The third question:

Question 3

WHY IS A SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE OFTEN CALLED A VISION? WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SIGHT AND VISION? A WHILE AGO YOU SPOKE ABOUT WHAT IT IS 'TO HEAR'. PLEASE, WHAT DOES IT MEAN 'TO SEE'?

A blind man looks at the sun. The sun is there, but the blind man cannot see because he has no sight, he has no eyes. If he attains to sight he will have the vision of the sun. Sight has to happen inside, and the vision will be outside.

You have to search for eyes, you have to become a seer. You have to drop your blindness. You have to drop all kinds of buffers that are covering your eyes. You have to become open: that is the meaning of attaining to sight, or insight. Insight is far better because it emphasizes the 'in'. Sight happens in -- that is the meaning of insight. You open up, you hear, you see, you are capable of receiving, and then all that is already present there -- the primordial sound of OMKAR, the celestial music that surrounds you... and you have not heard it yet, because you don't have ears to hear it, you don't have that sensitive ear. You can hear only noises, you can't hear music. If you train, if you cultivate the ear, slowly, slowly your ear becomes more and more meditative, silent, receptive, passive. It comes to a state that Taoists call WU-WEI, no action -- just utterly silent with no stirring of its own -- because if you are having some stirring of your own, you will miss that which is there. When your eyes are just empty, you have insight. Eyes full of thoughts, prejudices, concepts, beliefs, can't see. They go on seeing that which they believe, they don't see that which is. Hence you have to de-nude yourself utterly from all beliefs -- Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan -- you have to drop all kinds of philosophies. When your eyes are utterly naked -- you don't have any kind of belief inside you, you don't know what is what, you simply don't know at all; you know only one thing, that you don't know, that you are innocent -- in that innocence you have insight. And then whatsoever you see through that insight is called vision.

It is called vision to show a difference from dreams. The vision is REALLY there. The dream also looks there but is not really there. The dream is projected by you, the vision is part of reality. In dream, you have worked upon reality; in vision, reality works upon you. In dream you are active, you are doing something -- projecting. In vision you are WU-WEI, inactive, passive. You allow the reality to work upon you. In a dream you are a great doer; the dream is your doing. In vision you are a non-doer, a receptive end, a womb, open, waiting, ready to receive, welcoming. You are in a kind of let-go. And when you are in a kind of let-go, reality happens to you because you don't hinder it. It is continuously trying to happen to you but you go on hindering it.

God comes to you in millions of ways. But you have a certain idea of God, and God has no obligation to fulfill your idea. He goes on coming in His own ways and you go on waiting according to your belief. Hence, you go on missing.

For example, Christians will go on missing Christ because they are waiting for the SAME Christ. Not that Christ has not been happening in the world -- it happened in Kabir, it happened in Mohammed, it happened in Nanak, it happened in MANY more people. But Christians are waiting for the SAME Christ that they have some ideas about. They are waiting for the second coming of Christ. It is not going to happen, ever. They are waiting in vain. Christ goes on coming, but never again the same way. Because for Christ to come in the same way, the whole existence will have to be in the same situation -- and that is not going to happen ever again. Just think... EXACTLY in the same situation: each stone in the same place as it was, and each man with the same shape as he had. Now how is it possible? Pontius Pilate is no more Governor General, he writes no more rules. That world of the Jews, that mythological world of their dreams, is no more valid. Things have changed.

I have heard....

In a school a teacher told his small disciples to paint something, but the story should be taken from the Bible. There were many paintings, but one was very strange. One small boy had painted an aeroplane. He loved aeroplanes. And things were clear -- at the back there were three figures, and in the front, in the cockpit, was the pilot.

And the teacher asked, "Who are these three people?"

He said, "This is God, the Father. This is Jesus, the Son. And this is a very clumsy type of fellow -- who is this? -- this is the Holy Ghost."

And the teacher asked, "Then who is this fourth?"

And he said, "Who else? Pontius the Pilot."

The world has changed. Now, Pontius the Pilate can only be a pilot.

That mythological world -- and all societies have lived in mythologies -- creates a certain poetry around them, a certain dream around them. They invent. Jews were the chosen people; now they are no more. Even Jews are tired now of remaining the chosen people.

I have heard....

An old Jew was praying, and he said to God, "Is it true, Sir, that we are your chosen people?"

And God boomed from the skies, "Yes! You are my chosen people!"

And the old Jew said, "Sir, is it not time you should choose somebody else? We have suffered a lot."

Now even Jews are not willing to be the chosen people. Just because they have this stupid notion of being the chosen people, they have suffered. This egoistic idea went against everybody, and everybody tried to put them in their place. They have been massacred, killed, murdered, and behind all that is the single idea: "We are the chosen people."

Now the world has changed utterly. Christ cannot come the way he came that time. He can come in that way only if the world again repeats EXACTLY the same situation, and that is impossible. The world is never again the same. It is a flux, things go on moving. And Christians go on waiting for Christ, and Hindus are waiting for Krishna. For five thousand years they have waited, because Krishna had said, "When there is trouble, and the dark night, and religion will be uprooted, and there will be atheism in the world, and when my people will be oppressed and will be in misery, I will come. I promise." And they are waiting. Now what more misery does India need for him to come? Can you think of any country being more miserable than India is? If he can't come now then there is no hope, because more misery is not possible. But he is not coming, and Hindus go on waiting and they go on looking at the sky.

He HAS been coming, but God cannot come according to your belief. You have to be in a state of receptivity. You have to drop all beliefs; then suddenly, the vision! When the insight is ready, the vision happens. Vision is not a dream, it is reality, it is so.

Christians are dreaming. Hindus are dreaming. These are different kinds of dreamers. They go on dreaming that things will again be the same. They go on dreaming about the past. They go on projecting the past in their minds again and again. They go on playing the same game that they have become very skillful in playing, and they DON'T see that the reality has changed and their game is simply absurd.

Vision is not your dream. Vision is when all dreams have disappeared and you don't have a dreaming mind; then what happens is a vision. But for that, insight is needed. You have to learn how to see, and you have to learn how to be, and you have to learn how to hear, and you have to learn how to touch. You have to learn how to smell, how to taste. And then you will be surprised -- God comes through all the senses.

Be more sensitive -- less of belief, less of the head, and more of sensitivity. Be more sensuous, alive in your senses, and then suddenly one day you will see: it is not simply the light that is coming to you, it is God in the form of light; and it is not the tree that is standing there in front of you, but God; not the rock, but God; not the woman that you have fallen in love with, but a God; not the man, but God. When the insight becomes clear, unclouded, suddenly you start seeing that everywhere God is, because all is God.

A man took a flower once, and without a word, held it up before the men seated in a circle about him. Each man in his turn looked at the flower, and then explained its meaning, its significance, all that it symbolized. The last man, however, SEEING the flower, said nothing, only smiled. The man in the center then also smiled, and without a word handed him the flower. The origins of Zen are said to be in this.

That the man in the center happened to be the Buddha does not matter. Zen is what happens when any man, anywhere, at any time, SEES. SO is Sufism: it is a new way of SEEING into reality. So is Tantra, so is Yoga -- different names for the same phenomenon: a capacity to see into reality.

But you are so full of explanations.

I am holding the flower in my hand, just in front of you, but you can't see the flower because you are so full of explanations, so full of philosophizing, so full of questions and answers.

This 'birth of Zen' is one of the most beautiful anecdotes in the whole history of religion....

"Each man in his turn looked at the flower, and then explained its meaning..."

A flower need not be explained. A flower is its own explanation. All other explanations are intrusions into its reality. How can you say what a rose is? A rose is a rose is a rose! How can you say what it is? And whatsoever you say will be wrong, because in saying that the rose is 'this', you will be identifying the rose with something else which is not a rose. That's what we go on saying.

If somebody asks, "What is this?", you bring something else in to explain it, but that something else is not it. All explanations go astray. No explanation explains. They only explain things away. They are tricks of the mind.

"They explained its meaning, its significance and all that it symbolized."

A flower symbolizes nothing. It is simply there, not as a symbol. It is not a symbol, not a metaphor, not a sign. It is itself. It does not represent anybody else. It is its own being.

They all missed. Those people sitting around Buddha, and Buddha holding the flower in his hand, and they started saying things about the flower -- they all missed. They missed because they were so full of explanations. They could not see the flower, the flower was lost in their explanations. They became too obsessed with the mystery of the flower: "Why is Buddha holding it in his hand? What kind of flower is this? What species does it belong to? What does it represent? -- its color, its shape, its form." They forgot the flower completely, they went astray. They started running in different directions. And they were clever people, scholarly people: they must have quoted scripture, they must have brought the Vedas and the Upanishads into it. They must have talked of their knowledge, they must have performed great egoistic justifications, they must have brought many arguments into it, they must have been very logical. And they were thinking they would satisfy Buddha.

Buddha must have felt very sad.

A flower is simply there, it needs no explanation. You need to enjoy it; not to say anything about it, but to see it! Only one man did that.

"However, seeing the flower, one man said nothing."

His name was Mahakashyapa. He became the founder of Zen, because he was the first man to see the flower as it was. He had the insight and the vision.

"He said nothing, he only smiled."

What happened in that smile? He became a flower in that smile. Have you not watched it? When you smile, you bloom. He didn't say anything and he said everything. By becoming a flower he said everything. He smiled.

In fact, no flower is as beautiful as a human smile. The most beautiful flower is pale before a human smile. There is no comparison to a human smile. If it arises from your being, spreads all over you, you bloom. A smile is a flower of human consciousness. Mahakashyapa smiled.

"The man in the center then also smiled."

So there were three flowers that day, the whole trinity. The flower was already smiling; Mahakashyapa smiled; seeing these two beautiful flowers, Buddha smiled. Those three smiles became the foundation of Zen, those three flowers. It rarely happens, but whenever it happens a great tradition is born. But it happened so silently! Not a single word was uttered! Buddha also didn't utter a single word, he simply presented the flower to Mahakashyapa. And it is said that he gave to Mahakashyapa that which cannot be given through words. It was an insight and a vision, a transfer beyond scriptures, beyond words.

This is how Sufism, Hassidism, Zen, Tantra, Yoga, have been transferred down the ages. Whenever there is somebody who can see, the flower is given.

I am holding the flower before you. The day you will be able to see it, it will be given to you. I will go on holding the flower. I will go on waiting for the moment when you don't have any explanation about it. You don't ask for any explanation, you don't give any explanation, you simply live the mystery of it -- the mystery of the moment, the mystery of presence -- and you smile. And that mystery simply blooms in you as a flower. That day, you will understand what a flower is. Unless you I bloom you will not understand a rosebush. How can you understand? -- you have never known any flowering inside you. Only a Buddha can understand what is happening to a rosebush. Only a Buddha can understand what is happening to the stars. Only a Buddha can understand what is happening to this immense mystery called existence. When you have tasted your reality then you become capable -- not through scriptures, not through reading books, but by being, by experiencing.

"The origins of Zen are said to be in this anecdote."

And you will be surprised that no Indian scripture relates this anecdote. I have been searching and searching for it -- no Indian scripture relates this anecdote. If you ask the orthodox Buddhist scholars they will say, "This is just an invention of the Zen people."

Once a Buddhist scholar came to see me, a very famous scholar, a world-famous scholar on Buddhist scriptures. His name is Bhikku Anand Gosalayana. He came to see me and he said, exactly about this anecdote, "You go on talking about this. But this is all un-historical, because there is not a single mention in the scriptures about this. You please stop talking about it!"

I said to him, "That simply shows about the Indian mind, nothing else. The Indian mind cannot understand, it is too scholarly."

My feeling is that when this happened all those scholars who were giving explanations and philosophizing about the flower must have collected the scriptures later on. Yes, they have collected. They must have forgotten all about it, it was not of worth. They must have taken it as a joke: "Buddha must be playing a joke, must have been in some mood." And nothing was said so there was nothing to report. The scholar can only report that which is said. He goes on missing that which is shown. There was nothing to report, nothing had happened -- it was such a silent transfer. The scholars missed it. They have not mentioned it.

I said to the great scholar, "To me, this is the MOST important thing that has happened through Buddha. If it is not in the scriptures then those scriptures are wrong, because this to me is the MOST essential phenomenon. I can drop and burn all the scriptures, but I cannot drop this story. This parable contains the whole."

It was reported first by the Chinese; because of Taoism it was reported. Because of the Taoistic approach, it was understood for the first time. So it is mentioned in Chinese scriptures but not in Indian scriptures. The Indian mind is scholarly, philosophical, logical, argumentative. The Chinese mind is more aesthetic, more artistic, can look into silence, can feel for the silence.

Zen is a cross-breeding between Buddhism and Taoism. It is fifty percent Buddhism and fifty percent Taoism. And it is richer than both, because it has all that is beautiful in Buddhism and all that is beautiful in Taoism. It has gathered the silence of both, hence the beauty of Zen.

But remember that the man in the center happened to be the Buddha does not matter. Zen is what happens when any man, anywhere, at any time, sees.

Zen can happen here. Zen can happen sitting by the side of a tree, or by the side of a river. Zen can happen anywhere. Whenever you become capable of seeing, Zen happens. In your insight, in the opening of your insight, the vision happens. That vision is Zen. And that vision is Sufism. They are not different things.