Zen

THE FIRST PRINCIPLE

Chapter 8: The Profound and the Trivial

Question 3

 

 

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Question 3

USUALLY I AN "THIS WAY" OR "THAT WAY'.' BUT FOR SOME TIME I HAVE EXPERIENCED ALL KINDS OF CONTRADICTIONS, SIMULTANEOUSLY. I SEE WOMEN AS OBJECTS OF WORSHIP, AND AT THE SAME TIME I LUST AFTER THEM. I AM CONTENT TO LET LIFE FLOW, AND I AM AFRAID OF THE FUTURE. I CRAVE TO BE ALONE, AND I CRAVE TO BE ALWAYS WITH PEOPLE. I FEEL BIZARRE BECAUSE THESE CONTRADICTIONS ALL SEEM EQUALLY REAL AND TRUE. IS THERE ANYTHING TO BE UNDERSTOOD OR DONE ABOUT THIS?

Whenever you come across a contradiction, watch very carefully. There is bound to be something of great significance. Never avoid contradictions, because life is contradictory. Life exists through the tension of contradiction. So whenever you come across a contradiction you are very close to the source of life. Let that be always remembered.

The ordinary reaction is whenever you come across a contradiction you start trying to solve it, start finding explanations for it, or start dropping it into the unconscious so you need not worry about it. You start doing something about it immediately the moment you feel some contradiction because you have been taught to live noncontradictorily. You have been taught a very dangerous thing. Nobody can live noncontradictorily. If you want to live you have to live through contradiction, AS contradiction.

You have been taught to be consistent; that's why you have become false. This is the whole trick. How does such great hypocrisy exist in the world? Why? Why has the whole world turned out to be hypocritical? There is a trick to it, a great trick; a great technology is behind it. The technology is: teach people to be consistent, and they will become hypocrites. Because life exists through contradiction.

Life is inconsistent. One moment this, another moment that; life is that way. One moment you are feeling loving, another moment you hate the same person; life is like that. Now, you have been taught if you love, then love always. What happens? You cannot love always, so only one thing is possible: when hate comes you hide the hate, you repress the hate, and you go on pretending love. This is what hypocrisy is. When you don't love you pretend.

You are full of hate for your wife, but you come home and you hug her and you kiss her and you inquire, "How are you, honey?" and all that. And deep down you are hating her and you want to kill her. In fact, the whole day you have been fantasizing how to kill this woman. But you have been taught to be consistent. So, once, you had fallen in love, and you have said things in those love moments and you have promised that "I will love you forever and ever" -- now you have to be consistent.

What will you do with your hate that is bound to arise? Each love object is bound to be the hate object too. If you want not to hate, then you will have to stop loving. If you really want not to hate anybody, then you will have to stop loving, but you cannot love consistently. The inconsistency will come up again and again.

It is as if somebody has told you, "If you see the day, don't see the night. That is inconsistent." So what will you do? In the day you keep your eyes open, in the night you keep your eyes closed and believe that it is day. But the night comes; it doesn't follow your ideas. It has to come. The night follows the day; the day follows the night.

You have been taught, "Be consistent." Your so-called character is nothing but an effort to be consistent.

A real man cannot have any character. A real man is bound to be characterless because to have a character means to have consistency. To be characterless means to be free.

I said something yesterday. Now, if I have a character, I will try to be consistent with my past; whatsoever I said yesterday, I have to say the same thing today. But then I have to repeat my past. I cannot live in the moment and I cannot live in the present.

In fact, a consistent man is one who goes on changing his past into his future, who goes on putting his past as his future, ahead of himself. That is the man of character, consistent man. An inconsistent man is one who never allows the past to become his future, who remains free for the future, who has no promises to keep, who has no commitment with the past. Whenever it was, he lived it totally; gone, it is gone.

A real man will love you and will hate you too. And sometimes he will say, "I will love you always"; and sometimes he will say, "I cannot love you again. Impossible." Sometimes he will be in a deep honeymoon with you and sometimes in a deep divorce, and both things will go like day and night. A real marriage is a continuous honeymoon and divorce, and honeymoon and divorce. Mini honeymoons, mini divorces; big honeymoons, big divorces. It continues like day and night.

So whenever you come across a contradiction, be watchful, be very alert. You are very close to life. And when you are consistent you are just false, a plastic thing, you are not real.

I don't teach consistency. I teach the freedom of being inconsistent. I teach the freedom of being contradictory. That's my whole approach towards life.

Of course, you are afraid of being contradictory because then you will not know who you are. With character there is something, something very secure: you know who you are. You have a label: a good man, a bad man, a saint, a sinner. You can believe in your identity when you are consistent -- that you are a good husband, a good Christian, a churchgoer, and this and that. With the inconsistency your identity disappears; you don't know who you are. You become an opening, you are no more closed, you have an open future. You don't know what you are going to do the next moment; only the next moment will tell. To live in that insecurity needs courage.

Sannyas is what I propose. Sannyas means to remain in insecurity; sannyas means not to allow your past to influence your future, not to allow your past to project itself into the future. Let the dead bury the dead. The past is gone, gone. Don't cling to it, and don't help it to cling to you.

The moment something has passed it has passed. Be completely clean of it and be free and fresh again; then you will be real, authentically real, and there will be joy, and there will be celebration and song. I am not saying you will not ever be sad, no. You will be sad. The false man is never sad -- because he is never happy. The false man just remains in the middle, never happy, never sad. He is simply so-so, lukewarm; he is never too cold and never too hot. He is just "okay". He somehow manages. He has a comfortable life, but no real life.

I am not saying that the real man will always be happy. I am saying the real man will always be real. When he is sad he will be really sad. He will sing a song -- of sadness. He will accept his sadness as part of life, as part of growth. He will not reject it. If he feels like crying he will cry; he will not say, "What am I doing? This is not good. Only women cry, and I am a man." He will not say that. He will say, "If my eyes want to cry and the tears are rolling down, good. I have to be real. I am only whatsoever I am." He will cry. His tears will be true.

Your smiles are false, your tears are false. You manage to smile, and you manage to cry too. So you live an empty life. The real man's life will be full, sometimes full of joy and sometimes full of sadness.

And the real man one day becomes enlightened. The unreal man never becomes enlightened. When the real man becomes enlightened, then there is no joy and no sadness. Then his being is just a witness. Joy comes: he watches it. Sadness comes: he watches it.

Now, these are the three stages. The false man: his joy is just a show, a mask, his sadness too; he pretends. The real man, the second stage: he is natural, spontaneous; his joy is true, his sadness is true. You can trust him. When he is crying, his whole heart is crying; and when he smiles, his whole heart is smiling. And the second stage is a must to attain to the third, the enlightened man. The enlightened man is neither sad nor happy. He has attained to the witnessing soul; he simply watches. He knows the sadness has come, the happiness has come, but these are like climates that come and go and change, and he remains centered.

The false man cannot jump to the enlightened state; hence I teach the real man, but the real man is not the goal.

That's why my work goes beyond the Encounter ideology, Gestalt ideology. The Gestalt ideology or the Encounter ideology stops at the real man. Good. Better than the unreal. But not enough. Something has yet to happen. I use Encounter groups, Gestalt groups, and all the therapies that have become available in the West. They are perfectly beautiful; they bring you from the first, false state to the authentic, real state. But my work goes beyond them. But I can go beyond only if you have gone through the second stage. From the first there is no way, from the false there is no way, to enlightenment; only from the real is there a way.

You will have to go through the ecstasy of the real and the agony of the real. When you have lived deeply all the realities of life, the witness will arise. It arises naturally, out of being real.

So you say, "Usually I am'this way' or'that way'." That is not a good way. You get fixed with one thing, this way or that. Become more fluid, remain more fluid, because life is not solid; it is fluid, it is flow. And that's what is happening and is confusing you.

"But for some time I have experienced all kinds of contradictions, simultaneously." Good. You are blessed. This confusion is the beginning of a great journey, a great pilgrimage. If you become afraid you will go back to the false.

The false is secure. Let me remind you again and again: the false is comfortable. A good way to die is the false, but not a good way to live. Even your death will be false, because how can the death be real? When you have not lived really, how can you die really?

So many people die, but rarely does a real death happen. When a Buddha dies it is a real death, or when Lin Chi dies it is a real death. There are very few deaths which are real, because there are very few lives which are real. You only pretend to live, and then one day you pretend to die.

I have heard, a man met an old friend on the road, and the old friend was a very, very fanatical Christian Scientist. The old friend asked this man, "How is your father now?" and the man said, "He is very ill." The Christian Scientist, of course, to be consistent with his philosophy, said, "He is not ill. He only thinks he is ill."

That is the Christian Scientists' ideology, that you only think that you are ill, that's why you are ill. You are not really ill. He said, "He only thinks he is ill. He is not really ill."

After eight days, these two men met again, and the Christian Scientist asked again, "How is your father now?"

And the young man hesitated a little, and then he said, "Now he thinks he is dead." -- to be consistent with this old man's ideology.

The father has died, but this is a reality.

You go on living in a fantasy world. Your life is nothing but your thinking, a pseudo thing; and so is your death. Your illness, your health, your happiness, your sadness are all so bogus that how can you die a real death? A real death has to be earned. One has to become worthy of real death. And one becomes worthy only by living truly.

Now you are very close to a great source of light. That's why you are feeling all sorts of contradictions simultaneously. That means your solidity is melting. Your hate and love are not categorized as two anymore. They are not put into boxes separately anymore; they are merging with each other. The profound and the trivial are coming together, and you are confused because now you cannot label what is what.

"I have experienced all kinds of contradictions, simultaneously. I see women as objects of worship, and at the same time I lust after them." That's what has happened down the ages. There are two things man has done with woman: either he has worshiped woman as a goddess or he has condemned woman as a witch. Either he has exploited the woman for his lust or he has touched her feet and said, "You are divine. Divine mother." Either the woman has been a prostitute or a divine mother. Man has not accepted woman just as human.

And woman is human, as human as you are. She is neither a divine mother nor is she a prostitute, but that's how the mind goes on. The mind makes things different, separate, puts them in categories. You have killed the real woman, because the real woman is both, the prostitute and the divine mother, together, simultaneously. If you fall in love with a prostitute you will find a divine mother. Even a prostitute will turn into a divine mother if you are in love with her; you will not find the prostitute. And fall in love with a divine mother and you will find the prostitute too.

What I am saying is that life is not so small as to be put into boxes -- that this is a prostitute and this is a divine mother. Life is vast, so big. It contains contradictions. And that is the beauty of life and that is the richness of life.

Man has been changing between these polarities. Sometimes he calls the woman the divine mother. That too is inhuman, because then you put the woman on a pedestal and you don't allow her to be human. Watch. When you force a woman to be a divine mother, what are you doing? You are not allowing her to be human. And she will pretend that she is a divine mother, so if you want to make love to her she will be reluctantly ready. She will say no, and she will mean yes. She has to say no; she is the divine mother.

A good woman has to be a dead woman. Even while you are making love, she will lie down there like a corpse. A slight movement, and you will become afraid: so are you wrong, she is not so good, not so virtuous? If she starts enjoying your lovemaking, you will think that she is a bad woman. Only bad women enjoy lovemaking, not good women. Good women? They don't think of sex at all.

Look at the trick. You put the woman so high; then you don't allow her to be human. You have made her "superhuman". That is a way to make her INhuman. Or you force her to be a prostitute; that is again a way, to put her below the human, to make her again INhuman. Then you go to the prostitute, you give her the money, you make love to her -- with no responsibility, with no love. It is simple, pure lust, but you know that that woman is a bad woman. How can you love her? You feel good, there is no problem. You can lust after this woman and you can uSe her as a thing. She is just a prostitute, not a human being; you don't relate to her. You just go and do things to her, pay the price, and you are finished. Next day in the marketplace, you will not even recognize her.

In both these ways you have turned the woman into inhuman beings. Both are ugly.

The woman is both: the divine mother and the prostitute. Just as you are both: God and animal.

Let me repeat: the profane is the sacred, the samsara is the nirvana.

Through these categories.... The reality is so complex and so deep it cannot be categorized, it cannot be demarked into definitions. No woman is just a prostitute and no woman is just a divine mother. And that is true about man, the same way. Once you see this, you are freed from categories, logical boxes, pigeonholes, and you can see reality as it is.

A woman is a human being, as you are a human being. Yes sometimes she is a witch; just as sometimes you are mean, ugly, horrible, she is too. And sometimes she is ecstasy, pure ecstasy. Sometimes she is the most beautiful phenomenon on the earth, just as you are.

In India we have the right representation, the symbol of Kali. You must have seen the pictures of Kali or the statues of Kali. That is really a great understanding about women. Kali is painted as black, as black as the devil -- "kali" means "black" -- and yet she is the divine mother. And she is most beautiful. She is black, as black as the devil, but her form is that of the divine. She has a beautiful face, a beautiful body, absolutely in proportion; but she is black. And then, she is dancing on the chest of her husband, almost killing him. Shiva is her husband, and she is dancing on his chest and almost killing him. And she loves him too. She loves and kills together. All contradictions put together.

The mother gives you birth, the woman gives you birth, and by and by the woman kills you too. She brings your death closer; hence the attraction and the fear. You are attracted with the divine, and you are afraid with the devilish.

So you say, "I see women as objects of worship, and at the same time I lust after them." Both are complementaries. Accept them. That's how reality is. The woman is both, and you are both. And if you accept this contradictory reality, one day you will go beyond it, you will transcend it.

There is a transcendental element too, but that transcendental element can be understood only when you pass through contradictions. If you avoid contradictions you will never attain the transcendental. Go through the contradictory, and by and by you will become just a witness to them both.

How does it work? It works in a simple way. If you think you are good, you are identified with good. If you think you are bad, you are identified with the bad. But if you allow both good and bad together, you cannot get identified with either. You remain unidentified, and that is the fundamental, the radical change. You remain unidentified. You cannot figure out who you are, good or bad, day or night, life or death, beautiful or ugly. You cannot identify with anything, so you remain unidentified.

Good comes and passes, and you know you cannot be good, because the bad is coming. And the bad comes and passes, and you know you cannot be the bad. either, because the good is coming. So you cannot be good and you cannot be bad; then who are you? You are a witness. a witness who watches everything come and go, a watcher on the hills.

"I am content to let life flow, and I am afraid of the future." The same. The same contradiction on so many levels.

"I crave to be alone, and I crave to be always with people." The same.

"I feel bizarre because these contradictions all seem equally real and true." They are. And when for the first time you recognize that they are true and real, one feels bizarre. That's what the Zen people say: first the rivers are rivers and the mountain are mountains, then the rivers are no more rivers and the mountains are no more mountains -- bizarre, confusion, clouds, everything topsy-turvy, all disturbed -- and then one day mountains are again mountains and rivers are again rivers, everything settled again, on a higher plane of course, on the transcendental plane of course.

You will have to go through this bizarreness. To be sane one has to pass through many insanities.

"Is there anything to be understood or done about this?" Just understood, nothing to be done about it. I don't teach doing. Nothing has to be done. You just watch. Watch more and more carefully, watch in detail. Watch the subtlest nuance of any change in you. Watch all -- which no prejudice, with no judgement. And that watching will integrate you, will make you more and more aware.

And that is the whole purpose of life: to create more intelligence, to create more awareness.

 

Next: Chapter 8: The Profound and the Trivial, Question 4

 

Energy Enhancement                Enlightened Texts                Zen                 The First Principle

 

 

Chapter 8

 

 

 

 
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