| ENERGY
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GAIN ENERGY APPRENTICE
LEVEL1
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THE ENERGY BLOCKAGE REMOVAL
PROCESS
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THE KARMA CLEARING
PROCESS APPRENTICE LEVEL3
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MASTERY
OF RELATIONSHIPS TANTRA APPRENTICE LEVEL4
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Christianity: The Deadliest Poison and Zen: The Antidote to All Poisons
Chapter 8: Fictitious father, crackpot son
Energy Enhancement Enlightened Texts Christianity The Antidote to All Poisons
OUR BELOVED MASTER,
YAKUSAN ONCE ASKED HIS DISCIPLE, UNGAN, "I HEARD THAT YOU KNOW HOW TO DEAL WITH THE LIONS -- IS THAT TRUE?"
UNGAN REPLIED, "YES, IT IS."
YAKUSAN ASKED, "HOW MANY OF THEM DO YOU GET AND DEAL WITH?"
"SIX," UNGAN REPLIED.
YAKUSAN THEN SAID, "I ALSO KNOW HOW TO DEAL WITH THE LION."
UNGAN ASKED, "HOW MANY DO you GET?"
YAKUSAN REPLIED, "ONLY ONE."
UNGAN THEN COMMENTED, "ONE IS SIX; SIX IS ONE."
LATER ON, WHEN UNGAN VISITED ISAN, ISAN SAID, "I HAVE HEARD THAT WHEN YOU WERE WITH YAKUSAN, YOU HAD A CONVERSATION ABOUT GETTING AND DEALING WITH LIONS. IS THAT TRUE?"
"YES, IT IS," REPLIED UNGAN.
ISAN ASKED, "DO YOU CONTINUE TO DEAL WITH THEM, OR DO YOU SOMETIMES STOP DOING THAT?"
UNGAN REPLIED, "WHEN I WANT TO, I DEAL WITH THEM; AND WHEN I WANT TO STOP, I STOP."
"WHEN YOU STOP," ASKED ISAN, "WHERE DO THE LIONS GO?"
UNGAN REPLIED, "STOPPING IS STOPPING."
Friends,
Christianity, I have been told by the Christian friends, is based on family: family is its foundation stone. But family is also the foundation stone of all neurosis, of all psychosis, of all kinds of mental sicknesses, of all kinds of social problems. It is also the base of races, of nations, of wars.
Family has to be understood. It has no future; it has already outlived its usefulness, its necessity. But we have been conditioned -- not only Christians, but everybody -- that the family is a great contribution to the world. The reality is totally different. I have to go point by point, in detail, because the problem of family is one of the most serious problems.
The first thing ... The family is a prison, it wants to keep control of the children, of the wife. It is a very tight group of people, and they have made this prison sacred. But the results are very ugly.
Every kind of imprisonment prevents spiritual growth. What do you think ... why did Buddha renounce the world? Why did Mahavira renounce the world? In fact they were not renouncing the world, they were simply renouncing the family -- nobody has said this before -- because how can you renounce the world? Wherever you are, the world is. You can only renounce the family.
But all religious scriptures, including Christian scriptures, are continuously lying to the people: they talk of renouncing the world. It distracts you completely from the fact that all these people were renouncing the family, because the family was such that they could not grow within it.
The family is programming every child according to its prejudices. If you are born in a Christian family you will be continuously programmed for Christianity, and you will not ever suspect that your conditioning may be wrong, your conditioning may be preventing you from going beyond.
Just the other night, when the wife and the son of the sannyasin who has died arrived, the son was very much excited the whole day. He told the sannyasins he would like to come here and live forever. But when he heard me, he freaked out. He told the sannyasins, "I am a Christian and I believe in God -- and I am not a homosexual!"
His prejudiced mind could not see that I have not said that all Christians are homosexuals. I have said only that the monks and the nuns are homosexuals, are lesbians. This is how people go on missing points. He heard in his mind, through his interpretation of the programming, that I am calling all Christians homosexuals.
And he proudly says, "I believe in God" -- without understanding a single word. What does belief mean? Belief means you don't know. It is utterly in ignorance that people have forced the idea on you, and you carry it as if you know God. A man who believes in God should be ashamed, not proud.
Believing is hiding your ignorance.
Knowing is a totally different matter.
But Christianity and all other religions go on confusing people's minds. They never make the distinction between believing and knowing. A blind man can believe in light, but that is not going to help. One needs eyes to see the light, and then there is no need to believe. When you know something, is there any need to believe in it?
Do you believe in light? Do you believe in the moon? Do you believe in the stars? You simply know, there is no question of belief. Belief arises only for fictions, for lies, not for truth. Every belief system is a hindrance for spirituality.
But that young man, I could see in his face, I could see in his eyes ... And I immediately inquired, "What is wrong with him? So young and he has already become dead?" His father who had come here to meditate and who wanted to be a sannyasin was younger than him. He wanted to live here his whole life after hearing me and everything I said about Christianity.
His mother is far younger than him. She wants to come here and stay for a few days, to meditate. She loved the place, she loved the people. She was touched very much by your ceremony for her husband. Nowhere in the world would she have got that ceremony for her husband.
Death, according to Christianity, is a taboo: you should not talk about it. Death is taboo ... And life is also taboo, you should not live it! Death you should not talk about, and life you should not live! They don't leave you any alternative -- neither can you live, nor can you die. They keep you hanging in the middle, half-dead, half-alive.
This creates schizophrenia. You are not allowed to be total in anything: in life, in death, in love -- only partially involved. A man who is partially involved is only partially alive. The deeper your involvement in existence, the deeper your life. When you are involved totally in life, in death, in love, in meditation, in any kind of thing that you want to do -- painting, music, poetry, dance -- unless you are totally involved in it you will never know the maximum, the optimum pleasure, the optimum blissfulness.
People are living only at the minimum, just surviving, or, to be absolutely truthful, just vegetating -- just waiting ... and waiting, and nothing happens in their life. No flowers blossom in their life, no festivals happen in their life. And their death is as ugly as their life was, because death is the ultimate culmination of your life.
If you have lived totally, death is not the end. Death is only an episode, a small episode in an eternal life. You have died many times, but because you have never lived totally, you became unconscious at the moment of death; the fear brought you into a coma.
That's why you don't remember your past lives, because the coma stands as a barrier for the past lives and their remembrance. And because you don't know your past lives, you cannot understand that there is going to be life after death, that life is eternal. Birth and death are mere episodes; thousands of times you have been into birth, into death. But when you are not allowed to live totally, when everywhere there is interference from religion ...
One small boy in the school -- of course a Christian boy -- was asked by the teacher the first day he entered the school, "What is your name?"
He said, "Don't."
The teacher said, "Strange, I have never heard such a name."
He said, "Everything, whatever I do, I only hear this: `Don't' -- so I think it is my name."
But the whole of Christianity is doing that to everybody. It is a life-negative religion, it does not allow you to live joyously. And the family is the root, because obviously the programming starts from the family. Christianity says that it is founded on family.
And I know perfectly well that unless family disappears from the world these religions, these nations, these wars will not disappear, because they are all based on family. The family teaches you that you are a Hindu, and the Hindu religion is the best religion of all; other religions are so-so.
Christianity continues the programming of children: "You can be saved only through Jesus Christ. Nobody else can save you. All other religions are just moralities, very superficial, they are not going to help you."
And when a child, alongside his breast feeding, is continuously fed with all kinds of superstitions -- God, and the Holy Ghost, and the only begotten son of God, Jesus, heaven and hell ...
Children are very vulnerable, because they are born as a tabula rasa -- nothing is written on them, their minds are pure. You can write anything you want on the child, and every family commits the crime: they destroy the individual and create a slave. Obedience is virtue, disobedience is the original sin.
When a child starts being programmed from the very birth, when he is very vulnerable and very soft, you can write anything. It will go on in his unconscious. You can tell him that "Our nation is the greatest nation in the world"; every nation is telling that. "Our religion is the greatest religion, our scripture is written by God himself" -- Hindus are saying that, Christians are saying that, Jews are saying that. Everybody is doing the same crime.
Christianity, of course, is doing it more efficiently, more cunningly, because it is the greatest religion in the world. It uses ultra-modern techniques of programming. It sends its missionaries to learn psychoanalysis, to learn how to program people, how to deprogram people. If a Hindu has to be converted into Christianity, first he has to be deprogrammed of Hinduism. Again the tabula rasa appears; what was written is erased. Now you can write again, "Christianity is the highest religion in the world, and there has been no man like Jesus Christ, and will never be again, because he is the only begotten son of God."
All wars depend on the family. It has been a tradition in many nations in the past that you should contribute at least one son to the army, to protect the nation, to protect the dignity and the pride of the nation.
In Tibet, every family has to contribute the eldest son to the monasteries. This has been done for thousands of years, as if the children are just commodities you can contribute, as if the children are money you can give in charity.
This divided the world into different camps because of religion, because of politics, because of nationalities, because of races. They all depend on family. Family is the root cause of mankind's thousands of wounds.
To go deeper, in more detail, psychologists have discovered a certain phenomenon they call "imprinting." When a child is born, he gets the first imprint of the mother, the father, because they are there. You may not be aware what imprinting can do ....
When a scientist was exploring the phenomenon of imprinting, he was standing by the side of a hen's egg, and it was time for the egg to break open and allow the small bird to come out. Ordinarily, the hen is sitting on the egg, so the first imprint is of the mother. But this scientist was standing there, so when the baby came out from the egg he saw the scientist's shoe. That was his first imprint.
The scientist could not believe his eyes. When the baby became older, rather than falling in love with any female, he was continuously trying to make love to the scientist's shoe! The scientist could not believe what was happening!
But he had discovered a great phenomenon: that whatever comes first in the vision of the child is his first imprint. The mother is his first imprint, the father is his second imprint. And if the child is a boy, then he falls in love with his mother, and his whole life he will suffer.
All couples are suffering around the world, and they don't know the reason why. The reason is that the boy has been imprinted by the mother, and since that time he is looking and looking, searching for a woman who will fulfill his desire, who will be his mother. Now, you cannot find your mother again. Perhaps something of the mother ...
Lovers are greatly embarrassed if you ask them, "Why have you chosen this woman, or this man?" They simply shrug their shoulders, they say, "We don't know, it simply happened."
It did not just happen, it is not so simple as you think. You simply don't know.
The woman you have fallen in love with in some way resembles your mother, in some way. Of course, she cannot be one hundred percent your mother. Perhaps her hairstyle is the same as your mother's, perhaps her nose, perhaps the color of her eyes, perhaps the way she walks, perhaps the sound of her voice resembles your mother's. You fall in love with that partial mother in the woman. It is your mother calling you through this woman to fall in love, it is nothing to do with "happening." But it is a partial thing, remember. The hairdo, or the nose ...
What are you going to do with the hairdo and the nose? Soon you will discover on your honeymoon, "My God! This is not my mother." And the girl has fallen in love with you because something in you resembles her father. So both are searching for something which is not there.
So the woman will be looking at the husband, and will be surprised that she has been deceived. This is not the man she was looking for, "Only his moustache looked like my father's!" But what to do with the moustache?
The husband is looking for his mother, and the wife is looking for her father. Both are in a tremendous dilemma: "How did it happen? Now how to get rid of each other?" And the problem becomes more difficult because the church does not allow divorce.
Christianity says -- I am quoting the Bible -- "What God has joined together, let no man put asunder." God has joined wives and husbands together; let no man put them asunder. This is interpreted as the basis for forbidding divorce. Whatever the suffering, all the old stories end up with marriage, all ancient stories end up with marriage, with the last statement after the marriage, "and they lived in happiness forever."
The truth is, after the marriage is the deluge, after the marriage is the hellfire. So as not to disturb people, every story stops at the marriage. In fact this is the beginning of the story, and they have made it the end.
Meeting a girl on the sea beach is not the real thing. Neither is the girl real, nor are you real. You are pretending to be a great man, a hero, Alexander the Great. She is pretending to be Sophia Loren. You both are hypocrites -- but hypocrisy is good on the sea beach. You see each other only for a few seconds, or a few hours at the most. Hypocrisy can be maintained for a few hours, but it cannot be maintained for your whole life. Once you get married, the hypocrisy becomes a burden, you cannot carry it.
Two persons got married and entered a sea resort honeymoon hotel. The wife immediately started moving towards the bathroom, and told the husband, "Put the light off. When I come to bed I don't like lights on."
The husband said, "This is a strange thing, because I have to go to the bathroom also. The lights should remain on!"
The wife said, "Do you hear me or not? Put the lights off!"
The husband said, "It is better to say the truth. The truth is that one of my legs is false!" -- and he took the leg off and put it aside. He said, "I cannot walk in the darkness. It is very difficult for me to walk even in the light!"
The wife said, "If that is the case, then it is better to be friends." She pulled off both her breasts and threw them down.
The husband looked at the breasts lying on the floor, and he said, "It is okay." He took his teeth out and threw them.
The wife said, "You think you are going to win?" She took off her hair, she was baldheaded, and threw the hair on top of everything. It was becoming a big heap!
Actually something like this happens. By and by you start dropping your hypocrisy, your falseness, your pretensions. And when all pretensions are gone, then the woman you thought was a Juliet is so ordinary -- and not even ordinary, but worse than ordinary. And the man you were thinking of as a Romeo -- all the Romeo and the romance are finished. He turns out to be just a chicken.
And then the story begins. Then it is constant frustration, and constant effort to find someone else. But religion prohibits adultery, you should remain confined in your family.
When Jesus said, "Love your neighbor ..." And if the neighbor happens to be a woman? I sometimes wonder, perhaps he never thought about the implications. Love thine enemy -- but if the enemy happens to be a woman?
He was not a great thinker or philosopher, just a poor carpenter's son. What does he know of logic and its implications?
And because every family is in conflict -- the husband and wife are continuously fighting -- the children are growing up with this constant fight; this is becoming their imprint. The boy will repeat his father's structure, and the girl will repeat her mother's behavior, when they get married. It is a constant repetition, generation after generation, because from where will they learn how to be a husband, how to be a wife? From the mother, from the father -- those are the only people who are available in childhood. And that is the most vulnerable time.
The children learn that the parents fight, they use ugly words to each other. Every night there is a pillow fight, every day the wife is nagging. The father feels the wife is just a pain in the neck and nothing else. The father tries to remain as long as possible in the office, and then he goes to the pub. The boy is learning. The girl is also learning: when the husband comes home, the wife is going to beat him.
One of my professors, a professor of economics, was built almost like a wrestler, a very big man, but inside a chicken. I was very friendly with him. In fact, he had to be friendly with me, because that was the time when the medium of expression was changing. From English it was becoming Hindi. So he was accustomed to speaking English, but many times he would get stuck with some word, and I was his only hope -- that I would supply him the right word in Hindi.
I used to give him right words, but once in a while I would ...
Once he got stuck with the word `haggling'. He looked at me, and I was in the right mood, so I said, "It means chikallas." Chikallas really means joking with each other, not haggling. Haggling is debating over the price.
So he started using the word chikallas: "When you go into the market and you start chikallas ..." and the whole class laughed. He looked at me, "What is the matter?"
I said, "I don't know what is the matter. Why are these people laughing?"
He said, "There is something, because whenever I say `chikallas' they start laughing."
I said, "This is chikallas -- when you say something and people start laughing!"
He said, "I thought you were my friend! I have been depending on you for translations, and you give me such a word?"
I said, "I was in the right mood! When I am in the right mood, you should not ask me anything."
I used to go to his home, and there I discovered a small woman. He used to tell me, "My wife beats me." He was almost proud of it. He used to speak about it in the class and show us how "She has hit my hand." One day he showed his back, where the wife had hit him with a stick, and there was a blood mark.
When I saw his wife, I said to him, "You could have killed her any time just with your hands, squeezed all the juice from her."
He said, "You don't know, she is such a pain in the neck that when I go out of my house I feel almost like a lion. When I come back to my house, I feel almost like a rat."
Children are watching very carefully what is happening all around them, and they are learning without being taught. They will repeat the same pattern.
The girl sees that whenever the husband proposes to the wife, "What about IT?" she simply turns to the other side and says, "I am suffering from headache. In the morning the servant did not come, the gas people I phoned have not come yet, and the electricity is out. Problems and problems ... and finally you come here. Just go down to your bed and sleep, I have a headache!"
The girl is learning, watching carefully how to behave with the husband, how to control the husband. The boy is trying to learn how to control the wife, how to control and possess the wife. They are living in a battlefield, not in a family. There is no family anywhere; these are simply battlegrounds, where the man is fighting the woman, the woman is fighting the man.
This professor of economics asked me, "Can you suggest something to me? What to do? She refuses to make love to me, she always has a headache!"
I said, "I will give you the medicine." I gave him two aspirins.
He said, "What do you mean?"
I said, "You do one thing today. Don't ask her, `What about it?', just give her two aspirins and a glass of water and tell her, `Take it please' -- and see what happens!"
He said, "You are trying to get me into trouble."
I said, "You try."
The wife was surprised because it was so new and such an original idea and she did not believe that this idiot, her husband, could have any original idea. But she could not say that now she had a headache. Two aspirins are enough to remove the headache. She asked him, "Who has told you this?" And as I told you, he was very afraid of her, so he told my name.
The next time I went to their house, the wife took me aside. She said, "Don't give him any original ideas, let him remain an idiot. Everything was going good. Now he comes every day with two aspirins -- and whether I have a headache or not, I have to take aspirins. Since you gave him that idea he carries aspirins with him, and before I can say `headache,' aspirins are presented to me and I have to swallow them. I have been deceiving him continuously."
What kind of love is this? You don't allow the woman to move; if she moves she is a prostitute. If she enjoys making love to you, that means she is not a virtuous woman. You want the woman not to move. That's why the missionary posture is used -- the woman underneath and the beast on top of her.
And Christianity says it has brought culture to the world!
In the East, for thousands of years, this has been taken for granted, that the man should be under the woman, not on top of her. He is more weighty, he has more muscles. The woman is smaller and more fragile; she should be on top of the man. But on top of the man she will be enjoying movement.
Her real pleasure does not come from the vagina. The vagina is absolutely insensitive. It has to be insensitive because the birth of the child will happen through it. If it is too sensitive, the woman will go crazy when the child comes out. The vagina is absolutely insensitive, there is no feeling. It is the small clitoris on top of the vagina which gives her pleasure, but that is possible only if she is allowed to move.
So every woman hates love, and man understood very early on, in primitive days, that he is not really as competent sexually as the woman. A man can have only one orgasm. For the second orgasm he will have to wait according to his age. The woman is capable at any age of having multiple orgasms.
It was a very cunning strategy to keep the woman underneath, unmoving, with closed eyes, so you can have the orgasm and the woman knows nothing of pleasure in it. She simply feels exploited, used, just like any commodity. It hurts. And the man is finished within two minutes -- at the most three minutes, but that is the record. The woman has not even started to get into it and the man is out! Naturally she hates it.
Naturally she goes to listen to the monks talking about celibacy. She touches the feet of the saints, saying that "You are great people who live in celibacy, brahmacharya, and there is my husband, an idiot, every day ... I am tired after working the whole day, taking care of the children, taking care of the kitchen, taking care of the clothes, taking care of the house, of the servants. I am continuously tired, and he comes home and all that he wants is to make love. After making love -- that is two minutes, average -- he turns to the other side and goes to sleep and starts snoring."
When the man is snoring the woman is crying and has tears, because what kind of life is this? He has no respect for her. She is simply being used, and when she has been used she is of no more importance.
And Christians say this is culture.
The Eastern scriptures of Tantra know what culture is. They make it a point that the man should always be under the woman so he can remain static. If he remains unmoving, then he can remain without ejaculation for as long as he wants -- not two minutes, not three minutes. The woman should be on top and allowed to have as much joy of movement as possible so her clitoris gives her great orgasms -- multiple, one after another. She starts groaning, moaning, shouting, all kinds of gibberish. Only then is she happy.
Seeing this disparity, that the man can have only one orgasm and the woman is capable of having multiple orgasms, man simply dropped the idea, because multiple orgasm is dangerous, he cannot cope with it. Keep the woman static so she never comes to know that there is anything like orgasm.
I don't think in India you can find one percent of women who have known orgasm. I have asked hundreds of women; they don't know what orgasm is.
Even in the West, only within these last thirty years, twenty percent of women have started having orgasms; still eighty percent are old-fashioned. They still belong to the church and they still believe in the Bible, they still listen to all kinds of nonsense called sermons.
If a woman is satisfied, having multiple orgasms, she will never be a pain in the neck. She will love you, she will rejoice in you, she will celebrate you, she will wait for you; she will prepare better food, better clothes. But you have destroyed all her joy, and you still want her to respect you and to love you -- for what? And because she is not happy the children become miserable from the very beginning.
The mother's impact on the children is immense. She is unhappy, frustrated, always tired. The children start learning all these things and they will repeat them in their lives. Now it is a well-established psychological fact that every boy loves his mother; every girl loves her father. That is absolutely natural, the other sex is attractive.
But because the girl loves the father, she starts hating her mother -- because she is keeping control, complete control, of the father. And as the girl grows older the mother does not allow any intimacy between the father and the girl. She is standing in between, she is afraid -- and she is not wrong, because the father remembers for the first time, when his daughter becomes sixteen or seventeen years old, how his wife used to look. This was the woman he had fallen in love with; the daughter looks almost like his wife when she was seventeen, when he had fallen in love with her.
The same is true with the boys. They love their mothers, but there is no possibility of any love affair between the boy and the mother. The second opportunity for love is the sisters, who look like the mother and are younger, but Christianity and all other religions prohibit it absolutely: no love affair between the brother and the sister. So every child, whether girl or boy, grows up in a miserable situation, and the misery deepens at the age of fourteen.
The girls become capable of giving birth at the age of thirteen. They are always one year ahead of the boys. They grow in intelligence one year ahead of the boys. Boys become sexually mature at fourteen. Once they are sexually mature they are prohibited by the Christian church, and by all other religions, from having any contact with any girl.
So boys have their hostels, girls have their hostels -- guarded, so that no boy can enter into girls' hostels, and no girl can enter into boys' hostels. Naturally this creates perversion, the same perversion that is created in monasteries and nunneries. On a wider scale, boys become homosexuals, girls start becoming lesbians, because the energy is now arising to such a peak.
By the time the boys and girls are seventeen and a half they have reached to the ultimate peak of their sexual energy; now there will be a decline. That is the best period to make love. That is the best period to reach to the greatest orgasmic experiences.
And this you call society? This you call civilization? It is cutting human beings from their very roots, from all kinds of joys.
If it was for me to decide, at seventeen and a half every boy and every girl should be allowed to make love, and particularly now when pregnancy is not necessary. There is the pill -- the greatest revolution in the whole history of man, which has made the woman equal. Pregnancy was her slavery, pregnancy was her dependence on the man.
But the pill for the woman was not one hundred percent safe, because the woman may not be thinking to make love that night; she may not be taking the pills. The husband may be away and he suddenly comes back ... and the human mind is such that it always takes chances: "Just one night without the pill ... you are not going to get pregnant. You don't always get pregnant, it is only once in a while." But people do get pregnant, even though they were hoping they would not ....
The Christian church is against abortion. Just a few days ago some Christians marched in America to the Senate, because the Supreme Court of America has allowed abortion to be legal. Against that legalization of abortion, thousands and thousands of fundamentalist Christians had a long procession in protest to the Senate. What was more puzzling to me was that President George Bush immediately, before the procession started, sent a message to the people who were going to protest -- missionaries, bishops, archbishops, priests and all kinds of fanatics.
He sent the message that "I am with you. I am against the abortion bill, so don't think that your president is not with you. I am amongst you and I will support you, and I would like the Supreme Court to remove the law that has made abortion legal."
Such fear of the crowd ... That's why I always say your politicians are not leaders. They don't create a revolutionary mind in the people. On the contrary, they are followers of the followers. Immediately the president sent the message that "I am with you" -- just to gain the favor of the voters, but with no consideration for the poor woman who cannot afford a child, or an unmarried woman who cannot say, "It was the Holy Ghost who made me pregnant!" Nobody is going to believe her.
If a woman gives birth to a child while she is not married, her chances for marriage become almost nil, because the male chauvinist mind always wants a virgin.
You will be surprised to know ... there are doctors who make women virgins. Their whole expertise is to put a small thin skin inside the woman's vagina; that is the proof that her vagina has not been penetrated by any male, otherwise the skin is broken. But the skin can be broken just by riding on a bicycle, the skin can be broken just by riding in a rickshaw in Poona! It does not need any male partner, the road will do the thing.
In the Middle Ages, these so-called Christians, who think they have civilized the world, arranged that not only the skin has to be intact but blood should come out. So the doctors used to fix the skin and a little blood behind the skin, and the man who has married the woman would proudly show the next day the bedsheet with blood on it. Friends gathered, families gathered, to see whether the woman was a virgin or not, and it was a great pride for the man to see that "I have got a virgin woman."
What is great in being a virgin? It simply means inexperienced. You will be better if you marry an experienced woman, if you marry an experienced man. Experience has a value. Inexperience cannot be supported in any argument.
This family that Christians think is their foundation is their foundation only because it programs the children according to the church. It makes them slaves, it takes their dignity of individuality, it makes them hypocrites. It forces on them all kinds of lies -- and the greatest lie is God. From God arise all kinds of lies. The only begotten son Jesus Christ would not be there if there were no God fiction; hell and heaven would not be there if there were no God who is going to give punishment and reward.
Creating this program in the child's mind is preventing him from going beyond the mind in search, in exploration. It is against truth. Every family stands against truth. Every family stands against enlightenment.
That's why I say, for the first time in the whole of history, that Buddha and Mahavira had not renounced the world, they had simply renounced the family. It is a lie to say they renounced the world. They lived in the world, they moved with thousands of disciples. That was their world. They moved in the cities, they preached and taught meditation to people.
They had not renounced the world. They were trying in every way to help humanity evolve into consciousness. They were not against humanity; they were not against human consciousness growing as high as the stars, as deep as the Pacific Ocean. All that they renounced was the family, because the family was not going to help them meditate.
Many sannyasins have been reporting to me that, "Our families don't allow us to meditate. They say this is simply wasting time. `Closing your eyes and sitting in a lotus posture, whom are you deceiving? Just do some good work. Serve the poor, serve the sick.'"
If one wants to meditate one needs seclusion, one needs no interference, in the beginning at least. When meditation becomes a ripe fruit in you then there is no problem. Then you can meditate in the marketplace, you can meditate anywhere, once you know the secret. But before you have known the secret, every disturbance brings you out.
But Christianity is not interested in meditation at all. It is interested in prayer. Prayer to whom? -- to a fictitious God. Prayer to whom? -- to Jesus who is a crackpot. And no prayer is ever heard, because there is nobody to hear it. It is not the fault of somebody above the clouds who is not hearing your prayer. There is nobody.
Prayer is not the right kind of religion. Any religion that is based on prayer is a wrong religion. Only religions which are based on meditation have some quality of religiousness, because meditation takes you inwards to your very foundation of life, to the source of your consciousness.
Prayer is simply insane. Raising your hands upwards -- and there is nobody. When people talk to nobody you call them mad. If somebody is talking to nobody you will immediately take him to the hospital: something is wrong with this man, he was standing under a tree and there was nobody and he was talking and having a good dialogue!
What is Christianity doing? And what are other prayer religions doing? Talking to nobody. These are insane people who need psychiatric help. And because every family teaches you hypocrisy, you become schizophrenic. You have your individuality repressed by a personality given by your family -- you are divided into two. You will remain always in conflict, fighting within yourself, with yourself. You will become two. You can become many, it depends ....
I was staying with a family. They had only one child, a beautiful child. I was sitting on the lawn, and the child came and sat by my side. I asked him, "What are you going to become in life?"
He said, "I don't know. My father wants me to become a doctor, my mother wants me to become an engineer, my uncle wants me to become an actor, my second uncle wants me to become a politician. They are all driving me crazy and they are all fighting and nobody is asking me, `What do you want to become?' You are the first person who is asking me."
I said, "What do you want? -- just tell me."
He said, "I have not figured it out."
I said, "Then don't listen to anybody -- your father, your mother, your uncles, your brothers. Don't listen to anybody. Wait till the time comes when you have to choose. Go into the library and look into different subjects, see which attracts you more, which seems to be having a certain harmony with you. Only decide then -- not according to anybody else but simply according to you."
The boy stood up, smiled. He said, "I really want to become a guitarist -- in my neighborhood there is a man who plays the guitar -- but don't tell anybody."
I said, "That's perfectly good. Forget all about being a doctor, there are enough -- enough doctors to kill people, don't be worried! And there are enough engineers whose bridges go on falling down. To be a guitarist is absolutely innocent; I will not tell anybody, but you remain firm. Those people will manipulate you in every way."
My father loved me too much -- but it was what they think is love. He wanted me to go to a science college. "Either become a doctor or become a scientist or become an engineer, but first go to the science college. First graduate in science and then move into a specialization."
I refused. I said, "I know your love, but I also know your love is unconscious. You simply want your ambition to be fulfilled, that your son is a great doctor, a great scientist or engineer. I am going to study religion, philosophy, logic, psychology."
He said, "Then" -- it was just a threat and later he repented very much. He said, "Then I am not going to support you financially."
I said, "That's settled. It is obvious: I am not following your idea, why should you support me? In fact, even if you change your mind, I am not going to take any support from you."
He was wondering how I would manage, thinking perhaps I would drop my idea. He said, "Philosophy ...!" India has one hundred universities, one hundred philosophical departments, and there are many universities where the whole department is empty -- four professors and not a single student. " ... So what are you going to do?"
I said, "I understand. I am not going to do anything. I am not going to use my education for any career, because I have decided to be good for nothing. I am going to relax and enjoy life!"
He said, "But who is going to support you?"
I said, "You don't be worried. You will see."
So I left my house after matriculation, and entered into a department of philosophy. My father thought, "How will he manage?" But I entered into a night class. The whole day I was working in a newspaper, and in the night I would go to the university class.
After six months he thought, "He must have managed somehow ...." He came to see me. The village was almost a hundred miles away. He came to see me and he found me perfectly well. I had managed. I had found a family who simply loved me. They were not my relatives; just the man had met me in the public park where I was discussing with a few students, my colleagues. Sitting by the side on a bench, he heard me discuss and he was immensely impressed. He took me to the side, and he said, "Where do you live?"
I said, "I don't have any place to live."
He said, "I have a big house. You just come with me."
And when he saw the situation, what I was doing -- the whole day I was working in a press and the whole night, the first part of the night in the university, and the second part with my own books, not the textbooks -- he said, "You will fall sick. Don't be worried, I have enough money."
I told him, "Remember one thing: I am not going to return it."
He said, "That is settled."
I said, "Think twice. It is a question of six years. You can have time to think. I will not return a single rupee because I will not have any money anytime in my whole life. If you are giving me out of your abundance, I will accept with gratitude, but no obligation. And no bragging about it, that you have helped me."
He said, "No, that's not at all the question. In fact you have helped me. Since you have come in my house, a strange peace has come, a silence has come. I have never been so happy and so joyous. I have all the amenities, all that the world can provide, but there was a certain emptiness inside me. You have fulfilled it by teaching me meditation. I cannot repay it. Whatever money I spend on you is not even the interest on what you have given to me and what you are giving to me every day."
My father came, and he wanted to help me. I said, "We have settled it. I did not follow your idea, and you simply did not arrange the financing. There is no bitterness about it. Our relationship remains the same. It was simply a disagreement, and I was at fault to disagree with you. You are just unnecessarily feeling guilty."
But he said, "I will give you money, whatever you want to do with it."
I said, "If you want to give without any condition, I can take as much money as you can give. I alone can use all the money in the world without any trouble."
He used to send me money, and that money helped me to purchase as many books as possible.
Now, the library you see -- it has one hundred and fifty thousand books. Most of them were purchased with his money. All the money he gave me went into purchasing books, and soon I was receiving scholarships -- and all that money went into books. Soon I had friends all over India, and I was purchasing everywhere -- in Poona, in Bombay, in New Delhi, in Amritsar, in Ludhiana, in Calcutta, in Allahabad, in Varanasi, in Madras. All over the country I was purchasing as many books as possible -- as many as the friend with whom I was staying could manage.
The family gives you ambition, and ambition is one of the hindrances for enlightenment. It gives you desires, it gives you a longing to be successful, and all these things create your tensions, your anxieties: how to be a celebrity?
The family wants you to be a celebrity. The family wants you to be known all over the world. The family wants you to be the richest person. The family wants you to be the president of the country ....
All these ambitions the family creates, without knowing that all these ambitions are creating a mind which will remain continuously in anguish, suffering. Only one man can become the president of the country. What about the nine hundred million people in this country? -- they are all failures. This is an ugly situation, to keep people feeling they are failures, unsuccessful, inferior to others.
Family is the base for all pathology.
I would love a world where the family is replaced by the commune. Psychologically it is more healthy to have a commune, where children are not possessed by the parents, they belong to the commune; where children are not given the imprint of the mother and father only, they have many uncles in the commune, many aunts in the commune. Sometimes they sleep with this family, sometimes with that family.
In my commune every child belongs to everybody; he does not have a single imprint. Because so many people love him, sometimes he will sleep with somebody, sometimes with somebody else. And they are invited ...
Now Siddhartha has come back with a girlfriend. When he came for the first time he was so small, but so intelligent, that he rarely stayed with his mother or father. I would ask the mother, and she would say, "I have not seen him for fifteen days. He stays everywhere, he goes with anybody who invites him." He used to get money from anybody: "Just give me ten rupees!"
Now he has become grown-up, is training to become an actor, has got a beautiful girlfriend who is a model. She has also become a sannyasin.
I want the family to be replaced by the commune, and in a commune there is no need for marriage. You love a woman, you live with her. Love disappears, you say goodbye in deep gratitude: "All these days that I spent with you were memorable. I will carry these days in my mind, in my memory, as a beautiful fragrance. They will haunt me like a dream, a beautiful dream. But now it is time for us to depart, joyously. From now onwards we will be friends" -- there is no need to become enemies.
And both get tired, it is simply human. The family is inhuman. It forces you to live with a woman you hate. It forces you to lie with a man you want to kill. It is prostitution, it is not family!
My definition of prostitution is, making love to a woman you don't love, making love to a man you don't love. Then it is simply a long-term prostitution. A prostitute is available to you only for one night; you pay for it. Your wife is available to you for your whole life, and you pay for it. It is an economic arrangement, financial. You have purchased the woman for the whole life.
In a commune there is no need of marriage. Marriage creates the family. People should be together out of love, sheer love. And the moment they feel the love is no more there, and now hanging around each other is creating tension and anxiety, it is better to say goodbye to each other before things become too bitter. At the first sign of frustration, boredom, depart. Find new friends.
And if you have children ... you can have children only if the commune allows you. The commune has to take care of the population; the commune is responsible not to expand the population so much that everybody becomes poor. So you can have a child only with the permission of the commune, and you can have the child only with the permission of the medical board of the commune.
If the medical board suggests that your child will not be healthy, will not be very intelligent, that it is better to have a child through insemination, then have the child by insemination. Your love remains with your friend; insemination does not disturb you. People will be proud and say that "I have got the best insemination for my child, the best semen."
You can even ask the medical board for the kind of child you want. A genius? -- a healthy child who will not suffer from unnecessary diseases his whole life? A child who will be able to live beyond the ordinary span of seventy years -- one hundred years, two hundred years, three hundred years ...?
Three hundred years is a possibility; just the right semen is needed. Just as there are blood banks, every commune should have semen banks. And medical experts should find out different qualities of different semen cells, categorize them, keep them deep-frozen. And whenever somebody wants a mathematician, somebody wants a scientist, somebody wants a musician, somebody wants a mystic, just give the right insemination. The child will belong to the commune, so you need not be worried what will happen to the child.
Children are keeping people together, although their love was finished a long time back.
I have told you the story of a man who was ninety-five and a woman who was ninety-three .... They went to the court, they wanted a divorce. The judge looked at them and he said, "Your one foot is in the grave and you want a divorce? If you wanted a divorce why did you not come before? How long have you been married?"
They said, "We don't exactly know, but maybe sixty years, seventy years."
The judge said, "Strange. I have been dealing with these matters for years, and this is the first case .... Why did you remain married so long if you did not like each other?"
They said, "Yes, from the very first day we did not like each other, but we had to remain married because of the children."
So the magistrate asked, "What happened to the children?"
They said, "They all died. Now we are free, and we want the divorce immediately! Just two, three years maybe, but to live in freedom ... Just even three years is enough, a taste of freedom at the last moment. Fortunately, all the children have died."
It is the children who are keeping the family together, because where will the children go? What will happen to the children? If the commune takes responsibility for the children ...
From the very beginning the children should move to the commune's hostel. On holidays they can come to be with their parents, or to be with their uncles or with their aunts, who will be thousands. They can choose.
I want a new man in the world without any imprint. When a child lives with many women, if he is a boy, he will not have a single imprint. He will have so many imprints that they will become fuzzy. He will not be able to figure out what kind of woman ... Then any woman can be a tremendous satisfaction. Then a love affair can last far beyond the honeymoon; otherwise, by the time the honeymoon is finished, love is finished.
Just watch when people are going on honeymoon with their suitcases -- "Just married." See how fast they are going. And when they come back, just look at their faces -- punctured. Look at their suitcases. Just in seven days, what catastrophe has happened?
I am against the family, and I am for the commune.
Family dispersed, the church will die automatically. Nations will disappear automatically. Races will disappear automatically. The world can become one only if there are communes, not families.
And the last thing that I want to say about Christianity -- because this is the last lecture of this series -- is about a man I have loved very much through his writings, Thomas Merton. He was a Trappist Christian.
He studied in many seminaries, in different theological sects of Christianity, and finally ended up with a Trappist monastery in America. It is the most arduous self-torturing kind of sect, it is really a trap. Once you get into the trap, it is very difficult to get out of it.
Thomas Merton was a world-famous writer. The chief abbot of the Trappist monastery was very jealous of him. He wanted somehow to prevent his writings. Thomas Merton lived for many years in the Trappist monastery, but could not find any way to his inner world, which was his interest. Everything was just outward discipline, and a strange kind of torture.
I have told you the story of a Trappist monastery. A man entered the monastery, and the abbot said to him, "This is our rule in the monastery: you can speak only once in seven years."
He accepted it, and he was shown the cell where he was to live. He thought, "My God!" The glass of the window was broken, and the cell was a very small cell, just enough to lie down in.
Rains came, and the water would come inside. He was suffering from cold, sneezing, and all his clothes were wet, but he could not speak. So for seven years he suffered the rain. The rain destroyed the mattress, and it destroyed his health also.
But after seven years he ran to the abbot, and he said, "You have given me a cell which has no glass in the window. I have suffered too much from the rain."
The abbot said, "Enough! Glass will be put in. Just go back, and for seven years, no more speaking."
New glass was put in, but when he went back to the cell, then he remembered that the mattress was completely rotten. But now, seven years ... So he waited for seven years with that rotten mattress, with all kinds of cockroaches and rats. But seven years passed. They were too long, longer than seven years used to be! It was almost an eternity, suffering all those cockroaches moving on his face while he was lying down.
After seven years he went running to the abbot, and he said, "You put in the glass, but I forgot to tell you at that time that the mattress was rotten, and cockroaches and rats and all kinds of animals are moving inside the cell. Please move that rotten mattress, and remove all the cockroaches and rats."
The abbot said, "It shall be done -- but no more coming here for seven years!"
So the mattress was removed, the cockroaches were removed, the rats were removed, but the people who brought the new mattress ... It was too big, so they forced it and broke the glass! Again the same story began, the rains started coming, and from the broken window the rats which had gone out, the cockroaches -- they all came back, the whole family.
Now it was too much. He could not believe that he would survive seven years, but he survived. Man has immense capacity to adapt to any conditions.
After seven years, as he approached the abbot, the abbot said, "Don't speak a single word. Since you have come into this monastery, complaints, complaints, complaints! I never hear anything else. Just get out of the monastery."
The man could not say even what he had come to say. He had been thrown out of the monastery. After twenty-one years, this was the only result.
Thomas Merton was an intelligent man, a genius. Because he was world-famous and he was writing books on Zen, I have looked at his books. For fifteen years I have not read anything, so it was fifteen years ago when I used to read his books. I always thought that sooner or later this man was going to land up in Japan. His understanding about Zen was purely intellectual. Beautiful ... he was writing beautiful sentences, beautiful poems, but it was all intellectual, he had no understanding of meditation.
Christianity does not allow meditation.
And just now I have heard ... Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk and a world-famous author. He wanted to go to Japan to study Zen, but again and again his superiors in the monastery refused him permission.
Do you see the comparison with Zen masters? If a disciple asks to go to another monastery, he is welcomed by the master, "Be richer, find the truth anywhere. The question is truth, not me, or the monastery."
But again and again he was refused permission to go to Japan, without being given any reason. There was no reason not to give it. All that he wanted was to know Zen directly, straight, by living in a Zen monastery for a few months or a few years, because he had not found anything in Christianity.
A letter from Rome, confirming the refusal, stated that, "His requested visit to Japan cannot possibly be the will of God." In the name of God, so many crimes ... In the name of God, people are being enslaved. Now, how does Rome know what the will of God is?
If Thomas Merton's whole being wants to go to Japan to learn Zen, that may perhaps be the will of God. But Rome decides for a faraway monk in America ....
But the reason is not exactly that it cannot possibly be the will of God -- that's why the refusal to allow him to go to Japan. The refusal is for the reason that anybody who will understand Zen will drop Christianity -- immediately. Christianity will look like a disease, a poison, in comparison to Zen.
But finally it happened, not that they allowed him to go to Japan, but that he became decisive in his mind. There was going to be a Catholic conference in Thailand, so he asked permission to read some papers on the Catholic religion in the conference. The deep desire was that from Thailand he would reach to Japan, not bothering about the permission. At the most they can expel him from the church -- and the church has not given him anything, so there is nothing to lose.
Finally, he was allowed to visit Thailand to address a Catholic conference. At the end of his speech he said, "And thus I fade off into the night." He had some suspicions ... some suspicions that they may poison him, they may kill him if he tries to go to Japan. The whole conference consisted of Catholic monks, and they were all informed, "Keep an eye on Thomas Merton. He should not escape from Thailand to Japan" -- which is very close.
At the end of his speech he said to the conference, "And thus I fade off into the night." A few hours later he was found dead in suspicious circumstances in his room. There is every reason to believe that he was killed by the Catholics.
There were rumors that he was killed so that he could not travel on to Japan to study Zen. Circumstantial evidence shows that the rumors may be true. No autopsy was done on the body -- which is a regular process, and particularly in a suspicious case. He was perfectly healthy, he addressed the meeting; and just within two hours he was dead. And he had made the indication that "Perhaps I may fade off into the night."
No autopsy was done on the body, and it was not embalmed -- which is a regular procedure for Catholic monks, Trappist monks. Their bodies have to be embalmed.
It took seven days for the body to reach his monastery in the U.S. It is only a question of, at the most, twenty hours from Thailand to the U.S. -- and it took seven days. They wanted the body to decompose. Once the body starts decomposing, no autopsy is possible; you cannot know the reason why the person died. That's why it took seven days to reach his monastery in the U.S. He had to be buried in a special casket because the body was so decomposed, completely decomposed; there was no question of finding anything in it.
In his last book, not published until twenty years after his death, Merton wrote, "I have a real sense that my own vocation demands a deepened and experiential study from within, as well as Japanese and particularly Zen experiences."
He also wrote, "I cannot go to Asia to seek all their sources, some of the things I see to be vitally important -- the Zen ground of all the dimensions of expression and mystery. This is an imprisonment and confinement."
With this I end my arguments against Christianity.
And with this I discuss the last sutra of Zen.
OUR BELOVED MASTER,
YAKUSAN ONCE ASKED HIS DISCIPLE, UNGAN, "I HEARD THAT YOU KNOW HOW TO DEAL WITH THE LIONS -- IS THAT TRUE?"
UNGAN REPLIED, "YES, IT IS."
YAKUSAN ASKED, "HOW MANY OF THEM DO YOU GET AND DEAL WITH?"
"SIX," UNGAN SAID.
YAKUSAN THEN SAID, "I ALSO KNOW HOW TO DEAL WITH THE LION."
UNGAN ASKED, "HOW MANY DO YOU GET?"
YAKUSAN REPLIED, "ONLY ONE."
UNGAN THEN COMMENTED, "ONE IS SIX; SIX IS ONE."
Now, it is a very mysterious anecdote. But once you understand the symbology, it becomes absolutely simple.
There are seven chakras in the human body. In Zen they are called the seven lions. The first chakra is the sex center; the second chakra, which is just below the navel, is called in Japanese, hara.
If somebody wants to commit suicide -- which in Japanese is called hara-kiri -- he simply pushes a knife into the hara center. That is the simplest strategy to commit suicide, and without pain -- no pain at all. That center is the second center. The sex center has all the life energy gathered in it. For ordinary human beings, all the energy is gathered at the lowest center. This is just above that. So if you put a knife into the hara, the life energy is released from the hara center, which is just above it, into the cosmos.
So in Japan nobody shoots himself in the head, nobody cuts his own throat, nobody hangs himself. The only way to commit suicide in Japan is just to push a knife into the hara. A man may commit hara-kiri just sitting next to you and you may not even know that he has died. It is so silent. Life simply flies out.
The third center is the navel, and the fourth center is the heart. The fifth center is the throat, and the sixth center is the third eye, just between your two eyebrows. The seventh center is just on top of your head.
Once you understand that these centers are significant, that the sex center is the lowest point in your life, and the seventh ... If the energy moves from the first to the second, from the second to the third, from the third to the fourth -- every center has its own expression, and your life goes on changing.
For example, if the energy moves from the sex center to the second center, the hara, you suddenly become aware of death. People are not aware, they think it always happens to somebody else; obviously, you always see somebody else dying, you have never seen yourself dying. Perhaps you are an exception. It happens to somebody else, always -- although the poet says, "Never ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee."
In Christian villages, the church bell tolls to inform all the farmers in the orchards, in the fields, to come to the village, somebody has died. It refers to that. "Never ask for whom the bell tolls, it always tolls for thee."
When your energy is at the hara center -- the hara center is the death center -- you suddenly become aware that just as millions of people have been dying since centuries, "I cannot be an exception. I will have to die, if not today, then tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. But someday, that which is born always dies. I am born, I am going to die."
Birth is the beginning of death. Birth contains death in itself. Birth is the seed, and death is the flower. It takes seventy years from the cradle to the grave; it is a seventy-year-old tree. But your death is growing side by side with your life.
Once you are at the sex center, your whole concentration is on the other sex -- if you are not a perverted Christian monk. If you are a Christian monk then your whole attention is either towards other men, or if other men are not available, then other animals -- female animals, in the beginning. If female animals are not available, then male animals.
Heterosexuality is between man and woman, a natural phenomenon. Homosexuality is between man and man, lesbianism is between woman and woman -- unnatural, perversions. And bestiality is between man and animals, or woman and animals.
It is surprising how man can get perverted.
I know an actual case of a woman .... I had just gone to the hospital to see a patient who had been meditating with me for many years, and as I was entering the hospital a woman was taken from a car. She had been making love to a dog.
But to make love to a dog is very dangerous, one of the most dangerous things a woman can do, because a dog has a special sexual mechanism. His prick is very thin and long, so as it enters into the vagina it is very easy. But the mechanism is such that inside the vagina it starts becoming thicker and thicker, so getting out can be very difficult.
You must have seen dogs making love, how difficult it can be. People are throwing stones, and the dogs are dragging each other in this direction and that direction, but they cannot get unhooked. For the first time I saw a beautiful woman, the wife of a very well known surgeon ... So there is bestiality.
And this bestiality, homosexuality, lesbianism, has brought the most dangerous disease in the world -- Christians are ninety percent responsible for it -- AIDS. That is the only positive contribution to the world by Christianity: AIDS positive.
But if you are not a pervert, as your energy moves to the second center, the hara, you become absolutely uninterested in sex. It is not celibacy, you have not taken any vow, your energy has simply moved higher. Its concern becomes death. In sex the concern was birth, because through sex is all reproduction.
Moving from sex you have moved from birth to death, a small distance. Suddenly you become aware that "Death is coming and I am concerned only with trivia -- money, power, prestige, respectability. All this will be gone when death comes. I am unnecessarily making the effort of creating a signature on the sands. A little breeze of wind, a little tidal wave, and the signature will be finished."
Death comes as a tidal wave, and all your personality, all your respectability, prestige, are erased. One becomes aware that, "I have to find something which is beyond death."
Once the energy moves to the hara, the concern for the search for something immortal in you becomes very predominant, and when the energy moves to the third center, your concern is no more intellectual. You don't simply philosophize, you don't read the books which say, "Life is eternal"; you don't believe. At the third center -- the navel -- your interest becomes experiential.
Thomas Merton was at the third center. His interest in intellectual jargon was finished. He wanted something experiential. That happens at the navel.
It is not a coincidence that people talk about meditators as "navel gazers." That is meaningful. You are gazing at the navel, not from the outside; that won't help. You have to close your eyes and go to the navel. That's what I am calling the center of your being. It is just behind the navel. That's why the navel joins you with the mother, because your being is just behind the navel. If you were not nourished by the mother, through the navel, you would not have survived nine months in the womb.
Once your energy rises to the navel -- and it goes on happening, in all the meditations your energy is going up -- your concern becomes meditation. You want to know on your own, not through the scriptures, what is the truth, whether there is life beyond death or not.
As you move above to the fourth center, that is the heart, your whole life becomes a sharing of love. The third center has created the abundance of love. By reaching to the third center in meditation, you have become so overflowing with love, with compassion, and you want to share. It happens at the fourth center -- the heart.
That's why even in the ordinary world people think love comes out of the heart. For them it is just hearsay, they have heard it. They don't know it because they have never reached to their heart. But the meditator finally reaches to the heart.
As he has reached to the center of his being -- the third center -- suddenly an explosion of love and compassion and joy and blissfulness and benediction has arisen in him with such a force that it hits his heart and opens the heart. The heart is just in the middle of all your seven centers -- three centers below, three centers above. You have come exactly to the middle.
That's why the person of the heart is very balanced, utterly balanced. He has a tremendous grace, a beauty that seems to be not of this world. His eyes are showering love, his hands are showering love, even if he does nothing. Even his presence is radiating love. It is a vibration, multidimensional. All around him a love energy goes on flowing. Those who are receptive, their hearts will start ringing a bell. For the first time they will hear a new music, a new harmony, a new synchronicity.
The fifth center is the throat. The throat is the center of expression. When you are too full of experience, you share love at the fourth center, and you share your experience through language, through devices, from the fifth center.
The sixth center is just between the two eyebrows, inside. In India we have called it the third eye. It gives you a tremendous clarity, a vision of the whole existence as it is. And when you open your eyes ... it affects even your ordinary world. Trees are greener, roses are rosier, everything around you of which you were never aware becomes more graceful. Everything around you becomes more beautiful. Even wildflowers look so beautiful; they have their own individuality, they cannot be compared to roses, they cannot be compared to lotuses. There is no comparison at all.
Once you have reached to the sixth -- the third eye -- everything in your life becomes crystal clear. No questions, no answers -- you know it. No belief, no disbelief -- you know it.
And the seventh center is when you become enlightened: the center of samadhi, the center of ultimate awakening, the center where you become a buddha. Understanding this symbology it will be easy to understand this mysterious anecdote.
YAKUSAN ONCE ASKED HIS DISCIPLE, UNGAN, "I HEARD THAT YOU KNOW HOW TO DEAL WITH THE LIONS" -- remember, by "THE LIONS" he means the centers -- "IS THAT TRUE?"
UNGAN REPLIED, "YES, IT IS."
YAKUSAN ASKED, "HOW MANY OF THEM DO YOU GET AND DEAL WITH?"
"SIX," UNGAN REPLIED.
He has reached to the third eye -- the sixth center. He has managed and tamed six lions, six centers of immense energy.
In fact, the Sanskrit word `chakra' is not rightly translated by `center'. A center gives you a sense of staticness -- just like a full point. Chakra means a wheel; the energy is constantly moving. Energy cannot be static, it cannot remain in one place. It is always on the go. So the chakra can be exactly represented by the wheel of energy -- but I am not using it because center has been used in English for centuries.
The Christian missionaries who translated from ancient scriptures about the chakras could not make the distinction between a center and an energy wheel, and because it is an energy wheel, it is dealing with a lion. You are in a whirlpool. It is going to transform you totally.
When Ungan said six, he was saying that he had not become enlightened yet -- but he was very close. He could see the seventh from his sixth center. It needs just a little more effort, a little more deepening, and the seventh chakra, the seventh energy wheel, will open up into a lotus flower -- it is just like a lotus flower, the opening of the petals -- and life will move into the ultimate.
If you commit hara-kiri, life moves into another womb. If life moves from the head, then it moves into the cosmic. Then it is never born again.
YAKUSAN THEN SAID, "I ALSO KNOW HOW TO DEAL WITH THE LION." He is using the word `lion' not `lions'.
UNGAN ASKED, "HOW MANY DO you GET?"
YAKUSAN REPLIED, "ONLY ONE."
Yakusan was an enlightened master, a buddha. He had reached to the seventh center. Once you have reached to the seventh center, all the six other centers disappear; the whole energy from all the six is moved to the seventh. Then you have only one energy field, and that is around your head.
You have seen pictures of Krishna and Buddha and Jesus with an aura around their heads. That is symbolic, that shows the person is supposed to be enlightened. Those who can see, can see rays radiating all around his head. His face becomes almost a sun, or a moon.
Yakusan said, "I have only one."
Ungan then commented, and his comment shows that he was certainly at the sixth .... UNGAN SAID: "ONE IS SIX," because that one contains all the energy of the six. It pulls every energy from every center into the flowering of the ultimate being, into becoming a buddha. The whole energy is absorbed.
Yakusan's answer did not create a puzzle to Ungan. He commented, "ONE IS SIX; SIX IS ONE. Just a little more time. I am moving towards the one. Six will become one just as one contains all the six."
This can be said only by a man who has reached to the sixth center, because from the sixth, you can see the seventh. It is just there, a very small distance. Everything is clear.
Ungan is only one step behind Yakusan, but he can see Yakusan. He has gathered the whole energy of the six centers into one. He is at the sixth, any moment he will be moving to the seventh. And then the six will become one.
This is a beautiful anecdote between a master and a would-be master, one who is going to become a master soon.
LATER ON, WHEN UNGAN VISITED ISAN, ANOTHER ENLIGHTENED MASTER, ISAN SAID, "I HAVE HEARD THAT WHEN YOU WERE WITH YAKUSAN, YOU HAD A CONVERSATION ABOUT GETTING AND DEALING WITH LIONS. IS THAT TRUE?"
"YES, IT IS," REPLIED UNGAN.
ISAN ASKED, "DO YOU CONTINUE TO DEAL WITH THEM, OR DO YOU SOMETIMES STOP DOING THAT?"
UNGAN REPLIED, "WHEN I WANT TO, I DEAL WITH THEM; AND WHEN I WANT TO STOP, I STOP."
His answer is immensely beautiful and significant. A man who has gone beyond the mind to the seventh center is capable, if he wants to use the mind, of using it. I am using it, but only when I am talking to you. When I am sitting in my room, I am not using it.
A man who has reached to the highest center is capable of using any center of his being, even the lowest. If he wants to use even the lowest -- it will be difficult, because the distance is far away. Bringing the energy back down to the sex center will be a difficult job, but he can use it, it is not impossible. He can use any center if he wants, if there is any need; but otherwise, all those six centers remain silent. On their own they don't pull you, they have no power over you, but you have all power over them.
Ungan replied perfectly well: "WHEN I WANT TO, I DEAL WITH THEM; AND WHEN I WANT TO STOP, I STOP."
"WHEN YOU STOP," ASKED ISAN, "WHERE DO THE LIONS GO?"
UNGAN REPLIED, "STOPPING IS STOPPING." There are no more lions. There are only wheels of energy.
The man of enlightenment concentrates all the energy into one center. All other centers are no more moving wheels, they are stopped, just as a wheel stops moving. But if he wants, the man of enlightenment can bring the energy down. He can bring it to the sixth center and he can see far and wide with clarity. That will not be possible at the seventh center.
The seventh center is beyond everything. You simply are no more. At the sixth, again you are. The energy comes, the circle, the wheel starts moving. You can bring it down to the fifth ....
I have to bring it down to the fifth every day when I am talking to you. Without the throat, I cannot talk. But when I stop talking the energy goes back to the seventh. I can bring it to the fourth -- then you feel tremendous love.
The man who has reached to the seventh becomes the master of his whole life structure. He can do everything that he wants, and when he stops, the energy simply moves automatically back to the seventh.
That's why Ungan replied, "STOPPING IS STOPPING." Don't ask what happens to the lions; they lie dead. But if we want to make them alive we have to bring the energy back. Then they start roaring again.
It is one of the most important anecdotes that you have come across. It gives you the whole science of energy and transformation.
Issa wrote:
THE MOON IN THE PINE TREE;
AND WITH THE CUCKOO,
AH, HOW GLORIOUS!
This is looking from the sixth center. From the seventh center you are simply silent. You cannot do anything, you cannot say anything. You are. It is pure isness.
THE MOON IN THE PINE TREE;
AND WITH THE CUCKOO,
Next: Chapter 8: Fictitious father, crackpot son, Question 1
Energy Enhancement Enlightened Texts Christianity The Antidote to All Poisons
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