|
|
>>>
What Happens When We Say "NO!" ? <<<
NO - Condemnation comes
easily to the mind. It is the easiest thing in the world to say that something is wrong. To say no is the easiest thing for
the mind. Yes is the hardest thing. --- Watch your mind, how many times it says no. Even sometimes if it has to say yes, it
says it grudgingly. With no, it is very happy. The moment you say no to somebody you feel very powerful. You enjoy saying
no because no helps the ego - yes dissolves it. And it is easy to say no. It is very, very difficult to say yes, because with
the yes a door opens - with the no a door closes. When you say no, watch what happens in your innermost being - suddenly all
doors close. When you say no, you are closed.You become a monad of Leibnitz with no windows, no doors, no bridges.
The
no simply cuts all possibilities of bridging yourself to the other. All possibilities of love, prayer, surrender, all possibilities
of meditation, are cut immediately, the moment you say no! --- No makes you an island, and NO man is an island. And to feel
that you are an island is the greatest illusion - you are part of the whole. When you say no, you are cut, you have broken
all the bridges. And the ego always wants, enjoys to say no, it relishes it. --- Watch! Unless it is absolutely necessary,
never say no! Even dropping the word will make you more and more alert. Even if you have to say no, say it in such a way that
it becomes positive, takes the form of yes. Just by
dropping the no you will feel many new things happening within you,
because this is a very, very potential word. These two words are very potential: yes and no. They change your total being,
because they are not ordinary words. They are not words, they are gestures - that's your way, your very style of life. A man
who goes on saying no will become more and more sad, depressed; life will not knock on his door
any more. If you continuosly
say no, how can life go on knocking at your door? Winds will not flow towards him; flowers will not be flowering on his path.
He is sowing thorns by saying no. --- The no-sayer is the only atheist. To say no to God is just the
culmination of your
total trend of saying no. To say yes to life is what theism means to me - to say yes to life, to open doors, to relate, to
be available. Say yes and suddenly you feel windows opening inside. Just sit under a tree and say loudly, "Yes!" and feel
the change. Then say "NO!" and feel the change. You create a different climate; different vibrations come with the no. With
yes you create an opening, as if you have thrown a pebble in a lake, and ripples arise, and they go on and on and on, spreading
and spreading; they will reach to the very opposite bank. When you say yes you throw a stone of acceptance, of love, of prayer,
of your being ready, of surrender - and then the ripples go on and on and on, and they reach to the very infinity. A yes-sayer
is bound to become a theist some day, because yes ultimately culminates into the divine. --- Yes becomes the God. No becomes,
finally, godlessness. --- The God of the mystics can be found not by belief or concepts, but by a deep going inward. It has
nothing to do with theology; it has something to do with an inner search, an insight into your own being. The moment you know
who you are you have found God, and in that very finding you find your freedom, your truth ...
**Denying
the Varieties of Light**
A look at Nietzsches diatribe against
mans beliefs in his own impotence,
and the nature of the superman and the will-to-power,- Nietzsches concept
that
was used by Adolf Hitler. -
Nietzsche was not insane in this last phase of his life, it was the
inevitable conclusion
of his negative approach. An intellect can only be
negative; it can argue and criticize and be sarcastic, but it cannot
give you
any nourishment. From no negative standpoint can you get any
nourishment. So he lost his God, and he lost
his consolation. He became free
just to be mad.
And it is not only Friedrich Nietzsche, so it cannot be said that
it was just
an accident. Many intellectual giants find themselves in mad asylums or
commit suicide, because nobody
can live in a negative darkness. One needs
light and a positive, affirmative experience of truth. Nietzsche demolished
the light and created a vacuum in himself and in others who followed him.
If you feel deep down a vacuum, utter
emptiness with no meaning, it is
because of Friedrich Nietzsche. A whole philosophy has grown in the West:
Nietzsche
is the founder of this very negative approach to life.
Soren Kierkegaard, and Jean-Paul Sartre, and Marcel, and Jaspers,
and
Martin Heidegger -- all the great giants of the first half of this century --
were talking only about meaninglessness,
anguish, suffering, anxiety, dread,
fear, angst. And this philosophy has been called in the West existentialism.
It
is not. It is simply non-existentialism. It destroys everything that has
consoled you.
Nietzsches statement is
bound to be only one side of the coin.
Nietzsche has forgotten one thing, which
was bound to happen because his statement
is based on rationality, logic
and intellect. It is not based on meditation.
Man is free, but free for what? If
there is no God and man is free, that will
simply mean man is now capable of doing anything, good or bad; there is
nobody
to judge him, nobody to forgive him. This freedom will be simply
licentiousness.Then there is no question of sin or virtue,
no question of sinners and saints.Nothing
is good and nothing is bad.
There comes the other side. You remove God and you leave man utterly
empty. Of course,
you declare his freedom, but to what purpose? How is he
going to use his freedom creatively, responsibly? How is he going
to avoid
freedom being reduced to licentiousness?
Friedrich Nietzsche was not aware of any meditations -- that
is the other
side of the coin. Man is free, but his freedom can only be a joy and a
blessing to him if he is rooted
in meditation.
Friedrich Nietzsche in his last phase of life became almost insane. He was
hospitalized, kept in
a mad asylum. Such a great giant, what happened to
him? He had concluded: "God is dead," but it is a negative conclusion.
He
became empty, but his freedom was meaningless. There was no joy in it
because it was only freedom from God, but
for what? Freedom has two
sides: from and for. The other side was missing. That drove him insane.
Emptiness always
drives people insane. You need some grounding, you need
some centering, you need some relationship with existence. God
being dead,
all your relationship with existence was finished. God being dead, you were
left alone without roots.
A tree cannot live without roots, nor can you,
you are leaving man in an utter vacuum. Out of
that vacuum existentialism
is born, thats why it talks only about
meaninglessness: "Life has no meaning." It talks about no significance: "You
are
just an accident. Whether you are here or not does not matter at all to
existence."
And these people call their
philosophy existentialism. They should call it
accidentalism.
You are not needed; just by accident, on the margin,
somehow you have
popped up, and these philosophers from
Nietzsche to Jean-Paul Sartre are making you accidental.
There
is a tremendous need in mans being to be related to existence.
He needs roots in existence, because only when the roots
go deep into
existence will he blossom into a Buddha, will he blossom into millions of
flowers, will his life not
be meaningless. Then his life will be tremendously
overflowing with meaning, significance, blissfulness; his life will
be simply a
celebration.
But the conclusion of the so-called existentialists is that you are
unnecessary,
that your life has no meaning, no significance. Existence is not
in need of you at all!
Without God certainly
you are free, but for what?
You are left with empty hands. You were with empty hands before also,
because the hands
that looked full were full of lies. Now you are absolutely
aware that the hands are empty and there is nowhere to go.
I have heard about one very famous atheist. He died, and his wife brought
his best clothes, best shoes, before
he was put in the coffin -- the best tie,
the costliest possible. She wanted to give him a good farewell, a good
send-off.
He was dressed as he had never dressed in his whole life.
And then friends came, and neighbors came. And one woman
said: "Wow!
Hes all dressed up and nowhere to go." He was an atheist, so he did not
believe in God, he did not believe
in heaven, he did not believe in hell --
nowhere to go, and so well-dressed!
But this is the situation any negative
philosophy is going to leave for the
whole of mankind: well-dressed, ready to go, but nowhere to go! This
situation
creates insanity.
It was not an accident that Friedrich Nietzsche became insane, it was the
outcome of his negative
philosophy.
Religion always deteriorates
into morality. Morality is dead religion.
Religion is alive morality. They never meet, they cannot meet. Because
life
and death never meet light and darkness never meet. But the
problem is that they look very alike -- the corpse looks very
like the
living man. Everything is just like when the man was alive: the same
face, the same eyes, the same nose,
the hair, the body. Just one thing
is missing, and that one thing is invisible.
Life is missing, but life is not
tangible and not visible. So when a man is
dead, he looks as if he is still alive. And with the problem of morality, it
becomes more complex.
Morality looks exactly like religion, but it is not. It is a corpse: it stinks of
death.
Religion is youth, religion is freshness -- the freshness of the
flowers and the freshness of the morning dew. Religion
is splendor -- the
splendor of the stars, of life, of existence itself. When religion is there,
there is no morality
at all and the person is moral. But there is no
morality; there is no idea of what morality is. It is just natural; it
follows
you as your shadow follows you. You need not carry your shadow, you
need not think about your shadow. You
need not look back again and
again and see whether the shadow is following you still or not. It follows.
Just
like that, morality follows a religious person. He never considers it,
he never deliberately thinks about it; it is his
natural flavor. But when
religion is dead, when life has disappeared, then one starts thinking
about morality continuously.
Consciousness has disappeared, and
conscience becomes the only shelter.
Conscience is a pseudo phenomenon. Consciousness
is yours,
conscience is borrowed. Conscience is of the society of the collective
mind; it does not arise in your own
being. When you are conscious you
act rightly because your act is conscious, and the conscious act can
never go wrong.
When your eyes are fully open and there is light, you
dont try to get through the wall, you go through the door. When
there
is no light and your eyes are also not functioning well, naturally you
grope in the dark. You have to think
a thousand and one times where
the door is -- "To the left, to the right? Am I moving in the right
direction?" And
you stumble upon the furniture, and you try to get out
through the wall.
A religious person is one who has eyes
to see, who has awareness. In
that awareness actions are naturally good. Let me repeat: naturally
good. Not that you
manage them to be good. Managed goodness is not
goodness at all. It is pseudo, it is pretension, it is hypocrisy. When
goodness is natural, spontaneous, just as trees are green and the sky is
blue, so is the religious man moral -- completely
unaware of his morality.
Aware of himself but unaware of his morality, he has no idea that he is
moral, that he is
good, that what he is doing is right. Out of his
awareness comes innocence, out of his awareness comes the right act
--
of its own accord. It has not to be brought, it has not to be
cultivated, it has not to be practised. Then morality has
a beauty, but it
is no more morality; it is simply moral. In fact, it is just a religious way of
living.
Love / Fear
EVIL - Jesus says: "Resist
not evil." A very strange
statement. No other awakened person has given such a
rebellious statement. Christian priests,
missionaries,
don't talk about it at all. They talk about other
things, but they don't talk about this strange statement:
"Resist not evil." It seems very illogical, irreligious.
Evil HAS to be resisted - and Jesus says: "Resist not evil."
Why? --- There is a secret in it. If you resist evil,
you give energy to it. Every resistance gives energy to the
thing resisted. "Don't resist evil" means if you DON'T
resist it, it will drop of its own accord because you will
not be nourishing it with your energy; you are disconnected
immediately. - Only love can be just because only love
can
understand. Without love there is no understanding and
without understanding how can there be any justice? Science
and the mind cannot know anything about love and cannot
know anything about man's inner being and cannot know
anything
about God. It is impossible because the scientific
approach itself inhibits it, prohibits it. The very approach
is
such,the requirement is such, the methodology is such,that
these things are debarred ... If you want to understand the
truth you have to be very loving. If you really want to
understand the whole of life in all its dimensions, you have
to approach it with great love and care. You have to be very
tender, soft. And then a new phenomenom arises in you:
your life becomes full of justice.
You cannot be unjust then; you cannot be unfair then -
it is impossible. A
loving person cannot be unfair.
And love is always protected by God. Only those who are not
in love are unprotected;
those who are not in love are always
in insecurity. The moment you enter love, you enter absolute
security, safety,
because love is another name of God and
God is protection. The ordinary man lives in fear, anxiety.
He tries to protect
himself, hence he becomes very tense.
Once God is known, tasted, death disappears. Death exists
only for those who
have not known love. Those who have known
love are beyond death.
 
|
|
|
