The Last
Testament Volume 6 - Chapter 2
Bhagwan, what purpose does your philosophy
or religion give for life - for the existence of anything at all?
First it is not right to make
religion and philosophy synonymous. They are two totally different things.
Philosophy is thinking about
life, its purpose, its goal, but it is only thinking.
Religion is living it, not
thinking.
The difference is as great as:
you are thinking about food, delicious food, and that you are eating it.
Thinking cannot quench your hunger - it is only eating that is going to help.
Philosophy is a futile exercise
of the mind - it leads nowhere.
Secondly, the moment you divide
philosophy and religion the question takes a different shape. Now it becomes:
what is the purpose of your religion?
The very idea of purpose is
valid in a philosophical investigation. That idea does not belong to religion
at all.
Religion is living. Living
totally, living intensely, without any purpose because purpose is always in the
future and living is always in the present. If you have a purpose to live your
life is divided between present and future - you cannot be total. And without
being total you cannot experience what life is.
The only way to be total is to
forget all about purpose. It is a meaningless question. It leads only to a
logical regress. If it is said that `A' is the purpose of life then the
question will remain `what is the purpose of A?' The question is not dissolved.
If `B' is the purpose of `A' then the question will simply shift from A to B.
Finally and ultimately, one has
to understand that there is no purpose to life or to existence... and there is
no need either.
It is perfectly beautiful to
have no purpose and live totally, enjoy totally, relax in the moment totally.
It will take you to the peaks of ecstasy - but that is not the purpose of life,
it is just a byproduct of total living.
It is a little bit difficult.
It will lead - I repeat again - to ultimate ecstasy. But that is not the goal.
If you make it a goal you will never reach it. It is not a purpose. If you make
it a purpose then you are cut off from it forever because purpose and goal all
exist in future and you have to live in the present.
And present and future never
meet.
So you have divided yourself
into two halves which are not going to meet. So I will not say that ecstasy is
the purpose or the goal. I will say, 'when you live intensely, totally in the
present, without any purpose and without any goal, ecstasy happens as a
byproduct of total living'.
Bhagwan, why does suffering
exist in the world?
The suffering exists in the
world because of purposes, goals and things like that. The suffering simply means
you are split, torn apart - you are in such a situation that you can never be
one whole, you can never be an organic unity.
Suffering disappears the moment
you drop purposes, goals - ends. And you start living moment to moment. There
is no tomorrow and there is no future.
Time means now.
And space means here.
All suffering disappears.
But because the so-called
leaders of the world, thinkers, philosophers, theologians - they are all giving
you great ideals to be achieved, great goals to be reached; they have managed
humanity to suffer forever. Those ideals, those goals, those ends are the
causes of suffering and your so-called great religious political, social
leaders are the criminals who have created the whole phenomenon of dividing
man.
But it has been done with such
sophistication, perhaps they themselves are not aware what they are doing. They
may be suffering themselves.
Bhagwan, what is the goal of
your religion or philosophy, nirvana or heaven et cetera? Can you describe this
goal or ultimate reality?
There is no goal. The question
of describing it does not arise. There is certainly a byproduct of total living
which can be indicated at.
It is absolute contentment,
fulfillment, coming to one's realization of all the potentials that were in the
seed form, now they are all have come to be flowers.
A great fragrance, a tremendous
insight and clarity into things, absolute silence and peace, no desire, nowhere
to go... everything is so calm and quiet there is no question, no word at all -
it is a wordless blissfulness.
But it is not a goal that I am
describing.
I hate the word goal.
It is good when you are playing
football, then you can have goal and goalkeepers, but don't make life a game of
football. Life is not a game. This has created a great problem for human beings
because whenever somebody has lived totally they had seen the beauty, the
rejoicing, the peacefulness, the tremendous quality of contentment. Seeing this
they have made it a goal. They thought that this is the goal to be achieved.
And this was only a byproduct.
But for the outsiders it became
a goal and they started striving for contentment, for desirelessness, for
fulfilment, for silence, for peace, for ecstasy, for nirvana...
and those people have never
reached. Not a single person who has made these things as goals has ever
reached. It is enough proof that in the whole history of humanity not a single
exception exists.
The people who have reached are
those who never bothered about goals, who never bothered about reaching
somewhere, they were simple people, loving people, loved life for its own sake,
no other purpose.
And to love life for its own
sake can be described my way of life.
Bhagwan, how did the universe
come to exist, and why?
It never came to exist, it has
always been there. So the question: how it came to exist does not arise.
And because it has always been
there, the question of why is also irrelevant.
Whom to ask? How to find?
It has always been there, and
it will be always there. It is simply there.
These questions are invented by
your so-called philosophers which if reduced to reality are more foolosophers
than philosophers. Because they can't see a simple point, a simple logical
point, that if you say how the existence came into being, any answer is not
going to satisfy.
Each answer will create the
same question again.
It will lead you to an
absurdity in logical terms. Seeing that every question will bring an answer,
but the question will not move even a single inch, you can go on finding other
answers - the question remains the same.
It simply shows that the
question is wrong. Otherwise some answer would have been suitable. And you
cannot conceive any answer that can be suitable about: how this existence, why
this existence?
Hence the people who had a
clarity - not thinkers, thinkers are the most clouded people, they don't have
any clarity. But people of meditation who had absolute clarity, no thinking,
they could see immediately which question is relevant and which question is
irrelevant.
Even to answer an irrelevant
question is not good because that shows that you are not clear, that you cannot
see clearly that your answer will again help the same question to crop up. So I
seem(*) existence find it(*) it have not. It has always been here. It has never
been created. It will always be here.
The forms may change but the
essential reality into those forms continues. It is a continuum - absolute
continuum.
This also helps you to get rid
of god which is a heavy burden - a pain in the neck. The idea of god helps
nobody and tortures millions of people. Devil has never tortured so many
people. But the idea of god has made people torture themselves. And the idea of
god is simply invented, invented because of these questions.
I could see it even as a small
child because just by the side of my house there was a temple, a Hindu temple
and people were worshipping and priests were worshipping and I used to play in
that temple and ask the priest, that "What kind of game is this that you
go on playing? Because there is nobody, just a stone sculptured in the shape of
a man; and you are praying and you are kneeling down and tears are flowing,
great emotion, great sentimentality and I don't see a single tear on the other
side. On the other side there is nobody, just a stone."
And they will say, "Don't
say things like that. It is not a stone. It is God who created the world.
Without God the world cannot exist. Something is necessarily needed. If it
exists, then there must be a creator."
And finally they prohibited me
to enter in the temple. Because I asked them, that "If that is true, then
who created God, because he exists according to you. So you must have the guts
to ask, `Who created God?'" And they were so angry that they simply,
virtually threw me out of the temple and told me never to come in. I said,
"But this is not the answer. It simply shows you don't have any answer and
if God can exist without being created then what is wrong in the existence to
exist without being created."
If you have to accept at some
point that a thing can be without any creator then why go into unnecessary
hypotheses. Then why not remain with the reality which is not a hypothesis?
Bhagwan, what lies beyond
death? What is it that exists - the soul, atman - can you describe it?
There is no death, only a
change of form.
Everything continues...
The water that is constituting
you, almost eighty percent or more, goes to the water. The mud that is
constituting you, goes to the mud.
All the elements that
constitute you go to their original sources. Your consciousness moves on into a
new body. You can call it soul, you can call it atman.
The old body was no more
capable as a house to be lived in so you simply move in a new house and you
continue moving into new houses till any kind of desire remains in you.
The moment all desires
disappear, the moment you live so totally that all desires are consumed by your
living, that you simply live without any desire, without any ambition, without
any goal, then the material elements move into material elements and your
consciousness moves into the universal consciousness.
Nothing dies.
Only combinations disperse.
And they constitute another
body for you. Existence is very compassionate - it goes on giving you new
bodies, new forms, until you have learned the lesson.
And the lesson is to live so
totally that there is no space for any desire. Then you are allowed to be part
of the universal consciousness.
This universal consciousness is
not separate from existence. It is part, intrinsic part of existence. Existence
is one. Matter and consciousness are two extremes of one energy. Matter is a
certain combination of the same energy as consciousness.
It is the same cloth out of
which all kinds of clothes are made - your shirts, your caps, your pyjamas,
everything. According to your need.
But the cloth, the basic
reality, is one.
And death is just a
misconception, a misunderstanding.
It always happen to others.
That's the reason why you are having a misunderstanding.
It is always somebody else who
dies. You never die. So the question arises `what is death?' And the moment you
will die, if you are living with all kinds of desires, unfulfilled ambitions,
then the possibility is the process of death will happen but you will be
unconscious. That too is the compassion of existence.
Just like a surgeon will give
you anesthesia before surgery, existence gives you a coma before it separates
your elements and changes the whole structure and gives you a new being, a new
form.
But nothing dies.
Death is as much a lie as God
is.
So when I first read Frederick
Nietzsche's statement that 'God is dead' I said that this is such a small
statement but having too biggest lies in it - God and death.
Bhagwan, how do you explain the
need and existence of so many religions?
There are so many religions
because there are so many imaginative people in the world. If there was clarity
in people's minds, there would not be a single religion. Then religion would
not be needed at all.
It is the imagination that
creates religions.
Because these questions haunt
the mind of anybody who does not know anything beyond the mind. The mind is
full of questions, curiosities - it wants some answers. Even if they are false,
it is a solace. Not to have any answers is very difficult.
To accept one's ignorance is
against man's ego.
So it would rather accept any
stupid answer rather than say that "I don't know"...
it hurts. It wants to claim
that it knows. It covers up all the questions that are haunting him - who created
the world, why he created the world, when he created the world?
Now it is just a question of
your imagination how you manage to answer these questions. Each religion has
its own imagination. That is the only difference between all religions. They
are not based in truth because truth cannot have so many religions.
It is different climates,
different people, different ages, and different imaginations.
For example, there are tribes,
ancient tribes, which have remained still attached to their old pattern, they
have not changed, they are still dominated by women not by men. The matriarchal
aboriginals; their god is a woman, obviously...
because if the society is
dominated by women how can a man be god?
And in fact, the god is the
imagination of the woman, the powerful one. The woman is the priestess, the
woman decides all the rituals. Naturally the god is a woman.
And then there are societies
which are made by man, dominated by man... they cannot accept God as a woman.
God has to be a man. Simply the male chauvinist, but a natural imagination.
Whoever is in power will decide
who is the god.
Different cultures, different
societies and different religions have different ideas of their heaven, their
hell, and it is all imaginative.
I have seen in India in the
temples, there used to be - I don't know whether they still are there or have
been removed - but in my childhood I have seen in temples maps hanging showing
where is hell, where is heaven, where is God's house, where is Devil's house...
And these people who had made these maps had no idea of the map of the world,
in which we live, because you cannot imagine it you have to know it otherwise
soon your imagination will be proved false.
They did not have any map of
the world, but they had maps of heaven and hell - exact. And nobody can
challenge, because there is no way to prove it or disprove it. But they all had
descriptions which show something of themselves, not about heaven and hell.
The Tibetan hell is eternally
ice cold - there is a rare hell, because all the hells are full of fire and
people are being burned. But in Tibetan hell it is eternal ice that never melts
and you are thrown into the ice. Because Tibet has suffered so much from ice,
finding some fire in hell would be impossible - you cannot find any fire there.
Yes in their heaven, it is
warm, fire is available, it never gets cold, because it is their climate that
is giving them a certain imagination.
The Indian heaven is not warm,
it is almost air-conditioned. They had no word like air-conditioner in those
ancient days, but the description is that just as in the early morning cool air
blows, the whole day it is the same - the cool air. India has suffered much
from heat, naturally for saints cool air is needed and fire is needed for
sinners.
These are all man made
conceptions. All the religions are rooted in imagination, in dreaming. They are
nothing to do with facts, nothing to do with truth. That's why there are so
many. There are three hundred religions in the world. Perhaps it is impossible
to imagine anything more... three hundred religions may have exhausted all
possibilities of imaginations, that's why the number has stopped there. But
they are all false. Their manyness is a proof of their falsity.
Bhagwan, what would happen if
religion did not exist?
It will be just far out...
Life would be a real joy,
without any guilt.
People will be more authentic,
more sincere, in living and in every aspect of their being.
Religion has made them
hypocrites. It has given them masks to bear. It has hidden their original
faces.
If there was no religion people
will have their originality, their original faces, their sincerity, their
uniqueness. And they will be playful about everything, there will be no
seriousness. All seriousness is created by religions...
Asking questions which are
absurd, then answering those questions, then forcing people, conditioning
people to accept those false answers for false questions - they have destroyed
humanity tremendously. They have destroyed your freedom, they have destroyed
your joy, they have destroyed your laughter, they have destroyed as much as
nobody else... These religions have been a curse, not a blessing.
If there were no religions life
will be a real blessing and my whole effort is that there should be no religions
and man should be left alone with his reality and the reality of existence,
without all these pretenders, prophets, saviors, messiahs...
It will bring a great newness
to a life which seems to be dull, a freshness to a life which these people have
made a sin. It will bring songs to people's heart, it will be possible again to
dance under the stars for no reason at all... just because it is so beautiful
to dance, so beautiful to sing, so beautiful to love, so beautiful to live.
The burden on the heart put by
these religions is Himalayan.
It is a miracle that man has
still survived... somehow, he goes on creeping under the burden, but he has
survived.
But it is only survival, it is
not life.
Bhagwan, another question: what
is important to you?
It depends on each moment.
I cannot give a wholesale
answer to it because that means again I am proposing a philosophy, again making
a religion that `this is important for me and this will be important for me
tomorrow too.'
It changes...
While I am taking a bath, the
shower is important.
While I am talking to you,
talking to you is important.
While I am eating, eating is
important.
While I am sleeping, sleeping
is important.
So it is very difficult for me.
Everything is important at the time I am doing it...
and I don't do unimportant
things.
Okay. Good Maneesha.