The traditional concept of man was that of a materialist or spiritualist, moral or immoral person, sinner or saint. A divided man is miserable. He is neither healthy nor whole; the other half that has been denied will go on taking revenge. It will find ways and means to overcome the part you have imposed upon yourself. You will become a battleground, there will be civil war.
In the past we were unable to create real human beings; we made humanoids. A humanoid is one who looks like a human being but is utterly challenged. He has not been allowed to bloom in his totality. He is adhoora, and because he is half is always tense; he cannot celebrate. Celebration is the fragrance of being whole.
Only a fulfilled tree will flower. Man is yet to flower. The new man will be earthy and divine, worldly and other-worldly. The new man will accept his totality and he will live it without any inner division, without getting split. His god will not be opposed to the devil, his morality will not be opposed to immorality; he will know no opposition.
He will transcend duality, he will not be schizophrenic. With the new man will come a new world, because the new man will perceive in a qualitatively different way. He will live a totally different life. He will be a mystic, poet, scientist. all at once.
The moment a child grows to become whole, society starts to suffocate him, stifling and cutting him into fragments, telling him what to do and what not to do, what to be and what not to be.
Losing his wholeness, he becomes guilty about his whole being. He denies much that is natural, and in that very denial he becomes uncreative. Now he will be only a fragment, and a fragment cannot dance, a fragment cannot sing. And a fragment is always suicidal because the fragment cannot know what life is. The humanoid cannot decide on his own.
Others have been deciding for him — his parents, the teachers, the leaders, the priests; they have taken all his decisiveness. They decide, they order; he simply follows. The humanoid is a slave.
My concept of the new man is that he will be Zorba the Greek and he will also be Gautama the Buddha. The new man will be Zorba the Buddha. He will be sensuous and spiritual — in the body, yet with a great consciousness, a great witnessing.
He will be Christ and Epicurus together. Religion failed because it was too other-worldly. It neglected this world. And you cannot neglect this world; to neglect this world is to neglect your own roots. Science has failed because it neglected the other world, the inner, and you cannot neglect the flowers.
Once you do that, neglect the innermost core of being, life loses all meaning. The tree needs roots, so man needs roots, and the roots can only be in the earth. The tree needs an open sky to grow, to come to great foliage and to have thousands of flowers. Then only is the tree fulfilled, then only does the tree feel significance and meaning and life becomes relevant.
Religion talks only of flowers that remain philosophical, abstract; they never materialise because they are removed from earth. And science has failed because it cares only about the roots.
We now need a new humanity in which religion and science become two aspects of one human being. And art will be the bridge. That’s why I say that the new man will be a mystic, a poet and a scientist.
Man ordinarily is a crowd. No man ordinarily is one, but many. And that´s why there is so much noise within - many voices, many faces - and a constant quarrel. One part wants to do one thing. Another part is simply against it and wants to do something else. It is a miracle how we go on managing to keep ourselves together. Otherwise we are constantly falling apart. There is no center. The master is missing.
There are only servants, and each servant is trying to claim masterhood. For a moment each servant sits on the throne, proclaims himself the master, and in that moment you think, “This is the master.” When there is anger, anger becomes the master, but soon it will be gone. It is a constantly changing scene. After anger comes regret. Then regret is the master and you feel sorry. Sometimes it is love, sometimes it is hate, and the scenes change so fast. Still you do not become aware that you cannot be so many things. We become identified with anything that comes in front of us. When the cloud of anger is there we think we are anger. When the cloud of love is there we think we are love. When compassion is there we think we are compassion. When sadness is there we think we are sadness.
We are none of these - we are the watcher! Anger will come and go and the watcher abides. Sadness comes and passes by and the witness remains. To remember that witness more and more will make you integrated, because that is the only center which is everlasting, eternal. Only on the eternal rock of witnessing can a real life be built.
During my whole life, I always thought that I loved somebody. Now, being here for the first time with you, I ask myself: have I ever really been in love? Am I even able to love? Am I able to love you? Or has life brought me to a point where happiness in love does not happen anymore?
The basic fallacy that you are carrying within you is that you always loved somebody.
This is one of the most significant things about all human beings; their love is always for somebody, it is addressed – and the moment you address your love, you destroy it. It is as if you are saying, “I will breathe only for you – and when you are not there, then how can I breathe?”
Love should be like breathing. It should be just a quality in you – wherever you are, with whomsoever you are, or even if you are alone, love goes on overflowing from you. It is not a question of being in love with someone – it is a question of being love.
People are frustrated in their love experiences, not because something is wrong with love…they narrow down love to such a point that the ocean of love cannot remain there. You cannot contain the ocean – it is not a small stream; love is your whole being – love is your godliness. One should think in terms of whether one is loving or not. The question of the object of love does not arise. With your wife, you love your wife; with your children, you love your children; with your servants, you love your servants; with your friends, you love your friends; with the trees, you love the trees; with the ocean, you love the ocean.
You are love.
Love is not dependent on the object, but is a radiation of your subjectivity – a radiation of your soul. And the vaster the radiation, the greater is your soul. The wider spread are the wings of your love, the bigger is the sky of your being.
You have lived under a common fallacy of all human beings. Now you are asking, “Am I able to love you?” – again, the same fallacy.
Just ask: Am I able to become love?
When you are in my presence, you need not think of loving me; otherwise, you have not come out of your ordinary fallacies. Here, you have to learn…just being loving. Of course your love will reach me too; it will reach others too. It will be a vibe surrounding you, spreading all over; and if so many people are simply broadcasting their love, their song, their ecstasy, the whole place becomes a temple. There is no other way of making a temple. Then the whole area is filled with a new kind of energy, and nobody is at a loss – because on you is showering the love of so many people: on each single person, so many people’s love is showering.
Drop that fallacy. And because of that fallacy, another question arises in you: “…or has life brought me to the point where happiness in love does not happen anymore?” Life is nothing but an opportunity for love to blossom. If you are alive, the opportunity is there – even to the last breath. You may have missed your whole life: just the last breath, the last moment on the earth, if you can be love, you have not missed anything – because a single moment of love is equal to the whole eternity of love.
When mind knows, we call it knowledge.
When heart knows, we call it love.
And when being knows, we call it meditation
But all three speak different languages, which are not translatable into each other. And the deeper you go, the more difficult it becomes to translate, because at the very center of your being there is nothing but silence. Now, how to translate silence into sound? The moment you translate silence into sound you have destroyed it. Even music cannot translate it. Perhaps music comes closest, but still it is sound.
Poetry does not come quite as close as music, because words, howsoever beautiful, are still words. They don't have life in them, they are dead. How can you translate life into something dead? Yes, perhaps between the words you may have a glimpse here and there – but it is between the words, between the lines, not in the words, not in the lines.
This is the most fundamental error of all religions: that they have deceived humanity by blatantly posing as if they know all.
But every day they have been exposed and their knowledge has been exposed; hence, they have been fighting with any progress of knowledge.
If Galileo finds that the earth moves around the sun, the pope is angry. The pope is infallible; he is only a representative of Jesus, but he is infallible. What to say about Jesus – he is the only begotten son of God, and what to say about God.... But in the Bible – which is a book descended from heaven, written by God – the sun goes around the earth.
Now, Galileo creates a problem. If Galileo is right, then God is wrong; God's only begotten son is wrong, the only begotten son's representatives for these two thousand years – all the popes who are infallible – are wrong. Just a single man, Galileo, destroys the whole pretension. The whole hypocrisy he exposes. His mouth has to be shut. He was old, dying, on his deathbed, but he was forced, almost dragged, to the court of the pope to ask for an apology.
And the pope demanded: "You change it in your book, because the holy book cannot be wrong. You are a mere human being; you can be wrong; but jesus Christ cannot be wrong, God Himself cannot be wrong, hundreds of infallible popes cannot be wrong.... You are standing against God, His son, and His representatives. You simply change it!"
Galileo must have been a man with an immense sense of humor – which I count to be one of the great qualities of a religious man. Only idiots are serious; they are bound to be serious. To be able to laugh you need a little intelligence.
It is said that an Englishman laughs twice when he hears a joke: once, just to be nice to the fellow who is telling the joke, out of etiquette, a mannerism; and second, in the middle of the night when he gets the meaning of the joke. The German laughs only once, just to show that he has understood it. The Jew never laughs; he simply says, "In the first place you are telling it all wrong...."
You need a little intelligence, and Galileo must have been intelligent. He was one of the greatest scientists of the world, but he must be counted as one of the most religious persons also. He said, "Of course God cannot be wrong, Jesus cannot be wrong, all the infallible popes cannot be wrong, but poor Galileo can always be wrong. There is no problem about it – i will change it in my book. But one thing you should remember: the earth will still go around the sun. About that I cannot do anything; it does not follow my orders. As far as my book is concerned I will change it, but in the note I will have to write this:'The earth does not follow my orders, it still goes around the sun.'"
And just opposite me lived a very famous astrologer who was deciding people's marriages by reading their birth-charts. As we were living opposite each other, it did not take long to get introduced to him.
I told him, "Do you really believe that what you are doing is sane?"
He said, "What do you mean? I am the best astrologer around this area. People come to me from hundreds of miles away."
I said, "That I can see myself. But I also see that your wife beats you. Did you look at your birth-charts when you got married to this woman? And if you could not decide even for yourself, don't you feel ashamed that what you are doing is simply stupid -- and not only stupid, inhuman?"
He was at a loss. I said, "Remember, I am a strange man. I will spread this news to everybody, and I will sit in the front of my garden to prevent people coming to you. I will tell them what is happening in your life."
At that very moment his wife came in from the kitchen and she said, "You are right. I will support you. This man is simply an idiot. He knows nothing; he has destroyed my life, he has destroyed his life, and he is destroying thousands of other people's lives!"
But this goes on.
There are people who will consult the I-Ching, who will consult the Tarot cards.... But the real thing is somewhere else. And it is known, but religious prejudices are preventing humanity from using it.
For example, the way education is imparted to students is utterly old-fashioned. It still depends on feeding the memory; and the more the memory is loaded, the less is the possibility of clarity and intelligence. I take it as a great opportunity that students can be freed from storing all kinds of information. They can carry small computers which will have all the information they need at any moment. That will help their minds to be more meditative, clear, innocent. Now their minds are too cluttered with unnecessary rubbish.
In the future, education will be centralized on computer and on TV, because what can be seen graphically is more easily remembered than what is read or heard. Eyes are far more powerful instruments than ears, or anything else. And it takes away the boredom of reading and listening. On the contrary, TV becomes a joyful experience. Geography can be taught very colorfully....
The teacher should be only a guide to show you the right channel, to show you how to use the computer, how to find the latest book. His function will be totally different. He is not imparting knowledge to you, he is making you aware of the contemporary knowledge, of the latest knowledge. He is only a guide.
The first is informative, like history, geography, and many other subjects which can be dealt with by television and computer together.
But about history – we have to take a completely radical standpoint. Right now history consists of Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Nadirshah, Adolf Hitler, etc. These are not our history, these are our nightmares. Even the idea that human beings can be so cruel to other human beings is nauseating. Our children should not be fed with such ideas.
In the future, history should consist only of those great geniuses who have contributed something to the beauty of this planet, to humanity – a Gautam Buddha, a Socrates, a Lao Tzu; great mystics like Jalaluddin Rumi, J. Krishnamurti; great poets like Walt Whitman, Omar Khayyam; great literary figures like Leo Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Rabindranath Tagore, Basho.
We should teach the positive grandeur of our inheritance, with footnotes about the people who have been counted up to now as historically great men – people like Adolf Hitler. They can have only a place in footnotes, or an appendix, with a clear explanation that they were either insane or suffered from some inferiority complex or other psychiatric disorder.
We have to make the future generations completely aware that a dark side existed in the past and dominated the past, but now there is no place for that side.
In the first dimension also come languages. Every person in the world should know at least two languages; one is his mother tongue, and the other is English as an international vehicle for communication. They can also be taught more accurately by television – the accent, the grammar, everything can be taught more correctly.
We can create in the world an atmosphere of brotherhood: language connects people and language disconnects too. There is right now no international language. This is due to our prejudices. English is perfectly suitable, because it is known by more people around the world on a wider scale.
The second is the inquiry of scientific subjects, which is tremendously important because it is half of reality, the outside reality. They can be imparted by television and computer too, but they are more complicated, and the human guide will be more necessary.
And the third will be what is missing in present-day education, the art of living. People have taken it for granted that they know what love is. They don't know...and by the time they know, it is too late. Every child should be helped to transform his anger, hatred, jealousy, into love.
THE EDUCATION THAT has prevailed in the past is very insufficient, incomplete, superficial. It only creates people who can earn their livelihood but it does not give any insight into living itself. It is not only incomplete, it is harmful too – because it is based on competition.
Any type of competition is violent deep down, and creates people who are unloving. Their whole effort is to be the achievers: of name, of fame, of all kinds of ambitions – obviously, they have to struggle and be in conflict for them. That destroys their joys and that destroys their friendliness. It seems everybody is fighting against the whole world.
Education up to now has been goal-oriented: what you are learning is not important; what is important is the examination that will come a year or two years later. It makes the future important – more important than the present. It sacrifices the present for the future. And that becomes your very style of life; you are always sacrificing the moment for something which is not present. It creates a tremendous emptiness in life.
Before I enter into those five dimensions, a few things have to be noted. One: there should not be any kind of examination as part of education, but every day, every hour, observation by the teachers; their remarks throughout the year will decide whether you move further or you remain a little longer in the same class. Nobody fails, nobody passes – it is just that a few people are speedy and a few people are a little bit lazy – because the idea of failure creates a deep wound of inferiority, and the idea of being successful also creates a different kind of disease, that of superiority.
So, examinations will not have any place. That will change the whole perspective from the future to the present. What you are doing right this moment will be decisive, not five questions at the end of two years. Of thousands of things you will pass through during these two years, each will be decisive; so the education will not be goal-oriented.
The teacher has been of immense importance in the past, because he knew he had passed all the examinations, he had accumulated knowledge. But the situation has changed – and this is one of the problems, that situations change but our responses remain the old ones. Now the knowledge explosion is so vast, so tremendous, so speedy, that you cannot write a big book on any scientific subject because by the time your book is complete, it will be out of date; new facts, new discoveries will have made it irrelevant. So now science has to depend on articles, on periodicals, not on books.
The teacher was educated thirty years earlier. In thirty years everything has changed, and he goes on repeating what he was taught. He is out of date, and he is making his students out of date. So in my vision the teacher has no place. Instead of teachers there will be guides, and the difference has to be understood: the guide will tell you where, in the library, to find the latest information on the subject.
It never becomes an intrinsic part of you, it never circulates in your blood, you never breath it in or breathe it out, it never beats in your heart -- it is simply something useless. Ornamental maybe, at the most, but of no utility to you. Some day you go to the church; it is a formality, a social need. And you can pay lip service to God, to the Bible, to the Koran, to the Vedas, but you don't mean it, you are not sincere about it. Your life goes on without it, your life goes on in a totally different way -- it has nothing to do with religion.
Watch...somebody says he is a Mohammedan, somebody says he is a Hindu, somebody says he is a Christian, somebody says he is a Jew -- their beliefs are different but watch their life and you will not find any difference. The Mohammedan, the Jew, the Christian, the Hindu -- they all live the same life. Their life is not at all touched by their belief. In fact, beliefs cannot touch your life, beliefs are devices. Beliefs are cunning devices through which you say: "I know what life is" -- and you can rest at ease, you are not troubled by life. You hold a concept and that concept helps you to rationalize. Then life does not bother you much because you have all the answers to all the questions.
But remember...unless religion is personal, unless religion is not abstract but real, deep in your roots, deep in your guts, unless it is like blood and bone and marrow, it is futile, it is of no use. It is the religion of the philosophers not the religion of the sages.
These other two are the falsifications of religion, pseudo-dimensions -- cheap, very easy, because they don't challenge you. The third is very difficult, arduous; it is a great challenge; it will create a turmoil in your life -- because the third, the real religion says God has to be addressed in a personal way. You have to provoke him and you have to allow him to provoke you and you have to come to terms with him; in fact, you have to struggle with him, you have to clash against him. You have to love him, and you have to hate him; you have to be a friend and you have to be an enemy; you have to make your experience of God a living experience.
I have heard about a small child -- and I would like you to be like this small child. He was really smart....
A little boy was lost at a Sunday school picnic. His mother began a frantic search for him, and soon she heard loud sounds in a childish voice calling: "Estelle, Estelle!"
She quickly spotted the youngster and rushed up to grab him in her arms. "Why did you keep calling me by my name, Estelle, instead of Mother?" she asked him, as he had never called her by her first name before. "Well," the youngster answered, "it was no use calling out 'Mother' -- the place is full of them."
If you call "mother" there are so many mothers -- the place is full of them. You have to call in a personal way, you have to call the first name.
The perception that happiness is the end of the road is what leads people to perpetual unhappiness and the illusion of an unfulfilled life. We are beings that live in duality ALL the time. The same moment you praise yourself for something, you beat yourself up for something else. If you are loved by 100 people, you are certainly despised by others to the same degree that you are loved. It is the law of cause and effect working synchronistically. There is no action now, reaction later.. It happens simultaneously. It is our distorted perception that leads us to believe that "karma" plays a role in our lives. Nothing is missing in your life. You are as happy as you are sad. You are as good as you are bad. You are as loved as you are hated. The key to understand the divine matrix is to open your heart with gratitude and feel the infinite love that surrounds you. The feeling of unconditional love (not the temporary dopamine fix of instant gratifications) is all there really is. All else is illusion. Until you are grateful for everything in your life, it is impossible to feel it. Blessings..
Man is born as a seed. He is born as a potentiality,he is not born as an actuality. And this is very special,this is extraordinary,because in the whole of existence only the human being is born as a potentiality; ever other animal is born actual. A dog is born as a dog, he will remain the same his whole life. The lion is born as a lion. Man is not born as a human being, man is born only as a seed: he May flower,he may not. Man has a future; no other animal has a future. All animals are born instinctively perfect. Man is the only imperfect animal; hence growth, evolution, is possible.
Education is a bridge between the potentiality and the actuality. Education is to help you to become that which you are only in a seed form. And this is what I am doing here; this is a place of education.The thing that is being done in the ordinary schools and colleges and universities is not education. It only prepares you to get a job, a good earning; it is not real education. It does not give you life.Maybe it can give you a better standard of living, but the better standard of living is not a better standard of life; they are not synonymous.
The so-called education that goes on in the world prepares you only to earn bread. And Jesus says " Man cannot live by bread alone " And that's what your universities have been doing - they prepare you to earn bread in a better way, in an easier way, in a more comfortable way,with less effort, with less hardship. It is a very primitive kids of education: it does not prepare you for life.
Hence you see so many robots walking around.They are perfect as clerks, as stationmasters, as deputy collectors. They are perfect, they are skillful , but if you look deep down in them they are just beggars and nothing else. They have not even tasted one bite of life. They have not known what life is, what love is,what light is . They have not known anything of godliness, they have not tasted anything of existence, they don't know how to sing and how dance and how to celebrate.They don't know the grammar of life; They are utterly stupid. Yes , they earn - they earn more than others, they are very skillful and they go on rising higher and higher on the ladder of success - but deep down they remain empty,poor.
Education is to give you inner richness. It is not just to make you more informed; that is a very primitive idea of education. I call it primitive because it is rooted in fear,rooted in the idea that " If I am not well educated I will not be able to survive " I call it primitive because deep down it is violent: it teaches you competition, it makes you ambitious. It is nothing but a preparation for a cutthroat, competitive world where everybody is the enemy of everybody else. Hence the world has become a madhouse. Love cannot happen. How can love happen in such a violent, ambitious, competitive world where everybody is at each other's throats ? This is very primitive, It takes life only as a struggle. My vision of education is that life should not be taken as a struggle for survival; life should be taken as a celebration.
The first type is childish; it is searching for a father-figure. The first type is immature; it cannot rely upon itself, hence it needs a God somewhere or other. The God may exist or not -- that is not the point -- but a God is needed. Even if the God is not there the immature mind will invent him, because the immature mind has a psychological need -- it is not a question of truth whether God is there or not, it is a psychological need.
In the Bible it is said God made man in his own image, but the reverse is more true: man made God in his own image. Whatsoever is your need you create that sort of God, that's why the concept of God goes on changing in every age. Every country has its own concept because every country has its own need. In fact, every single person has a different concept of God because his own needs are there and they have to be fulfilled.
A small boy was saying his prayers and concluded with this remark: "Dear God, take care of Mommy, take care of Daddy, take care of baby sister and Aunt Emma and Uncle John and Grandma and Grandpa -- and, please God, take care of yourself, or else we're all sunk!"
This is the God of the majority. Ninety per cent of the so-called religious people are immature people. They believe because they cannot live without belief; they believe because belief gives a sort of security; they believe because belief helps them to feel protected. It is their dream, but it helps. In the dark night of life, in the deep struggle of existence, without such a belief they will feel left alone. But their God is their God, not the God of reality. And once they get rid of their immaturity, their God will disappear.
That's what has happened to many people. In this century many people have become irreligious -- not that they have come to know that God does not exist but only because this age has made man a little more mature.
So the God of the childhood, the God of the immature mind, has simply become irrelevant.
That is the meaning when Friedrich Nietzsche declares that "God is dead." It is not God that is dead, it is the God of the immature mind that is dead. In fact to say that God is dead is not right because that God was never alive. The only right expression will be to say that "God is no more relevant" Man can rely more upon himself -- he does not need belief, he does not need the crutches of belief.
Hence people have become less and less interested in religion. They have become indifferent to what goes on in the church. They have become so indifferent to it that they will not even argue against it. If you say: "Do you believe in God?" they will say: "It's okay whether he is or not, it doesn't make any difference, it doesn't matter." Just to be polite, if you believe, they will say: "Yes, he is." If you don't believe, they will say: "No, he is not." But it is no more a passionate concern.
This is the first type of religion; it has existed for centuries, down the centuries, down the ages, and it is becoming more and more outmoded, out of date. Its time is finished. A new God is needed -- who is not psychological; a new God is needed -- who is existential, the God of reality, the God as reality. We can even drop the word "God" -- "the real" will do, "the existential" will do.
Then there is a second type of religious people for whom religion is not out of fear. The first type of religion is out of fear, the second type -- also bogus, also pseudo, also so-called -- is not out of fear, it is only out of cleverness. There are very clever people who go on inventing theories, who are very trained in logic, in metaphysics, in philosophy. They create a religion which is just an abstraction: a beautiful piece of art work, of intelligence, of intellectuality, of philosophizing. But it never penetrates life, it never touches life anywhere, it simply remains an abstract conceptualization.
Now what kind of religion is that? It has no impact on life.
"Not only the corporate houses but every place where man dwells has much to learn from the temples. First, you are always moving on holy ground. Not only in the temple are you in a holy place, but even in the marketplace you are moving on the same holy ground. You are not to be just prayerful in the temple, in the mosque, in the church. Your prayerfulness has to become just your breathing. You have not to create only in your temple a beautiful world of incense, of flowers, of music, of chanting, of beautiful architecture, of sculptures -- the temple should simply be the model for every house. Not only corporate houses, every house should be a temple, because every body is a temple.
God dwells in you, and wherever you are, you should create the aroma, the fragrance of godliness.
The authentically religious person is neither Hindu, nor Mohammedan, nor Christian, nor Jaina, nor Buddhist. An authentic religious person is simply a prayerful person, a loving person, a creative person -- a man who has the golden touch; whatever he touches becomes beautiful and valuable. It is not possible that our houses remain in hell and once in a while, for an hour, we can enter a temple and find heaven -- that is not possible. Unless you are twenty-four hours in heaven, you cannot enter into a temple and suddenly change -- suddenly drop your jealousies, your anger, your hatred, your competitiveness, your ambitions, your politics. You cannot simply drop all your ugliness.
You can pretend, you can be a hypocrite ... and in fact all the people who are visiting temples of any religion are hypocrites, because their other twenty-three hours show their reality. For only one hour, they cannot become a different being.
A religious person has to understand that it is not a question of believing in a certain theology; it is not a question of believing in a certain tradition. It is a question of transforming yourself in such a way that compassion becomes your very heartbeat, that gratitude becomes your very breathing, that wherever you are, your eyes can see the divine -- in the trees, in the mountains, in people, in animals, in birds. Unless you can make the whole existence your temple, you are not religious.
Wherever you move, you are always in a temple, because you are always surrounded by that mysterious energy that people have called "God." A few others have given it other names -- they differ only in names. But one thing is certain: we are not living in a mundane universe. On each step there is a mystery, and there are mysteries beyond mysteries. If you are simply aware of all the mysteries, your worship will be to make everything as worthy of God as possible.
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