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THE DHAMMAPADA: THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA, VOL. 3
Chapter 8: A good belly laughter
Question 1
Energy Enhancement Enlightened Texts Dhammapada The Way of the Buddha, Vol. 3
The first question:
Question 1
BELOVED MASTER,
YOU GRACIOUSLY SENT ME A TAPED ANSWER TO A QUESTION LAST AUTUMN. THE GIST OF YOUR ANSWER WAS THAT I WAS TRYING TOO HARD AT SPIRITUAL PURSUITS. I STOPPED ALMOST EVERYTHING FOR NINE MONTHS AND GOT GOOD RESULTS FROM FOLLOWING YOUR ADVICE.
NOW I AM ATTENDING A SANNYASIN GROUP AGAIN, BUT I FEEL THAT BECOMING A SANNYASIN WOULD BE DOING WHAT YOU TOLD ME NOT TO DO -- TRYING TOO HARD. I HAVE ALREADY BEEN INITIATED INTO MANY GROUPS AND FEEL THAT THIS MAY BE SYMPTOMATIC OF TRYING TOO HARD. SHOULD I JUST RELAX AND ENJOY YOU THE WAY WE ARE NOW?
Mariel Strauss, that's exactly what sannyas is: relaxing and enjoying whatsoever is. It is not an initiation like other initiations you have been through -- it is a totally different phenomenon. It is not a serious affair at all, it is basically playfulness. It is for the first time on the earth that we are trying to bring playfulness to religion.
Religion has always been of a long face, sad, serious, somber. Because of that seriousness, millions of people have remained aloof from religion. Those who were alive could not become religious because religion meant a kind of suicide to them -- and it was so. Those who were already dead or dying, those who were ill, pathological, suicidal, only they were interested in the old religions.
The old religions were not dancing, singing, celebrating; they were anti-life, anti-earth, anti-body. They were purely negative; they had nothing to affirm. Their God was based on negativity. Go on negating: the more you negate life, the more religious you were thought to be.
I am bringing a totally new vision of religion to the earth: I am introducing you to a religion that can laugh, a religion that can love, a religion that can live the ordinary life with extraordinary awareness.
Religion is not a question of changing life patterns, of changing things and situations. Religion changes you, not your situation. It does not change things: it changes the way you look at things. It changes your eyes, your vision; it gives you an insight. Then God is not something against life: then God is the intrinsic core of life. Then spirit is not anti-matter but the highest form of matter, the purest fragrance of matter.
Mariel Strauss, if you avoid sannyas that will be being serious. You have not understood that this is not the same kind of initiation. You have been into many schools, and you have gathered much knowledge about initiation and the mysteries -- but this is not that kind of initiation. It is just the opposite: it is getting initiated into life, into the ordinary life. Once your ordinary life becomes suffused with your meditativeness you are a sannyasin. It is not a question of changing your clothes only -- that is only symbolic -- the real sannyasin is bringing meditation to the ordinary affairs of life, bringing meditation to the marketplace. Eating, walking, sleeping, one can remain continuously in a state of meditation. It is nothing special that you are doing, but doing the same things with a new way, with a new method, with new art.
Sannyas changes your outlook.
You listened to my advice and for nine months, you say, you stopped almost everything and got good results from following the advice. But somewhere deep down you are still serious; otherwise you would have taken a jump into sannyas -- nonseriously. Even to ask about it is to show your seriousness. You could not accept it playfully, with a laughter.
Sannyas is just a play -- LEELA. That concept is not known in the West; the West has missed much because of not knowing that concept. In the West, religion has no idea that God is not a creator but a player, that existence is not his creation but his play of energies. Just like the ocean waves roaring, shattering on the banks and the rocks, eternally, just a play of energy, so is God. These millions of forms are not created by God, those are just because of his overflowing energy.
God is not a person at all. You cannot worship God. You can live in a godly way but you cannot worship God -- there is nobody to worship. All your worship is sheer stupidity, all your images of God are your own creation. There is no God as such, but there is godliness, certainly -- in the flowers, in the birds, in the stars, in the eyes of the people, when a song arises in the heart and poetry surrounds you... all this is God. Let us say "godliness" rather than using the word 'God' -- that word gives you the idea of a person, and God is not a person but a presence.
Sannyas is not like becoming a Hindu or a Christian or a Mohammedan. In fact, it is dropping out of all these trips -- Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan, all these trips. Sannyas is simply dropping out of all ideologies. Ideologies are bound to be serious; no ideology can have laughter as its spirit, because ideologies have to fight with each other, argue with each other, and argument cannot be done with laughter. Argument has to be serious! Argument is basically egoistic, how can it laugh? The ego knows no laughter at all.
Once it happened:
A great philosopher and thinker, Keshav Chandra Sen, went to see Ramakrishna. He wanted to defeat Ramakrishna, and, certainly, he was capable of great argument. He argued against God, against religion, against the whole nonsense that Ramakrishna was doing. He was trying to prove that Ramakrishna was a fool, that there is no God, that nobody has ever proved the existence of God. He talked and talked, and slowly slowly he started feeling a little weird because Ramakrishna would only laugh. He would listen to the argument and laugh -- and not only laugh, he would jump, hug Keshav Chandra Sen, kiss him and say, "Beautiful! This argument I have never heard! It is really intelligent, clever."
Keshav Chandra Sen started feeling very embarrassed. A crowd had gathered seeing that Keshav Chandra, a great philosopher, is going to Ramakrishna; many people had come to listen, hearing that something is going to transpire there. Even they started feeling that the whole journey had been futile. "This is a strange thing that is happening!"
And Ramakrishna danced and laughed and he said, "Even if there had been any doubt in my mind about God, you have destroyed it. How can there be such intelligence without God? You are proof, Keshav Chandra -- I believe in you."
And Keshav Chandra has written in his memoirs, "Ramakrishna's laughter defeated me -- defeated me forever. I forgot all arguments. It looked so foolish! And he had not argued against me, he had not even said a single word against me. He simply kissed me, hugged me, laughed, danced. He appreciated me as nobody has ever appreciated -- and I was talking against him! He said, 'Keshav Chandra, your presence, such intelligence, such genius, is enough proof that God is!' He said this to me," Keshav Chandra writes, "but really his presence, his laughter, his dance, his hugging and kissing, proved to me that God is; otherwise, how is such a phenomenon as Ramakrishna possible?"
The uneducated Ramakrishna, the villager Ramakrishna, proved far more profound than the very sophisticated, educated Keshav Chandra. What happened? Something tremendously beautiful happened. Ramakrishna is really religious; he knows what religion is, he knows what godliness is: to take life in a dancing way, to take life singing, to accept life in all its manifoldness, without any judgment -- to love it for what it is.
A sannyasin means one who is not trying to solve the mystery of life but is diving deep into the mystery itself. Living the mystery is sannyas, not solving the mystery. If you start solving it you become serious. If you start living it you become more and more playful.
Mariel Strauss, see the difference between sannyas and other initiations. There is a qualitative difference. It is not initiation in the old sense, just as it is not a learning in the old sense -- it is an unlearning, and so I can say it is UNinitiation. It will bring you out of all your initiations, because if you have been to so many schools and sects and ideologies, many things must be still hanging around inside you. You need a good cleaning, you need a thorough cleaning, you need a good bath -- and sannyas will give you a shower, it will cleanse your soul. It will give you back the innocence of a child, the laughter of a child, the eyes full of wonder and awe.
Don't hesitate... take the jump. It is a jump, because you cannot come to it through thinking. It is a jump because it is not a conclusion of your mind. To others it will look like madness -- in fact all love is mad and all love is blind, at least to those who don't know what love is. To UNlovers love is blind; to lovers love is the only possible eye which can see to the very core of existence. To those who don't know the taste of religion, sannyas is madness; but to those who know, everything else is madness except sannyas. This is entering into sanity. I don't see anything saner than laughter, saner than love, saner than celebration.
But you are still thinking in serious terms: 'initiation' is a great word. You are still obsessed with your old ideas, still afraid that you may start trying too hard. In fact, you are still trying.
First I had suggested to you not to try too hard. Now you are trying too hard on the opposite end, on the polar opposite: trying too hard not to try hard! It is the same thing. Become a sannyasin and forget all this nonsense. Then one transcends trying and nontrying both. A great laughter is waiting for you. And the moment the beyond starts laughing inside you, giggling inside you, then you know for the first time what it means to be a christ, what it means to be a buddha.
But Christians say Christ never laughed -- this is THEIR idea about Christ. This is not true about the real Christ -- I know the man! It is impossible to conceive that he never laughed. He enjoyed good food, you know, dining and wining both; he enjoyed beautiful company. And if you want beautiful company you have to find it not in the scholars but in the gamblers; if you really want good company you will have to move to those who live on the fringes of your so-called society -- the fringe people, the outsiders, the gamblers, the drunkards, the prostitutes -- because your society has become so dull and dead. The established society is almost a cemetery; you don't meet people there, you meet only dead bodies, corpses -- walking, talking, moving, doing things... it is a miracle!
One day a small boy was asking me, "Do you believe in ghosts?"
I said, "Believe? -- I am surrounded by ghosts!"
He understood the point immediately. He said, "So... so you mean... the people in the streets and the market are all ghosts?"
I said, "Yes, they are all ghosts. They are all living a post-mortem existence. They have died long ago. In fact, they died before they were ever born."
The society kills and kills slowly, skillfully. You never become aware because it is done so slowly, that's why. A child is slowly poisoned.
In the East, in the past, there used to be a certain kind of woman detective. Those woman detectives were called VISHKANYAS -- poisoned girls. Certain beautiful girls were poisoned very slowly from the very beginning with the mother's milk -- it is an historical fact -- but the poison was given in such small doses that it would not kill them immediately; but slowly slowly their whole system would become poisoned. Poison would flow in their blood, their breath would become poison. By the time they became adolescent, they would be ready to be used by the kings, and they were so beautiful that it was very easy to allure anybody with them. They were sent to the enemy king who was bound to fall in the trap of the beautiful woman, and once the woman kissed the man that was the end of him. Just the kiss was enough to kill; a kiss of death it was.
To make love to such a woman will be the end -- you will die like a few spiders die. There are a few spiders who die while making love -- because the girlfriend starts eating them while they are getting higher and higher, and they are in such ecstasy -- you know spiders -- trembling, and they have completely forgotten the world. They are no longer material, they are spiritual. But women are women; they are very materialistic. The moment the spider gets into his orgasmic spasms, the girlfriend starts eating him. By the time he comes back, he is no more. He was thinking he was coming -- he was really going!
Those poisoned girls were trained... but the miracle was that so much poison didn't kill them. It was given in such mild doses, very slowly.
A scientist was experimenting with frogs: he threw a frog into boiling water -- of course, the frog jumped immediately out of it. Then he gave the frog just ordinary water, normal temperature; the frog enjoyed the bucket, sat at the bottom, relaxed, and the scientist started heating it up slowly slowly, very slowly. Within hours it was boiling, but the frog didn't jump out of it... he died. He never became aware, the thing happened so slowly.
And that's what is happening in society. It takes almost twenty-five years to kill a child totally, to poison a child totally. By the time he comes from the university he is dead, he is finished; now he will live a post-mortem existence.
I can see a grain of truth in the hippie idea that don't trust a man beyond thirty. There IS some truth in it. By the time a man is thirty he is no longer alive -- if he is still alive he will become a Buddha, he will be a Christ, he will be a Krishna. But by that time people die -- and they die so unconsciously that they go on living as if they are alive.
Sannyas means giving you your life back. It is a process of deprogramming you, unconditioning you, unpoisoning you. You cannot decide logically to be a sannyasin, because that very mind is a problem, and you are trying to decide with that very mind. Sannyas has to be a jump. It happens from the heart, not from the head.
Mariel Strauss, you are still thinking from the head. Please, get down from the head. At least let one thing happen from the heart -- not logically but illogically, not in a prosaic way but in a poetic way. Sannyas has to be a love affair! Nonserious, full of laughter, enter into it... and you will be surprised that this is not some other initiation. This will bring out all your initiations and all your philosophy and all your systems of thought.
Next: Chapter 8: A good belly laughter, Question 2
Energy Enhancement Enlightened Texts Dhammapada The Way of the Buddha, Vol. 3
| ENERGY
|
GAIN ENERGY APPRENTICE
LEVEL1
|
THE ENERGY BLOCKAGE REMOVAL
PROCESS
|
THE KARMA CLEARING
PROCESS APPRENTICE LEVEL3
|
MASTERY
OF RELATIONSHIPS TANTRA APPRENTICE LEVEL4
|
|
ENERGY ENHANCEMENT TESTIMONIALS EE LEVEL1 EE LEVEL2 EE LEVEL3 EE LEVEL4 EE FAQS |
