Taoblog

This is the tragedy that we are all carrying an unconscious of which we are not even aware. That what kind of animality, criminality will come up from the unconscious when the opportunity is there. The unconscious should be changed into consciousness so that nothing remains inside you that you don't know. That is the only possibility that you may not fall into darkness and you may not do things which are inhuman, that you will not go in the ways of evil. The only possibility is that your whole mind is simply consciousness -- there is no unconscious part at all. And this is one of the greatest contributions of the East to the world. Sigmund Freud, Carl Gustav Jung, Alfred Adler and other psychologists in the West, only in the last century have been able to find that there is something like unconscious. In the East for five thousand years they have been aware of the unconscious. Not only that, they have been aware how to transform it into consciousness. The West has accepted now that there is an unconscious but it has not yet been able to find how to transform it into consciousness. The East has the methods but the ego of the Western psychology prevents it to accept the methods which are already available. Thousands of people have been meditating and have come to the same experience of illumination that the darkness disappears, that one becomes full of light. And after that it is impossible to fall. Politics seems keeping humanity retarded because the vested interest of the politicians is that humanity should not be very intelligent. If humanity is really very intelligent who is going to accept a man like Adolf Hitler as a leader of a nation -- who is simply insane. Adolf Hitler needs an insane humanity to support him. Just look at your politicians. They are not the most intelligent people in the society; they are the most cunning, certainly. But cunningness does not mean intelligence. The politicians are afraid of intelligence, awareness, consciousness. It is a basic truth that only people who are suffering from inferiority complex go into politics. It is the inferiority complex that leads them into politics so that they can prove to themselves and to the world that they are not inferior, they have power. A real superior man never goes to politics. It is below him. It is always the inferior who go to the politics. And these inferior people have all the power of the armies, of atomic energies, of nuclear weapons. It is a very strange world. The best of the minds create atomic energy. For example, Albert Einstein created atomic energy. If he had not left Germany the atom bombs would have been in the hands of Adolf Hitler. But there is not much difference. The atom bombs were in the hands of Roosevelt or Truman. And Truman used those atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki uselessly, without any purpose. Germany has already failed and Japan could have lasted not more than two weeks. There was no need to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki and to use atom bombs. But Truman was in a hurry. He wanted to use them to show the power to the whole world.

A question is always indicative of a conflict. The problem is an inner conflict, a division. And this will be your whole life's problem. Whenever you have to decide something, you will always feel a conflict, a wavering. It has something to do with you. And it has to be so because the problem arises because of a certain pattern of the mind. When somebody trusts, he surrenders. Problems never arise to him. Then there are others who are sceptical; who are not yet finished with their egos; who still hope that something is going to happen through their egos; who still hope that their mind is going to deliver some paradise, some happiness, some bliss to them; who still think that through logic, reason, they will arrive at knowing what truth is. Then there is no problem for them. Both these people -- people who have trust and people who don't have trust -- are clear in a way. Your problem is that you are neither totally irrational nor totally rational. Half of your mind is argumentative and half of your mind is ready to trust. You are divided; a split is there, half-half. Nothing bad in it. If you understand it you can become a very very rich personality; richer than one-sided people. One who simply has faith is simple -- like one-note music. An orchestra cannot be created out of it. One who is simply sceptical is again simple. He may be argumentative but he has no complexity about it; he is clear-cut. You are ambiguous, vague. If you don't understand this you will become more and more confused. If you understand it, you can become a mystic... So this is the dilemma, the dichotomy in you. You have to understand it otherwise you will fall into a chaos because these two polarities will pull you apart, will tear you apart. If this type of mind goes on and on and on without any meditative understanding, the ultimate result is going to be schizophrenia. Then a person becomes two persons. Right now those two divisions are not separate; they are together. Somehow you are managing, but any day you can be in a great crisis. The left side can go to this side and the right side to another side; then you become two persons. And that is the whole problem of the modern mind: schizophrenia. Everybody is split. You love the same person whom you hate. Now there is no possibility of coming to a blissful state of affairs. If you satisfy your love, your hate remains unsatisfied. If you satisfy your hate, your love suffers. So whatsoever you do, you remain miserable. With one hand you put a brick down to make a building, and with another hand you pull it away -- so the house is never built. You are working hard for your whole life and nothing comes out of it. The danger is that if you don't go deep in meditation and understanding, you will be accumulating a sort of neurosis.

Once you knew the real self. Before you entered and became part of a society, a culture, a civilization, you knew it. It is not a coincidence that people go on thinking that their childhood was the most beautiful part of their life. It is a long-forgotten memory, because there have been days in your life, the earliest days, which you cannot remember exactly; only a vague feeling, a kind of fragrance, a kind of shadow is there. If you re-spect, if you look again and go deep into your existence, you are going to find the place from where you started losing yourself and gaining the ego. That moment is a moment of illumination because once you have seen what the ego is, the game is finished. So you cannot drop the ego, because you accept the reality of your ego. And how are you going to drop it -- you are it. Right now, you are it. The self you have lost far away back in the past. There is a great distance between you and your self. Right now you are existing at the periphery of your self. That periphery is pretending to be your self. That pretender is the ego. Now telling the ego, "Drop! Surrender! Be humble!" is simply idiotic. Mount Abu has one of the most artistic temples in the whole world. They are Jaina temples, Delwada temples. The carving in the marble is incomparable. The Delwada temple is a very precious temple, very ancient, and yet as fresh as if it had just been finished, just created. Marble has that quality of freshness: for thousands of years it remains young, fresh, innocent. And Delwada temples are just marble and marble. The Taj Mahal is nothing compared to Delwada temples. The Taj Mahal is a simple structure, but Delwada temples are the artwork of thousands of artists, perhaps over hundreds of years. There is carved on the marble wall, a beautiful sentence, a statement from Mahavira. The statement is such that nobody could object to it, and nobody had ever objected. The statement was simple. The statement was: "The humble man is respected universally. Be humble." But the reason you are given for being humble is that you will be honoured universally. The whole statement of Mahavira is: "The king is honoured in his own country, but the humble man is honoured universally" there are no boundaries to his honour. A king's honour has boundaries -- within his own kingdom. Beyond those boundaries he is nobody. But the humble person has no boundaries to his kingdom, the whole universe is his kingdom; he is universally honoured. But to whom is this idea going to appeal? The ego will immediately catch hold of it. That's what the ego wants: to be honoured universally! And if humbleness is the way, then okay, the ego is ready to be humble. If surrender is the way, the ego is ready to surrender.

A man used to come to a great saint and he would always ask, 'Sir, one thing puzzles me. You are so innocent, so pure, how is this possible? Suspicion arises in my mind that maybe you simply pretend. In this world of corruption, how can one be so pure and innocent and so virgin? How can one avoid being corrupted by the world? Maybe deep down you still carry the same thing but on the surface you have maintained it, you have maintained it well.' One day the man came. He again started to say the same thing. And the Master said, 'Listen, there is something more important to be said to you. Just show me your hand.' He looked at his hand, became very sad, closed his eyes and started to cry. The man said, 'What is the matter? Why are you crying, Sir? I have never seen you crying.' He said, 'I am crying because only seven days are left. Within seven days you will be gone. Your lifeline is cut. Next Sunday you will die. That's why I am crying. Now you can ask whatsoever you want to ask. You wanted to ask something?' The man said, 'I have forgotten. You have disturbed me very much. Only seven days?' Now this Master was so loved by people, so much respected, that there was no reason to suspect that he would tell a lie. The man rushed home, fell ill, didn't move from his bed for seven days, was sinking every day, stopped eating, and could not sleep. The relatives gathered. On the seventh day they were just waiting, because the Master had said that as the sun sets, he would die. And there was just half an hour to go. The sun was just coming down, coming down, and relatives and friends and the wife and the children were crying and the man was just sinking into death. Then the Master came and said to the man, 'I have one question to ask. In these seven days have you committed anything that you used to call sin, impurity, corruption, this and that? Did any idea come into your mind, any worldly idea?' The man opened his eyes with great difficulty. He said, 'What are you talking about? I am dying! How can a man have any ideas of sin or of the world when he is dying? Only death was there around me. It was coming closer. In these seven days there was not a single worldly desire in me. I was only thinking of God. I was praying, repeating God's name.' The Master laughed. He said, 'You can get up. You are not going to die! That was only a design to show you why I am pure. Death surrounds me continuously. What does it matter whether it is coming in seven days or seven years or seventy years? It doesn't matter. It is only a question of time. It is coming -- that much is certain -- it is coming. When death is coming, this becomes very, very clear to your consciousness. Life goes through a great change, a radical change.' The man started laughing. He said, 'You played a joke!' He was perfectly okay; within minutes he was okay. But he said, 'Master, one thing, how could you lie?' The Master said, 'It is neither a lie, nor a truth; it is a design, a naqshbandi.'