DRUGS

The joy of this life, the bliss, the ecstasy, belongs only to those whose
wine is not coming from the outside -- that is very ephemeral, very
temporal, made of the same stuff as dreams are made of. There is another
wine which grows within you. The moment you start moving inwards, there
is no need for anything else to make you oblivious to all the misery that
surrounds you. There is no need for any other drug.

A few idiots in the West have started calling a drug "ecstasy." Now that is
absolutely against all the laws of the world, because ecstasy has been for
centuries copyrighted by the mystic the saint!
And it is not an outside drug, it flows
in the very juices of your life. You dont have to move even an inch;
wherever you are you can be surrounded by all possibilities of blissfulness.
And these possibilities of blissfulness are not temporal; it is not that
tomorrow morning you will have a hangover. The more you drink, the more
sober, the more sane, the more alert, the more conscious you become.

Unless a drug is found within your being, you are bound to look for it
somewhere else. It raises a tremendously significant question. As long as
we can remember in human history the oldest, ancientmost scripture is the
Rig Veda of the Hindus, and the Rig Veda talks about a certain drug,
somrasa.

One of the most intelligent men of our century, Aldous Huxley, became very
interested in searching for what this somrasa was, because the seers of Rig
Veda used to drink it and dance around the fire. Certainly it seems it must
have been a drug, and particularly to the Western objective thinker it
cannot be anything else than a drug.

Aldous Huxley experimented with all kinds of drugs and finally he decided
that LSD seems to come very close to the description of somrasa. In the
hope that in the future LSD will be more refined -- because it is a synthetic
drug, manufactured; hence there is every possibility to improve upon it, to
take away all the ingredients which can be harmful and leave only that
which brings health, wholeness, awareness, and a tremendous insight into
the mysteries of existence . Hoping that some day scientists were going to
discover it, Huxley had already named it soma, just to pay respect to the
ancient seers of Rig Veda.

The somrasa that is being described in the Rig Veda is certainly a drug just
like marijuana which used to grow in the Himalayas. Perhaps it still grows
there but we have not been able to find the place where it grows.

And the fire they were dancing around has nothing to do with the inner fire
of life. I have looked into the Rig Veda as deeply, as sympathetically as
possible. The people who are talking about the somrasa and the fire ritual
were even sacrificing human beings, not to mention sacrificing other
animals. The Hindus, who go on continuously making trouble in this country
because of their insistence that cow slaughter should be stopped, should
read their ancientmost scriptures. All their priests were slaughtering cows
as a sacrifice to the fire god, and they were all eating the meat of the
cows. Now, these people cannot be said to be meditative.

I absolutely deny the Rig Veda and the prestige that it has in the minds of
men, because people dont read it and people dont analyze it and people
dont see its stupidities and all kinds of inhumanities.

In the Rig Veda women are just a commodity. You can purchase women in
the marketplace in any auction. Even the so-called seers had many wives,
and they were not even satisfied by that. That is an absolutely ugly state,
that any human being reduces so many women into cattle. Over and above
all that, they were continually purchasing beautiful girls in auctions.

These seers accumulated immense wealth, had many slaves, used to eat
meat -- I cannot conceive that they had found the inner ecstasy I am
talking about. All the circumstantial evidence goes against them. And look
at their prayers -- their prayers are so stupid that one feels embarrassed
that these people were called great seers. Their prayers are in the Rig
Veda, and the Rig Veda consists of ninety-eight percent prayers. Only two
percent can be sorted out, cleaned, interpreted in a way that makes some
sense. Otherwise, ninety-eight percent of it consists of such prayers that
you will not believe .

One seer is praying to God, drinking that ancient LSD of Aldous Huxley, "This
time, my God, listen to my prayer: your clouds should rain only on my fields,
not on the fields of my enemies. You have never listened to me but this
time I am sacrificing so many cows, so many horses, and you have to listen.
Give more children to me, and dont give a single child to my enemies." And
who are the enemies? -- other seers, and they are also praying! Prayers
which look so stupid. "If you are compassionate, give a proof to me: the
milk in the breasts of my enemys cows should dry up."

These are religious people? "Give victory to me, to my friends, and defeat to
my enemies and their friends." I cannot think of these people as meditative.
Aldous Huxley was absolutely wrong. Somrasa was nothing but some horrible
drug; perhaps it may have been marijuana, because it still grows in Kulu
Manali and in other parts of the Himalayas. There is no need to cultivate it,
it simply grows naturally. Those are the places where the Rig Veda was
composed.

All the governments of the
world and all the religions of the world, all the moral teachers of the world
have been against drugs; still drugs are more predominant today than they
have ever been. The more they have been condemned, prohibited, made
illegal, the more attractive they have become. People used to drink and
take drugs at a certain stage, but the latest information from California is
that school children are taking drugs, and small boys and girls are suffering
in jails because they have been found taking drugs.

All the religions are against drugs, all the governments are against drugs, all
the teachers, all the moralists are against drugs, and the influence of drugs
goes on growing. There must be something deeper in it than people have
looked into.

My understanding is that unless man finds a drug within himself, which I call
ecstasy, he will go on finding some kind of drug as a substitute in the
outside world. Only meditation can stop a person from taking drugs. No law
can prohibit them -- all laws have failed. It only creates hypocrites.

I am not against ecstasy, but when I say ecstasy I dont mean the drug
that is available in the market. I mean the ecstasy that you are born with,
that you are still holding inside you, and you have not touched. Just a little
taste of it and everything else on the outside immediately becomes
meaningless.

Be drunkards, but your drink has to come from your own
innermost center. And the difference can be very easily understood: every
outer drug will make you unconscious, addicted, and every time you will
need more and more of it because your body will become immune to it.

Still, in India, there are a few ancient traditions which have fallen into the
same fallacy as Aldous Huxley. But they have gone farther than Aldous
Huxley; they drink all kinds of alcoholic beverages, they use all kinds of
drugs. A moment comes when no drug can make them unconscious, no drug
can bring them what they have been trying to find -- a way to forget
themselves, to forget this miserable world, to forget all these people. The
last resort is that there are ashrams in Assam; they are the only remnants
of a very long-standing tradition. They keep cobra snakes as a last resort
-- when no drug affects you, the cobra is allowed to bite you on your
tongue. Only then do you feel a little shaken, but the miracle is that the
cobra dies! The man is so full of poison but the poor cobra was not aware;
otherwise he would have escaped.

Man has remained so much interested in poisons. The reason is not too
far away to see; you just need a clarity. Man is so miserable that he cannot
live consciously with this misery. He needs a few gaps, at least a few
holidays from this miserable anguish, anxiety, and all kinds of tortures.
Thats the function of any drug.

Drop all future, all hope, all illusion, and just relax in the moment knowing
perfectly well that this is the only moment which exists. All else is either
memory or imagination.

One who is in the present immediately drowns in his own well of something
which is not poisonous, but it is certainly ecstatic. And once you have
known your own source, there is no need to go anywhere,
to any pub to any liquor store.

The young doctor, inexperienced with operations, is instructed to stand at
the head of the patient so that without getting in the way, he can watch
the expert do an abdominal operation. He is also instructed not to speak,
but after a while he cant resist: "How is your end, sir?" says the young
man. "All right," says the expert, looking up, "why?"
"I only wondered, sir," says the young man, "because my ends been dead
for ten minutes."

There are a few things which all traditions have prohibited people to speak,
and it needs immense courage to go against the whole tradition of mankind.
For example, everybody has been told not to support any kind of drug in
any way, and people have remained silent. I have not come across a single
statement in which somebody has dared to say that the predominance of
drugs shows something immensely significant, and it cannot be simply
outlawed; it cannot be simply prohibited. But I want to say it.

Unless man finds the authentic drug which is in his own being, there is no
force on the earth which can prohibit alcohol, which can prohibit marijuana,
which can prohibit hashish, which can prohibit LSD.
More and more drugs will be coming in, and the miracle is that the people
who are trying to prohibit these things -- ninety percent of them are
themselves using them.

There is only one single target, and that is your innermost being.
Drop all games -- worldly games, spiritual games, games that
the whole of humanity has played up to now. These games keep you
retarded. These games hinder you from growing into consciousness, into
your own ultimate flowering.Cut away all this rubbish that
prevents you. Be alone, absolutely alone, so that you cannot take
anybodys help, so you cannot cling to anyone.
Left alone -- utterly alone -- you are bound to find your innermost center.
There is no way, nowhere to go, no advisor, no teacher, no master.
It seems hard, it seems harsh, even enlightenment is the last game.
The sooner you drop it, the better. Why not just simply be?
Why unnecessarily hurry here and there? You are what existence
wants you to be. Just relax.


				*DRUGS*