and the normal man are not different qualitatively. The difference is only of degree: the normal man is normally mad, and the abnormal man is abnormally mad. They both are mad. One is still in control of his madness. But everybody is almost a borderline case; any moment, just a single step more, and you have stepped into the psychiatric hospital.

Paddy climbs up a flagpole and begins shouting obscenities at the top of his voice. Soon the cops come along, arrest him, and charge him with disturbing the peace. He is sent to the psychiatric hospital for an examination. "How do you explain your behavior?" asks the doctor.

"It is like this, Doc," replies Paddy, "if I did not do something crazy once in a while, I would go nuts."

Just watch yourself. Once in a while you are also doing something crazy; perhaps not in public...

in your bathroom, otherwise you would also go nuts. A little release once in a while helps. And we have socially-accepted releases. Have you seen the people at a football match? They may not be seeing the actual football match, they may be seeing it only on the television, and you can see they are going crazy. I know about one man who was jumping up all the time before the TV set, and finally he took up the TV set and crashed it into the wall. I said, "What happened?"

He said, "My team lost the game."

I said, "Why destroy the TV set?"

He said, "I had to do something."

Everybody, if he watches himself, is doing something crazy just to avoid going nuts. You can hold only so much.

One California university has studied, for a year, the results of football matches, boxing matches...

what they do to the public minds. Crimes rise fourteen percent; there are more murders, more rapes, more thefts - in every direction, all crimes start rising immediately. And this fourteen percent increase remains stable for almost one week after the match is finished. What has the match done to the people's minds?

And can you think this society is sane? - which has boxing matches where two persons are being almost barbarous to each other, hitting on their noses, blood coming out. And thousands and thousands of people are watching so attentively, breathlessly - as if something great is happening - shouting madly, starting to fight amongst themselves. If somebody is shouting against your favorite, immediately fights break out amongst the spectators. And why do we have such ugly games?

We know that everybody condemns the Romans who used to throw human beings, the criminals, before the hungry lions. And thousands of civilized Romans, aristocrats, used to watch it. It was in Rome that great stadiums were first created. The reason for creating those stadiums was to watch hungry lions killing poor criminals. Is there any way to call these people civilized, cultured? Is there not some psychological background behind it? Are they not enjoying something which is unworthy of any human being? Are they not identifying themselves with the lion and enjoying a good meal?

And Roman culture was at its pinnacle; even the emperor and his wife, the prince and the whole royal family used to come to see - to them it was a game. But we are not different either. In Spain they are enjoying bullfights. They raise bulls, and then human beings are fighting those bulls; most of the animals get killed or at least badly hurt. And what are these thousands of people doing?...

leaving all work aside, nothing is more important than to see the bullfight.

People who can afford it come from all over the world to Spain to see these bullfights; and boxing is just as barbarous. These are our ways of releasing our craziness in installments so it does not get accumulated to a point where we are no more in control, where it becomes the master and we are in its control. That becomes madness, the difference is only of degree.

Only meditators have been found, down the centuries, not to have become mad. Because the meditator knows how to go beyond mind, he knows how to go beyond madness. He does not collect all kinds of crazy things; on the contrary, he continuously cleans his mind, throws away all rubbish that just goes on collecting in life, naturally.

You clean your house every day, but you have not thought of cleaning your mind every day. Just as your house collects dust - which is not dangerous unless it is radioactive, which is also a man-made danger - your mind also collects all kinds of junk, and you go on piling it up. A day comes... suddenly the pile is bigger than you, more powerful than you, starts dictating to you; you have to listen to it, otherwise it will not leave you in peace.

Arhata, mind cannot be a creator of joy. At the most it can be just a passage for the joy from the beyond to descend... and reach even to the very fibers of your body.

In the busy New York traffic, a taxi driver ran into the back of the car of Dr. Kendall, a psychiatrist.

Dr. Kendall jumped out of his car, shook his fist at the cabby and screamed, "Why the hell can't you look where you are going, you idiot?"

Then suddenly, he remembered his profession. He looked tenderly at the taxi driver, and said softly, "Let me put it this way - why do you hate your mother?"

He was a psychoanalyst doctor, and the psychoanalyst is obsessed with the idea of hating your mother, of hating your father. Anything goes wrong, the first thing is, "Why do you hate your mother?"

So now he is speaking his professional, cultured and educated language. But he had forgotten it for a single moment when he jumped out of his car and shouted, "Why the hell can't you look where you are going, you idiot?" That was authentic - the second statement is stupid, although it is professional.

The psychoanalyst noticed a parrot perched on the farmhouse roof. He ran to fetch a ladder, climbed onto the roof, and was about to clap his cap over the bird, when the parrot fixed him with a beady eye and asked, "What the hell do you think you are doing?"

"Gosh, I didn't mean nothing," said the psychoanalyst. "I thought you was a bird."

Even a man who is well educated... but all education remains part of the mind; it does not make you more alert, more conscious, it simply fills you with information. It treats you like a computer, and it is now well known that computers also can go crazy.

It was thought before that computers cannot go crazy, but it has been found that that was a wrong idea - computers can go crazy, can go mad.

In Japan, robots have killed ten human beings, for no reason at all. The robots just went crazy - because the mind and the computer are not different things. The mind is produced by biology, and the computer is produced by us. But their functioning is the same; too much information gets entangled, too much anger repressed becomes murderous, too much suppression of your natural instincts becomes perversion.

So you go on keeping a beautiful profile, a beautiful mask, and behind it you are accumulating all kinds of dangerous possibilities which can explode at any moment. Every man who is not a meditator is vulnerable and can become a madman.

Question 3:

Deva Sukuvar, it is unfortunate that society only introduces you to the world of the mind; and madness follows as a shadow with the growth of the mind. The society does not introduce you to meditation, because that is the only way to be absolutely certain that you will never go mad, that you will always remain master of your actions. But there are reasons why the society is interested in the mind, and not in meditation.

The society's whole interest is in how to exploit you, how to enslave you, how to use you in a more efficient way, almost like a machine. It gives you all the education just for these hidden, secret aims.

It prevents you from knowing anything about meditation.

It is afraid of meditation, for the simple reason that a meditator starts living a life of freedom, a life which has its source within himself. He does not care about respectability, honor, money, power. All these things become trivia, because the meditator knows real, valuable things: he knows silence, he knows peace, he knows love, he knows a dancing heart, he knows the music that is within his own being and also outside of him. He becomes aware of all these treasures.

Now money is like children's play; power is violent, brutal, barbarous. Anything that needs to be competitive he will not participate in, because every competition means enmity, every competition means putting somebody down. Your victory is going to be somebody's defeat, and he cannot conceive that he can be the cause of anybody's defeat, sadness and suffering. He becomes a dropout from the competitive, egoistic, money-minded, power-oriented society.

Hence every society has been afraid of meditation. They teach you things which, taken to the extreme, are bound to create insanity in you. And once you are a participant in their game, there is no way not to go to the extreme. One thing leads to another, one step to another step.

You want to reach the peak, you forget completely that what you are doing is being very destructive to your own being - and you cannot be destructive to others without being destructive to yourself.

Your jealousies, your anger, your greed, all accumulate like wounds inside you. Sooner or later...

there is a limit that you can tolerate; once that limit is crossed, the same society which has created the insanity in you puts you in an insane asylum.

And have you ever heard that anybody comes out cured from your insane asylums? Have you ever heard of anybody who is cured by years of psychoanalysis? I know people who have been, for fifteen years or even twenty years, into psychoanalysis, wasting treasures. Now they have become addicts; their basic problem is still there but a new problem has arisen: they cannot live without psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis has become a drug. Twice a week or three times a week they need psychoanalysis.

But nobody is cured, because the function of psychoanalysis or psychiatry - or any other therapies used in insane asylums - is not to cure you. It is just to make you normally insane so that you can go back to work, so that you can be again useful to the society, so that the society can again exploit you. They are simply pushing you back within the limit so you can function efficiently.

This is not cure; any small incident and you may cross the line again. Your wife dies, your child dies, your business goes bankrupt and again you are back beyond the sanity line. In fact the society is not sane, and its whole education and culture is not for the sane.

The rebellious society of my vision will first discipline every child more in meditation than in anything else, because the child is the most capable of being meditative. The child is innocent, unburdened, unworried, he has no thoughts, no memories, no wounds, he is still unscratched.

The first thing that should be as a foundation for his whole life is the art of meditation; anything else should come later on. First, make sure that he knows how to get out of the mind, to get out of the jungle of thoughts any moment he wants. Then there will be no need of any madhouses and no need of any psychoanalysis, no need of thousands of people suffering unnecessarily... the society is responsible.

Question 4:

Shakti Agita, the human mind became perverted when it started following priests and politicians against its own nature. Perversion happens the moment you go against your nature. You cannot throw your nature out of the window; it is within you. But if you go against it, its natural expression is closed. And when the natural expression is closed, the unnatural energy starts finding some other way, it has to come out.

For example, celibacy creates millions of people who are perverted. Their perversion is rooted in their idea of celibacy; then homosexuality arises, lesbianism arises, sodomy arises, pornography arises. And now all that perversion has brought a new disease in the world, AIDS, which knows no cure. Still, no man of any importance is saying that it is because of celibacy - because that means irritating and annoying all the religions.

I have never thought that humanity is so poor that there are not even a dozen people who will say the truth - that when the time comes they will not hesitate to risk all their respectability. But I am utterly disappointed in the intelligentsia of the world, nobody is saying that it is celibacy that should be made a crime. On the contrary, governments are making laws saying that homosexuality is a crime. You are making the symptoms a crime, and nobody is even asking why people turn out to be homosexuals, and who are the people who turn to homosexuality in the first place?

The monks, the soldiers, the prisoners, the boys living separately in university hostels. They become sexually mature at the age of fourteen and they have to wait at least ten more years for their marriage. And the biologists have found that men's sexuality, their sexual energy, is at its peak when they are nearabout eighteen years of age. By the time they get married they are already going down.

And when they were at the peak of their energy, you prevented them from meeting girls; and the same is the situation of the girls. You don't allow mixed hostels, otherwise there would be no homosexuality. You don't allow nuns and monks to live in the same monastery, otherwise there would be no need for homosexuality. Destroy the basis and the perversion disappears.

Shepherds living far away in the forest or in the mountains, alone with their sheep, start making love to the sheep. That is sodomy; they can't even find a man, they are so alone there, and their sexual energy wants some way to be relieved.

Perversion has been around man since religions began dominating. They started giving disciplines to people without any understanding of human nature, without any knowledge of human psychology.

They are still doing that, and they are forcing governments to make homosexuality a crime punishable by at least five years in jail. And the strangest thing is, in the jail, homosexuality is the most prevalent thing. So by sending homosexuals into jails, you are giving them new pastures, new possibilities. But nobody will say that celibacy is the cause, because all the religions preach celibacy.

Perhaps I am the only person who is saying that celibacy should be completely banned, and that all monks and all nuns should be made to live together. This unnaturalness should be prevented.

Just a few days ago a Jaina nun, just twenty-two years old, but courageous enough, escaped from the fold. She wrote a letter to her father, saying, "Don't search or seek for me, otherwise I will expose everything that goes on inside the monasteries. I have suffered so much torture, so much indignity; I have been exploited sexually and in every other way. And we go on showing the face of celibacy and receiving the respect of people.

"I was forced to become a nun when I was only nine years old, and I had no idea what was happening. Now I am an adult, I don't want to remain a nun, it is absolutely unnatural and ugly.

Everything goes on from the back door, and we have to be hypocrites; I hate this kind of life."

But the government is supporting the Jainas. They have arrested the man with whom the girl has escaped. They have arrest warrants for the girl, and the family wants the girl to be returned to the fold. If she does not want to go back to the fold, she should come back to the family. The girl simply does not want to have any relations with those parents who forced her to be a nun when she was only nine years old.

Now the whole Jaina community near Indore and Bhopal, where this case has happened, is in such an uproar because they are afraid that the girl may expose everything that goes on behind the curtains. And the government is supporting them - the magistrate has issued an arrest warrant.

It is a strange world; the politicians are interested only in the votes of the Jainas, and that area is one of the richest Jaina areas. All the richest people there are Jainas, so all the money for elections comes from them; the politicians cannot annoy them.

The situation is absolutely clear, that the girl is now of age and she has every freedom and right to decide what way of life she wants to live. If she does not want to remain a nun you cannot force her - by police, by law or by the court - to live a life which she does not want to live, which she hates to live. Now the governor of Madhya Pradesh has appealed that, wherever that girl is hiding, she should be delivered to the nearest police station, and nobody should give her any shelter. And we call this twentieth century a civilized century, and we call this world democratic?

Perversions arise because religions are against nature. And God is the most important cause of all perversions. Those who want perversions to disappear, have to declare the death of God, because only with the death of God can those religions disappear and leave man in freedom to live according to his nature.

Elsie the Cow was on one side of the fence, and Ferdinand the Bull was on the other side. Elsie gave Ferdinand a wink, and he leaped over the fence to her side, "Are not you Ferdinand the Bull?"

she asked.

"Just call me Ferdinand," he said. "The fence was higher than I thought."

That's how things become perverted.

Religion has proved to be the greatest man-made calamity, a disaster, a suicidal attempt by man himself. It has created institutions which are all unnatural: celibacy on one hand, marriage on the other hand. And they have praised marriage as highly as possible. Marriages, they say, are made in heaven... but ask the married people - they live in hell. It is strange, marriages happen in heaven, and married people live in hell. But to say anything against marriage annoys even those people who are living in hell, and they will not raise their hands in support.

I have heard about Leo Tolstoy, Chekov, and Gorky, three great novelists of Russia before the revolution. They were sitting in the garden of Leo Tolstoy just talking about things and, by the way, they started talking about women. Chekov said something, Gorky said something, but Tolstoy remained silent. They both turned to him and said, "Why you are not saying anything about it?"

He said, "I will say, but I will say only when one of my feet is in the grave. I will say it and jump into the grave, because if I say anything and my wife hears it... I am already living in hell, why make it even worse? I will just keep quiet."

Hymie Goldberg knocked on the door of the psychiatric hospital. A nurse answered the door, and he asked whether any of their patients had escaped recently.

"Why do you want to know?" asked the nurse.

"Well," said Goldberg, "someone has run off with my wife."

Okay, Maneesha?

Yes, Beloved Master.