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I CELEBRATE MYSELF: GOD IS NOW WHERE, LIFE IS NOW HERE
Chapter 3: The paradise of yourself
Question 1
Energy Enhancement Enlightened Texts Zen I Celebrate Myself
The questions from sannyasins.
Question 1
The first question:
I HEARD YOU SAY EXISTENCE IS NON-JUDGMENTAL, BUT OUR MINDS ARE FULL OF JUDGMENTS.
WHERE DO THEY COME FROM? ARE THEY ALSO RELATED TO THE IDEA OF GOD?
Existence is non-judgmental.
That is one of the greatest contributions of Zen to humanity: that you need not be a saint to be awakened. You can be awakened from any angle, from any dimension of life.
It is almost like somebody is dreaming that he is murdering someone, and somebody else is dreaming a very sweet dream that he is serving the poor people. Somebody is dreaming that he is very virtuous, a saint, and somebody is dreaming that he is a murderer, the worst kind of criminal.
Do you think the saintly dreamer will wake up sooner, and the sinner and the criminal will take a little longer time to wake up? They will both wake up exactly at the same time, by the same method. Just throw one bucket full of ice-cold water on both and they will jump out of their beds. It does not matter whether they were dreaming of sin or they were dreaming of virtue.
Zen's understanding is -- and I absolutely support it, it is my own experience -- that you can wake up wherever you are, whatever you are doing; your actions, your personality, your character, don't count at all. This is a tremendous declaration because all religions have been telling you, "First you have to become a saint, then only can you enter into the paradise of God."
Zen gives you a tremendous equality. It does not matter what you are doing, it does not matter how you are behaving, it does not matter what is your personality -- polished, crude, uncultured ... You can wake up by the same method, meditation, directly, without changing anything in your character, in your actions.
And existence in this way is non-judgmental. It gives life to the sinner, it gives life to the saint, without any discrimination. It gives love, showers silence over all, without any discrimination.
Your question is, where do these judgments come from? Fundamentally, originally, they come from the fiction of God. But a fiction cannot do anything, the fiction has to hire living people. They come from your priesthood, from your popes, your shankaracharyas, your imams, your Ayatolla Khomeniacs.
Just now, one Mohammedan has written a book about the holy Koran. It has been banned by Rajiv Gandhi -- and he has not read it -- because the Mohammedan pressure in India is of immense importance. They vote in a solid block and they are second to Hindus -- they create fear. They asked that the book should be banned. It is being banned in many countries which are Mohammedan.
Ayatolla Khomeini came on the radio in Iran and declared that wherever this man is, he has to be immediately killed, murdered -- not only the person who has written the book, but the person who has published it, and the person who has printed it, and the person who has the sole agency to sell it. All four have to be butchered wherever they are. And it is the duty of every Mohammedan to finish them off as quickly as possible and burn all the copies of the book. Not a single copy should remain anywhere in existence. And that man has done an immense job of analysis.
This you call a world which is democratic?
This you call a world where there is freedom of speech?
These priests are the source, the immediate source. In the name of God they have made your minds judgmental. Without understanding anything, you are carrying judgments in your mind.
The moment you see something, immediately a judgment arises. You don't have to make the judgment it has become almost automatic. You see a rose and suddenly you watch a judgment arising: "This is beautiful." But the moment you say, "This is beautiful," the judgment is hiding the rose. The judgment is coming from past experiences of roses. But this is a new rose, you have never met it before, it has never before been on the earth. For the first and last time it has come into expression. You may have seen roses, but this one is not the same. All your judgments about other roses are figments of your memory.
The robotlike arises in you: "This is beautiful" -- not that you have understood its beauty, not that you are existentially in direct contact with its beauty, not that your eyes are absolutely pure and rejoicing the beauty of the rose.
The judgment comes and you destroy the rose.
The judgment stands between you and the rose, and you are lost into past memories of roses that you have seen before. But this is not one that you have ever come across.
Any judgment is past oriented, and existence is always herenow, life is always herenow. All judgments are coming from your past experiences, your education, your religion, your parents -- which may be dead, but their judgments are being carried by your mind and they will be given as a heritage to your children. Generation after generation, every disease is being transferred as a heritage.
Only a non-judgmental mind has intelligence, because it is spontaneously responding to reality.
I want you to drop God.
I want you to drop your scriptures.
I want you to drop your parents.
I want you to drop everything that has been given to you with all good intentions -- that does not matter. Those good intentions don't have any weight but they have made you judgmental.
So immediately, without knowing, without understanding, without experiencing, you come to a judgment. The judgment comes immediately, so quickly that if you are not alert enough you are not going to be able to get rid of them. They are just waiting there in your mind, in your storage of the memory. The moment you see something, the moment you hear something, immediately comes the judgment: "It is right, it is wrong. It is according to my mind, hence I agree with it."
But if you are agreeing according to your mind you are not agreeing, you are simply getting your mind to become stronger.
The function of the master is a very delicate one. He has to take away all your mind, slowly slowly, so that a certain pure space exists in your mind. Then only have you the eyes to see, and the ears to hear. Then everything goes deep, without any obstacles, to your very center of being.
Everything in existence is nourishing.
Everything in existence has its own purpose, it is fulfilling its own job. That which you deny according to your borrowed knowledge is needed by existence, otherwise it would not have been there. Anything that is happening anywhere must have some support from existence, otherwise it will simply drop dead.
Life needs variety. Just think of a world where everybody is a saint -- it will be the worst world, the most boring. And the boredom will become so heavy that it will create only one desire: how to finish yourself, because you cannot finish all the saints. Only you can commit suicide to get out of that boredom. If all the people were of the same size and had the same faces ... howsoever beautiful the faces, howsoever beautiful the personalities, if they were all the same, carbon copies of carbon copies, you would be utterly bored. Knowing one woman you would know all women, finished -- there is no opportunity to have another experience. Knowing one man you would have known all men.
And that is not right because every man is different and every woman is different. Every rose is different from other roses, every flower is different from other flowers.
Just now, as I was getting ready to come here, taking my bath, the cuckoos in my garden were really going cuckoo! But I wondered that every cuckoo has its own song to sing. I could make out clearly how many cuckoos there were. Their song was different, their sound was different.
Existence takes care of variety.
Sinners are also needed in this world -- they make life more cheerful. Saints are also needed as an example that you should not follow them. They are as dead as dodos. They are good examples to avoid. Sinners are nice people. I have never seen a sinner sad and I have never seen a saint joyful. It is strange, it should have been otherwise if religions were true. But religions are not true.
Sinners have a quality of innocence which saints don't have. They are very calculating, very cunning. What they are doing in their saintliness is just purchasing some good land, some good house, some bank account in the other world. They are so greedy that they are not satisfied with this beautiful planet and this beautiful dance of life. Sinners are non-greedy people, they rejoice in small things -- a beautiful woman, delicious food, just a little drink; and they are so happy to dance and sing and celebrate. These are the real salt of the earth. They are needed. And saints are needed so that you can avoid them.
But remember, everything in this world has its own place and has its own dignity, and by your judgment you are destroying the dignity of someone, you are interfering into somebody's territory.
A man who is full of judgment becomes ugly, become unbearable. A man without judgment is always welcomed by everyone because he will never interfere into your territory, he will never trespass your spirituality and your dignity.
All your judgments are coming from the priesthood in the name of God. God cannot do it by himself because he is a lie; he does not exist, he has never existed. But priests go on supporting the lie, it is their very profession. If God is exposed completely then the priests have no way to continue their exploitation of humanity. They are selling God to almost the whole of humanity -- a God which does not exist.
I have heard about a shop in New York which was advertising: "We have manufactured invisible hairpins."
Certainly there were queues of women. Invisible hairpins? No woman can resist the temptation.
One woman looked into the box when she got it -- of course the invisible pins you cannot see -- seeing the box empty, she asked the salesman, "Are you sure that there are invisible hairpins inside?"
He said, "To be frank with you, we have run out of invisible hairpins for almost two weeks, but the empty boxes are selling. But the truth is, there are no invisible pins, and only empty boxes were selling from the very beginning."
You can sell invisible pins to people ... and God is the most invisible thing in the world. Perhaps some day we may invent invisible pins, but God cannot be manufactured. And a God manufactured by us will not be much of a God. We would like to change the model every year, and those who are super-rich would like to change every six months.
But because God is nowhere to be found, the priests can go on thriving on the business. They know perfectly well -- they are the only people who know -- that God does not exist. But they cannot say it because what will happen to their whole profession? A millions-of-years-old profession, supporting millions of priests around the world -- and they are the highest people everywhere. They don't want to lose it, they don't want to miss their whole business.
So they go on creating more commandments, more judgments, they go on creating more theological fictions and they go on feeding your mind. Their whole purpose is your mind should be full of all kinds of rubbish so you cannot have any space to be intelligent. Because if you can have an empty mind the no-mind is not far away. The empty mind becomes the door to no-mind. When the empty mind becomes a stepping-stone to no-mind, it creates no problems, no obstacles.
So your mind has to be filled with the holy Koran, with The Holy Bible, with the holy Gita, and there are thousands of scriptures. You can choose whatever kind of rubbish you want -- it comes in all sizes and all shapes. There is immense choice. There are three hundred religions on the earth. You can't imagine a new religion, they have exhausted all possibilities. Three hundred religions about one God -- you can choose. You are free to choose but you are not free not to choose.
And that's what I am teaching you: don't choose.
Explore, discover, don't decide before you have realized. And realization, liberation, freedom, will give you an insight into everything. You will feel compassionate and loving to the whole life that surrounds you, non-judgmental.
I have told you the story of a Zen master ....
A thief entered his house without knowing that it was a Zen master's house -- it contained nothing. The Zen master felt very embarrassed. The night was cold and he had only one blanket that he used in the day to cover his body, and in the night to cover his body to go asleep. That was all that he had, and the whole house was empty.
He felt so compassionate towards the thief that when the thief was going out he threw the blanket on his shoulders and told him: "Please accept it. You came without informing me. If you had just informed me at least three days before, I would have gathered something for you. I feel for the first time really poor. I cannot give you anything; this house is empty."
And the thief was very much afraid of this man. He was standing naked in the cold winter night and he had given his only possession, the blanket. But the man was strange, he was saying to him, "You should first inform me and then you can come. But give me a little time so I can beg from people and keep something for you. This is not right for you to come so suddenly without any information."
The man certainly was strange. The thief had come across hundreds of people -- everybody was angry, everybody was handing him over to the police. He had suffered in jails so many times. Everybody was abusive, everybody was insulting. Out of jail, life was difficult. Nobody was ready to give him a job, so finally, he had to commit another crime just to enter into jail because that became his home. At least he had food, shelter, clothes.
This man was strange. He became afraid of this man -- he rushed out of the door.
And the Zen monk shouted, "Stop! That's not right, come back. First give me a `thank you' so that you don't feel guilty that you have stolen anything -- I have given it to you.
"And then close the doors. You have opened the doors, at least this is your responsibility to close the doors. I am naked, the door is open, and the cold wind is blowing ... and you don't have any compassion."
So he gave him a "thank you," and while he was leaving and closing the door, the saint said, "Perhaps some day this `thank you' will save you, this closing the door will be of much help to you."
He could not understand what help it could be .... But that night, looking from the window to the full moon in the sky, the Zen master wrote a small haiku which said:
I AM SO POOR.
I WOULD HAVE LOVED
TO GIVE THIS MOON TO THAT THIEF,
BUT I DON'T POSSESS IT.
Two years afterwards the thief was caught again in a very dangerous case -- perhaps he would get a life-long imprisonment.
The judge asked him, "Can you bring anybody as a witness that you are not a criminal? We don't have any evidence, only circumstantial evidence, that you have committed a crime. If you can produce a man of dignity to support you in that you are a man who is not capable of doing such a crime ..."
He remembered the Zen master because that was the only person who could support him. He told the judge the name of the Zen master.
The judge said, "You are referring to a Zen master -- I know him. If he says you are not a criminal the case is finished."
And the Zen master came and he said, "This man you are saying is a criminal -- this man is so nice. When I gave him a blanket he thanked me, and when I told him to close the door, he closed the door. He is so obedient, such a nice person. The blanket was not much, it had holes, it was old, but he received it as if I was giving him an empire. He was so grateful -- just leave him."
The case was dropped ... the Zen master was well known, even to the emperor.
The thief followed the Zen monk, and the Zen monk asked him, "Where are you going?"
The thief said, "I am not going anywhere, I am coming with you. I have found a man who has no judgments and who has returned my dignity to me. For the first time I feel I am a human being and there is someone who loves me, there is someone who feels for me, and there is someone who has compassion even for a man who has never done anything good."
The Zen master said, "Don't judge yourself."
This is the trouble. People judge others and they judge themselves too. When they judge themselves they feel guilty; when they judge others they take people's dignity and honor. This judgmental mind is a double-edged sword, it cuts both the ways. It cuts you, it cuts others. It has destroyed the whole humanity.
Next: Chapter 3: The paradise of yourself, Question 2
Energy Enhancement Enlightened Texts Zen I Celebrate Myself
| ENERGY
|
GAIN ENERGY APPRENTICE
LEVEL1
|
THE ENERGY BLOCKAGE REMOVAL
PROCESS
|
THE KARMA CLEARING
PROCESS APPRENTICE LEVEL3
|
MASTERY
OF RELATIONSHIPS TANTRA APPRENTICE LEVEL4
|
|
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