Here everyone is the best

Question 1:

Deva Satyarthi, I knew, as everybody else did, whose question this was! I was waiting for it; in fact it arrived almost the same day. But I waited so that you could cool down a little.

You don't seem to understand the language of this commune. Here everyone is the best! I have never come across another category. This is not the ordinary world you are in. Here things have a different meaning. And you are to be understanding enough; otherwise you will go on missing the basic points of inner growth.

Just the other day, when Anubuddha was working on my hand it was hurting so much, and I had to decide whether to say to him, "Do your worst, don't be worried," or, "Do your best, don't be worried."

For the first time I came to understand that the worst and the best can be the same. But it is our whole upbringing which teaches competition, jealousy, which teaches comparison and continuously keeps us in a despair.

These are foundations of despair and anguish. If you are continuously comparing... Then somebody has a little longer nose than yours, and you will feel very much hurt against God, "What kind of miserliness... Just a little bit longer nose and I would have been a beautiful person. And he has given me a nose which looks as if he has punched it. Is it a nose or a joke? - punch line!"

And you are always looking all around - thousands of people. There are people who have beautiful bodies, there are people who have great intelligence, and there are people who have money - and they all keep you in misery. They don't do anything to you, you do everything yourself; it is a self- created hell. But continuously comparing yourself with everybody you come across, you will be never out of misery; you are following all the rules which create misery. One has to learn not to compare, not to be competitive.

Satyarthi has been working on my body almost for one month and he is my best bodyworker. There is no question and no doubt about it. But he is a best bodyworker in his own way; Anubuddha is in his own way. Leela was working on my body... My body is a kind of test for my bodyworkers. So many people... they enjoy working. I say, "Okay, torture me as much as you can. Anyway I have nothing else to do. You are doing the whole work, I am simply witnessing how much people can torture each other."

Satyarthi is one of the best body torturers. If you are feeling in the dumps, down, go to Satyarthi, because to get out of misery there is only one way: to invite greater misery. Lying down, I have nothing to do, but I go on watching what is their method of torture. Satyarthi has a very clear-cut method. First he does such a deep massage that your whole body hurts - naturally. And slowly he starts doing less deep massage and you start improving. Finally he is doing a soft massage and your whole body is healthy. It was healthy in the first place! The day I understood his trick, I told him, "Now give somebody else a chance."

But remember one thing: the moment you drop comparison, competition, all jealousy disappears.

You are yourself, perfectly beautiful; as an individual, incomparable. But even the greatest people suffer from such stupid things.

The man who created the greatest revolution in the world, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, had small legs, disproportionate to his body. They never reached to his feet. Special chairs were made for him; otherwise he was dangling in the air. Naturally he was feeling very inferior. The greatest revolutionary of the world... but what to do? Existence goes on joking with people. He was always very conscious that nobody mentioned his legs. And in such situations the ordinary thing is that everybody will mention his legs - what happened?

A guest was coming to Hymie Goldberg's family and he was a great politician, very powerful. And Hymie Goldberg and his wife Becky were telling their son, Herschel, the whole day, "Remember, don't mention about his nose!"

The boy was very much puzzled, "Why so much concern about his nose? Many guests have come, but nobody has told me, 'Never mention about his...' Why should I mention about his nose?"

Then the guest came and there was great silence. And Herschel said, "My God, he has no nose!

And the whole day I have been tortured: don't talk about his nose. And Jews know what a nose is!

This you call a nose?"

Hymie Goldberg hit his head. He said, "The whole day I wasted telling him, 'Herschel, you can get out and either go to play or to meet somebody or go to your grandmother's house. But if you remain here, a guest is coming - don't mention about his nose.'"

He said, "I am not going from this place, because if something strange is coming..."

Naturally, the thing that you don't want anybody to know, everybody will know. Your very hiding will indicate that something is wrong.

It is a very strange atmosphere, created by the whole world. It has a certain background behind it. It wanted to destroy the individual, take away his dignity. It wanted to destroy the joyfulness and give him misery, because only miserable people are controllable, only miserable people are able to be exploited. Miserable people are always ready to play into the hands of others, the vested interests.

The vested interests don't want individuals, because an individual, just by the very definition, is a rebel. He does not belong to any crowd, any religion, any nation, any race; he simply is himself. It is very difficult to exploit a world which consists of individuals. It is very difficult to create unnecessary wars, destruction, if the world consists of individuals. Because the world consists of miserable people, you can force them to do anything. They are always looking upwards, for somebody to order them.

In the army it comes to the extreme point. All the trainings in all the armies of the world are basically the same. The structure is how to destroy the individual, but in such a way that you will never think that it is destroying the individual. They call it discipline, they call it obedience, they call it courage.

They call it many beautiful names. And what is the training?

In the second world war when there was a shortage of people in the army, a professor in England had to be compulsorily enrolled. He resisted. He said, "Listen, I am a professor of philosophy. I cannot do anything without thinking about it. I cannot even shoot without first contemplating about the consequences." But they did not listen. They thought, "We will manage." They had their training.

The first day he was standing in the line in the morning for parade and the commander said, "Left turn." Everybody turned except the professor. He was thinking, "I don't see any point, why I should turn left. There is no reason at all. I am perfectly good as I am."

The commander looked very angrily at him, but remained silent, thinking that he would take him to task afterwards. Then he ordered everybody to turn to the left, to the right; to go backwards, to go forwards; and then finally to stand in the same place from where they had started the whole exercise.

And then he came to the professor who was standing, and asked him, "Why don't you move?"

He said, "Why should I move? And what have all these people gained by moving? These are all idiots! For no reason: move left, move right, go forward, go backward. I am not an idiot."

The commander said, "This is a strange fellow. Nobody ever has raised the question." He said to the general, "This man is absolutely uncontrollable. Whatever you say, he asks why. If you say, 'Your shoes are not shining as they should be shining,' he says, 'I am perfectly happy with them as they are. And what has it to do with the training and the discipline?' If you say, 'Your clothes are not perfectly well ironed,' he says, 'It is not your problem. I like loose clothes.'"

Finally he went to the general and he said, "You take this man over. He may spoil the others, because the others laugh. And others have also started thinking, 'Perhaps the professor is right.

What is wrong in loose clothes, if he likes loose clothes? What is wrong if the shoes are not shining?

In what way are shining shoes going to win the war?'"

"He raises such questions," the commander said, "that I cannot manage. You take him away."

The general called the professor and he said, "You'd better work in the mess." And he gave him a pile of peas and told him to sort out the bigger peas from the smaller peas: "Make two piles, and after one hour I will come to see the result."

After one hour he came and saw the result. The professor was waiting, looking at the peas. The peas were sitting in the same place. The general asked, "What is the matter with you? Can't you sort out bigger peas from smaller ones?"

He said, "The problem is, where to put the middle ones? And I never do anything unless I have planned it completely. I have not been able to figure out where to put the middle ones. All are not big and all are not small - there are middle ones too. You tell me, where should I put the middle ones? And if you tell me with the big ones, then why? Explain! If you tell me with the smaller ones, an explanation is needed."

He was released from the army, with honor. This type of man is not needed in the army. The army wants obedient people. Whatever is said has to be done; there is no question of why. This obedience is nothing but another name of slavery, creating a slave psychology. First, "Left, right, backward, forward" - innocent things, because you are not destroying anything, not killing anybody.

But they have developed, down the ages, certain tactics.

Once you become obedient and you start doing things as you are told, and you don't ask why, then when one day you are marching with guns, the moment you are ordered to shoot you don't think even for a moment, "Why?" That man is absolutely innocent. He has not done any wrong to you. He also has a wife, he also has children, he also has old parents waiting for him, just as your parents are waiting and praying that you will come back home soon. If the soldiers start thinking, both soldiers will throw away their guns and will hug each other and say, "It is time to go home. What is the point?"

If the politicians cannot agree on certain points, that is their business. They should wrestle with each other. Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan can have a boxing match and decide - whoever wins. But why waste millions of people's lives? Millions of people are in the army wasting their lives.

Just "Left, right, left, right."

And finally comes the loaded gun, "Shoot!"

Or the bomb.

The man who dropped the bombs, atom bombs, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not think for a single moment about what he was doing. His mind was completely brainwashed, completely mechanical.

He had been ordered; he was obeying. Obedience is the greatest religion, not only in the army, but also in the church; not only in the politician's world, but also in the priest's conception of existence - obedience, just obey. And he obeyed.

A man of small intelligence and individuality would have thought at least twice, "What am I going to do? One hundred thousand people will be destroyed within three minutes." But he dropped atom bombs on two cities... two hundred thousand people. He came back to his camp, and in the morning when asked, "Did you have any rest?" he said, "Why not? I followed the order, I rested well. I am an obedient person."

Obedience is the greatest value in a world of slaves. And this is not only the case with the ordinary politician and the priest; it begins with your God himself. He was against Adam and Eve because they disobeyed. What kind of God have people been worshipping? And a God who prevents his own children from eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge and the tree of eternal life does not seem to be a very loving father. He seems most dangerous, a despot. And that's what the devil managed to convince Eve of. And the devil was absolutely right.

You will be surprised to know, there are thousands of devil worshippers in the world. And I can see the point, why they worship the devil. He was the first revolutionary, and he suggested the right thing. He said "These are the two most important trees in the whole garden of Eden. If you know and if you experience eternal life, what else is needed? Wisdom is enlightenment and eternal life is deathlessness - you have attained everything. God has prohibited the two most important things in life. And the reason why he has prevented you is that he is afraid that if you eat these two fruits, you will also become like God. He is jealous! He is afraid that he will lose his power. Everybody will be as powerful as he is."

Now, this fascist has been worshipped as God, and the poor fellow, the devil, has been condemned, who has been the greatest benefactor of humanity. He has not harmed anybody, he has simply suggested that these are the two things worth achieving: the wisdom of the truth, and the life which knows no death. Then it takes a totally new aroma, a beauty and a blessing.

God has prevented you so that you can remain slaves, afraid of death, afraid of disease, and always a worshipper. He has destroyed your dignity by preventing you. I have always loved the fact... for some reason, which is lost far back in the historical records, the word 'devil' comes from the Sanskrit word 'divine'. It exactly means God. In its origin, God means nothing; in no language does it have any meaning. It is just Godot.

When I was reading WAITING FOR GODOT I thought, Godot seems to be like a German word. The very sound of the word... One of my old sannyasins, Haridas, was with me. I asked Haridas, "What is German for God?"

He said, "The German for God is Gott!"

It seems only Germans have Gott it! God does not mean anything. It is a meaningless word and you can manage to give any image to it.

So I cannot condemn devil worshippers. They are growing. Just a few days ago there were reports from Australia that devil worshippers are not only worshipping the devil, they don't allow the Christian church to continue their Sunday ritual. They throw stones at the churches, at the windows, disturb the meetings. And they are all Christians - they are not my sannyasins!

Deva Satyarthi, your question is good for everybody. From this moment start learning that we don't have any other category than the best. Everybody is the best in his own way. There is nobody else to be compared to. And once you drop this comparison business, you will feel so light and so full of joy. The same energy that goes on becoming jealousy and competition and comparison turns into blissfulness, becomes a shower of ecstasy in the deepest core of your being.

That day after I talked about Anubuddha I had remembered Satyarthi, and I knew that he was going to be very much disturbed. And while passing him I had smiled at him - just to give a finish, the last touch. But he could not laugh. If he had laughed, he would have become enlightened!

Little Herschel Goldberg is causing his parents much heartache by his behavior. He has already been kicked out of two state schools, so in desperation they send him to a Roman Catholic school.

When Herschel gets home from his first day at school, he goes straight to his room to do his homework. Hymie comes home from work and says to Becky, "Well, how did Herschel get on at his new school?"

"Fine," says Becky, "he is upstairs now doing his homework."

"Homework?" cries Hymie. "He has never done any homework in his life!"

So Hymie runs upstairs and says to Herschel, "Well, son, how come you are doing homework? Why this big change?"

"Well," says Herschel, "I am the only Jewish boy in the school, and up on the wall they have a picture of the last one who went there. And, Oy! you should see what they did to him. They nailed him to a lamppost!"

Man is living in fear. He is doing everything out of fear. If he does not do it he will lose respectability; if he does not do it according to the idea of others, he will not be thought to be somebody special. It is all fear, and out of fear nothing great ever comes. Anything great is born only out of love, meditation, silence, understanding. If you create out of fear it is not creation. Your fear will be there, just like a shadow, destroying the beauty of your creation.

If your creation comes out of joy, then whatever you do has a beauty, a beauty that you can be proud of. Whether anybody understands it or not does not matter.

I am reminded of Van Gogh. He painted - perhaps the first painter - with his own blood. He was a poor coal miner's son. The family was not able to send him to an arts school. And the family could not conceive - what kind of crazy idea has he got, that he has to become a painter? He left the family, but he had no other kind of education, qualification. His brother used to send him every week exactly seven days' money for food, for clothes, for absolute necessities. And Van Gogh was fasting for four days and saving the money to purchase paints and canvases and brushes. So one day he would eat, one day he would fast.

Perhaps no man has fasted so spiritually. THIS I call a spiritual fast, because it is in the service of creativity. It is not out of greed - you fast because you want heavenly pleasures after death. It will be counted, how many fasts you did. It is sheer greed; it is not spirituality. You give to beggars just as a way of opening an account in God's bank. And these beggars go on saying that if you give one rupee here, there you will get a thousand in return. It is not even business; it is sheer gambling. It is not spirituality. Only a man like Van Gogh fasting can I say is spiritual.

He would paint, and he was so far ahead of his contemporaries that nobody ever understood what he was painting. Not even painters could understand his paintings. He could not sell a single painting his whole life. And now his paintings are sold for ten million dollars, a single painting; twelve million dollars, a single painting. There are only two hundred left, and he had painted thousands. And he had given them just to friends, because what else to do? He had no place to collect them.

A man one day came to purchase a painting. Van Gogh was very happy. He started showing him all the paintings that he thought were his best creations.

The man said, "You don't worry. You give me anything, just this is the price."

This was so insulting. He immediately threw the money out on the street and pushed the man out and told him, "Tell my brother never to send any other man to purchase my paintings. You are not the man... you don't even have an eye for the beauty, for creativity. You don't even want to see...

Certainly I can say this money has been given by my brother to you, just to give me a little satisfaction that at least one painting has been sold."

It was a very strange life - fasting, continuously painting, he was becoming weaker and weaker.

Finally he wanted to paint the sun, so day after day he was just watching the sun - painting, but rejecting the paintings; they were not coming up to his standard. He went crazy. He was forced to enter a mental asylum. For one year he remained in that madhouse.

That was the only peaceful time, where the medical and the psychiatric doctors were sympathetic to him, to his whole misery. He had done no harm. And they allowed him, from the institution's money, to have paints and everything that he wanted. For the first time he had everything he needed to paint without being hungry. His best paintings are those which he painted in a madhouse.

But still he was thought mad, because the paintings were not created for selling, the paintings were not competitive, the paintings had no ambition; the paintings were not desires and greed to become somebody special. The paintings were the children of his love. And he painted as an individual; his society could not understand them, because he did not follow the society's symbols.

For example, his trees all go higher than his stars. Now, anybody can point out, "This is not factual.

Stars are far higher and your trees are going beyond the stars." He said, "What can I do? Whenever I listen to the trees I feel that they are the desires of the earth to reach the stars. I am simply painting what I am experiencing."

He painted his stars as spirals. Everybody laughed, because stars are not spirals. Just recently, physicists have come to the idea that stars are spirals - just because of their distance we cannot see that they are spirals - and Van Gogh was for the first time validated by science. A hundred years before, with naked eyes, with no scientific instruments... the man's clarity must have been immense.

His love must have been so enormous, his silence so penetrating, that it reached to the farthest stars without any instruments, without any support. Everybody was against him, but he painted stars as spirals.

A man should live according to his heart. Even if he remains a beggar, he will have a dignity which even a king cannot have. The king can lose his dignity within minutes. A man should work not out of fear and comparison and to defeat someone, but to express his own genius. And everybody has a genius of some kind.

Now something for Deva Satyarthi to laugh. I don't want anybody to be serious here. It is a temple of love, a temple of laughter. Seriousness is considered sickness by me.

A woman is out riding one day when she falls off her horse and shoots straight through a hedge, where her jeans and sweater are torn off. She is lying naked and unconscious in the field when Father Murphy comes by on his bicycle.

Seeing the naked girl, he runs over to see what has happened, but not knowing what to do, he places his black priest's hat over her pussy and jumps on his bicycle to go and get help.

Just then, Paddy and Sean stagger out of the pub and go over to the hedge to take a piss.

Seeing the girl lying there, Paddy turns to Sean and says, "Look, that girl seems to be in trouble."

"She is," says Sean, "and the first thing we've got to do is to get Father Murphy out of there."

A young cowboy, in the wild west for the first time, finds himself in a town without women. At the local saloon, he asks the other cowboys how they manage without women, and they tell him to find a sheep or a cow for a companion.

A few days later, the young man walks in with a pig. He sits her down at a table and then walks over to the bar and says, "I will have a large whiskey for myself and a root beer for the young lady."

The bartender reaches below the bar and brings out his shotgun. He points it at the young man, who starts to back away.

"I don't understand," he says. "You told me I could find a companion."

"I know," replies the bartender, taking aim.

"Then why are you pointing that gun at me?" cries the cowboy.

"We told you to find a companion," says the bartender, "but not the sheriff's wife."

Okay, Maneesha?

Yes, Beloved Master.