Mind lives on borrowed knowledge.

WE HUMANS SEEM TO LIKE TO BE TOLD WHAT TO DO. IF WE DON’T HAVE A ”GOD,” WE HAVE SOMEONE ELSE TO TELL US WHAT IS RIGHT OR WRONG AND WHAT IS GOOD OR BAD. WHY SUCH A RESISTANCE TO THINKING FOR OURSELVES?

It is not a question of thinking. In fact you think too much. It is a question of how to stop thinking and of seeing directly into every situation that you are facing. If there is no thought, there is no barrier, there is no dust in your eyes; you can see clearly.

And when this clarity is there, you don’t have the alternatives of good and bad. With this clarity there is a choiceless consciousness. You simply do what is good – not that you make any effort to do it. It comes effortlessly to the man of awareness, consciousness, alertness. He simply cannot imagine the bad, the evil. His whole awareness simply points him towards the good.

So your problem is not why there is such a resistance to thinking for yourselves. You cannot think for yourself, because the vision of good is not part of the mind. And you know only the mind, hence the whole problem arises. Because you know only the mind, you don’t have clarity. You have hundreds of thoughts moving continuously in your mind. It is a rush hour twenty-four hours; a crowd of thoughts goes on, clouds go on moving so fast that you are completely hidden behind the clouds. Your eyes are almost blind. Your inner sensitivity is completely covered by your thoughts.

Through the mind you cannot know what is good and what is bad. You have to depend on others. This dependence is absolutely natural because mind is a dependent phenomenon; it depends on others; its whole knowledge is borrowed.

All that your mind knows has come either from the parents, or from the priest, or from the teachers, or from the society. Just watch, and you will not be able to find a single thought that is original to you.

All is borrowed; mind lives on borrowed knowledge. In every situation it wants somebody to guide it. Your whole life is being guided by others. From the very beginning you are told what is right and what is wrong by your parents. Then your teachers, then your priests, then your neighbors... not that they know, they too have borrowed from others.

This borrowing goes on century after century, generation after generation. Every disease goes on being inherited by the new generation. It is just a replica of the older generation, a reflection, a shadow, but it does not have its own originality. It is because of this you need a god, an ultimate guide. You cannot depend on your parents, because you start seeing as you grow older their falsities, their lies. You start seeing that their advice is not perfect; they are fallible human beings. But the small child has believed in them as if they were infallible. It was not their fault, it was the small child’s innocence; it trusted the father, the mother, who loved him. But finally he comes to know as he grows towards a little maturity that what these people say is not necessarily true.

One day I was playing – I must have been five or six years old... A man used to come to see my father, an utterly boring man. And my father was growing tired of him. So he called me and told me, ”I see that man is coming; he will waste my time unnecessarily and it is very difficult to get rid of him. I always have to go out, and say to him, ‘Now I have some appointment’ – unnecessarily I have to go out, just to get rid of him. And sometimes it happens that he says, ‘I am coming with you. So on the way we can have a good talk.’ And there is no talk, it is a monologue. He talks, and tortures people.”

So my father said, ”I am going inside. You just remain playing outside. And when he comes, you simply say to him that your father is out.”

And my father used to teach me continuously, ”Never speak an untruth.” So I was shocked. This was contradictory.

So when the man came and asked me, ”Where is your father?” I said, ”He is in, but he says that he is out.”

My father heard this from inside, and the man entered with me, so he could not say anything in front of him. When the man had gone, after two or three hours my father was really angry with me, not with the man.

He said, ”I told you to tell him, ‘My father is out.’”

I said, ”Exactly, I repeated the same thing. I told him the same thing: ‘My father says to tell you that he is out. But he is in, the truth is he is in.’ You have been teaching me to be true whatever the consequence. So I am ready for the consequence. Any punishment, if you want to give me, give. But remember, if truth is punished, truth is destroyed. Truth has to be rewarded. Give me some reward, so I can go on speaking the truth whatever happens.”

He looked at me and he said, ”You are clever.”

I said, ”That you know already. Just give me some reward. I have spoken the truth.”

And he had to give me some reward; he gave me a one rupee note. At that time one rupee was almost equal to twenty-five rupees today. You could live with a one rupee note for almost half a month. And he said, ”Go and enjoy whatever you want to purchase.”

I said, ”You have to remember it. If you tell me to speak a lie, I am going to tell the person that you have told me to. I am not telling a lie. And each time you contradict yourself, you will have to reward me. So stop lying. If you don’t want that man, you should tell him directly that you don’t have any time and don’t like his boring talk because he says the same things again and again. Why are you afraid? Why do you have to tell a lie?”

He said, ”The difficulty is, he is my best customer.”

My father had a very beautiful clothes shop, and this man was rich. He used to purchase a huge lot for his family, relatives, friends. He was a very generous man – just being boring was his problem.

So my father said, ”I have to suffer all the boredom because he is my best customer and I cannot lose him.”

I said, ”That is your problem, that is not my problem. So you are lying because he is your best customer, and I am going to say this to him.”

He said, ”Wait!”

I said, ”I cannot wait because he must be told immediately that you go on suffering all his boring talk just because he is a good customer – and you will have to give me some reward.”

He said, ”You are so difficult. You are destroying my best customer. And I will have to give you a reward too. But just don’t do that.”

But I did it. And I got two rewards, one from that boring man because I told him, ”Truth should always be rewarded, so give me some reward because I am destroying one of the best customers of my father.”

He hugged me and he gave me two rupees. And I said, ”Remember, don’t stop buying from my father’s shop, but don’t bore him either. If you want to talk, you can talk to the walls, to the trees. The whole world is available. You can just close your room and talk to yourself. And then you will be bored.”

And I told my father, ”Don’t be worried. Look, one rupee I have got from you, two rupees I have got from your customer. Now one more rupee I am owed; you have to give it me, because I have told the truth. But don’t be worried. I have made him a better customer and he will never bore you again. He has promised me.”

My father said, ”You have done a miracle!” Since that day that man never came, or even if he did come he would stay just for one or two minutes to say hello and he would go away. And he continued to purchase from my father’s shop.

And he said to my father, ”It is because of your son that I continue. Otherwise I would have felt wounded, but that little boy managed both things. He stopped me boring you and he asked me, requested me, ‘Don’t stop shopping from my father’s shop. He depends on you.’ And he got two rupees from me and he was saying such a shocking thing to me. Nobody has ever dared tell me that I am a boring man.”

He was the richest man in the village. Everybody was in some way connected with him. People borrowed money from him, people have borrowed lands from him to work on. He was the richest man and the biggest landowner in that village. Everybody was somehow or other obliged to him, so nobody was able to say to him that he was boring.

So he said, ”It was a very great shock, but it was true. I know I am boring. I bore myself with my thoughts. That’s why I go to others to bore them, just to get rid of my thoughts. If I am bored with my thoughts, I know perfectly well the other person will be bored, but everybody is under an obligation to me. Only this boy has no obligation and is not afraid of the consequences. And he is daring. He asked for the reward. He said to me, ‘If you don’t reward truth, you are rewarding lies.’”

This is why this society is in such a mad space. Everybody is teaching you to be truthful, and nobody is rewarding you for being truthful, so they create a schizophrenia. The Indian Government has the motto Satyameva jayate – ”truth is always victorious.” That is their motto.

But every politician goes on lying to the people, giving promises which they know they cannot fulfill. And in every court is written satyameva jayate, truth is always victorious. But in every court it is not the truth that is victorious, it is the more efficient, more argumentative advocate who wins the case. It does not matter whether he is in favor of the criminal or against the criminal.

I used to have a vice-chancellor who was one of the biggest law experts in the world. He had three offices, one in London, one in New Delhi, and one in Peking. He was continuously running from one country to another country, and he never lost a single case. All the great cases in which millions of dollars were involved... all the maharajas of this country were his clients; but he was a drunkard.

He was fighting a case in the privy council in London, the highest appeals court for India under the British empire. The supreme court was here but if you wanted to go against the supreme court, the privy council was in London. And he was a privy council man; he was continuously fighting cases in the privy council.

That night he was at a party and drank too much. Next day he had a hangover, and was still a little drunk, but he had to go to the court. The case involved two districts of Rajasthan, Udaipur and Jaipur. Both the maharajas were fighting for a certain bit of land – to which district did it belong? It was thousands of acres of land. And under his hangover he forgot which party he was fighting for, Udaipur or Jaipur.

So he went on criticizing the maharaja of Jaipur; all his arguments were against the maharaja. Many times his secretary pulled his coat, but he simply wouldn’t listen. When it was lunchtime, the court stopped for an hour. Then the secretary said, ”You have spoilt the whole case. You are for the maharaja of Jaipur and you are arguing against him. And you have created such a problem because the man who is against the maharaja of Jaipur, who is fighting you, another great expert, is at a loss what to do. All the arguments that he has prepared, you have already put against the maharaja of Jaipur.”

Now he was getting over his hangover; he said, ”Don’t be worried. There is still time.”

After lunchtime he said to the court, ”Before lunch I gave all the arguments that the opposite party can give. Now I am going to criticize the opposite party, argument by argument, because I am standing here for the maharaja of Jaipur.” And he criticized his own arguments so cleverly.

When he told me this... I used to go often to visit him. He loved me very much. He always told me: ”You should join the law department, not philosophy.”

I said, ”That is not my field.” But he loved my arguments.

He said, ”It is a loss to the world of law and constitution. You have such arguments that you would become a world-famous legal expert.”

I said, ”I am going to become a world-notorious illegal expert. Don’t be worried about me."

But he loved me, so he told me that incident. It is not a question of truth at all, it is only a question of who is a better arguer.

On the one hand the government and all the religions and all the preachers go on saying, ”You should tell the truth.” But society does not reward the truth. Just today I have received a threatening letter from a law firm in Madras that I have offended the religious feelings of their clients.

I have told my legal secretary, Anando, to write to them that in the first place there are no religious feelings. A religion is beyond feelings and beyond thoughts and beyond mind. There are only religious superstitions. A man of religion cannot be hurt. He knows the truth. It is the lies that you are living in that are hurt. Truth always hurts lies. So you should tell your clients to be really religious. Go beyond the mind, go beyond feelings, sentiments, emotions, thoughts and you will not be hurt.

But if you want to come to the court, you can. My whole life I have been fighting in courts on the same point that people’s religious feelings are hurt. I have been telling the judges, ”If I am true and somebody’s feelings are hurt, do you think I have to be punished for it? That man needs psychological treatment. If his religious feelings are so weak, that shows that they are only beliefs. He does not know what religion is. And if truth hurts people, what do you suggest? Should I start lying?” And the judges would look all around – what to do? They cannot say I should start lying, so they are puzzled.

In the first court case they gave me a choice of the Bible, the Koran or Bhagavad Gita, whichever religion I belonged to. I was asked to take the book – all the books were on the table – and take the oath that I would speak only the truth and nothing else.

I said, ”I cannot do that for one reason: all these three books are full of lies. To take an oath on a book which is full of lies is absolutely absurd; you are an intelligent man. Secondly, I cannot take the oath because I always speak the truth. Taking the oath will mean that I won’t speak the truth unless I take the oath. The implication is clear. You are telling me that I am an untruthful man. You are insulting me in your court. If I insult you, you will say that the court has been insulted. But you are insulting me by telling me to take the oath. I cannot take the oath because I simply speak the truth. There is no question of an oath.”

He looked at me and he said, ”I can understand, but this creates a problem. Without taking the oath, the case cannot start.”

I said, ”That is not my problem. Who wants to start it? It is the other party that is starting it. I can go home right now.”

He said, ”I will make an exception for you because you are saying you will speak the truth.”

I said, ”I am not saying that, I am saying I only speak the truth. And that’s the problem. These people are hurt by the truth. I have said that there is no God, and they are believers of God. Now they should prove that there is a God. That is their problem, not my problem. I simply repeat again, there is no God. Now they should prove the existence of God with evidence, with witnesses.”

”What do you think?” I asked the judge. ”Do you believe in God? Do you have any evidence, any witness who has seen God? Can you say that you have seen God?”

He said, ”It seems you are the judge here and I am the criminal.”

I said, ”Truth is always victorious. It is just behind you. Read it.”
The case was dismissed. Hundreds of cases have been dismissed. But the society goes on rewarding a person who consoles you. It does not matter that he is consoling you by a lie.

Once it happened that a man died and his wife was really in despair, crying and crying. And one of my neighbors went to her and said, ”Don’t be worried, the soul is immortal. Your husband has not died, it is just the body; his soul is immortal and cannot die. So don’t unnecessarily be in despair, be sad and cry, there is no need.”

I was listening, standing by his side. I thought, ”Let me wait. When somebody dies in this fellow’s house, then I will go.” Two years later his father died. So I went immediately.

My father said, ”Where are you going?” I said, ”The same place you are going,” because he was going to participate in the funeral procession. A neighbor has died and he was an old friend. He said, ”He was my old friend, but why are you going?”

I said, ”I am going to take care of his son, because that idiot was telling a woman whose husband had died, ‘Don’t cry, the soul is immortal.’ Now I have to see whether he is crying or not.”

And he was crying. So I said, ”Stop crying. You were telling that poor woman that the soul is immortal. What happened? Your father’s soul is not immortal? Stop crying.”

He said, ”You are a strange person. I am in a deep sadness.”

I said, ”What happened two years ago? When somebody else’s husband died, you told her great and beautiful things. All lies! Your tears prove you were lying. If you were true, there would be no tears. Your father’s soul is immortal.”

He said, ”I know it. But what to do? I feel sad.”

I said to him, ”That woman also knew it.”

All knowledge is borrowed; hence all knowledge that is borrowed is a lie. Deep down you are not in agreement with it. Deep down there is doubt.

So what you are asking is: If we don’t have a God, suddenly the problem arises, to whom do we have to look for guidance about what is good and what is bad? And you feel, you think, it is because there is a certain resistance to thinking. No, it is not as you think. It is not a question of resistance to thinking. Thinking cannot solve the problem.

For example, a man has fallen into a well. Now is it good or bad to pull him out? Can you decide that by thinking? You may think it is good to save the man; but if you save the man and tomorrow he commits a murder, then you will be responsible, at least fifty percent responsible, for the murder. If you had not saved the man, there would have been no murder.

There is a religious sect, Terapanth, in India, which says: Don’t interfere in anybody’s life. If somebody is drowning, you simply move on; don’t listen. He is shouting for help, ”Save me!” Don’t listen, because he is suffering from his past evil acts.

If you interfere, you are committing two crimes. First, you are interfering in his personal life. He was suffering because of his personal evil acts. He has to suffer; you are preventing him. He will have to fall again some day. It is better to let him finish with the past evil acts. And secondly, by saving him you are taking an immense responsibility. He may rape a woman, he may kill somebody. He may turn out to be a thief or anything, and you will be responsible. So you have unnecessarily taken a responsibility on yourself which will disturb your own spiritual growth.”

So the followers of Terapanth – the head of the panth is Acharya Tulsi – say, ”Don’t give any food to a beggar. He is a beggar because he is suffering from his past life’s karmas.” They don’t believe in charity, they don’t believe in compassion, they don’t believe that you should help anybody who is in trouble. You should keep aloof, otherwise you are taking responsibilities which will become too burdensome for you. The first task is to get rid of your own evil acts and now you are taking on other people’s responsibilities. You will never become enlightened. So the people following Acharya Tulsi have become absolutely inhuman; nothing matters.

Thinking cannot decide anything, because something may be good in one situation and the same thing may be bad in a different situation. Sometimes even poison can be medicine, and sometimes even medicine can be poison – you have to understand the changing flux of life.

So by thinking you cannot decide. It is not a question of deciding as a logical conclusion, it is a question of choiceless awareness. You need a mind without thoughts. In other words, you need a no-mind, just a pure silence, so you can see directly into things. And out of that clarity will come the choice on its own; you are not choosing. You will act just as a buddha acts. Your action will have beauty, your action will have truth, your action will have the fragrance of the divine. There is no need for you to choose.

You have to look for guidance because you don’t know your inner guide is hidden inside you. You have to find the inner guide, and that’s what I call your witness. That’s what I call your dharma, that’s what I call your intrinsic buddha. You have to awaken that buddha and your life will shower blessings, benediction. Your life will become so radiant with good, with godliness, more than you can possibly conceive.

It is almost like light. Your room is dark, just bring light in. Even a small candle will do, and the whole darkness disappears. And once you have a candle you know where the door is. You don’t have to think about it: ”Where is the door?” Only blind people think about where the door is. People who have eyes and the light is there, they don’t think. Have you ever thought, ”Where is the door?” You simply get up and go out. You never give a single thought to where the door is. You don’t start groping for the door or hitting your head against the wall. You simply see, and there is not even a flicker of thought. You simply go out.

Exactly the same is the situation when you are beyond mind. When there are no clouds and the sun is bright in the sky, you don’t have to think, ”Where is the sun?” When there are clouds covering the sun, you have to think about it.

Your own being is covered with thoughts, emotions, feelings, and they are all mind-products. Just put them aside, and then whatever you do is good – not that you follow certain scriptures, not that you follow certain commandments, not that you follow certain spiritual leaders. You are in your own right the guide of your life. And that is the dignity of man, to be the guide of his own life. That makes man a lion, transforms him from a sheep which is always looking for somebody else to defend it.

But this is not only your problem, this is the problem of almost the whole of humanity. You have been programmed by others as to what is right and what is wrong.

So when there is no God, there is no holy scripture and there is no son of God like Jesus Christ to save you, and there is no meaning in the pope who represents Jesus Christ who is the son of God who does not exist! Can you be a son of someone who does not exist? To be a son of someone who does not exist simply means you are a crackpot – and the pope is representing the crackpot, Jesus Christ. And he goes on saying that he is infallible.

And each pope has contradicted other popes. In these twenty centuries there have been many instances when one pope acted in a certain way and another pope demolished that and changed the rule. Both cannot be right. Both cannot be infallible. Both can be fallible, but both cannot be infallible, one has to be fallible. But if one pope is fallible, then what is the guarantee that other popes will not be fallible?

And the pope is elected. Do you elect a buddha? By election you decide who is a buddha? Then your politicians will become buddhas, and your buddhas will not have any votes, because your buddhas will not go begging for votes. A buddha is unconcerned whether you think him a buddha or not.

The pope is elected. And you will be surprised to know that even Jesus Christ, three hundred years after his death, was elected as a divine being by a conference under the Emperor Constantine. The conference is known as the Niscene Council. It was by election, by voting, that it was decided that Jesus is holy.

You cannot decide by election that Jesus is holy. You cannot decide by election whether Albert Einstein is right or wrong – by election, by people who don’t know any mathematics, who don’t know any physics. People who don’t have any experience of the holy are voting for or against Jesus, whether he is holy or not. After three hundred years, people who have not known Jesus and people who have no idea and no experience of holiness, they are deciding by election!

It was just because of the power of Emperor Constantine; he forced people to vote for Jesus Christ as a holy man. Because they could not go against the emperor, they had to vote. And then the second thing he wanted them to vote on was: although Jesus Christ was holy and was a messiah, he failed in his mission. ”I am the real messiah.” Constantine said to the conference, ”You now vote for me. I am the real messiah and a successful one.” He turned the whole Roman empire to Christianity. That’s why the Vatican exists in Italy. Italy’s old name was the Roman Empire, and under Constantine the whole of the Roman empire was converted to Christianity. Of course he was far more successful than Jesus.

You can’t think Jesus was a success. He was crucified, poor fellow. Do you call this success?

Crucifixion? On either side two criminals... even they were laughing. They were crucified, but they had committed crimes so there was no question; they knew that this was absolutely justified.

And Jesus told those two... first, to one he said, ”Don’t be worried, you will be coming with me to paradise. And I am the son of God so I will help you to enter into paradise.” Then he told the other, and both started laughing. They said, ”You cannot save yourself! And you are not a criminal, we know. You have not committed any crime, and you are being crucified. You cannot save yourself and you are promising us that you will save us?”

But Constantine forced the council of Niscene to accept him as the real messiah – and certainly Constantine was successful; he converted the whole of the Roman empire to Christianity.

Jesus had only twelve apostles, uneducated, carpenters, fishermen, uncultured – not a single rabbi, not a single learned man was ever his follower. No educated, no cultured people ever gathered around him.

But the viceroy of the Roman empire – Judea was under the Roman empire – Pontius Pilate, heard about him from his wife. Just by chance she was passing when Jesus was preaching to a crowd, so she stopped her chariot. From her chariot she heard Jesus and she loved what he was saying. Those sayings were beautiful. She told her husband, ”This man has something, some quality. I have never heard any man speaking with such authority, such beautiful sayings. And he is uneducated and very young,” – he was only thirty years at that time. By thirty-three he was crucified.

So Pontius Pilate could not go as a viceroy to listen to him, but in disguise as a soldier he just passed that way and stood under a tree far away, listening to what this man was saying. And his wife was right.

Pilate was a very educated man, but he had never heard anybody speaking with such authority; such beautiful words from an uneducated man! So he was very favorable to Jesus and wanted somehow to save him from crucifixion, but the Jews were too much against him – not that he had committed any crime, but because he was claiming something which the Jews could not accept. He was claiming, ”I am your last prophet for whom you have been waiting for centuries. I have come.”

And he was a carpenter’s son, and there was even a difficulty believing that he was his own father’s son, because he was born just four months after the marriage. That is how the whole story begins about the Virgin Mary and the Holy Ghost. The whole thing was that the girl was already pregnant when she married Joseph the carpenter. It was not the Holy Ghost, it was some unholy neighbor. And he was not God’s son; he was not even the son of his own father!

But if you tell the truth, if you call him ”the bastard” then Christians are going to be hurt in their religious feelings. And I am simply telling the truth! They have to prove where the Holy Ghost is, and what is the logic behind calling him holy if he is raping virgin girls?

But people feel hurt because they don’t know what authentic religiousness is. You are living with ideas, borrowed, so when God is no longer there, Jesus is no longer there, popes are no longer there, who is going to guide you?

If God is not there, then all your Hindu incarnations of God are phony. When God himself is not there, how can he be incarnated in Krishna, in Ram...?

These are just arch-egoists proclaiming something which they cannot prove. Not a single incarnation of God has been able to prove on what grounds he is calling himself an incarnation. Self-styled, socalled incarnations of God, self-styled prophets and messiahs, they have all created your morality, your religion, and you have been depending on them. And you think from these people can come the truth?

Truth can only arise within you. Nobody else can give it to you. And with truth comes beauty, followed by good. This is the authentic trinity of a truly religious man: truth, beauty, good. These three experiences happen when you enter into your own subjectivity, when you explore the interiority of your being.

You have been living in the porch outside your being; you have never gone in. Once you go in you will find your buddha, your awareness, your choiceless consciousness. Then you don’t have to decide what is good and what is wrong. That choiceless consciousness takes you towards the good without any effort. It is effortless.

And because it is effortless it brings you great joy. When there is effort... have you ever thought about it? Effort simply means repression. Otherwise there is no need of any effort. Do you make any effort to feel hungry? Or do you make any effort to feel thirsty? When you are thirsty you know you are thirsty, when you are hungry you know you are hungry.

But you have to make an effort to be celibate. All efforts are futile, against nature. I declare unto you there has never been a single man who was celibate, unless he was impotent. But the impotents don’t count.

I say it on the grounds that nobody can go against nature. Those who try to go against nature have to make an effort. All effort is against nature, and all relaxation is in tune with nature. To be in tune is to be religious, to be in tune with the universe. And you don’t have to look for any guide. That very tuning turns you into a beautiful flower, fragrant. It is not an effort on your part, it is simply a natural growth.

But all your religions are against nature. It is very strange – and you have never thought about it – but all these religions say God created nature. Yet, if God created nature, then to be against nature means to be against God. It is such a simple argument, it does not need much intelligence. If God has created existence, then to be in tune with existence is the only way of being religious – to be in tune with God’s existence.

But, strangely, all religions teach you to be against nature. Fast! But fasting is not natural. Perhaps once in a while, but that too is needed only if you have been unnatural with your stomach. If you have been stuffing unnecessary things in your stomach, once in a while you may need to fast. But if you have been natural, eating only that amount which is needed by your body – not a single thing more – you will never need to fast in your whole life.

All religions teach you not to sleep for eight hours, which is natural. They are teaching you to cut your sleep. Saints sleep only three hours, two hours; the greater the saint, the less the sleep.

One day a woman came to me, the wife of a sardar, a Sikh (AT THIS SARDAR GURUDAYAL SINGH LAUGHS HEARTILY.) It was not the wife of Sardar Gurudayal Singh because he does not believe in wives, he believes in girlfriends.

The wife came to me, and said, ”My husband is going bananas.”

I said, ”What happened to your husband?”

She said, ”He has been following a so-called saint who teaches him stupid things, and he follows...”

The saint had told her husband, ”First you should start living on pure food.”

And what is pure food according to the Hindu mind? – the only pure food is milk. And in fact it is one of the most impure things in the world because it comes out of blood; it is really a transformation of blood. That’s why when you drink milk you start looking red. It is an impure thing, the worst thing you could think of. But Hindus believe that drinking milk is the purest thing.

And it is against nature. Have you seen any grown-up animal living on the milk of the mother? Just in the beginning, when the child of any animal cannot digest solid food – it is only a question of weeks – he has to depend on the mother’s milk. Once he starts eating solid food, he completely forgets about the mother’s milk. It was a temporary phenomenon.

It is only man who goes on drinking milk even when he can digest solid food. And the milk is not from his mother, because the mother cannot manage to give you milk for your whole life. Just four or five years are enough to destroy her breasts. A whole life! You are seventy years old and drinking mother’s milk. You will kill the poor woman! She may be already dead, and you are chewing on the dead body... So you are not able to do that, and no other woman will allow you to. Even your own wife will not allow it. Once in a while it is okay... but every day? In the middle of the night you start crying, ”I want some milk”? The wife is not a cow... A few wives are, but very rarely!

You are drinking milk from other animals – cows and sheep and goats – and you don’t understand the chemistry. The cow’s milk is for her children, not for you. You are depriving her children – that is one act against nature. And secondly, her milk is for the bulls. So her milk has immense sexuality, and your saints are drinking milk and trying to be celibate. This is such a contradiction... that they exactly become bulls!

The cow’s milk is not for you, it is for a bull. It has the strength to create a bull. So firstly you are depriving her children, which is an act of violence. Secondly, you are drinking something which is not meant for you, and it is going to create exactly the opposite of what you are trying to do. Why the pure food? So that you can be celibate!

So that woman, poor woman, told me, ”First, that saint told him to live only on milk, and be celibate. So his whole sexuality went into his head; the whole day he is just thinking about sex and nothing else.”

That is the situation of all your saints’ minds. You just need to open a little window in their head and inside you will see Marilyn Monroe standing naked, Sophia Loren standing naked, queues of women... I hope someday we will be able to create windows in the head so people can look.

When you are repressing sex it is going to become cerebral. It will go into the head, because the actual sex center is in the brain. So it will create fantasies, sexual imagination... now you will go to the saint for another bit of advice: ”What to do? My whole mind is just whirling with one thought, women.” The saint then says you have to cut down your sleep.

So this saint told the poor woman’s husband, ”Cut your sleep.” He was sleeping for only two hours, so now the whole day he felt sleepy. He could not go to work, because the work he was doing was dangerous. He was working in a gun carriage factory. So if he was sleepy he might get killed by the mechanisms all around. He may do something wrong and explode the whole factory, so even his officers told him, ”First you get cured of your... the whole day you look sleepy. We won’t allow you...”

So he again went to the saint. That’s how you keep on going to the guides and the rabbis and the bishops and the priests and the saints. They go on giving you advice which is not a cure, which is really creating more and more diseases. So the saint said to him, ”If you are feeling sleepy the whole day it means...” In Hindu philosophy it is called tamas. Your past lives have been of pure darkness; they are surfacing. The darkness is surfacing. Tamas is coming up. So you have to continue the whole day repeating the name of Rama – that is the Hindu God.

So now he continuously repeats, ”Rama, Rama, Rama.” Even walking on the street he has to repeat it. Now the repetition has become so automatic that he does not hear the horns of the trucks or the buses or the cars. He is so full of his own ”Rama, Rama, Rama...”

So the wife was afraid that he would be killed. People had reported to her that he was going straight for a truck, and the truck was honking the horn but he wouldn’t listen. So she said, ”I have come to you. You have to help. And he does not allow anybody else to sleep, so we are all getting sick. He gets up at three o’clock in the morning. He goes to bed at one o’clock in the night, so up to one o’clock, ‘Rama, Rama, Rama...’ through the whole house. The children are crying, ‘Our examinations are coming close and this man won’t let us sleep.’ And by three o’clock he’s back. Even the neighbors are coming to say, ‘This is too much, we cannot tolerate it. From three o’clock, ”Rama, Rama” – and he shouts!’” So she said, ”Something has to be done.”

I said, ”Certainly. You bring him to me.”

But he wouldn’t listen, because he was continuously repeating, ”Rama, Rama,” in front of me! I said, ”Shut up!”

He said, ”But it is the name of God.”

I said, ”Who told you?”

He said, ”My saint.”

I said, ”He knows exactly that Rama is the name of God?”

He said, ”His own master has told him.”

I said, ”It is just a tale told from one idiot to another idiot... and you are the last in the line. There is nothing holy in it, there is nothing divine in it; it is an ordinary name. There are millions of people in India who have Ram in their name – do you think they are all gods?”

He said, ”No.”

I said, ”What is your name?” And by chance his name was Sardar Ram Singh. ”You are an idiot! You are just repeating your own name.”

He said, ”I never thought about it.”

I said, ”You have never thought about anything! What else is your master telling you? Because you are not sleeping well, that’s why the whole day you are feeling sleepy. And because you are trying to be celibate, the mind is continuously thinking of sex. And because you are thinking of sex, your master says to you that your food must be impure so drink cow’s milk. That will make you more sexual; you become a bull. Soon, Sardar Ram Singh, you will become a bull!”

He said, ”My God! So what am I to do?”

I said, ”First, stop drinking milk. Just be a normal human being. Yes, you can drink a little bit in your tea in the morning, but not the whole day. How much milk are you drinking? Your body seems so fat.”

The wife said, ”The whole day he is drinking, to make himself celibate. His job has gone, and whatever small balance he had in an account is wasted in purchasing two cows, and he drinks all the milk of two cows!”

I said, ”You brought him at the right time. Soon he would have turned into a bull. He is just on the verge.” So I said to him, ”Sell those cows and start eating like a human being. And sleep like a human being. And there is no need to repeat ‘Ram, Ram...’

”You can do one thing. In the morning, say ‘Ram’ and then say, ‘Ditto – applicable for twenty-four hours.’ It is just a small thing. You can write it on a page: Ditto, applied for the twenty-four hours. Next day again you say one time, ‘Ram,’ and ‘Ditto.’”

He said, ”This is a great secret! I was getting bored and tired, and I was getting deaf because I was continuously repeating, repeating, repeating. Even those two hours in sleep I was continuously repeating inside, ‘Ram, Ram...’” Because if you are repeating for twenty-two hours then you cannot leave it just for two hours in sleep; it will go on in an undercurrent.

I said, ”You will be okay within two weeks. Not much is needed, just be normal and natural. And stop going to that stupid man you think is a saint.”

He said, ”Then can I come to you?”

I said, ”No. You don’t need anybody outside; you have to go within yourself. First, for two weeks get saner; then you can come to me and I will tell you how to meditate. And you don’t have to meditate the whole day; just one hour before sunrise. And there is no need to shout, because you are not praying for the neighbors, and there is no God to listen howsoever loud you shout. No God is there to listen to it. Have you ever received any answer?”

He said, ”No, I have never received any answer, only condemnation from everybody. My children are against me, my wife is against me, all the neighborhood is against me, my boss is against me. I have got into such trouble with this religion...”

I said, ”Everybody is in the same situation, more or less.”

All religions are driving people bananas.

And they give you advice that seems to be very significant because all the scriptures are repeating it down the ages. It is so ancient you cannot doubt it.

You don’t need anybody to tell you what is good and what is wrong. All that you need is an awakening within you of a consciousness which makes you see things as they are. Then there is no question of choice.

Nobody chooses the bad consciously. It is the unconscious, the darkness within you, that chooses the evil.

Consciousness brings light to your whole being; you become full of luminosity. You cannot do anything that is harmful to anybody. You cannot do anything that is harmful to your own body. You become suddenly aware that you are one with this whole universe.

So your actions become good, beautiful, graceful; your words start having a certain poetry, your silence becomes so deep, so blissful, that your bliss starts overflowing to others.

This overflowing of bliss is the only significant sign of a man who is awakened. Just being with that man, just his presence, is enough to give you a taste of the beyond.

But it is not according to anybody else, only according to your own awareness.

And when I say God is dead, all that is left for you is your own consciousness. And your consciousness is part of an oceanic consciousness that surrounds you. Once you become aware of your inside, you will become aware that, all over, that same consciousness is throbbing, dancing. In the trees, in the rivers, in the mountains, in the oceans, in people’s eyes, in their hearts, it is the same song, it is the same dance – and you participate in it. Your participation is good. Your non-participation is bad.

God is Dead, Now Zen is the Only Living Truth 170 ♡♥Osho♡♥