Shadows of the dead

Question 1:

Jivan Mary, one who is not a rebel will not come close to me. The very fact that he comes close to me, becomes an initiate, is proof enough that he is a rebel. All my sannyasins are rebels; no other kind of people can be my sannyasins. Those who are not rebels are going to be against me, because whatever I am saying goes against the whole past of mankind - all its traditions, cultures, civilizations, religions.

Unless one is ready to disconnect himself from the past and the shadows of the dead, he cannot become a sannyasin; because my sannyas has no past, it has only future. It has no connections with the past, it is discontinuous with all that is old and dead. Its only concern is for the future growth of your being, your consciousness, your whole individuality.

That's exactly the meaning of being a rebel: to live according to your own light, howsoever small, and find your way in the unknown future. Give all the opportunities, accept all the challenges of the unknown fearlessly, as if you are the first people on the earth.

The past is a burden, and if you are attached to the past you cannot move a single inch. You are burdened with a mountain, your potentiality is going to be crushed. That has been happening for centuries - people are living so burdened, so conditioned, that there is no possibility for them to be themselves. They are Christians, they are Hindus, they are Mohammedans, but they are not themselves.

My sannyasin does not belong to any ideology, to any philosophy, to any theology. He is pure of all that is rotten, he is pure of all that has passed; his eyes are fixed on the future. And he is seeking and searching his own growth without any fear of the crowd, the masses - which don't have any individuality of their own. They are sheep, a crowd of sheep.

My sannyasin is a rebel. He comes out of the crowd, stands alone like a lion, finds himself - his path, his dignity, his freedom.

You are also asking, "Is it true that a rebel is born, not made, or are we born rebels but tamed and conditioned by our societies?"

Jivan Mary, a rebel is born, not made. In fact, nothing that is significant in human life is manufactured, is made. It is all intrinsic, inborn - you bring it with your life into the world. But you are born in a society, in a crowd; and that becomes a calamity, because the people you are born among and the people you will be growing with have no respect for individuals, particularly for children. They think that their children are their possessions, and their whole effort is to fulfill their own incomplete ambitions through their children.

They are frustrated; they have been running after shadows, they have not been able to attain any fulfillment. Now their only desire is that what they have not been able to do, their children will do. At least there will be some satisfaction because their children are part of them, their blood - through their children they will live.

And this idea of living through children is immensely dangerous. It means you will not allow the child to be himself - he has to be somebody that you want him to be. And you cannot have any idea...

there is no way to find out what the child was going to be if he were given freedom and support just to be himself. You help the child but you help the child with a condition, spoken or unspoken, that "You have to be the fulfillment of our desires, the representative of our longings, the completion of our ambitions."

That's why nobody is what he was meant by nature to be - he is somebody else. And you cannot be happy with being somebody other than yourself. You can pretend, but you are only playing a role imposed upon you; you are not being authentic and original. If you are a Catholic, can you think that if you had been left alone by your parents and the society, without any imposition to be a Catholic, you would have been a Catholic? Then the whole sky is open to you, to choose.

If you choose according to your own inclination, according to your own intuition... it is very strong in children but, slowly slowly, becomes weaker. The voices of the parents and the teachers, the society and the priest, become louder and louder. Now if you want to find out what is your voice, you will have to pass through a crowd of noises.

It is a tremendously beautiful experiment for meditators just to watch inside - whose voice is this?

Sometimes it is your father, sometimes it is your mother, sometimes it is your grandfather, sometimes it is your teacher; and those voices are all different. Just one thing you will not be able to find easily - your own voice; it has been always suppressed. You have been told to listen to your elders, to listen to the priest, to listen to the teachers. You have never been told to listen to your own heart.

You are carrying a still, small voice of your own, unheard, and in the crowd of voices that have been imposed upon you, it is almost impossible to find it. First you will have to get rid of all those noises, attain a certain quality of silence, peace, serenity. Only then will it come, as a surprise, that you also have your own voice. It was always there like an undercurrent.

Unless you have found your natural inclination your life is going to be a long, long tragedy, from the cradle to the grave. The only people who have been blissful in the world are the people who have lived according to their own intuition and have rebelled against any effort by others to impose their ideas. Howsoever valuable those ideas may be, they are useless because they are not yours. The only significant idea is that which arises in you, grows in you, blossoms in you.

Jivan Mary, everybody is born a rebel because everybody is born to be an individual in his own right. Everybody is born not to be a part in a drama but to live an authentic life, not to be a mask but to be his original face. But no society till now has allowed people to be themselves. Once in a while a person has escaped - a Gautam Buddha, a Zarathustra, a Chuang Tzu, a Kabir. These people suffered all the condemnation of the society, but they found the joy of being themselves. All the condemnation of the society was nothing in comparison to the joy that they found. They suffered laughingly....

When al-Hillaj Mansoor was killed by the orthodox, the traditionalists, because he was saying things which were rebellious, almost a million people gathered to see this ugliest possible murder. The crucifixion of Jesus seems far more cultured, because al-Hillaj Mansoor was cut into pieces: his legs were cut off, his hands were cut off, his eyes were taken out - piece by piece. This was a torture perhaps no other man has ever gone through, but there was a smile on his face. Under all this inhumanity, barbarousness...

One of the men who was cutting off his hands could not resist the temptation to ask, "Why are you smiling? Even I am feeling immensely miserable, sad and guilty. But this is my duty, this is my job.

Why are you smiling?"

And what Mansoor said is something to be remembered. He said, "I am smiling because you are killing somebody else; you are not killing me - that is beyond your capacity. I know my self, which no fire can burn and no sword can kill. You can cut the body... I am just smiling at the foolishness of you, and the emperor who has ordered this stupid act."

Everybody is born a rebel, that's why it is so easy to transform anybody who is still alive. Just a little understanding, a little encouragement, and he can be helped to drop his whole past and be reborn.

Everybody can become a rebel.

A female gorilla was turning down all her male suitors. The zoo desperately needed some baby gorillas and the zookeeper was at a loss as to what to do about it. While driving home that evening, the keeper notices a hairy Italian man walking about without a shirt on, and pulls his car up alongside him.

"Hey," he calls, "I will pay you five hundred dollars if you will come to the zoo tomorrow morning and make love to our female gorilla."

"Vai a fanculo buddy," says the offended Italian, "you have some nerve!" And he storms off.

At home that night he relates the incident to his wife, who throws up her hands and cries, "Mamma mia! We are so poor, we need-a the money. So tomorrow you-a go and make love-a to this gorilla, or don't-a come home to-a mamma."

The next morning, at the zoo, the Italian is about to climb into the gorilla's cage when he turns to the zookeeper and says, "Look, I will make-a love to this-a gorilla on three conditions: First-a, I don't-a have to kiss it. Second-a, I do it once. And third-a, when the kids are born you raise them as-a Catholics."

Question 2:

Rabia Prabhudasi, I am not changing the meaning of the word; I am making it complete. The meaning that has been given to it is only half... just the negative meaning; and no negative can be without a positive. It is true, the word 'rebel' comes from Latin, rebellare, fighting back. But that is only half of the meaning; the other half has been missing for centuries, from the very beginning.

Nobody has bothered to complete the whole meaning of the word. Fighting against is only the beginning part. But fighting for what?

And it is not only with the word 'rebel', it is with many words. 'Freedom' has only a negative nuance in people's minds - freedom from. But nobody asks about freedom for. Freedom from is an essential part, but only a negative part. Unless you have a positive goal, your freedom from is meaningless.

You should also be clearly aware of what you are fighting for: What is the goal of your freedom?

'Rebel' and 'rebellion' have been condemned, and this is part of the condemnation - that they have been given only the negative meaning by the linguists in the dictionaries. Nobody has raised the question, "Rebellion for what?" - which should be very essential to ask. To me, the negative part is only the beginning, but not the end. The positive part is the end, and completes the whole circle.

You rebel against that which is dead, and you rebel for that which is living. You rebel against superstitions, and you rebel for truth. Otherwise, what is the need to rebel against superstitions?

Every rebellion is incomplete and futile if it is only negative. Only the positive will make it meaningful, significant.

And always remember about all words - if the society has kept only the negative meaning, that means it is against those words. Not only is it against actual rebellion, it is even against the word rebellion; it has given it a color which is negative. To give it a positive color, a positive beauty, will mean a support for it.

I am not changing the meaning, I am simply completing it; it has been incomplete too long. It needs completion, and the last finishing touches, so that it can regain the beauty which has been taken away from it.

Society has been very cunning about every direction in life - about words, about language, it has manipulated everything so that it becomes supportive to the establishment. Even language has to be freed from the chains which have been put over it by the past. Beautiful words like 'rebel', 'revolution', 'freedom', all have to be redeemed from sheer negativity. And the only way is to make the positive the center of the world; the negative will be only a preparation for the positive. You prepare the ground for a garden; you take away the weeds, you take away the unnecessary growth of wild plants, and their roots - this is the negative part.

But just taking away the weeds, the wild plants and their roots, and cleaning the ground, is not enough to make a garden. It is necessary, but not enough. You will have to plant roses also; that will be the positive part. You will have to plant beautiful flowers, beautiful trees. The negative part is only a preparation for something positive to happen.

Question 3:

Devageet, David Yallop's book is a tremendous contribution towards understanding the murderous instinct of the Catholic church. The same is needed to be done about every religion - because they all are doing the same thing, more or less. Perhaps the Catholic church is the best example because it is the most organized religion in the world, and the greatest in numbers - seven hundred million people are Catholics.

And that religion has committed every crime that you can imagine. It has burned thousands of women alive, by fictitiously labeling them as witches. There is no devil anywhere, and there are no witches anywhere. But these women were chosen to be destroyed because they were competitors to the Catholic religion. They were carrying the older and more ancient tradition of the days when the world was pagan. They were nature worshippers.

And for Catholicism that is the worst crime - because that means there is no need of a God, nature is enough. There is no need of a Jesus Christ as a savior, because nobody is drowning. And there is no need for the Catholic priests and their confessionals, because nature knows nothing as sin.

These women were burned alive because they were pagans. But just to burn them because they were pagans was not enough of an excuse. They had to be condemned in such a way that their being burned alive could be supported rationally. First, they were tortured for days together: special mechanisms were invented to torture them.

When, six years ago, I had a bad back and I was in tremendous pain, the doctors brought a small mechanism; they call it traction. It pulls you - your legs in one direction, your hands in another direction - to fix your backbone. I asked the doctors, "Do you know who has invented this machine?"

They were not aware.

It was invented by the Catholic church to torture the so-called witches. Sometimes their legs would come off the body; sometimes their hands would come off the body. It was just a coincidence that one woman who was suffering from a bad back for years, and nothing had been of any help... when she was tortured on this mechanism, she was amazed - her back pain disappeared. So the traction machine is a contribution of the Catholic church, and later on it moved to the hospitals.

And after a week or two weeks of continuous torture - no food, beating, not allowing them to sleep - the women, in a kind of helplessness, finally confessed. Because unless they would confess, the torture would continue. So what was the point? You could not escape.

The church was very powerful; it was not only the religion, it was also the government. It had all the powers of religion and all the powers of the government, of the state; so whatever they asked, the women confessed. The priests dictated the confession. They told them that they had to confess that they were having a sexual relationship with the devil - with full details.

And they had to confess it in the court. The full details were given to them - that the devil has a forked penis, not an ordinary penis. Forked, so that he could enter the woman from both her entries simultaneously. And those poor women had to confess in the court, and then the court ordered them to be burned alive because they had committed the gravest sin.

The church's power has remained, although its state power has shrunk to eight square miles in the Vatican. But it is still a kingdom - an independent nation. And the pope is also the head of a state.

Right now the manager of the Vatican's bank is in hiding, because the Italian government has an arrest warrant against him. But they cannot enter the Vatican, it is an independent country - and his crimes have been found to be great.

The pope runs perhaps the greatest mafia in the world. And the pope's bank in the Vatican turns all the income from drugs into legitimate money - the black money into white, millions of dollars per week. And the head of the bank is now being sought by the Italian government. There is an unbailable arrest warrant, and the police are waiting around the Vatican for him. But the pope has rewarded him, he has been made a cardinal; he was only a bishop.

The pope has been spending money on his world tours as no other pope has ever done before. Just a few months ago, in Australia, he spent more on his tour than the queen of England did when she went there. Almost every year he has been spending millions of dollars for his worldwide tours. And all this money comes from heroin and other drugs.

It is strange how blind humanity is. And these people go on speaking beautiful words; they preach against drugs, yet their whole empire depends on drugs! They condemn everything which they themselves practice. They condemn homosexuality, and almost fifty percent of Catholic priests are homosexuals. This is a very conservative estimate; the percentage is probably more than that. What to say about the monks in the monasteries?

One of the predecessors of this Polack pope was himself a homosexual. Before becoming a pope he was a cardinal in Milan. He had a boyfriend, and it was the talk of the town. Then he became the pope, and the first thing he did was to appoint his boyfriend as "secretary to the pope." The whole world knew that he was a homosexual. The Catholic church is against homosexuality, and the head of the church is a practitioner of homosexuality! - absolute dishonesty, insincerity.

Millions of people have been killed in the name of religion and God in the crusades, jihads and other religious wars. David Yallop's book, IN GOD'S NAME, is a great contribution, "in which he clearly lays out the role of the Roman Catholic church in murder, terrorism, embezzlement, drug-running, major and continual swindling of incredible sums of money; manipulation of politics in America, Italy, South America, Poland...."

Recently the pope declared that the church should not take part in any kind of politics; that Christian priests, monks, bishops, and cardinals should remain beyond politics. And while he was saying all this, he was sending millions of dollars to a political party in Poland to fight against communism.

These people have so many faces! If you are not to take part in politics, then why should you be interested in the communist party not remaining in power in Poland? And where did you get millions of dollars to support the opposition?... from drugs.

But this is not new. This has been going on since the crucifixion of Jesus. If that poor carpenter's son had known that this is what was going to be the ultimate result of his teachings, Jews would not have been needed to crucify him; he would have committed suicide himself!

What David Yallop has done for the Catholic church should be done for all religions: a deep research into their workings. And you will not find them less criminal than the Catholics.

Look at what happened to Buddhists. Gautam Buddha was born in India; his impact was so tremendous that almost the whole country was under his influence and millions of people became Buddhists. But once he was dead, what happened to those millions of Buddhists? They were murdered, they were burned alive, they were driven out of the country. The whole of Asia is now Buddhist, because those people who escaped India just to save their lives reached China, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Burma, Japan, Sri Lanka - they moved all over the Far East. So the whole Far East is Buddhist - but not India.

And in India there has not been a single Buddhist for twenty-five centuries. They could not simply evaporate - such a tremendous movement. But because it was against brahminism, against Hinduism, Hindus could not tolerate it, brahmins could not tolerate it. It was destroying their whole profession, because brahmins have lived like parasites on people - they don't do anything except religious rituals. And Buddha was against all religious rituals; he was against the VEDAS, which are full of nonsense.

While he was alive, the Hindus remained silent, because there was no argument to defeat him; what he was saying was so clear, so right and so timely, that it was impossible to have any confrontation.

But once he was dead, there began a tremendous butchery against the Buddhists.

The same has happened against the Jainas. But nobody can say anything against these killings because the government immediately interferes - under the pretext of "not hurting anybody's religious feelings." This is strange. People are murdered, and you should not say anything about it. Hence, there is not a single book in India comparable to David Yallop's book, because the government has to look to the voters, and the Hindus constitute the majority of voters.

Nobody has written a history of what Mohammedans have done to Hindus or Jainas while they were ruling India; how many beautiful temples they destroyed, how many millions of art pieces which represented centuries of work. They have destroyed the statues, the temples. Nobody knows how many women they have raped, how many men they have forced to either be Mohammedans or to die. Because not all Mohammedans that are in India have come from Arabia - many are converted people. And they were converted on the point of the sword, not by any intellectual conviction, not by proving that Mohammedanism is better than their religion. Mohammedans have used the sword as their only argument.

But not a single book exists to tell the story of continuous murder and rape for almost fifteen centuries; because Mohammedans are the second majority - again the government is interested in their votes. You will be surprised to know that although Mohammedans have taken Pakistan, dividing India into two parts, still the number of Mohammedans in India is greater than in any other Mohammedan country in the world.

What happened in the partition when India and Pakistan were divided? So many people were burned, whole trains were burned. Trains were coming from Pakistan burning, bringing burned corpses into India. Pakistan has erased Hindus completely, but nobody can say anything. If you say anything you immediately lose your right to freedom of speech, because you are hurting somebody's religious feelings. It is a strange phenomenon.

And rape has been one of the basic strategies of Mohammedans, because once a Hindu woman is raped by a Mohammedan, or even kept in his house for the whole night without any rape, the Hindu cannot accept the woman again. That is their tradition and their orthodox mind. She has become untouchable; she has to go back.

And how many Jews have been killed by Christians? And what a great conspiracy by America and England in creating Israel amongst an ocean of Mohammedans! Israel had not been in existence for centuries - Mohammedans have been there; its name was Palestine. But this was a strategy, and such a subtle conspiracy, that even Jews could not suspect - in fact, they asked for it. They wanted their own land.

After the second world war it was easier, because Palestine was under American and British troops.

So they forced the Jews on the Mohammedans and created a new nation. But the nation is so small, and surrounded on all sides by Mohammedan countries. Since Israel has been created, they have been in continuous trouble. And Mohammedans will never leave them in peace, because it is their country, which has been forcibly taken from them.

It is a subtle strategy to keep the Jews in continuous trouble; they have suffered for almost their whole history of four thousand years. The greatest calamity was Adolf Hitler - he killed six million Jews. And now the second conspiracy of Christian nations is the creation of Israel. This is to keep the Jews always, forever in trouble.

Every religion should be looked into, researched, and the public should be made fully aware of what these people have done to humanity. And all this nonsense that their religious feelings might be hurt should not be paid any attention to. You go on committing crimes against man and, when something is said about it, your "religious feelings" are hurt.

One of the Mohammedan caliphs, Omar, destroyed the greatest library in the world, the library in Alexandria. It contained the ancientmost scriptures from Atlantis, a continent which had sunk into the ocean, and from Lemuria, another small continent that had also gone under water. These were natural calamities - or perhaps man-made, there is no way to find out - but the library contained all their history, all their religions, all their art.

Omar went with his armies to Alexandria, it was the greatest seat of learning in those days. In one of his hands he had the Holy Koran, in the other hand he had a burning torch. He asked the chief librarian, a great scholar, "You have to answer two questions: First, is there some literature in the library which goes against the Holy Koran? If your answer is yes, I am going to burn it. If your answer is no, then too, I am going to burn it. Because if everything in this library is consistent with the Holy Koran, then the Holy Koran is enough. What is the need of having such a big library?"

He did not allow the chief librarian to answer; he answered himself. There was no alternative, either yes or no - in each case he was going to burn the library. And he set the library on fire. The library was so big that it took six months to put the fire out. But he destroyed a great treasure which cannot be recovered in any way.

Devageet, the religions have done immense, incalculable harm to all human values, to human life, to human understanding, to human evolution. And it is time that they should all be mercilessly exposed because that will prepare the ground for the birth of my rebel, for the birth of a great rebellion against these ugly institutions. It will bring the whole of humanity into a loving relationship, without nations, without religions; but with a deep religiousness, with a great respect for life, and great gratitude for existence.

All that is needed is a widespread rebelliousness, particularly in the younger generation, because they are going to live in the future. The past should not be repeated.

You are asking, "Is sannyas a training for rebellion?" Yes, Devageet.

"Are you preparing us to be warriors, fighting for the right to be individuals in a society which labels truth as lies, and calls lies the truth?"

Yes, Devageet.

Okay, Maneesha?

Yes, Beloved Master.