Krishna
(/ˈkrɪʃnə/; [ˈkr̩ʂɳə] (About this sound listen); Sanskrit: कृष्ण, IAST: Kṛṣṇa) is a major deity of Hinduism. He is worshiped as the eighth avatar of the god Vishnu and also as the supreme God in his own right.[8] He is the god of compassion, tenderness, and love in Hinduism,and is one of the most popular and widely revered among Indian divinities. Krishna's birthday is celebrated every year by Hindus on Janmashtami according to the lunisolar Hindu calendar, which falls in late August or early September of the Gregorian calendar.
Krishna is also known by numerous names, such as Govinda, Mukunda, Madhusudhana, Vasudeva, and Makhan chor in affection. The anecdotes and narratives of Krishna's life are generally titled as Krishna Leela. He is a central character in the Mahabharata, Bhagavata Purana and the Bhagavad Gita, and is mentioned in many Hindu philosophical, theological, and mythological texts. They portray him in various perspectives: a god-child, a prankster, a model lover, a divine hero, and as the supreme power. His iconography reflects these legends, and show him in different stages of his life, such as an infant eating butter, a young boy playing a flute, a young man with Radha or surrounded by women devotees, or a friendly charioteer giving counsel to Arjuna.
The synonyms of Krishna have been traced to 1st millennium BCE literature. In some sub-traditions, Krishna is worshipped as Svayam Bhagavan, and this is sometimes referred to as Krishnaism. These sub-traditions arose in the medieval era Bhakti movement context.Krishna-related literature has inspired numerous performance arts such as Bharatnatyam, Kathakali, Kuchipudi, Odissi, and Manipuri dance.He is a pan-Hindu god, but is particularly revered in some locations such as Vrindavan in Uttar Pradesh, Jagannatha in Odisha, Mayapur in West Bengal, Dwarka and Junagadh in Gujarat, Pandharpur in Maharashtra, Udupi in Karnataka, and Nathdwara in Rajasthan.Since the 1960s the worship of Krishna has also spread to the Western world and to Africa, largely due to the work of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON).
source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krishna
OSHO ON INDIAN MYSTIC KRISHNA
If a man has to think, understand, and say something, for him there can be no more meaningful a topic than Krishna. He is the most significant person in all of history. It is not that other significant people did not happen in the past - and it would be wrong to say that significant people will not happen in the future; in fact, any number of remarkable people have walked this earth - but Krishna's significance is quite different. He is more significant for the future than for the past.The truth is, Krishna was born much ahead of his time. All great persons are born ahead of their time, and all insignificant people are born after their time. It is only mediocre people who are born in their time.
All significant people come ahead of their time, but Krishna came too far ahead. Perhaps only in some future period will we be able to understand him; the past could not do so.
And remember, we begin to worship those we fail to understand in their lifetimes. We worship those who perplex and defeat our ability to understand them. We either praise or slander them, but both praise and slander are kinds of worship. We worship friends with praise and we worship enemies with slander. It is all the same. One who defies our judgment, we call him a god or God-incarnate.
It is really difficult to accept one's ignorance; it is easier to call him a god or God-incarnate. But these are the two sides of the same coin. Such a person is God-like in the sense that we don't understand him, just as we don't understand God. This person is as unknowable and as mysterious as God himself. Despite our best efforts he, like God, ever remains to be known. And all such people become objects of worship.
It is precisely for this reason that I chose Krishna for discussion. He is, in my view, the most relevant, the most significant person in the context of the future. And in this regard, I would like to go into a few things.
With the exception of Krishna, all the remarkable people of the world, the salt of the earth like Mahavira, Buddha, and Christ, stood for some other world, for a life in some other world. They set distant things like the attainment of heaven and liberation as goals for man's life on this earth. In their day, life on this earth was so miserable and painful it was nearly impossible to live. Man's whole past was so full of want and hardship, of struggle and suffering, that it was hard to accept life happily.
Therefore all the religions in the past denied and denounced life on this earth.
In the whole galaxy of religious luminaries Krishna is the sole exception who fully accepts the whole of life on this earth. He does not believe in living here for the sake of another world and another life.
He believes in living this very life, here on this very earth. Where moksha, the freedom of Buddha and Mahavira, lies somewhere beyond this world and this time - there and then - Krishna's freedom is here and now. Life as we know it never received such deep and unconditional acceptance at the hands of any other enlightened soul.
In times to come there is going to be a considerable reduction in the hardship and misery of life in this world and a corresponding increase in its comfort and happiness. And so, for the first time, the world will refuse to follow those who renounced life. It is always an unhappy society that applauds the creed of renunciation; a happy society will refuse to do so. Renunciation and escape from life can have meaning in a society steeped in poverty and misery, but they hold no appeal for an affluent and happy society. A man can very well tell an unhappy society that since there is nothing here except suffering and pain, he is going to leave it - but he cannot tell the same thing to an affluent society; there, it will make no sense.
Religions believing in renunciation will have no relevance in the future. Science will eliminate all those hardships that make for life's sufferings. Buddha says that life from birth to death is a suffering.
Now pain can be banished. In the future, birth will cease to be painful both for the mother and for the child. Life will cease to be painful; disease can be removed. Even a cure for old age can be found, and the span of life considerably lengthened. The life span will be so long that dying will cease to be a problem; instead people will ask, "Why live this long?"
All these things are going to happen in the near future. Then Buddha's maxim about life being an unending chain of suffering will be hard to understand. And then Krishna's flute will become significant and his song and dance will become alive. Then life will become a celebration of happiness and joy. Then life will be a blossoming and a beauty.
In the midst of this blossoming the image of a naked Mahavira will lose its relevance. In the midst of this celebration the philosophy of renunciation will lose its luster. In the midst of this festivity that life will be, dancers and musicians will be on center-stage. In the future world there will be less and less misery and more and more happiness. That is how I see Krishna's importance ever on the ascent.
Up to now it was difficult to think that a man of religion carried a flute and played it. We could not imagine that a religious man wore a crown of peacock feathers and danced with young women. It was unthinkable that a religious man loved somebody and sang a song. A religious man, of our old concept, was one who had renounced life and fled the world. How could he sing and dance in a miserable world? He could only cry and weep. He could not play a flute; it was impossible to imagine that he danced.
It was for this reason that Krishna could not be understood in the past; it was simply impossible to understand him. He looked so irrelevant, so inconsistent and absurd in the context of our whole past.
But in the context of times to come, Krishna will be increasingly relevant and meaningful. And soon such a religion will come into being that will sing and dance and be happy. The religions of the past were all life-negative, defeatist, masochistic and escapist. The religion of the future will be life-affirming. It will accept and live the joys that life brings and will laugh and dance and celebrate in sheer gratitude.
In view of this immense possibility for a good life in the future I have chosen to talk about Krishna.
Of course it will be difficult for you to understand Krishna, because you are also conditioned, heavily conditioned by the misery of life in the past. You have, up to now, associated religion with tears and not with flutes.
Rarely have you come across a person who took to sannyas out of life's joys. Normally, when a man's wife died and his life became miserable, he turned to sannyas as an escape from his misery. If someone lost his wealth, went bankrupt and could not bear it, he took to sannyas in sheer despair. An unhappy person, a person ridden with sorrow and pain, escaped into sannyas. Sannyas stemmed from unhappiness and not from happiness. No one comes to sannyas with a song in his heart.
Krishna is an exception to the rule. To me he is that rare sannyasin whose sannyas is born out of joy and bliss. And one who chooses sannyas for the joy of it must be basically different from the general breed of sannyasins who come to it in misery and frustration.
As I say that the religion of the future will stem from bliss, so I also say that the sannyas of the future will flow from the joy and ecstasy of life. And one who chooses sannyas for the joy of it must be basically different from the old kind of sannyasin who left the world simply out of despair. He will take sannyas not because his family tortures him, but because his family is now too small for his expanding bliss - and so he adopts the whole world as his new family. He will accept sannyas not because his love turns sour, but because one person is now too small to contain his overflowing love - and he has to choose the whole earth as the object of his love.
And they alone can understand Krishna who understands this kind of sannyas that flows from the acceptance of life, from the juice and bliss of life.
If someone in the future says he took sannyas because he was unhappy we will ask him, "How can sannyas come from unhappiness?" The sannyas that is born out of unhappiness cannot lead to happiness and bliss. The sannyas that arises from pain and suffering can at best lessen your suffering, but it cannot bring you joy and bliss. You can, of course, reduce your suffering by moving away from the situation, but you cannot achieve joy and bliss through it. Only the sannyas, the Ganges of sannyas that is born out of bliss, can reach the ocean of bliss - because then all the efforts of the sannyasin will be directed towards enhancing his bliss.
Spiritual pursuit in the past was meant to mitigate suffering, it did not aim at bliss. And, of course, a traveler on this path does succeed, but it is a negative kind of success. What he achieves is a kind of indifference to life, which is only unhappiness reduced to its minimum. That is why our old sannyasins seem to be sad and dull, as if they have lost the battle of life and run away from it. Their sannyas is not alive and happy, dancing and celebrating.
To me, Krishna is a sannyasin of bliss. And because of the great possibility and potential of the sannyas of bliss opening up before us, I have deliberately chosen to discuss Krishna. It is not that Krishna has not been discussed before. But those who discussed him were sannyasins of sorrow, and therefore they could not do justice to him. On the contrary, they have been very unjust to him.
And it had to be so.
If Shankara interprets Krishna, he is bound to misinterpret him; he is the antithesis of Krishna.
His interpretation can never be right and just. Krishna could not be rightly interpreted in the past, because all the interpreters who wrote about him came from the world of sorrow. They said that the world is unreal and false, that it is an illusion, but Krishna says this world is not only real, it is divine. He accepts this world. He accepts everything; he denies nothing. He is for total acceptance - acceptance of the whole. Such a man had never trod this earth before.
As we discuss him here from day to day, many things, many facets of him, will unfold themselves.
For me, the very word "Krishna" is significant. It is a finger pointing to the moon of the future.
All significant people come ahead of their time, but Krishna came too far ahead. Perhaps only in some future period will we be able to understand him; the past could not do so.
And remember, we begin to worship those we fail to understand in their lifetimes. We worship those who perplex and defeat our ability to understand them. We either praise or slander them, but both praise and slander are kinds of worship. We worship friends with praise and we worship enemies with slander. It is all the same. One who defies our judgment, we call him a god or God-incarnate.
It is really difficult to accept one's ignorance; it is easier to call him a god or God-incarnate. But these are the two sides of the same coin. Such a person is God-like in the sense that we don't understand him, just as we don't understand God. This person is as unknowable and as mysterious as God himself. Despite our best efforts he, like God, ever remains to be known. And all such people become objects of worship.
It is precisely for this reason that I chose Krishna for discussion. He is, in my view, the most relevant, the most significant person in the context of the future. And in this regard, I would like to go into a few things.
With the exception of Krishna, all the remarkable people of the world, the salt of the earth like Mahavira, Buddha, and Christ, stood for some other world, for a life in some other world. They set distant things like the attainment of heaven and liberation as goals for man's life on this earth. In their day, life on this earth was so miserable and painful it was nearly impossible to live. Man's whole past was so full of want and hardship, of struggle and suffering, that it was hard to accept life happily.
Therefore all the religions in the past denied and denounced life on this earth.
In the whole galaxy of religious luminaries Krishna is the sole exception who fully accepts the whole of life on this earth. He does not believe in living here for the sake of another world and another life.
He believes in living this very life, here on this very earth. Where moksha, the freedom of Buddha and Mahavira, lies somewhere beyond this world and this time - there and then - Krishna's freedom is here and now. Life as we know it never received such deep and unconditional acceptance at the hands of any other enlightened soul.
In times to come there is going to be a considerable reduction in the hardship and misery of life in this world and a corresponding increase in its comfort and happiness. And so, for the first time, the world will refuse to follow those who renounced life. It is always an unhappy society that applauds the creed of renunciation; a happy society will refuse to do so. Renunciation and escape from life can have meaning in a society steeped in poverty and misery, but they hold no appeal for an affluent and happy society. A man can very well tell an unhappy society that since there is nothing here except suffering and pain, he is going to leave it - but he cannot tell the same thing to an affluent society; there, it will make no sense.
Religions believing in renunciation will have no relevance in the future. Science will eliminate all those hardships that make for life's sufferings. Buddha says that life from birth to death is a suffering.
Now pain can be banished. In the future, birth will cease to be painful both for the mother and for the child. Life will cease to be painful; disease can be removed. Even a cure for old age can be found, and the span of life considerably lengthened. The life span will be so long that dying will cease to be a problem; instead people will ask, "Why live this long?"
All these things are going to happen in the near future. Then Buddha's maxim about life being an unending chain of suffering will be hard to understand. And then Krishna's flute will become significant and his song and dance will become alive. Then life will become a celebration of happiness and joy. Then life will be a blossoming and a beauty.
In the midst of this blossoming the image of a naked Mahavira will lose its relevance. In the midst of this celebration the philosophy of renunciation will lose its luster. In the midst of this festivity that life will be, dancers and musicians will be on center-stage. In the future world there will be less and less misery and more and more happiness. That is how I see Krishna's importance ever on the ascent.
Up to now it was difficult to think that a man of religion carried a flute and played it. We could not imagine that a religious man wore a crown of peacock feathers and danced with young women. It was unthinkable that a religious man loved somebody and sang a song. A religious man, of our old concept, was one who had renounced life and fled the world. How could he sing and dance in a miserable world? He could only cry and weep. He could not play a flute; it was impossible to imagine that he danced.
It was for this reason that Krishna could not be understood in the past; it was simply impossible to understand him. He looked so irrelevant, so inconsistent and absurd in the context of our whole past.
But in the context of times to come, Krishna will be increasingly relevant and meaningful. And soon such a religion will come into being that will sing and dance and be happy. The religions of the past were all life-negative, defeatist, masochistic and escapist. The religion of the future will be life-affirming. It will accept and live the joys that life brings and will laugh and dance and celebrate in sheer gratitude.
In view of this immense possibility for a good life in the future I have chosen to talk about Krishna.
Of course it will be difficult for you to understand Krishna, because you are also conditioned, heavily conditioned by the misery of life in the past. You have, up to now, associated religion with tears and not with flutes.
Rarely have you come across a person who took to sannyas out of life's joys. Normally, when a man's wife died and his life became miserable, he turned to sannyas as an escape from his misery. If someone lost his wealth, went bankrupt and could not bear it, he took to sannyas in sheer despair. An unhappy person, a person ridden with sorrow and pain, escaped into sannyas. Sannyas stemmed from unhappiness and not from happiness. No one comes to sannyas with a song in his heart.
Krishna is an exception to the rule. To me he is that rare sannyasin whose sannyas is born out of joy and bliss. And one who chooses sannyas for the joy of it must be basically different from the general breed of sannyasins who come to it in misery and frustration.
As I say that the religion of the future will stem from bliss, so I also say that the sannyas of the future will flow from the joy and ecstasy of life. And one who chooses sannyas for the joy of it must be basically different from the old kind of sannyasin who left the world simply out of despair. He will take sannyas not because his family tortures him, but because his family is now too small for his expanding bliss - and so he adopts the whole world as his new family. He will accept sannyas not because his love turns sour, but because one person is now too small to contain his overflowing love - and he has to choose the whole earth as the object of his love.
And they alone can understand Krishna who understands this kind of sannyas that flows from the acceptance of life, from the juice and bliss of life.
If someone in the future says he took sannyas because he was unhappy we will ask him, "How can sannyas come from unhappiness?" The sannyas that is born out of unhappiness cannot lead to happiness and bliss. The sannyas that arises from pain and suffering can at best lessen your suffering, but it cannot bring you joy and bliss. You can, of course, reduce your suffering by moving away from the situation, but you cannot achieve joy and bliss through it. Only the sannyas, the Ganges of sannyas that is born out of bliss, can reach the ocean of bliss - because then all the efforts of the sannyasin will be directed towards enhancing his bliss.
Spiritual pursuit in the past was meant to mitigate suffering, it did not aim at bliss. And, of course, a traveler on this path does succeed, but it is a negative kind of success. What he achieves is a kind of indifference to life, which is only unhappiness reduced to its minimum. That is why our old sannyasins seem to be sad and dull, as if they have lost the battle of life and run away from it. Their sannyas is not alive and happy, dancing and celebrating.
To me, Krishna is a sannyasin of bliss. And because of the great possibility and potential of the sannyas of bliss opening up before us, I have deliberately chosen to discuss Krishna. It is not that Krishna has not been discussed before. But those who discussed him were sannyasins of sorrow, and therefore they could not do justice to him. On the contrary, they have been very unjust to him.
And it had to be so.
If Shankara interprets Krishna, he is bound to misinterpret him; he is the antithesis of Krishna.
His interpretation can never be right and just. Krishna could not be rightly interpreted in the past, because all the interpreters who wrote about him came from the world of sorrow. They said that the world is unreal and false, that it is an illusion, but Krishna says this world is not only real, it is divine. He accepts this world. He accepts everything; he denies nothing. He is for total acceptance - acceptance of the whole. Such a man had never trod this earth before.
As we discuss him here from day to day, many things, many facets of him, will unfold themselves.
For me, the very word "Krishna" is significant. It is a finger pointing to the moon of the future.
QUESTIONER: WHAT ARE THE REASONS FOR CALLING KRISHNA A COMPLETE
INCARNATION OF GOD? KINDLY SHED MORE LIGHT ON THIS MATTER. PLEASE EXPLAIN
IN DETAIL WHAT IS MEANT BY SAYING THAT KRISHNA POSSESSED ALL THE SIXTY-FOUR
ARTS THAT COMPRISE A COMPLETE INCARNATION.
There is no other reason but one, and that is total emptiness. Whosoever is empty is whole.Emptiness is the foundation of wholeness. Rightly said, emptiness alone is whole. Can you draw a half emptiness? Even geometry cannot draw a half zero; there is no such thing as a half zero.
Zero or emptiness is always complete, whole. Part-emptiness has no meaning whatsoever. How can you divide emptiness? And how can it be called emptiness if it is divided into parts? Emptiness is irreducible, indivisible. And where division begins, numbers begin; therefore, number one follows zero. One, two and three belong to the world of numbers. And all numbers arise from zero and end in zero. Zero or emptiness alone is whole.
He is whole who is empty. And it is significant that Krishna is called whole, because this man is absolutely empty. And only he who is choiceless can be empty. One who chooses becomes something. he accepts being somebody, he accepts "somebodiness". If he says he is a thief, he will become somebody; his emptiness will be no more. If he says he is a saint, then also is his emptiness destroyed. This person has accepted to be something, to be somebody. Now "somebodiness" has entered and "nothingness" is lost.
If someone asks Krishna who he is, he cannot answer the question meaningfully. Whatever answer he gives will bring choice in, and it will make something or somebody of him. If one really wants to be all, he must be prepared to be nothing.
Zen monks have a code, a maxim among themselves. They say, "One who longs to be everywhere must not be anywhere." One who wants to be all cannot afford to be anything. How can he be something? There is no congruity between all and something; they don't go together.
Choicelessness brings you to emptiness1 to nothingness. Then you are what you are, but you cannot say who you are, what vou are.
It is for this reason that, when Arjuna asks Krishna who he is, instead of answering his question, he reveals himself, his real being to him. In that revelation he is all and everything. The deepest significance of his being whole lies in his utter emptiness.
One who is something or somebody will be in difficulty. His very being something will become his bondage. Life is mysterious; it has its own laws. If I choose to be something, this "something" will become my prison.
There is a beautiful anecdote from the life of Kabir. Every day a number of people gather at Kabir's place to listen to his words of wisdom. At the end of the satsang, Kabir always requested them to dine with him before going home.
One day the matter came to a head. Kabir's son Kamal came to him and said, "It is now becoming too much. We can no longer bear the burden of feeding so many people every day. We have to buy everything on credit, and we are now heavily in debt." Kabir said, "Why don't you borrow more?"
"But who is going to repay it?" Kamal asked.
Then his father said, "One who gives will repay it. Why should we worry about it?"
Kamal could not understand what his father meant. He was a worldly man. He said, "This answer won't do; it's not a spiritual matter. Those who lend us money ask for repayment, and if we fail to repay them we will prove to be dishonest."
To this Kabir simply said, "Then prove to be so. What is wrong with it? What if people call us dishonest?"
Kamal could not take it. And he said, "It is too much. I can't put up with it. You just stop inviting people to dinner, that's all."
Kabir then said, "If it comes to this, so be it."
The next day people came to satsang again, and as usual Kabir invited them to eat with him. His son reminded him of his unfulfilled promise to stop feeding the visitors. Kabir said, "I can't give you my word, because I don't want to bind myself to anything. I live in the moment. I let what happens in the moment, happen. If some day I don't ask them to stay to dinner, it will be so. But as long as I happen to invite them, I will invite them."
Kamal then said in desperation, "It means that I will now have to resort to stealing, because nobody is prepared to give us credit any more. What else can I do?"
Kabir said grinning, "You fool, why didn't you think of this before? It would have saved us the trouble of borrowing."
Kamal was simply amazed to hear his father say this. He was known as a wise man, a sage, who always gave people profound advice. "What is the matter with him?" he wondered. Then he thought that maybe his father was just playing a joke, so he decided to put it to a test.
Late in the night when the whole village was asleep, Kamal awakened his father and said, "I am going to steal. Will you accompany me?"
Kabir said, "Now that you have awakened me, I should go with you." Kamal was startled once again; he could not believe his father would agree to steal. But he was Kabir's son, and he did not like beating a hasty retreat, so he decided to see the whole of this joke, or whatever it was, through to the end.
Kamal walked to the back of a farmer's house, his father following him, and he began to break through the wall of the house. Kabir was standing silently near him. Kamal still expected his father to call off the whole thing as a joke. And at the same time he was afraid. Kabir said, "Why are you afraid, Kamal?"
"What else can I be when I am going to commit theft?" he retorted. "Isn't it ironical to suggest I should not be afraid while stealing?"
Kabir said, "It is fear that makes you feel guilty, that makes you think you are stealing; otherwise there is no reason to think that you are a thief. Don't fear, do your job rightly; otherwise you will needlessly disturb the sleep of the entire family."
Somehow Kamal drilled a hole in the wall, still hoping his father would call it quits. Then he said, "Now let's enter the house." And Kabir readily joined him and went inside the house. They had not gone there to steal money, they only wanted grain, and so they picked up a bag of wheat and left the house.
When they were out again, Kabir said to his son, "Now that dawn is at hand, it would be good if you went and informed the family that we are taking a bag of wheat away with us."
This startled Kamal once again and he exclaimed, "What are you saying? We are here as thieves, not as merchants."
But Kabir said, "Why make them worry unnecessarily about this missing bag of wheat? Let them know where it is going."
Followers of Kabir have completely ignored this odd episode. They never mention it because it is so inscrutable. In the light of this event it would be difficult to decide whether Kabir was a sage or a thief. Undoubtedly a theft has been committed, hence he is indictable as a thief. But his being wise is equally indisputable, because first he asks Kamal not to fear and then to inform the family about it so they are not put to unnecessary trouble.
Kamal had then warned Kabir, "But if I inform the family, we will be known as thieves."
And Kabir had very innocently said, "Since theft has happened, we are thieves. They will not be wrong to think of us as thieves."
Kamal had again warned, "Not only the family concerned, but the whole village will come to know that you are a thief! Your reputation will be in the mud. No one will come to visit you again."
And Kabir had said, "Then your troubles will be over. If they don't come, I will not have to ask them to eat with us."
Kamal could not understand it the whole episode was so paradoxical.
Krishna is complete in another sense: his life encompasses all there is to life. It seems impossible how a single life could contain so much - all of life. Krishna has assimilated all that is contradictory, utterly contradictory in life. He has absorbed all the contradictions of life. You cannot find a life more inconsistent than Krishna's. There is a consistency running through the life of Jesus. So is Mahavira's life consistent. There is a logic, a rhythm, a harmonic system in the life of Buddha. If you can know a part of Buddha you will know all of him.
Ramakrishna has said, "Know one sage and all sages are known." But this rule does not apply to Krishna. Ramakrishna has said, "Know a drop of sea water and all the sea is known.'i But you can't say it about Krishna. The taste of sea water is the same all over - it is salty. But the waters of Krishna's life are not all salty; at places they can be sugary. And, maybe, a single drop contains more than one flavor. Really, Krishna comprises all the flavors of life.
In the same way, Krishna's life represents all the arts of existence. Krishna is not an artist, because an artist is one who knows only one art, or a few. Krishna is art itself. That completes him from every side and in every way.
That is why those who knew him had to take recourse in all kinds of exaggeration to describe him. With others we can escape exaggeration, or we have to exaggerate a particular facet of their lives, but we find ourselves in real difficulty when we come to say something about Krishna. Even exaggeration doesn't say much about him. We can portray him only in superlatives we cannot do without superlatives. And our difficulty is greater when we find the superlative antonyms too, because he is cold and hot together.
In fact, water is hot and cold together. The difficulty arises when we impose our interpretation on it:
then we separate hot from cold. If we ask water itself whether it is hot or cold, it will simply say, "To know me you only have to put your hand in me, because it is not a question of whether I am hot or cold, it is really a question of whether you are hot or cold." If you are warm, the water will seem to be cold, and if you are cold the water will seem to be hot. Its hotness or coldness is relative to you.
You can conduct an experiment. Warm one of your hands by exposing it to a fire, and cool your other hand on a piece of ice, and then put both hands together into a bucket of water. What will you find? Where your one hand will say the water is cold, the other will say the contrary. And it will be so difficult for you to decide if the water, the same water, is hot or cold.
You come upon the same kind of difficulty when you try to understand Krishna. It depends on you, and not on Krishna, how you see him. If you ask a Radha, who is in deep love with him, she will say something which will be entirely her own vision of Krishna. Maybe she does not call him a complete god, or maybe she does, but whatever she says depends on her, not on Krishna. So it will be a relative judgment. If sometimes Radha comes across Krishna dancing with another woman she will find it hard to accept him as a god. Then Krishna's water will feel cold to her. Maybe she does not feel any water at all. But when Krishna is dancing with Radha, he dances so totally with her that she feels he is wholly hers. Then she can say that he is God himself. Every Radha, when her lover is wholly with her, feels so in her bones. But the same person can look like a devil if she finds him flirting with another woman. These statements are relative; they cannot be absolute. For Arjuna and the Pandavas, Krishna is all-god, but the Kauravas will vehemently contest this claim. For them Krishna is worse than a devil. He is the person who is responsible for their defeat and destruction.
There can be a thousand statements about who Krishna is. But there cannot be a thousand statements about who Buddha is. Buddha has extricated himself from all relative relationships, from all involvements, and so he is unchanging, a monotone. Taste him from anywhere, his flavor is the same. Therefore, Buddha is not that controversial; he is like flat land. We can clearly know him as such-and-such, and our statements about him will always have a consistent meaning. But Krishna belies all our statements. And I call him complete and whole because he has disaffirmed all our pronouncements on him. No statement, howsoever astute, can wholly encompass Krishna; he always remains unsaid. So one has to cover the remaining side of his life with contrary statements.
All these statements together can wholly cover him, but then they themselves seem paradoxical.
Krishna's wholeness lies in the fact that he has no personality of his own, that he is not a person, an individual - he is existence itself. He is just existence; he is just emptiness. You can say he is like a mirror; he just mirrors everything that comes before him. He just mirrors. And when you see yourself mirrored in him, you think Krishna is like you. But the moment you move away from him, he is empty again. And whosoever comes to him, whosoever is reflected in his mirror thinks the same way and says Krishna is like him.
For this very reason there are a thousand commentaries on the GEETA. Every one of the commentators saw himself reflected in the GEETA. There are not many commentaries on the sayings of Buddha, and there is a reason for this. There are still fewer on the teachings of Jesus, and they are not much different from each other. In fact, a thousand meanings can only be implanted on Krishna, not on Buddha. What Buddha says is definite and unequivocal; his statements are complete, clear cut and logical. There may be some differences in their meaning according to the minds of different commentators, but this difference cannot be great.
The dispute over Mahavira was so small It only led to two factions among his followers. The dispute between the Shwetambaras and the Digambaras is confined to petty things like Mahavira lived naked or did not live naked. They don't quarrel over the teachings of Mahavira, which are very clear.
It would be difficult to create differing sects around the Jaina Tirthankara.
It is strange that it is as difficult to create sects around Krishna as it is around Mahavira. And it is so for very contrary reasons. If people try to create sects around Krishna. the number will run into the tens of thousands, and even then Krishna will remain inexhaustible. Therefore in the place of sects, around Krishna thousands of interpretations arose. In this respect too, Krishna is rare in that sects could not be built around him. Around Christ two to three major factions arose, but none around Krishna. But there are a thousand commentaries on the GEETA alone. And it is significant that no two commentaries tally: one commentary can be diametrically opposed to another, so much so they look like enemies. Ramanuja and Shankara have no meeting point, One can say to the other, "You are just an ignoramus!" And what is amazing is that in their own way both can be tight; there is no difficulty in it. Why is it so?
It is so because Krishna is not definite, conclusive. He does not have a system, a structure, a form, an outline. Krishna is formless, incorporeal. He is limitless. You cannot define him; he is simply indefinable. In this sense too, Krishna is complete and whole, because only the whole can be formless, indefinable.
No interpretations of the GEETA interpret Krishna, they only interpret the interpreters. Shankara finds corroboration of his own views from the GEETA: he finds that the world is an illusion. From the same book Ramanuja discovers that devotion is the path to God. Tilak finds something else: for him the GEETA stands for the discipline of action. And curiously enough, from this sermon on the battlefield, Gandhi unearths that non violence is the way. No body has any difficulty finding in the GEETA what he wants to find. Krishna does not come in their way; everyone is welcome there. He is an empty mirror. You see your image, move away, and the mirror is as empty as ever. It has no fixed image of its own; it is mere emptiness.
Krishna is not like a film. The film also works as a mirror, but only once: your reflection stays with it. So one can say that a particular photo is of so and so. You cannot say the same about a mirror; it mirrors you only as long as you are with it. What does it do after you move away from it? Then it just mirrors emptiness, It mirrors whatsoever faces it, exactly as it is. Krishna is that mirror. And therefore I say he is complete, whole.
Krishna is whole in many other ways too, and we will come to understand this as we go on with this discussion. Someone can be whole only if he is whole in every way. A person is not whole if his wholeness is confined to a particular dimension of life. In their own dimensions Mahavira and Jesus are whole. In itself the life of Jesus is whole, and it lacks nothing as such. He is whole, as a rose is whole as a rose and a marigold is whole as a marigold. But a rose cannot be whole as a marigold, only a marigold is whole as a marigold. Similarly, a marigold cannot be whole as a rose. So Buddha, Mahavira and Jesus are whole in their own dimensions; in themselves they lack nothing.
But the wholeness of Krishna is utterly different. He is not one-dimensional, he is really multi- dimensional. He enters and pervades every walk of life, every dimension of life. If he is a thief he is a whole thief, and if he is a sage he is a whole sage. When he remembers something he remembers it totally, and when he forgets it he forgets it totally. That is why, when he left Mathura, he left it completely. Now the inhabitants of that place cry and wail for him and say that Krishna is very hard-hearted, which is not true. Or if he is hard-hearted, he is totally so.
In fact, one who remembers totally also forgets totally. When a mirror mirrors you it does so fully, and when it is empty it is fully empty. When Krishna's mirror moves to Dwarka it now reflects Dwarka as fully as it reflected Mathura when it was there. He is now totally at Dwarka, where he lives totally, loves totally and even fights totally.
Krishna's wholeness is multidimensional, which is rare indeed. It is arduous to be whole even in one dimension it is not that easy. So it would be wrong to say that to be multidimensionally whole is arduous, it is simply impossible. But sometimes even the impossible happens, and when it happens it is a miracle. Krishna's life is that miracle, an absolute miracle.
We can find a comparison for every kind of person, but not for Krishna. The lives of Buddha and Mahavira are very similar they look like close neighbors. There is little difference between them.
Even if there is any difference, it is on the outside; their inside, their innermost beings are identical.
But it is utterly improbable to find a comparison for Krishna on this planet. As a man he symbolizes the impossible.
It is natural that a person who is whole in every dimension will have disadvantages and advantages both. He will not compare well with one who has achieved wholeness in a particular dimension, in so far as that particular dimension is concerned. Mahavira has exerted all his energy in one dimension, so in his own field he will excel Krishna, who has diversified his energy in all dimensions. Christ will also excel him in his own field. But on the whole, Krishna is superb. Mahavira, Buddha and Christ can not compare with him; he is utterly incomparable.
The significance of Krishna lies in his being multi-dimensional. Let us for a moment imagine a flower which from time to time becomes a marigold, a jasmine, a rose, a lotus and a celestial flower too - and every time we go to it we find it an altogether different flower. This flower cannot compare well with a rose which, through and through, has been only a rose. Where the rose has, with single- mindedness, spent all its energy being a rose, this imaginary flower has diversified its energy in many directions. The life of this imaginary flower is so pervasive, so extensive that it cannot possibly have the density there is in the life of a rose. Krishna is that imaginary flower: his being has vastness, but it lacks density. His vastness is simply endless, immense.
So Krishna's wholeness represents infinity. He is infinite. Mahavira's wholeness means he has achieved everything there is to achieve in his one dimension, that he has left nothing to be achieved as far as this dimension is concerned. Now, no seeker will ever achieve anything more than Mahavira achieved in his own field; he can never excel Mahavira. Therefore, Krishna is whole in the sense that he is multidimensional, expansive, vast and infinite.
A person who is whole in one dimension is going to be a total stranger in so far as other dimensions are concerned. Where Krishna can even steal skillfully, Mahavira will be a complete failure as a thief.
If Mahavira tries his hand at it there is every chance of his landing in a prison. Krishna will succeed even as a thief. Where Krishna will shine on the battlefield as an accomplished warrior, Buddha will cut a sorry figure if he takes his stand there. We can not imagine Christ playing a flute, but we can easily think of Krishna going to the gallows. Krishna will feel no difficulty on the cross. Intrinsically, he is as capable of facing crucifixion as of playing a flute. But it will be a hard task for Christ if he is handed a flute to play. We cannot think of Christ in the image of Krishna.
Christians say Jesus never laughed. Playing a flute will be a far cry for one who never laughed. If Jesus is asked to stand like Krishna, with one leg on the other, a crown of peacock feathers on his head and a flute on his lips, Jesus will immediately say, "I prefer the cross to this flute." He is at ease with the cross; he never felt so happy as on the cross. From the cross alone could he say, "Father, forgive them for they don't know what they are doing." He meets his death most peacefully on the cross, because it is his dimension. He finds no difficulty whatsoever in fulfilling his destiny. What was destined to happen is now happening. His journey's direction is now reaching its culminating point.
Jesus is rebellious, a rebel, a revolutionary, so the cross is his most natural destination. A Jesus can predict he is going to be crucified, If he is not crucified it will look like failure. In his case crucifixion is inevitable.
Krishna's case is very different and difficult. In his case no prediction is possible; he is simply un predictable. Whether he will die on the gallows or amid adulation and worship, nobody can say.
Nobody could predict the way he really died. He was lying restfully under a tree; it was really not an occasion for death. Someone, a hunter, saw him from a distance, thought a deer was lying there and hit him with his arrow. His death was so accidental, so out of place; it is rare in its own way.
Everybody's death has an element of predetermination about it; Krishna's death seems to be totally undetermined. He dies in a manner as if his death has no utility whatsoever. His life was wholly non-utilitarian; so is his death.
The death of Jesus proved to be very purposeful. The truth is, Christianity wouldn't have come into existence had Jesus not been crucified. Christianity owes its existence to the cross, not to Jesus.
Jesus was an unknown entity before his crucifixion. Therefore, crucifixion became significant and the cross be came the symbol of Christianity. The crucifixion turned into Christianity's birth. Even Jesus is known to the world because of it.
But Krishna's death seems to be strange and insignificant. Is this a way to die? Does any one die like this? Is this the way to choose one's death, where someone hits you with an arrow, without your knowing, without any reason? Krishna's death does not make for an historical event; it is as ordinary as a flower blooming, withering and dying. Nobody knows when an evening gust of wind comes and hurls the flower to the ground. Krishna's death is such a non-event. It is so because he is multi-dimensional. Nothing can be said about his goings-on; none can know how his life is going to shape itself.
Lastly, let us look at it in another way. If Mahavira has to live another fifty yeats it can certainly be said how his life will shape up. Similarly, if Jesus is given an extra span of fifty years, we can easily outline on paper how he is going to spend it. It is predictable; it is within the grasp of astrologers.
If Mahavira is given only ten years, the story of how he will live them can be written down here and now. It can be said precisely when he will leave his bed in the morning and when he will go to bed at night. Even the daily menus for his breakfast, lunch and dinner can be laid out. One can reduce to writing what he is going to say in his discourses. What he will do in ten years will be just a repetition of what he did in the preceding decade.
But in the case of Krishna, not only ten years, but even ten days will be as unpredictable. No one can say what will happen in the world in that ten days' time; no repetition whatsoever is possible in his case. This man does not live according to a plan, a schedule, a program; he lives without any planning, without any programming. He lives in the moment. What will happen will happen. In this sense too, Krishna is an infinity. He does not seem to end anywhere.
Now I will give you the ultimate meaning of Krishna as a complete incarnation It is that he alone is complete who does not seem to be completing, to be concluding. What completes itself comes to its end, is finished. This will seem to be paradoxical to you. Ordinarily we believe that to be perfect means to reach the point of culmination beyond which nothing remains to be done, where one is finished with oneself If you think so, this is really the idea of one-dimensional perfection.
Krishna's wholeness is not like that which concludes itself, comes to an end and finishes itself, his completeness means that no matter how long he lives and journeys through life he is never going to come to a finish, he is going to go on and on and on.
The Upanishads' definition of wholeness is, therefore, tight. It says, "From wholeness emerges wholeness, and if you take away wholeness from wholeness, wholeness still remains." If we take away thousands of Krishnas from Krishna, this man will still remain; more and more Krishnas can still be taken from him. There is no difficulty. Krishna will have no trouble whatsoever, because he can be anything.
Mahavira cannot be born today. It will be utterly impossible for him to be born at the present time, because Mahavira reached wholeness in a particular situation, in a particular time. That dimension could be perfected only in that particular situation. In the same way Jesus cannot be born today.
If today he comes at all, in the first place nobody will crucify him. No matter how much noise he makes, people will say, "Just ignore him." Jews have learned their lesson from their first mistake, which gave rise to Christianity. There are a billion Christians all over the earth today. Jews will not commit the same mistake again. They will say, "Don't get involved with this man again, leave him alone. Let him say and do what he likes."
In his lifetime Jesus could not get many people to become interested in him; after his death millions became interested. But of the hundred thousand people who had gathered to watch him being crucified, hardly eight were those who loved him. Eight in a hundred thousand! Even that handful of his lovers were not courageous enough to say "Yes" if they were confronted with the question as to whether they were Jesus' friends. They would have said, "We don't know him." The woman who brought the dead body of Jesus down from the cross had not come from a respectable Jerusalem family, because it was difficult for Jesus to reach the aristocracy and influence them. She who could gather courage to bring Jesus down from the cross was a prostitute. As a prostitute she was already at the lowest rung of the social ladder, what worse could society do to her? So it was a prostitute, not a woman of the aristocracy, who brought his dead body down. In my view, even today, no woman from a respectable family will agree to do so if Jesus comes and happens to be crucified a second time.Jesus can be neglected, because his statements are so innocent.
There is another danger, in case people of today don't neglect him: they will take him for a madman.
What was the bone of contention which led to his crucifixion? Jesus had said, "I am God; I and my father in heaven are one." Today we would say, "Let him say it. What does it matter?"
For Jesus to be born again it is necessary for the same situation to exist that was present in his time. That is why Jesus is an historical person. Please remember it is only the followers of Jesus who began writing the history of religion. No other people had done it. History begins with Jesus.
It is not accidental that an era begins with Jesus. Jesus is an historical event, and he can happen only in a particular historical moment.
We did not write Krishna's history. The dates of his birth and death are not definitely known. And it is useless to know them: any dates would do. Particular dates and times are irrelevant in relation to Krishna: he can happen at any date and time; he will be relevant to any time and situation. He will have no difficulty whatsoever in being what he is; he will be the same in all times. He does not insist on being like this or that. If you have any conditions, you will need a corresponding situation for it, but if you say that anything will do, you can be at ease in every situation. Mahavira will insist on being naked, but Krishna will even put on peg-legged pants, he will have no difficulty. He will even say that had you made him this outfit earlier, he would gladly have worn it.
To live so choicelessly is to live in infinity. No time, no place, no situation can be a problem for him.
He will be one with any age, with any period of human history. His flower will bloom wherever and whenever he is.
Therefore I say that where Mahavira, Buddha and Jesus are historical persons, Krishna is not. This does not mean that Krishna did not happen. He very much happened, but he does not belong to any particular time and space, and it is in this sense that he is not historical. He is a mythical and legendary figure. He is an actor, a performer really. He can happen any time. And he is not attached to a character, to an idealized lifestyle. He will not ask for a particular Radha, any Radha will be okay for him. He will not insist on a particular age, a special period of time; any age will suit him. It is not necessary that he only play a flute, any musical instrument of any age will do for him.
Krishna is whole in the sense that no matter how much you take away from him, he still remains complete and whole. He can happen over and over again. We will have another question-and-answer discussion this afternoon. You can send in writing whatever questions arise in your mind.
Zero or emptiness is always complete, whole. Part-emptiness has no meaning whatsoever. How can you divide emptiness? And how can it be called emptiness if it is divided into parts? Emptiness is irreducible, indivisible. And where division begins, numbers begin; therefore, number one follows zero. One, two and three belong to the world of numbers. And all numbers arise from zero and end in zero. Zero or emptiness alone is whole.
He is whole who is empty. And it is significant that Krishna is called whole, because this man is absolutely empty. And only he who is choiceless can be empty. One who chooses becomes something. he accepts being somebody, he accepts "somebodiness". If he says he is a thief, he will become somebody; his emptiness will be no more. If he says he is a saint, then also is his emptiness destroyed. This person has accepted to be something, to be somebody. Now "somebodiness" has entered and "nothingness" is lost.
If someone asks Krishna who he is, he cannot answer the question meaningfully. Whatever answer he gives will bring choice in, and it will make something or somebody of him. If one really wants to be all, he must be prepared to be nothing.
Zen monks have a code, a maxim among themselves. They say, "One who longs to be everywhere must not be anywhere." One who wants to be all cannot afford to be anything. How can he be something? There is no congruity between all and something; they don't go together.
Choicelessness brings you to emptiness1 to nothingness. Then you are what you are, but you cannot say who you are, what vou are.
It is for this reason that, when Arjuna asks Krishna who he is, instead of answering his question, he reveals himself, his real being to him. In that revelation he is all and everything. The deepest significance of his being whole lies in his utter emptiness.
One who is something or somebody will be in difficulty. His very being something will become his bondage. Life is mysterious; it has its own laws. If I choose to be something, this "something" will become my prison.
There is a beautiful anecdote from the life of Kabir. Every day a number of people gather at Kabir's place to listen to his words of wisdom. At the end of the satsang, Kabir always requested them to dine with him before going home.
One day the matter came to a head. Kabir's son Kamal came to him and said, "It is now becoming too much. We can no longer bear the burden of feeding so many people every day. We have to buy everything on credit, and we are now heavily in debt." Kabir said, "Why don't you borrow more?"
"But who is going to repay it?" Kamal asked.
Then his father said, "One who gives will repay it. Why should we worry about it?"
Kamal could not understand what his father meant. He was a worldly man. He said, "This answer won't do; it's not a spiritual matter. Those who lend us money ask for repayment, and if we fail to repay them we will prove to be dishonest."
To this Kabir simply said, "Then prove to be so. What is wrong with it? What if people call us dishonest?"
Kamal could not take it. And he said, "It is too much. I can't put up with it. You just stop inviting people to dinner, that's all."
Kabir then said, "If it comes to this, so be it."
The next day people came to satsang again, and as usual Kabir invited them to eat with him. His son reminded him of his unfulfilled promise to stop feeding the visitors. Kabir said, "I can't give you my word, because I don't want to bind myself to anything. I live in the moment. I let what happens in the moment, happen. If some day I don't ask them to stay to dinner, it will be so. But as long as I happen to invite them, I will invite them."
Kamal then said in desperation, "It means that I will now have to resort to stealing, because nobody is prepared to give us credit any more. What else can I do?"
Kabir said grinning, "You fool, why didn't you think of this before? It would have saved us the trouble of borrowing."
Kamal was simply amazed to hear his father say this. He was known as a wise man, a sage, who always gave people profound advice. "What is the matter with him?" he wondered. Then he thought that maybe his father was just playing a joke, so he decided to put it to a test.
Late in the night when the whole village was asleep, Kamal awakened his father and said, "I am going to steal. Will you accompany me?"
Kabir said, "Now that you have awakened me, I should go with you." Kamal was startled once again; he could not believe his father would agree to steal. But he was Kabir's son, and he did not like beating a hasty retreat, so he decided to see the whole of this joke, or whatever it was, through to the end.
Kamal walked to the back of a farmer's house, his father following him, and he began to break through the wall of the house. Kabir was standing silently near him. Kamal still expected his father to call off the whole thing as a joke. And at the same time he was afraid. Kabir said, "Why are you afraid, Kamal?"
"What else can I be when I am going to commit theft?" he retorted. "Isn't it ironical to suggest I should not be afraid while stealing?"
Kabir said, "It is fear that makes you feel guilty, that makes you think you are stealing; otherwise there is no reason to think that you are a thief. Don't fear, do your job rightly; otherwise you will needlessly disturb the sleep of the entire family."
Somehow Kamal drilled a hole in the wall, still hoping his father would call it quits. Then he said, "Now let's enter the house." And Kabir readily joined him and went inside the house. They had not gone there to steal money, they only wanted grain, and so they picked up a bag of wheat and left the house.
When they were out again, Kabir said to his son, "Now that dawn is at hand, it would be good if you went and informed the family that we are taking a bag of wheat away with us."
This startled Kamal once again and he exclaimed, "What are you saying? We are here as thieves, not as merchants."
But Kabir said, "Why make them worry unnecessarily about this missing bag of wheat? Let them know where it is going."
Followers of Kabir have completely ignored this odd episode. They never mention it because it is so inscrutable. In the light of this event it would be difficult to decide whether Kabir was a sage or a thief. Undoubtedly a theft has been committed, hence he is indictable as a thief. But his being wise is equally indisputable, because first he asks Kamal not to fear and then to inform the family about it so they are not put to unnecessary trouble.
Kamal had then warned Kabir, "But if I inform the family, we will be known as thieves."
And Kabir had very innocently said, "Since theft has happened, we are thieves. They will not be wrong to think of us as thieves."
Kamal had again warned, "Not only the family concerned, but the whole village will come to know that you are a thief! Your reputation will be in the mud. No one will come to visit you again."
And Kabir had said, "Then your troubles will be over. If they don't come, I will not have to ask them to eat with us."
Kamal could not understand it the whole episode was so paradoxical.
Krishna is complete in another sense: his life encompasses all there is to life. It seems impossible how a single life could contain so much - all of life. Krishna has assimilated all that is contradictory, utterly contradictory in life. He has absorbed all the contradictions of life. You cannot find a life more inconsistent than Krishna's. There is a consistency running through the life of Jesus. So is Mahavira's life consistent. There is a logic, a rhythm, a harmonic system in the life of Buddha. If you can know a part of Buddha you will know all of him.
Ramakrishna has said, "Know one sage and all sages are known." But this rule does not apply to Krishna. Ramakrishna has said, "Know a drop of sea water and all the sea is known.'i But you can't say it about Krishna. The taste of sea water is the same all over - it is salty. But the waters of Krishna's life are not all salty; at places they can be sugary. And, maybe, a single drop contains more than one flavor. Really, Krishna comprises all the flavors of life.
In the same way, Krishna's life represents all the arts of existence. Krishna is not an artist, because an artist is one who knows only one art, or a few. Krishna is art itself. That completes him from every side and in every way.
That is why those who knew him had to take recourse in all kinds of exaggeration to describe him. With others we can escape exaggeration, or we have to exaggerate a particular facet of their lives, but we find ourselves in real difficulty when we come to say something about Krishna. Even exaggeration doesn't say much about him. We can portray him only in superlatives we cannot do without superlatives. And our difficulty is greater when we find the superlative antonyms too, because he is cold and hot together.
In fact, water is hot and cold together. The difficulty arises when we impose our interpretation on it:
then we separate hot from cold. If we ask water itself whether it is hot or cold, it will simply say, "To know me you only have to put your hand in me, because it is not a question of whether I am hot or cold, it is really a question of whether you are hot or cold." If you are warm, the water will seem to be cold, and if you are cold the water will seem to be hot. Its hotness or coldness is relative to you.
You can conduct an experiment. Warm one of your hands by exposing it to a fire, and cool your other hand on a piece of ice, and then put both hands together into a bucket of water. What will you find? Where your one hand will say the water is cold, the other will say the contrary. And it will be so difficult for you to decide if the water, the same water, is hot or cold.
You come upon the same kind of difficulty when you try to understand Krishna. It depends on you, and not on Krishna, how you see him. If you ask a Radha, who is in deep love with him, she will say something which will be entirely her own vision of Krishna. Maybe she does not call him a complete god, or maybe she does, but whatever she says depends on her, not on Krishna. So it will be a relative judgment. If sometimes Radha comes across Krishna dancing with another woman she will find it hard to accept him as a god. Then Krishna's water will feel cold to her. Maybe she does not feel any water at all. But when Krishna is dancing with Radha, he dances so totally with her that she feels he is wholly hers. Then she can say that he is God himself. Every Radha, when her lover is wholly with her, feels so in her bones. But the same person can look like a devil if she finds him flirting with another woman. These statements are relative; they cannot be absolute. For Arjuna and the Pandavas, Krishna is all-god, but the Kauravas will vehemently contest this claim. For them Krishna is worse than a devil. He is the person who is responsible for their defeat and destruction.
There can be a thousand statements about who Krishna is. But there cannot be a thousand statements about who Buddha is. Buddha has extricated himself from all relative relationships, from all involvements, and so he is unchanging, a monotone. Taste him from anywhere, his flavor is the same. Therefore, Buddha is not that controversial; he is like flat land. We can clearly know him as such-and-such, and our statements about him will always have a consistent meaning. But Krishna belies all our statements. And I call him complete and whole because he has disaffirmed all our pronouncements on him. No statement, howsoever astute, can wholly encompass Krishna; he always remains unsaid. So one has to cover the remaining side of his life with contrary statements.
All these statements together can wholly cover him, but then they themselves seem paradoxical.
Krishna's wholeness lies in the fact that he has no personality of his own, that he is not a person, an individual - he is existence itself. He is just existence; he is just emptiness. You can say he is like a mirror; he just mirrors everything that comes before him. He just mirrors. And when you see yourself mirrored in him, you think Krishna is like you. But the moment you move away from him, he is empty again. And whosoever comes to him, whosoever is reflected in his mirror thinks the same way and says Krishna is like him.
For this very reason there are a thousand commentaries on the GEETA. Every one of the commentators saw himself reflected in the GEETA. There are not many commentaries on the sayings of Buddha, and there is a reason for this. There are still fewer on the teachings of Jesus, and they are not much different from each other. In fact, a thousand meanings can only be implanted on Krishna, not on Buddha. What Buddha says is definite and unequivocal; his statements are complete, clear cut and logical. There may be some differences in their meaning according to the minds of different commentators, but this difference cannot be great.
The dispute over Mahavira was so small It only led to two factions among his followers. The dispute between the Shwetambaras and the Digambaras is confined to petty things like Mahavira lived naked or did not live naked. They don't quarrel over the teachings of Mahavira, which are very clear.
It would be difficult to create differing sects around the Jaina Tirthankara.
It is strange that it is as difficult to create sects around Krishna as it is around Mahavira. And it is so for very contrary reasons. If people try to create sects around Krishna. the number will run into the tens of thousands, and even then Krishna will remain inexhaustible. Therefore in the place of sects, around Krishna thousands of interpretations arose. In this respect too, Krishna is rare in that sects could not be built around him. Around Christ two to three major factions arose, but none around Krishna. But there are a thousand commentaries on the GEETA alone. And it is significant that no two commentaries tally: one commentary can be diametrically opposed to another, so much so they look like enemies. Ramanuja and Shankara have no meeting point, One can say to the other, "You are just an ignoramus!" And what is amazing is that in their own way both can be tight; there is no difficulty in it. Why is it so?
It is so because Krishna is not definite, conclusive. He does not have a system, a structure, a form, an outline. Krishna is formless, incorporeal. He is limitless. You cannot define him; he is simply indefinable. In this sense too, Krishna is complete and whole, because only the whole can be formless, indefinable.
No interpretations of the GEETA interpret Krishna, they only interpret the interpreters. Shankara finds corroboration of his own views from the GEETA: he finds that the world is an illusion. From the same book Ramanuja discovers that devotion is the path to God. Tilak finds something else: for him the GEETA stands for the discipline of action. And curiously enough, from this sermon on the battlefield, Gandhi unearths that non violence is the way. No body has any difficulty finding in the GEETA what he wants to find. Krishna does not come in their way; everyone is welcome there. He is an empty mirror. You see your image, move away, and the mirror is as empty as ever. It has no fixed image of its own; it is mere emptiness.
Krishna is not like a film. The film also works as a mirror, but only once: your reflection stays with it. So one can say that a particular photo is of so and so. You cannot say the same about a mirror; it mirrors you only as long as you are with it. What does it do after you move away from it? Then it just mirrors emptiness, It mirrors whatsoever faces it, exactly as it is. Krishna is that mirror. And therefore I say he is complete, whole.
Krishna is whole in many other ways too, and we will come to understand this as we go on with this discussion. Someone can be whole only if he is whole in every way. A person is not whole if his wholeness is confined to a particular dimension of life. In their own dimensions Mahavira and Jesus are whole. In itself the life of Jesus is whole, and it lacks nothing as such. He is whole, as a rose is whole as a rose and a marigold is whole as a marigold. But a rose cannot be whole as a marigold, only a marigold is whole as a marigold. Similarly, a marigold cannot be whole as a rose. So Buddha, Mahavira and Jesus are whole in their own dimensions; in themselves they lack nothing.
But the wholeness of Krishna is utterly different. He is not one-dimensional, he is really multi- dimensional. He enters and pervades every walk of life, every dimension of life. If he is a thief he is a whole thief, and if he is a sage he is a whole sage. When he remembers something he remembers it totally, and when he forgets it he forgets it totally. That is why, when he left Mathura, he left it completely. Now the inhabitants of that place cry and wail for him and say that Krishna is very hard-hearted, which is not true. Or if he is hard-hearted, he is totally so.
In fact, one who remembers totally also forgets totally. When a mirror mirrors you it does so fully, and when it is empty it is fully empty. When Krishna's mirror moves to Dwarka it now reflects Dwarka as fully as it reflected Mathura when it was there. He is now totally at Dwarka, where he lives totally, loves totally and even fights totally.
Krishna's wholeness is multidimensional, which is rare indeed. It is arduous to be whole even in one dimension it is not that easy. So it would be wrong to say that to be multidimensionally whole is arduous, it is simply impossible. But sometimes even the impossible happens, and when it happens it is a miracle. Krishna's life is that miracle, an absolute miracle.
We can find a comparison for every kind of person, but not for Krishna. The lives of Buddha and Mahavira are very similar they look like close neighbors. There is little difference between them.
Even if there is any difference, it is on the outside; their inside, their innermost beings are identical.
But it is utterly improbable to find a comparison for Krishna on this planet. As a man he symbolizes the impossible.
It is natural that a person who is whole in every dimension will have disadvantages and advantages both. He will not compare well with one who has achieved wholeness in a particular dimension, in so far as that particular dimension is concerned. Mahavira has exerted all his energy in one dimension, so in his own field he will excel Krishna, who has diversified his energy in all dimensions. Christ will also excel him in his own field. But on the whole, Krishna is superb. Mahavira, Buddha and Christ can not compare with him; he is utterly incomparable.
The significance of Krishna lies in his being multi-dimensional. Let us for a moment imagine a flower which from time to time becomes a marigold, a jasmine, a rose, a lotus and a celestial flower too - and every time we go to it we find it an altogether different flower. This flower cannot compare well with a rose which, through and through, has been only a rose. Where the rose has, with single- mindedness, spent all its energy being a rose, this imaginary flower has diversified its energy in many directions. The life of this imaginary flower is so pervasive, so extensive that it cannot possibly have the density there is in the life of a rose. Krishna is that imaginary flower: his being has vastness, but it lacks density. His vastness is simply endless, immense.
So Krishna's wholeness represents infinity. He is infinite. Mahavira's wholeness means he has achieved everything there is to achieve in his one dimension, that he has left nothing to be achieved as far as this dimension is concerned. Now, no seeker will ever achieve anything more than Mahavira achieved in his own field; he can never excel Mahavira. Therefore, Krishna is whole in the sense that he is multidimensional, expansive, vast and infinite.
A person who is whole in one dimension is going to be a total stranger in so far as other dimensions are concerned. Where Krishna can even steal skillfully, Mahavira will be a complete failure as a thief.
If Mahavira tries his hand at it there is every chance of his landing in a prison. Krishna will succeed even as a thief. Where Krishna will shine on the battlefield as an accomplished warrior, Buddha will cut a sorry figure if he takes his stand there. We can not imagine Christ playing a flute, but we can easily think of Krishna going to the gallows. Krishna will feel no difficulty on the cross. Intrinsically, he is as capable of facing crucifixion as of playing a flute. But it will be a hard task for Christ if he is handed a flute to play. We cannot think of Christ in the image of Krishna.
Christians say Jesus never laughed. Playing a flute will be a far cry for one who never laughed. If Jesus is asked to stand like Krishna, with one leg on the other, a crown of peacock feathers on his head and a flute on his lips, Jesus will immediately say, "I prefer the cross to this flute." He is at ease with the cross; he never felt so happy as on the cross. From the cross alone could he say, "Father, forgive them for they don't know what they are doing." He meets his death most peacefully on the cross, because it is his dimension. He finds no difficulty whatsoever in fulfilling his destiny. What was destined to happen is now happening. His journey's direction is now reaching its culminating point.
Jesus is rebellious, a rebel, a revolutionary, so the cross is his most natural destination. A Jesus can predict he is going to be crucified, If he is not crucified it will look like failure. In his case crucifixion is inevitable.
Krishna's case is very different and difficult. In his case no prediction is possible; he is simply un predictable. Whether he will die on the gallows or amid adulation and worship, nobody can say.
Nobody could predict the way he really died. He was lying restfully under a tree; it was really not an occasion for death. Someone, a hunter, saw him from a distance, thought a deer was lying there and hit him with his arrow. His death was so accidental, so out of place; it is rare in its own way.
Everybody's death has an element of predetermination about it; Krishna's death seems to be totally undetermined. He dies in a manner as if his death has no utility whatsoever. His life was wholly non-utilitarian; so is his death.
The death of Jesus proved to be very purposeful. The truth is, Christianity wouldn't have come into existence had Jesus not been crucified. Christianity owes its existence to the cross, not to Jesus.
Jesus was an unknown entity before his crucifixion. Therefore, crucifixion became significant and the cross be came the symbol of Christianity. The crucifixion turned into Christianity's birth. Even Jesus is known to the world because of it.
But Krishna's death seems to be strange and insignificant. Is this a way to die? Does any one die like this? Is this the way to choose one's death, where someone hits you with an arrow, without your knowing, without any reason? Krishna's death does not make for an historical event; it is as ordinary as a flower blooming, withering and dying. Nobody knows when an evening gust of wind comes and hurls the flower to the ground. Krishna's death is such a non-event. It is so because he is multi-dimensional. Nothing can be said about his goings-on; none can know how his life is going to shape itself.
Lastly, let us look at it in another way. If Mahavira has to live another fifty yeats it can certainly be said how his life will shape up. Similarly, if Jesus is given an extra span of fifty years, we can easily outline on paper how he is going to spend it. It is predictable; it is within the grasp of astrologers.
If Mahavira is given only ten years, the story of how he will live them can be written down here and now. It can be said precisely when he will leave his bed in the morning and when he will go to bed at night. Even the daily menus for his breakfast, lunch and dinner can be laid out. One can reduce to writing what he is going to say in his discourses. What he will do in ten years will be just a repetition of what he did in the preceding decade.
But in the case of Krishna, not only ten years, but even ten days will be as unpredictable. No one can say what will happen in the world in that ten days' time; no repetition whatsoever is possible in his case. This man does not live according to a plan, a schedule, a program; he lives without any planning, without any programming. He lives in the moment. What will happen will happen. In this sense too, Krishna is an infinity. He does not seem to end anywhere.
Now I will give you the ultimate meaning of Krishna as a complete incarnation It is that he alone is complete who does not seem to be completing, to be concluding. What completes itself comes to its end, is finished. This will seem to be paradoxical to you. Ordinarily we believe that to be perfect means to reach the point of culmination beyond which nothing remains to be done, where one is finished with oneself If you think so, this is really the idea of one-dimensional perfection.
Krishna's wholeness is not like that which concludes itself, comes to an end and finishes itself, his completeness means that no matter how long he lives and journeys through life he is never going to come to a finish, he is going to go on and on and on.
The Upanishads' definition of wholeness is, therefore, tight. It says, "From wholeness emerges wholeness, and if you take away wholeness from wholeness, wholeness still remains." If we take away thousands of Krishnas from Krishna, this man will still remain; more and more Krishnas can still be taken from him. There is no difficulty. Krishna will have no trouble whatsoever, because he can be anything.
Mahavira cannot be born today. It will be utterly impossible for him to be born at the present time, because Mahavira reached wholeness in a particular situation, in a particular time. That dimension could be perfected only in that particular situation. In the same way Jesus cannot be born today.
If today he comes at all, in the first place nobody will crucify him. No matter how much noise he makes, people will say, "Just ignore him." Jews have learned their lesson from their first mistake, which gave rise to Christianity. There are a billion Christians all over the earth today. Jews will not commit the same mistake again. They will say, "Don't get involved with this man again, leave him alone. Let him say and do what he likes."
In his lifetime Jesus could not get many people to become interested in him; after his death millions became interested. But of the hundred thousand people who had gathered to watch him being crucified, hardly eight were those who loved him. Eight in a hundred thousand! Even that handful of his lovers were not courageous enough to say "Yes" if they were confronted with the question as to whether they were Jesus' friends. They would have said, "We don't know him." The woman who brought the dead body of Jesus down from the cross had not come from a respectable Jerusalem family, because it was difficult for Jesus to reach the aristocracy and influence them. She who could gather courage to bring Jesus down from the cross was a prostitute. As a prostitute she was already at the lowest rung of the social ladder, what worse could society do to her? So it was a prostitute, not a woman of the aristocracy, who brought his dead body down. In my view, even today, no woman from a respectable family will agree to do so if Jesus comes and happens to be crucified a second time.Jesus can be neglected, because his statements are so innocent.
There is another danger, in case people of today don't neglect him: they will take him for a madman.
What was the bone of contention which led to his crucifixion? Jesus had said, "I am God; I and my father in heaven are one." Today we would say, "Let him say it. What does it matter?"
For Jesus to be born again it is necessary for the same situation to exist that was present in his time. That is why Jesus is an historical person. Please remember it is only the followers of Jesus who began writing the history of religion. No other people had done it. History begins with Jesus.
It is not accidental that an era begins with Jesus. Jesus is an historical event, and he can happen only in a particular historical moment.
We did not write Krishna's history. The dates of his birth and death are not definitely known. And it is useless to know them: any dates would do. Particular dates and times are irrelevant in relation to Krishna: he can happen at any date and time; he will be relevant to any time and situation. He will have no difficulty whatsoever in being what he is; he will be the same in all times. He does not insist on being like this or that. If you have any conditions, you will need a corresponding situation for it, but if you say that anything will do, you can be at ease in every situation. Mahavira will insist on being naked, but Krishna will even put on peg-legged pants, he will have no difficulty. He will even say that had you made him this outfit earlier, he would gladly have worn it.
To live so choicelessly is to live in infinity. No time, no place, no situation can be a problem for him.
He will be one with any age, with any period of human history. His flower will bloom wherever and whenever he is.
Therefore I say that where Mahavira, Buddha and Jesus are historical persons, Krishna is not. This does not mean that Krishna did not happen. He very much happened, but he does not belong to any particular time and space, and it is in this sense that he is not historical. He is a mythical and legendary figure. He is an actor, a performer really. He can happen any time. And he is not attached to a character, to an idealized lifestyle. He will not ask for a particular Radha, any Radha will be okay for him. He will not insist on a particular age, a special period of time; any age will suit him. It is not necessary that he only play a flute, any musical instrument of any age will do for him.
Krishna is whole in the sense that no matter how much you take away from him, he still remains complete and whole. He can happen over and over again. We will have another question-and-answer discussion this afternoon. You can send in writing whatever questions arise in your mind.
KRISHNA IS COMPLETE AND WHOLE
Let us first understand what I mean by completeness, wholeness.Wholeness can be both one-dimensional and multidimensional. A painter can be complete as a painter, but it does not mean that he is also complete as a scientist. A scientist can be whole as a scientist, but that does not make him whole as a musician. So there is a one-dimensional completeness. I say Mahavira, Buddha and Jesus were complete in a particular dimension. But Krishna was complete in a multidimensional way.
It is quite possible that one chooses a particular dimension of life to the exclusion of the rest, and attains to its wholeness. This wholeness too can lead to the supreme truth The river that flows in a single stream is as much entitled to reach the ocean as one flowing in many streams. With respect to reaching the ocean, there is no difference between the two. Mahavira and Buddha and Krishna all reach to the ocean of truth, but while Mahavira does it as a one-dimensional man, Krishna does it as one who is multi-dimensional. Krishna's completeness is multidimensional, while Mahavira's is one-dimensional. So don't think that Mahavira does not attain to wholeness; he transcends the seventh body and attains to wholeness as much as Krishna does.
Krishna reaches the same goal from many, many directions, and that is significant.
Another significant thing about Krishna is that unlike Mahavira and Buddha, he does not deny life, he is not life-negative. There is an unavoidable element of negation in the lives of Mahavira and Buddha which is completely absent in Krishna's life. There is not a trace of negativity in this man with the flute. Mahavira attains through renunciation of life; Krishna attains through total acceptance of it. That is why I differentiate Krishna's wholeness from that of others. But let no one think that Mahavira is incomplete. All one can say is that while his wholeness is one-dimensional, Krishna's wholeness is multidimensional.
One-dimensional wholeness is not going to have much meaning in the future. For the man of the future, multidimensional wholeness will have tremendous significance. And there are reasons for it. One who attains to wholeness through a single facet of his life not only negates all other facets of his own life, he also becomes instrumental in negating those aspects in the lives of many other multidimensional people.
On the other hand, one who attains to wholeness, to the absolute, through all aspects of his life, proves helpful even to all kinds of one-dimensional seekers in their journey to the supreme from their own aspect. In short, while Mahavira and Buddha can be of help only to a few, Krishna's help will be available to many. For example, we cannot think how a painter or sculptor or a poet can attain to the supreme through the path of Mahavira. Mahavira is one-dimensional not only for himself; all others who will try to understand him and experiment with his discipline will have to negate all other facets of their lives as ways to attainment. We cannot conceive how a dancer can attain to the supreme in Mahavira's terms, but in Krishna's terms he can. A dancer, if he so chooses, can drop all other aspects and keep to dancing, and by going deeper and deeper into it can attain to the same state Mahavira attains through meditation. This is possible in terms of Krishna.
Krishna makes every side, every facet of his life divine; with him every direction of life becomes sacred. It is not so with Mahavira: one particular direction in which he journeys becomes sacred, while all other directions remain profane. And in fact because his one direction becomes sacred all other directions are bound to remain profane; these are automatically condemned; doomed to live in the shade of profanity. And this is applicable not only to Mahavira, but also to Rama, Buddha, Christ, Mohammed - all those who adhere to one exclusive direction in life's quest.
Krishna is the sole being about whom it can be said that he made every path, every facet of life sacred and holy. He made it possible for every kind of seeker to attain to the supreme from any direction that comes naturally to him. In this sense he is multi-dimensional, not only for himself but for others too. With a flute on his lips one can dance his way to God; playing a flute he can touch that depth where samadhi, or ecstasy happens. But to Mahavira and Buddha with a flute there is no way.
It is not possible on the paths of Mahavira and Buddha that a flute can achieve the majestic heights of meditation and samadhi. It is impossible. To Mahavira, Meera can never attain to the highest; she is attached to Krishna, she loves Krishna. And according to Mahavira, attachment can never lead you to God, only non-attachment can. But going with Krishna, both the attached and non-attached can reach the same destination.
That is why I say that Krishna's wholeness is incomparable; it is rare.
Secondly, you want to know if none of the Jaina tirthankaras attained to wholeness. No, they all had attained to it, but only to one-dimensional wholeness. And it was because of this that Jaina ideology could not achieve widespread popularity. It was inherent in the very nature of Jainism. Twenty-five centuries have passed, and there ate only three and a half million Jainas, a very poor figure.
It is ironic that the message of a person of the stature of Mahavira - and he was not alone, he carried with him an immense heritage bequeathed by twenty-three tirthankaras - could reach only three and a half million people. If only three dozen persons had been influenced by Mahavira in his lifetime, they alone through procreation would have, in the course of twenty-five hundred years, reached this figure. What is the cause? The cause is obvious. It is their one-dimensional approach. They lack the multi-dimensional wholeness of Krishna. Their appeal is limited to a few; it is ineffectual in reaching the rest of mankind. People with inclinations different from the single dimension that Jainism represents remain wholly unaffected; they don't find themselves in tune with it.
It is ironic that even this handful of Jainas don't treat Mahavira the way he should be treated. It is all right to worship Krishna, but it is repugnant to Mahavira's teachings. And the Jainas are worshipping Mahavira. Worship is okay with Krishna but not with Mahavira. It means Mahavira will not agree with the minds of even those few who are born into the Jaina community. The reason is that the dimension of Mahavira is very exclusive; it accords with few. So being born in the Jaina community one continues to be a Jaina, but takes on many things that don't belong to Mahavira's dimension.
Devotion has entered Jainism, and along with it have come worship and prayer and other rituals.
They have nothing to do with Mahavira; they are alien to his genius. In fact, devotion and worship are an outrage against Mahavira; there is no place for them in the life of Mahavira. But the Jainas have their own difficulty; they cannot feel gratified without worship and prayer. So they go on incorporating all these things into the religion of Mahavira.
Here I would like to say that all those who have attained to one-dimensional wholeness are bound to be unjustly treated by their followers; they cannot escape it. But you cannot misbehave in this way with those who have attained to multidimensional wholeness; whatever you do they will accept it. While all types of people can walk with Krishna, only a particular type can go with Mahavira.
This is the reason I have said that all the twenty-four tirthankaras of the Jainas are travelers on the same path; their direction is the same and their spiritual discipline is the same. And I don't say that they don't arrive at the goal, they do arrive. It is not that ultimately they don't achieve what Krishna achieves; they achieve exactly that which Krishna achieves.
It does not matter whether a river reaches the ocean in hundreds of streams or in a single stream.
On reaching the ocean all journeys end and all the rivers become one with the ocean. Yet there is a difference between the two rivers - one has a single stream and another has many. While a river with many streams can water a very large area of the earth, the river with a single stream cannot - only a few trees and plants can be benefited by it. This difference has to be understood, it cannot be denied.
This is what I would like to say in regard to multidimensional wholeness.
And you ask: What is samyama, the discipline of balance in life, without repression?
In terms of renunciation samyama generally means repression. By and large, every seeker on the path of renunciation understands samyama in the sense of repression. For this reason the Jaina scriptures have even a term like body-repression; they believe that even the physical body has to be suppressed and repressed. It is unfortunate that samyama has become synonymous with repression.
But in Krishna's terms, samyama can never mean repression. How can Krishna say that samyama can be achieved through repression? For Krishna samyama has an absolutely different meaning.
Words sometimes put us in great difficulty. Words are the same, whether they come from Krishna's mouth or from Mahavira's, but their meanings change from mouth to mouth. This word samyama is one such word which has different meanings with different people. Mahavira means one thing when he uses this word, and Krishna means just the opposite when he uses the same word. While the word comes from the dictionary, its meaning comes from the person who uses it.
The meaning of a word does not, as is usually believed, come from the dictionary. Of course, people who have no individuality of their own depend on the dictionary for the meanings of words. People with individuality invest words with their own meanings. So what Krishna means by samyama can be known only in his context. Similarly Mahavira's meaning of samyama will have to be known from his context. Its meaning does not lie in the word itself, it lies in Krishna and Mahavira or whoever uses it.
Looking at Krishna's life no one can say that samyama means repression. If there has been a single person on this earth who can be called utterly unrepressed, uninhibited and free it is Krishna. So samyama for Krishna cannot have anything to do with repression. And as far as I am concerned, samyama and repression are antonyms, opposites.
This Sanskrit word samyama is really extraordinary. To me it means balance, equilibrium, to be just in the middle. When the scales are equalized so that neither side outweighs the other, it is samyam.
In this sense a renunciate does not have samyama, balance any more than one who indulges in worldly pleasures. Both are unbalanced; they are wanting in samyama. Both are extremists: the indulgent holds to one extreme of life; the renunciate holds to the other extreme. Samyama means to be equidistant from the two extremes, to be just in the middle. Krishna stands for that middle state where there is neither renunciation nor indulgence. Or you can say samyama is indulgence with an element of renunciation in it, or it is renunciation with an element of indulgence; it is striking a balance between indulgence and renunciation. Really samyama is neither indulgence nor renunciation; it is a state where you don't tilt the scales to either side. He alone is samyami who maintains equidistance from either extreme.
There is a man who is mad after wealth. Day in and day out he is running after amassing money.
Day in and day out he goes on adding to his bank balance. Money has become the be-all and end-all of his life - his demigod. This person has gone to one extreme of life. There is another person who has turned his back on wealth; he is running away from wealth. He renounces wealth and does not even look back lest it attract him and entrap him again. This person has gone to the other extreme. Both have lost balance, both lack samyama. Renunciation of wealth is the goal of one and acquisition of wealth is the goal of another.
Then who is samyami, the balanced person? In Krishna's terms a person like Janaka is samyami.
Negation of the extremes is samyama; to be exactly in the middle is equilibrium. Too much fasting and too much eating go against samyama; right eating goes with samyama. Fasting amounts to tilting the balance on the side of hunger; overeating amounts to tilting the balance on the side of indulgence. The balance lies in eating just the right amount of food - neither less nor more. By samyama Krishna means balance. equilibrium, equipoise. Any movement deviating from the center, even a slight deviation from the middle to one side or another destroys the equilibrium; on either side there is the death of samyama.
And one can deviate from samyama in only two ways: one way is indulgence and the other is renunciation. Either you get attached to a thing, you cling to it, or you get repelled by it. Have you watched a wall clock with a pendulum? Its pendulum is constantly swinging from one side to the other; it never stops in the middle. It swings from the left side to the right and back; it does not stop at the center. Another significant thing about the pendulum is that when it is moving toward the right, it only seems so; in reality it is gathering momentum to move toward the left. And when it is moving toward the left, it is really gathering momentum to move toward the right.
We are exactly like this pendulum. When one is fasting he is in fact, preparing himself for feasting, and similarly when he is feasting he is preparing to go on a fast. One who is running after attachments and addictions will soon get tired and will pursue renunciation and asceticism. Both extremes are joined together; they are two sides of the same thing.
Only when the pendulum stops in the middle, swinging in neither direction, it is balanced. And it is such a pendulum that can symbolize samyama. So long as one pursues indulgence or asceticism, he is unbalanced, he is an asamyami. One can be called a rightist kind of asamyami and the other a leftist kind.
To be steadied in the middle is samyama in terms of Krishna. It can have no other meaning as far as Krishna is concerned. To be balanced is samyama.
Let us look at samyama in the context of real life. In the context of real life, in the sense of the interiority of life, a person of samyama has two connotations. Such a person is neither an ascetic nor a hedonist - or he is both. Such a person is a renunciate and a hedonist together. His indulgence is blended with renunciation and his renunciation mixed with indulgence.
But none of the old traditions of renunciation will agree with this definition of samyama. To these traditions samyama means aversion to enjoyment and asamyama, imbalance, means addiction to enjoyments. One who gives up his attachments and takes to asceticism is a samyami in the eyes of the traditionalists.
Krishna is neither a renunciate nor a hedonist. If we have to place him somewhere, he will be midway between Charvaka and Mahavira. In indulgence he will equal Charvaka, and in renunciation he will not lag behind Mahavira. If we can have a blending of Charvaka and Mahavira, it will be Krishna.
So in terms of Krishna, all such words as samyama and asamyama will undergo a transformation.
The words will be the same, but their meanings will be radically different. The meanings will stem from Krishna's own being.
WHAT IS KRISHNA'S SADHANA OR SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE? WHAT IS HIS WAY OF WORSHIP.
There is nothing like sadhana - or spiritual discipline in the life of Krishna. There cannot be. The basic element of spiritual discipline is effort; without effort sadhana is not possible. And the second inescapable element of sadhana is ego; without the ego, the "?", spiritual discipline falls apart. Who will discipline himself? Effort implies a doer; there has to be somebody to make the effort. Effort ceases if there is no doer.
If we go into the matter deeply we will know that sadhana is an invention of the godless people, people who don't accept God. Those who deny God and accept only the soul believe in sadhana or spiritual discipline. They believe the soul has to make efforts to uncover itself, to be itself.
Upasana, devotion, is the way of a very different kind of people, who say there is no soul, only God is. Ordinarily we think that sadhana and upasana - discipline and worship - go together, but it is not so. Theists believe in devotion and worship; they don't believe in effort. They say all one has to do is to get closer and closer to God.
The word upasana is beautiful; it means to sit near God, to get close to one's object of worship. And the worshipper disappears; his ego evaporates in the very process of getting close to God. There is nothing more to be done. The theists believe that it is really one's ego that separates him from God; ego is the gulf between the seeker and the sought. The greater the ego, the greater is the distance between the two. Ego is the measure of distance between the seeker and God. To the extent this ego melts and evaporates, one gets closer and closer to God. And the day the ego disappears completely, the day the seeker ceases to be, his upasana is complete and he is God himself.
It is like ice turns into water, and water in turn evaporates and disappears into the sky. Does ice have to make efforts to become water? If it makes efforts, it will only become more hardened as ice.
Efforts will make ice more and more crystallized, solid. So if a seeker resorts to sadhana or spiritual discipline, it will only strengthen his ego, harden it and solidify it.
So sadhana ultimately leads to the soul, while upasana, devotion leads to God. One who disciplines himself will end with the soul, he cannot go beyond it He will say that he has ultimately found himself, his soul. On the other hand the devotee will say that he has lost himself and found God. So the sadhaka and the upasaka, the man of discipline and the devotee, are contrary to each other; they are not the same. While an upasaka will melt and evaporate like water, a sadhaka will be strengthened and crystallized as a soul.
In Krishna's life there is no element of discipline; there is actually no place whatsoever for sadhana.
It is upasana or devotion which has meaning for Krishna.
The whole journey of upasana is opposed to effort and discipline; it enters a different dimension altogether. For an upasaka it is a mistake to think that one finds himself. The self is the only barrier, the only falsehood. To be is the only bondage. And therefore not to be, or to be nothing, is the only freedom. While a sadhaka says, "I want to be free," an upasaka says, "I want to be free from the '?', the self." A sadhaka says, "I want freedom," but his "I" remains intact. To an upasaka, freedom means a state of "non-I" or complete egolessness. Not freedom of the "I" but freedom from the "I" is the highest state for an upasaka. So sadhana has no place in the vocabulary of Krishna; upasana has.
Therefore I will go into upasana in depth. To understand it, it is necessary first to know that it has nothing to do with efforts or discipline. Unless we know it clearly, we will continue to confuse the two. And remember that very few people want to take the path of devotion and worship. Most people would like to be sadhakas. doers. A sadhaka has nothing to lose, he has only to gain something - his soul. And an upasaka has everything to lose, he has to lose himself totally, he has nothing to gain. Losing is his only gain, and nothing else. So very few people want to take this path. That is why even the lovers of Krishna turn into sadhakas. They too talk in terms of sadhana and discipline, because they love to be doers. The ego loves the words: strive, achieve, arrive; it is always after achievement.
Upasana is arduous, devotion is hard. Nothing is more difficult than evaporating and disappearing into nothingness. One would, for sure, want to know why he should die and disappear into nothing ness, what he is going to gain by dying as an entity. A sadhaka, in spite of his lofty words, will always think in terms of gain and loss. Even his liberation is nothing more than a means to his happiness; his freedom is his freedom. So it is not surprising that a sadhaka is a selfish person in the deeper sense of the word. In this sense he cannot rise above the self. But an upasaka, a devotee will rise above self and will know the ultimate, where the self is no more.
What is this upasana? What is its meaning and significance? What is its way? Before you try to understand this question of upasana, it is essential that you drop the idea of sadhana altogether.
Forget it; it has no place whatsoever. Only then you can know what upasana is.As I said. the word upasana means to sit near someone, to sit close to someone. But what is the distance, the remoteness that has to be overcome in order to be near? There is physical distance, distance in space. You are sitting there and I am sitting here, and there is a distance between you and me. This is physical distance. We move closer to each other and the physical distance disappears. If we sit together taking each other's hands, the distance will disappear completely.
There is another kind of distance which is spiritual, inner, which has nothing to do with physical distance. Two persons can be together holding each others' hands and yet they may be hundreds of miles away from each other spiritually. And maybe, two other persons are physically separated from each other by hundreds of miles, yet they are intimately together in spirit. So there are two kinds of distances: one is physical and the other is psychological, spiritual. Upasana is a way of ending the inner distance, the psychological separateness between the seeker and the sought.
It is ironic that even a devotee is anxious to remove the physical distance that seems to separate him from his beloved. He says, "I am restless for you; don't torture me any more. I have made the bed for you, don't delay your arrival any longer." But the difficulty is that the inner distance remains even when the physical distance has been eliminated. To come close to one's beloved is altogether an inner phenomenon. A devotee can be with God, who is invisible, and there is no physical distance between the two. Upasana is a way of uniting the devotee with the divine. But how is this inner distance created?
We know how the outer distance is created. If I walk away from you in another direction, a physical distance will immediately come to exist between you and me. And if I walk back to you the distance will be gone. But how does the inner distance come into being? There is no way to walk in the inner space as we do on the outside. This inner space is created by becoming; the more solid my ego the greater is the distance between my becoming and being. And as the ego melts and evaporates the inner distance is destroyed in the same measure. And when my ego evaporates completely and I am no more, I am all emptiness, then the inner distance between me and God disappears altogether.
So upasana, devotion, means that the devotee becomes an emptiness, a nothingness, a non-being.
To know the truth that "I am not" is to be a devotee, is to be with God. And conversely, to know that "I am" and to cling to this ego is to go far away from God. The declaration that "I am" makes for the separation and distance between the seeker and the sought.
Rumi has written a beautiful song. It is the song of the Sufis, who know what devotion is. Sufis are among those few people on this earth who know what upasana is. If any one can understand Krishna fully it is the Sufis. Although they are Mohammedans, yet it makes no difference. This song belongs to Jalaluddin Rumi. A lover knocks at the door of his beloved. A voice from inside queries, "Who are you?"
The lover says, "I am; don't you know me?" And then no voice comes from inside; there is utter silence. The lover goes on knocking and shouting, "Don't you recognize my voice? I am your lover.
Open the door without delay." Then a small voice is heard coming from inside the house, "As long as you are, love's door will remain closed. This door never opens for one who says, 'I am.' So go back and return here only when your 'I' is no more."
The lover goes away disappointed. Many summers and winters, springs and falls come and go.
Even years pass. Then one day the lover reappears and knocks at the same door. He then hears the same question coming from the inner sanctuary of the house: "Who are you?" And the lover answers, "Now only thou art." And the door opens.
Rumi's song ends here.
I think Rumi could not get inside the spirit of devotion fully; he fails to reach to the height of Krishna.
He walks with him, but does not go the whole length. If I have to write this song, I would have the beloved say again to the lover, "As long as 'thou' remains 'I' will be here - maybe in hiding. So go back again and return here after you are finished with 'thou' too."
The awareness of "thou" cannot exist without "I". Whether one uses "I" or not, does not make a difference. As long as "thou" exists for me, I exist Maybe my "I" hides itself in the dark recesses of the unconscious, but it is there. Because who will say "thou" if the "I" is not there? So it does not make any difference if one says, "Only thou art"; it is like Tweedledum and Tweedledee. If I am going to write this poem I would have the beloved say, "As long as 'thou' is, 'I' cannot be erased. So go back and get rid of 'thou' as you got rid of '?'."
But do you think the lover will return after losing both "I" and "thou"? He will not. And then my poem will be in real difficulty, because then it cannot be completed. The lover will not return - Who will come? And to whom? Then he will never come again, because the inner distance, in which coming and going happens, is gone. In fact, the distance is made by the awareness of "I" and "thou"; with the cessation of "I" and "thou" distance is completely obliterated. So on coming to its end my song will be in real trouble. Maybe, for this very reason Rumi concluded his song the way it iS. One cannot take it any further, because nothing remains to be said after it. The song has to be concluded there.
There is no one who will go, and there is no one who will receive him. Who will go to whom? And for what?
As long as one comes and goes, there is distance. And when "I" and "thou" disappear, distances disappear. And with the disappearance of distances the meeting happens, merging happens A devotee need not go anywhere. The meeting happens wherever he is. It is not a question of going anywhere; one has to die as a self and one comes close to the supreme.
It is quite possible that one chooses a particular dimension of life to the exclusion of the rest, and attains to its wholeness. This wholeness too can lead to the supreme truth The river that flows in a single stream is as much entitled to reach the ocean as one flowing in many streams. With respect to reaching the ocean, there is no difference between the two. Mahavira and Buddha and Krishna all reach to the ocean of truth, but while Mahavira does it as a one-dimensional man, Krishna does it as one who is multi-dimensional. Krishna's completeness is multidimensional, while Mahavira's is one-dimensional. So don't think that Mahavira does not attain to wholeness; he transcends the seventh body and attains to wholeness as much as Krishna does.
Krishna reaches the same goal from many, many directions, and that is significant.
Another significant thing about Krishna is that unlike Mahavira and Buddha, he does not deny life, he is not life-negative. There is an unavoidable element of negation in the lives of Mahavira and Buddha which is completely absent in Krishna's life. There is not a trace of negativity in this man with the flute. Mahavira attains through renunciation of life; Krishna attains through total acceptance of it. That is why I differentiate Krishna's wholeness from that of others. But let no one think that Mahavira is incomplete. All one can say is that while his wholeness is one-dimensional, Krishna's wholeness is multidimensional.
One-dimensional wholeness is not going to have much meaning in the future. For the man of the future, multidimensional wholeness will have tremendous significance. And there are reasons for it. One who attains to wholeness through a single facet of his life not only negates all other facets of his own life, he also becomes instrumental in negating those aspects in the lives of many other multidimensional people.
On the other hand, one who attains to wholeness, to the absolute, through all aspects of his life, proves helpful even to all kinds of one-dimensional seekers in their journey to the supreme from their own aspect. In short, while Mahavira and Buddha can be of help only to a few, Krishna's help will be available to many. For example, we cannot think how a painter or sculptor or a poet can attain to the supreme through the path of Mahavira. Mahavira is one-dimensional not only for himself; all others who will try to understand him and experiment with his discipline will have to negate all other facets of their lives as ways to attainment. We cannot conceive how a dancer can attain to the supreme in Mahavira's terms, but in Krishna's terms he can. A dancer, if he so chooses, can drop all other aspects and keep to dancing, and by going deeper and deeper into it can attain to the same state Mahavira attains through meditation. This is possible in terms of Krishna.
Krishna makes every side, every facet of his life divine; with him every direction of life becomes sacred. It is not so with Mahavira: one particular direction in which he journeys becomes sacred, while all other directions remain profane. And in fact because his one direction becomes sacred all other directions are bound to remain profane; these are automatically condemned; doomed to live in the shade of profanity. And this is applicable not only to Mahavira, but also to Rama, Buddha, Christ, Mohammed - all those who adhere to one exclusive direction in life's quest.
Krishna is the sole being about whom it can be said that he made every path, every facet of life sacred and holy. He made it possible for every kind of seeker to attain to the supreme from any direction that comes naturally to him. In this sense he is multi-dimensional, not only for himself but for others too. With a flute on his lips one can dance his way to God; playing a flute he can touch that depth where samadhi, or ecstasy happens. But to Mahavira and Buddha with a flute there is no way.
It is not possible on the paths of Mahavira and Buddha that a flute can achieve the majestic heights of meditation and samadhi. It is impossible. To Mahavira, Meera can never attain to the highest; she is attached to Krishna, she loves Krishna. And according to Mahavira, attachment can never lead you to God, only non-attachment can. But going with Krishna, both the attached and non-attached can reach the same destination.
That is why I say that Krishna's wholeness is incomparable; it is rare.
Secondly, you want to know if none of the Jaina tirthankaras attained to wholeness. No, they all had attained to it, but only to one-dimensional wholeness. And it was because of this that Jaina ideology could not achieve widespread popularity. It was inherent in the very nature of Jainism. Twenty-five centuries have passed, and there ate only three and a half million Jainas, a very poor figure.
It is ironic that the message of a person of the stature of Mahavira - and he was not alone, he carried with him an immense heritage bequeathed by twenty-three tirthankaras - could reach only three and a half million people. If only three dozen persons had been influenced by Mahavira in his lifetime, they alone through procreation would have, in the course of twenty-five hundred years, reached this figure. What is the cause? The cause is obvious. It is their one-dimensional approach. They lack the multi-dimensional wholeness of Krishna. Their appeal is limited to a few; it is ineffectual in reaching the rest of mankind. People with inclinations different from the single dimension that Jainism represents remain wholly unaffected; they don't find themselves in tune with it.
It is ironic that even this handful of Jainas don't treat Mahavira the way he should be treated. It is all right to worship Krishna, but it is repugnant to Mahavira's teachings. And the Jainas are worshipping Mahavira. Worship is okay with Krishna but not with Mahavira. It means Mahavira will not agree with the minds of even those few who are born into the Jaina community. The reason is that the dimension of Mahavira is very exclusive; it accords with few. So being born in the Jaina community one continues to be a Jaina, but takes on many things that don't belong to Mahavira's dimension.
Devotion has entered Jainism, and along with it have come worship and prayer and other rituals.
They have nothing to do with Mahavira; they are alien to his genius. In fact, devotion and worship are an outrage against Mahavira; there is no place for them in the life of Mahavira. But the Jainas have their own difficulty; they cannot feel gratified without worship and prayer. So they go on incorporating all these things into the religion of Mahavira.
Here I would like to say that all those who have attained to one-dimensional wholeness are bound to be unjustly treated by their followers; they cannot escape it. But you cannot misbehave in this way with those who have attained to multidimensional wholeness; whatever you do they will accept it. While all types of people can walk with Krishna, only a particular type can go with Mahavira.
This is the reason I have said that all the twenty-four tirthankaras of the Jainas are travelers on the same path; their direction is the same and their spiritual discipline is the same. And I don't say that they don't arrive at the goal, they do arrive. It is not that ultimately they don't achieve what Krishna achieves; they achieve exactly that which Krishna achieves.
It does not matter whether a river reaches the ocean in hundreds of streams or in a single stream.
On reaching the ocean all journeys end and all the rivers become one with the ocean. Yet there is a difference between the two rivers - one has a single stream and another has many. While a river with many streams can water a very large area of the earth, the river with a single stream cannot - only a few trees and plants can be benefited by it. This difference has to be understood, it cannot be denied.
This is what I would like to say in regard to multidimensional wholeness.
And you ask: What is samyama, the discipline of balance in life, without repression?
In terms of renunciation samyama generally means repression. By and large, every seeker on the path of renunciation understands samyama in the sense of repression. For this reason the Jaina scriptures have even a term like body-repression; they believe that even the physical body has to be suppressed and repressed. It is unfortunate that samyama has become synonymous with repression.
But in Krishna's terms, samyama can never mean repression. How can Krishna say that samyama can be achieved through repression? For Krishna samyama has an absolutely different meaning.
Words sometimes put us in great difficulty. Words are the same, whether they come from Krishna's mouth or from Mahavira's, but their meanings change from mouth to mouth. This word samyama is one such word which has different meanings with different people. Mahavira means one thing when he uses this word, and Krishna means just the opposite when he uses the same word. While the word comes from the dictionary, its meaning comes from the person who uses it.
The meaning of a word does not, as is usually believed, come from the dictionary. Of course, people who have no individuality of their own depend on the dictionary for the meanings of words. People with individuality invest words with their own meanings. So what Krishna means by samyama can be known only in his context. Similarly Mahavira's meaning of samyama will have to be known from his context. Its meaning does not lie in the word itself, it lies in Krishna and Mahavira or whoever uses it.
Looking at Krishna's life no one can say that samyama means repression. If there has been a single person on this earth who can be called utterly unrepressed, uninhibited and free it is Krishna. So samyama for Krishna cannot have anything to do with repression. And as far as I am concerned, samyama and repression are antonyms, opposites.
This Sanskrit word samyama is really extraordinary. To me it means balance, equilibrium, to be just in the middle. When the scales are equalized so that neither side outweighs the other, it is samyam.
In this sense a renunciate does not have samyama, balance any more than one who indulges in worldly pleasures. Both are unbalanced; they are wanting in samyama. Both are extremists: the indulgent holds to one extreme of life; the renunciate holds to the other extreme. Samyama means to be equidistant from the two extremes, to be just in the middle. Krishna stands for that middle state where there is neither renunciation nor indulgence. Or you can say samyama is indulgence with an element of renunciation in it, or it is renunciation with an element of indulgence; it is striking a balance between indulgence and renunciation. Really samyama is neither indulgence nor renunciation; it is a state where you don't tilt the scales to either side. He alone is samyami who maintains equidistance from either extreme.
There is a man who is mad after wealth. Day in and day out he is running after amassing money.
Day in and day out he goes on adding to his bank balance. Money has become the be-all and end-all of his life - his demigod. This person has gone to one extreme of life. There is another person who has turned his back on wealth; he is running away from wealth. He renounces wealth and does not even look back lest it attract him and entrap him again. This person has gone to the other extreme. Both have lost balance, both lack samyama. Renunciation of wealth is the goal of one and acquisition of wealth is the goal of another.
Then who is samyami, the balanced person? In Krishna's terms a person like Janaka is samyami.
Negation of the extremes is samyama; to be exactly in the middle is equilibrium. Too much fasting and too much eating go against samyama; right eating goes with samyama. Fasting amounts to tilting the balance on the side of hunger; overeating amounts to tilting the balance on the side of indulgence. The balance lies in eating just the right amount of food - neither less nor more. By samyama Krishna means balance. equilibrium, equipoise. Any movement deviating from the center, even a slight deviation from the middle to one side or another destroys the equilibrium; on either side there is the death of samyama.
And one can deviate from samyama in only two ways: one way is indulgence and the other is renunciation. Either you get attached to a thing, you cling to it, or you get repelled by it. Have you watched a wall clock with a pendulum? Its pendulum is constantly swinging from one side to the other; it never stops in the middle. It swings from the left side to the right and back; it does not stop at the center. Another significant thing about the pendulum is that when it is moving toward the right, it only seems so; in reality it is gathering momentum to move toward the left. And when it is moving toward the left, it is really gathering momentum to move toward the right.
We are exactly like this pendulum. When one is fasting he is in fact, preparing himself for feasting, and similarly when he is feasting he is preparing to go on a fast. One who is running after attachments and addictions will soon get tired and will pursue renunciation and asceticism. Both extremes are joined together; they are two sides of the same thing.
Only when the pendulum stops in the middle, swinging in neither direction, it is balanced. And it is such a pendulum that can symbolize samyama. So long as one pursues indulgence or asceticism, he is unbalanced, he is an asamyami. One can be called a rightist kind of asamyami and the other a leftist kind.
To be steadied in the middle is samyama in terms of Krishna. It can have no other meaning as far as Krishna is concerned. To be balanced is samyama.
Let us look at samyama in the context of real life. In the context of real life, in the sense of the interiority of life, a person of samyama has two connotations. Such a person is neither an ascetic nor a hedonist - or he is both. Such a person is a renunciate and a hedonist together. His indulgence is blended with renunciation and his renunciation mixed with indulgence.
But none of the old traditions of renunciation will agree with this definition of samyama. To these traditions samyama means aversion to enjoyment and asamyama, imbalance, means addiction to enjoyments. One who gives up his attachments and takes to asceticism is a samyami in the eyes of the traditionalists.
Krishna is neither a renunciate nor a hedonist. If we have to place him somewhere, he will be midway between Charvaka and Mahavira. In indulgence he will equal Charvaka, and in renunciation he will not lag behind Mahavira. If we can have a blending of Charvaka and Mahavira, it will be Krishna.
So in terms of Krishna, all such words as samyama and asamyama will undergo a transformation.
The words will be the same, but their meanings will be radically different. The meanings will stem from Krishna's own being.
WHAT IS KRISHNA'S SADHANA OR SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE? WHAT IS HIS WAY OF WORSHIP.
There is nothing like sadhana - or spiritual discipline in the life of Krishna. There cannot be. The basic element of spiritual discipline is effort; without effort sadhana is not possible. And the second inescapable element of sadhana is ego; without the ego, the "?", spiritual discipline falls apart. Who will discipline himself? Effort implies a doer; there has to be somebody to make the effort. Effort ceases if there is no doer.
If we go into the matter deeply we will know that sadhana is an invention of the godless people, people who don't accept God. Those who deny God and accept only the soul believe in sadhana or spiritual discipline. They believe the soul has to make efforts to uncover itself, to be itself.
Upasana, devotion, is the way of a very different kind of people, who say there is no soul, only God is. Ordinarily we think that sadhana and upasana - discipline and worship - go together, but it is not so. Theists believe in devotion and worship; they don't believe in effort. They say all one has to do is to get closer and closer to God.
The word upasana is beautiful; it means to sit near God, to get close to one's object of worship. And the worshipper disappears; his ego evaporates in the very process of getting close to God. There is nothing more to be done. The theists believe that it is really one's ego that separates him from God; ego is the gulf between the seeker and the sought. The greater the ego, the greater is the distance between the two. Ego is the measure of distance between the seeker and God. To the extent this ego melts and evaporates, one gets closer and closer to God. And the day the ego disappears completely, the day the seeker ceases to be, his upasana is complete and he is God himself.
It is like ice turns into water, and water in turn evaporates and disappears into the sky. Does ice have to make efforts to become water? If it makes efforts, it will only become more hardened as ice.
Efforts will make ice more and more crystallized, solid. So if a seeker resorts to sadhana or spiritual discipline, it will only strengthen his ego, harden it and solidify it.
So sadhana ultimately leads to the soul, while upasana, devotion leads to God. One who disciplines himself will end with the soul, he cannot go beyond it He will say that he has ultimately found himself, his soul. On the other hand the devotee will say that he has lost himself and found God. So the sadhaka and the upasaka, the man of discipline and the devotee, are contrary to each other; they are not the same. While an upasaka will melt and evaporate like water, a sadhaka will be strengthened and crystallized as a soul.
In Krishna's life there is no element of discipline; there is actually no place whatsoever for sadhana.
It is upasana or devotion which has meaning for Krishna.
The whole journey of upasana is opposed to effort and discipline; it enters a different dimension altogether. For an upasaka it is a mistake to think that one finds himself. The self is the only barrier, the only falsehood. To be is the only bondage. And therefore not to be, or to be nothing, is the only freedom. While a sadhaka says, "I want to be free," an upasaka says, "I want to be free from the '?', the self." A sadhaka says, "I want freedom," but his "I" remains intact. To an upasaka, freedom means a state of "non-I" or complete egolessness. Not freedom of the "I" but freedom from the "I" is the highest state for an upasaka. So sadhana has no place in the vocabulary of Krishna; upasana has.
Therefore I will go into upasana in depth. To understand it, it is necessary first to know that it has nothing to do with efforts or discipline. Unless we know it clearly, we will continue to confuse the two. And remember that very few people want to take the path of devotion and worship. Most people would like to be sadhakas. doers. A sadhaka has nothing to lose, he has only to gain something - his soul. And an upasaka has everything to lose, he has to lose himself totally, he has nothing to gain. Losing is his only gain, and nothing else. So very few people want to take this path. That is why even the lovers of Krishna turn into sadhakas. They too talk in terms of sadhana and discipline, because they love to be doers. The ego loves the words: strive, achieve, arrive; it is always after achievement.
Upasana is arduous, devotion is hard. Nothing is more difficult than evaporating and disappearing into nothingness. One would, for sure, want to know why he should die and disappear into nothing ness, what he is going to gain by dying as an entity. A sadhaka, in spite of his lofty words, will always think in terms of gain and loss. Even his liberation is nothing more than a means to his happiness; his freedom is his freedom. So it is not surprising that a sadhaka is a selfish person in the deeper sense of the word. In this sense he cannot rise above the self. But an upasaka, a devotee will rise above self and will know the ultimate, where the self is no more.
What is this upasana? What is its meaning and significance? What is its way? Before you try to understand this question of upasana, it is essential that you drop the idea of sadhana altogether.
Forget it; it has no place whatsoever. Only then you can know what upasana is.As I said. the word upasana means to sit near someone, to sit close to someone. But what is the distance, the remoteness that has to be overcome in order to be near? There is physical distance, distance in space. You are sitting there and I am sitting here, and there is a distance between you and me. This is physical distance. We move closer to each other and the physical distance disappears. If we sit together taking each other's hands, the distance will disappear completely.
There is another kind of distance which is spiritual, inner, which has nothing to do with physical distance. Two persons can be together holding each others' hands and yet they may be hundreds of miles away from each other spiritually. And maybe, two other persons are physically separated from each other by hundreds of miles, yet they are intimately together in spirit. So there are two kinds of distances: one is physical and the other is psychological, spiritual. Upasana is a way of ending the inner distance, the psychological separateness between the seeker and the sought.
It is ironic that even a devotee is anxious to remove the physical distance that seems to separate him from his beloved. He says, "I am restless for you; don't torture me any more. I have made the bed for you, don't delay your arrival any longer." But the difficulty is that the inner distance remains even when the physical distance has been eliminated. To come close to one's beloved is altogether an inner phenomenon. A devotee can be with God, who is invisible, and there is no physical distance between the two. Upasana is a way of uniting the devotee with the divine. But how is this inner distance created?
We know how the outer distance is created. If I walk away from you in another direction, a physical distance will immediately come to exist between you and me. And if I walk back to you the distance will be gone. But how does the inner distance come into being? There is no way to walk in the inner space as we do on the outside. This inner space is created by becoming; the more solid my ego the greater is the distance between my becoming and being. And as the ego melts and evaporates the inner distance is destroyed in the same measure. And when my ego evaporates completely and I am no more, I am all emptiness, then the inner distance between me and God disappears altogether.
So upasana, devotion, means that the devotee becomes an emptiness, a nothingness, a non-being.
To know the truth that "I am not" is to be a devotee, is to be with God. And conversely, to know that "I am" and to cling to this ego is to go far away from God. The declaration that "I am" makes for the separation and distance between the seeker and the sought.
Rumi has written a beautiful song. It is the song of the Sufis, who know what devotion is. Sufis are among those few people on this earth who know what upasana is. If any one can understand Krishna fully it is the Sufis. Although they are Mohammedans, yet it makes no difference. This song belongs to Jalaluddin Rumi. A lover knocks at the door of his beloved. A voice from inside queries, "Who are you?"
The lover says, "I am; don't you know me?" And then no voice comes from inside; there is utter silence. The lover goes on knocking and shouting, "Don't you recognize my voice? I am your lover.
Open the door without delay." Then a small voice is heard coming from inside the house, "As long as you are, love's door will remain closed. This door never opens for one who says, 'I am.' So go back and return here only when your 'I' is no more."
The lover goes away disappointed. Many summers and winters, springs and falls come and go.
Even years pass. Then one day the lover reappears and knocks at the same door. He then hears the same question coming from the inner sanctuary of the house: "Who are you?" And the lover answers, "Now only thou art." And the door opens.
Rumi's song ends here.
I think Rumi could not get inside the spirit of devotion fully; he fails to reach to the height of Krishna.
He walks with him, but does not go the whole length. If I have to write this song, I would have the beloved say again to the lover, "As long as 'thou' remains 'I' will be here - maybe in hiding. So go back again and return here after you are finished with 'thou' too."
The awareness of "thou" cannot exist without "I". Whether one uses "I" or not, does not make a difference. As long as "thou" exists for me, I exist Maybe my "I" hides itself in the dark recesses of the unconscious, but it is there. Because who will say "thou" if the "I" is not there? So it does not make any difference if one says, "Only thou art"; it is like Tweedledum and Tweedledee. If I am going to write this poem I would have the beloved say, "As long as 'thou' is, 'I' cannot be erased. So go back and get rid of 'thou' as you got rid of '?'."
But do you think the lover will return after losing both "I" and "thou"? He will not. And then my poem will be in real difficulty, because then it cannot be completed. The lover will not return - Who will come? And to whom? Then he will never come again, because the inner distance, in which coming and going happens, is gone. In fact, the distance is made by the awareness of "I" and "thou"; with the cessation of "I" and "thou" distance is completely obliterated. So on coming to its end my song will be in real trouble. Maybe, for this very reason Rumi concluded his song the way it iS. One cannot take it any further, because nothing remains to be said after it. The song has to be concluded there.
There is no one who will go, and there is no one who will receive him. Who will go to whom? And for what?
As long as one comes and goes, there is distance. And when "I" and "thou" disappear, distances disappear. And with the disappearance of distances the meeting happens, merging happens A devotee need not go anywhere. The meeting happens wherever he is. It is not a question of going anywhere; one has to die as a self and one comes close to the supreme.
KRISHANA SOUL IS EVERLASTING PRESENT
Nothing in existence perishes, nor does anything new come into being. Forms change, appearances change, but the deepest mysteries of life remain ever the same. Individuals come and go, waves in the ocean rise and disappear, but that which is hidden in the individual, in the wave is eternal.We have to look at Krishna in two different ways, and then we can look at ourselves in the same way. We exist at two levels - one at the level of waves and another at the level of the ocean. As waves we are individual human beings, and as the ocean we are the supreme being.
Krishna's physical form, his voice, his music are like the waves. His soul, hidden inside the body is like the ocean. Waves come and go, but the ocean Is everlasting. While the forms of existence change, its soul, the spirit which abides in its elan vital is deathless. eternal. The spirit was there even when Krishna was not born and it is there when he is no more. It was there before your birth and it will be there even after your death. Krishna was like a wave that arose from the ocean, danced for a while with the winds, and disappeared again in the same ocean.
All of us are like Krishna, but there is a small difference. When Krishna is dancing as a wave he is aware that he belongs to the ocean, he is the ocean itself. But as far as we are concerned we know ourselves only as waves; we forget that we are the ocean. This is the difference between us and Krishna. And since we know ourselves only as waves, we fail to understand the oceanic form of Krishna.
Krishna's physical body, his picture and statue can be used to come in contact with his soul. But it is just a play that belongs to the world of appearances. And to understand it we have to approach it from two or three sides.
Even today we can make contact with the oceanic form of Krishna - his soul. In the same way we can come in contact with the souls of Mahavira and Bud&a. And to contact the essential Krishna we can make use of his physical form as a medium, an instrument.
When statues of men like Krishna were first made, they were not meant for worship. In fact, these statues came in the wake of an esoteric science which has become almost extinct. Before leaving their physical forms, the awakened ones had given a promise and a technique to their lovers, their disciples, that they could contact their oceanic life by meditating on unconscious mind that whenever you repeat the process he will go into sleep, and then his unconscious mind will begin to operate on him.
The power of our unconscious mind is enormous; what we cannot do in our conscious state we can do with the help of the unconscious mind. Man's unconscious mind is much more sensitive than his conscious. What we cannot hear in the conscious state becomes audible to the unconscious. In deep hypnotic sleep you can see things you can never see while awake. It is not the talisman, but the post hypnotic suggestion associated with it that works.
If a person like Krishna, Buddha or Christ is about to leave this world and some of his close lovers or disciples who have been in intimate contact with him, who have imbibed his vibes, request some techniques to contact him after his departure, the master in his compassion can give them such a technique. He can ask them to go into a state of meditation and then tell them that whenever they will meditate on a particular form of his - through a statue or a picture - they will immediately contact him even after his death. This is the esoteric science for which statues of Krishna, Buddha and others like them were first made.
These statues and symbols were specially given to chosen disciples in a meditative state. So your ordinary statues are not going to work, nor can ordinary seekers come in contact with them through these statues. To establish contact with Krishna one will need to have a special symbol and an inner suggestion given to him in his meditative state.
Before persons like Buddha, Mahavira and Krishna, depart from this earth, they leave such techniques and instructions with their most trusted group of disciples; those who are worthy of it.
This generation of disciples takes full advantage of this special transmission. And if this generation passes it on to a second generation of disciples, it can work their statues. It was for this purpose that their statues were first made.
To explain this esoteric science I would like you to know something about hypnosis. You must have watched a magician demonstrating his magical plays by the wayside. One of these plays is like this.
He makes a boy, who happens to be his assistant, lie down on the ground, and covers him with a piece of thick cloth. Then he puts a talisman on his chest which sends the boy into hypnotic sleep.
He then asks him many strange questions, and to the amaze ment of the spectators the sleeping boy answers them The magician then moves to one of the spectators and asks him to whisper his name into his ear. The spectator whispers his name so that even the person next to him can hardly hear It, but the sleeping boy immediately relays his name to the whole gathering. The magician moves to another spectator who happens to have currency in his pocket. He asks the boy to tell the note's number, and he shouts out the exact number. This casts a spell on the gathering, and then the magician tells them it is the power of the talisman that works through his sleeping aide. And he sells a few talismans - which are his only source of earning.
The magician uses hypnosis here, but he lies when he says that it is the power of the talisman. So when you take the talisman home and try it you meet with disappointment. The talisman is absolutely useless, except that it brings the magician some money. The magic really lies in hypnosis. In this case, it is post-hypnosis.
There is a simple technique for post-hypnosis. You put a person into hypnotic sleep through suggestions, and it is a very simple thing to do. After he goes into sleep - which is different from ordinary sleep - you ask him to look closely at the talisman and then tell him that whenever this talisman is put on his chest while he is lying down, he will go into sleep. This suggestion will sink so deep in the person's with them as well. But with the passage of time usually the science, the technique is lost and only statues and their rituals remain in the hands of succeeding generations.
Then it turns into a dead and fossilized tradition without any significance.
Now whatever you do sitting before a statue of Krishna, nothing is going to happen. Now no rituals are worthwhile, they are a sheer waste of time and energy. It is as if you buy a talisman from a street magician and it does not work, because you don't have the necessary technique - the post-hypnotic suggestion with you.
As I said, a statue, an icon works as an esoteric bridge between the disciple and his departed master's soul, his spirit. In the same way an awakened master's name can be used as an esoteric bridge, provided the name is received in a meditative state. Now any number of gurus are going about whispering name-bearing mantras into their disciples' ears, which is of absolutely no use.
It is not a matter of whispering a name in one's ear; that is just stupid. If a competent master transmits a symbolic word to his disciple, who is in a meditative state, the word becomes alive with esoteric energy. And when the disciple remembers it rightly, chants it, his whole consciousness is transformed. Such words are called beej shabda or seed words, and they are packed with something subtle, sublime.
If Krishna's name is really your seed word, it means that it has been sown in the innermost depth of your psyche when you were in a meditative state and that the necessary suggestions have been associated with it. Remember, a seed is always sown in such a way - it lies underground for a while and then alone it sprouts and grows into a tree, which is always above the ground. Such words are pregnant with immense possibilities. Because of such a seed word Ramakrishna was often put into any number of troubles. It became difficult for him to pass through a street without going through such troubles.
Once he was going somewhere and on the way someone greeted him with the words, "Jai Rama"
- meaning victory to Rama - and he immediately fell down and passed into samadhi, the highest state of meditation. At another time he visited a temple where devotees were chanting the name of Rama, and he again sank into deep samadhi. Rama's name was like a seed word for him; it was enough to transform his consciousness.
Since it will be difficult for you to understand the case of Ramakrishna, I will explain it to you in your own framework. There are situations which work like seed words for many people. Hearing some bad news, someone becomes worried and immediately puts his hand on his forehead. If you prevent him from taking his hand to his head, he will become restless. Another person sits up in a particular posture the moment he is faced with a serious problem. He will be in chaos if you prevent him from sitting in that posture.
Mr. Harisingh Gaud, a renowned lawyer of his time, has mentioned an extraordinary episode in his memoirs. He was once arguing a case before the Privy Council in London. He had a strange habit.
whenever he was faced with a complex and difficult point of law and he needed some inspiration to help argue his case rightly, his hand almost instinctively reached for the top button of his coat and turned it right and left, and soon he got on very nicely. Those who had worked with him in the legal profession knew that as soon as Dr. Gaud started turning his coat button his argument took on a new and powerful thrust. Then he was unbeatable. It was a big case, and the lawyer on the opposite side was smarting under the power of Mr. Gaud's arguments. So he bribed Gaud's chauffeur, asking him to remove the top button of his master's coat before he came to the court the following day.
The next day Dr. Gaud was going to conclude his case. When he was proceeding before the court with his argument, a moment came when his hand automatically moved to his coat button. He was shocked to find the button was missing. Dr. Gaud could not proceed any further, he just collapsed into his chair. He later wrote in his diary that for the first time in his life, to his chagrin, his brain stopped functioning and he found himself in a vacuum. He then requested the court to adjourn the hearing until the following day on the plea that he had no energy left to proceed further.
It seems strange that a little button had so much power over the mind of a mighty lawyer. This is what psychological association does. If a mind is used to being activated by the touch of a button, it is bound to fail if the button is not available to it. This syndrome is known as conditioned reflex in psychology.
In this same way a name, or a seed word, or a mantra can be used. Like Dr. Gaud's button - which for him was not just an ordinary coat button but a powerful lever to turn his mind on and off - a name can be used to transform your consciousness. But an empty word won't do; it has to he charged with a master's energy; it must be a seed word. A seed word is one that is implanted in the innermost depth of your unconscious in such a way that its very remembrance can bring about a mutation in you.
The names of men like Krishna and Buddha and many other words and mantras have been used for this purpose. But now people are repeating them meaninglessly. You repeat "Rama, Rama" a thousand times and it doesn't work. If it were a seed word it would work at the first chanting. And it is not necessary that only names like Rama and Krishna can be used; any word can be transformed into a seed word and implanted in the depth of your unconscious. But unless a word or a mantra is charged with meditative energy, it won't work as a transforming factor in your life. The difficulty is that very often the basic know how is lost and we are left with empty words and superficial rituals.
Day in and day out someone is chanting "Rama, Rama", and another is chanting "Krishna, Krishna"
and nothing happens. Do what you can till the end of time, nothing will happen.
You also want to know what kirtan, or singing hymns of praise to Krishna can do to enhance devotion.
It can do a lot if we do it rightly. The way we are doing the second stage of Dynamic Meditation can be used for singing or dancing as well. It has been used in the past by those who knew its real meaning. Those who don't know the real meaning just dance and shout - which is a waste of time. If kirtan can be done in the way of the second stage of the Dynamic Meditation, it can be of tremendous help.
If you can dance with abandon, you will begin to see yourself and your body as separate from each other. Soon you will cease to be a dancer; instead you will become a watcher, a witness. When your body will be dancing totally, a moment will come when you will suddenly find that you are completely separate from the dance.
In the past many devices were designed to bring about this separation between a seeker and his body, and singing and dancing was one such device. You can dance in such a way and with such abandon that a moment comes when you break away from dancing and clearly see yourself standing separate from the dance. Although your body will continue to dance, you will be quite separate from it as a spectator watching the dance. It will seem as if the axle has separated itself from the wheel which continues to keep moving - as if the axle has come to know that it is an axle and that which is moving is the wheel, although separate from it.
Dancing can be seen in the same way as a wheel. If the wheel moves with speed, a moment comes when it is seen distinctly separate from the axle. It is interesting that when the wheel is unmoving you cannot see it as separate from the axle, but when it moves you can clearly see them as two separate entities. You can know by contrast which is moving and which is not.
Let someone dance and let him bring all his energy to it, and soon he will find there is someone inside him who is not dancing, who is utterly steady and still. That is his axle, his center. That which is dancing is his circumference, his body, and he himself is the center. If one can be a witness in this great moment then kirtan has great significance. But if he continues to dance without witnessing it, he will only waste his time and energy.
Techniques and devices come into being and then they are lost. And they are lost for the simple reason that man as he is tends to forget the essential and hold on to the non-essential, the shadow.
The truth is that while the essential remains hidden and invisible like the roots of a tree, the non- essential, the trunk of the tree is visible. The non-essential is like our clothes, and the essential is like our soul. And we are liable to forget that which is subtle and invisible and remember the gross, the visible. It is for this reason when someone comes to me to know if kirtan can be useful, I emphatically deny it and ask him not to indulge in it. I know that now it is a dead tradition, a corpse without soul, as if the axle has disappeared and only the wheel remains
Krishna's physical form, his voice, his music are like the waves. His soul, hidden inside the body is like the ocean. Waves come and go, but the ocean Is everlasting. While the forms of existence change, its soul, the spirit which abides in its elan vital is deathless. eternal. The spirit was there even when Krishna was not born and it is there when he is no more. It was there before your birth and it will be there even after your death. Krishna was like a wave that arose from the ocean, danced for a while with the winds, and disappeared again in the same ocean.
All of us are like Krishna, but there is a small difference. When Krishna is dancing as a wave he is aware that he belongs to the ocean, he is the ocean itself. But as far as we are concerned we know ourselves only as waves; we forget that we are the ocean. This is the difference between us and Krishna. And since we know ourselves only as waves, we fail to understand the oceanic form of Krishna.
Krishna's physical body, his picture and statue can be used to come in contact with his soul. But it is just a play that belongs to the world of appearances. And to understand it we have to approach it from two or three sides.
Even today we can make contact with the oceanic form of Krishna - his soul. In the same way we can come in contact with the souls of Mahavira and Bud&a. And to contact the essential Krishna we can make use of his physical form as a medium, an instrument.
When statues of men like Krishna were first made, they were not meant for worship. In fact, these statues came in the wake of an esoteric science which has become almost extinct. Before leaving their physical forms, the awakened ones had given a promise and a technique to their lovers, their disciples, that they could contact their oceanic life by meditating on unconscious mind that whenever you repeat the process he will go into sleep, and then his unconscious mind will begin to operate on him.
The power of our unconscious mind is enormous; what we cannot do in our conscious state we can do with the help of the unconscious mind. Man's unconscious mind is much more sensitive than his conscious. What we cannot hear in the conscious state becomes audible to the unconscious. In deep hypnotic sleep you can see things you can never see while awake. It is not the talisman, but the post hypnotic suggestion associated with it that works.
If a person like Krishna, Buddha or Christ is about to leave this world and some of his close lovers or disciples who have been in intimate contact with him, who have imbibed his vibes, request some techniques to contact him after his departure, the master in his compassion can give them such a technique. He can ask them to go into a state of meditation and then tell them that whenever they will meditate on a particular form of his - through a statue or a picture - they will immediately contact him even after his death. This is the esoteric science for which statues of Krishna, Buddha and others like them were first made.
These statues and symbols were specially given to chosen disciples in a meditative state. So your ordinary statues are not going to work, nor can ordinary seekers come in contact with them through these statues. To establish contact with Krishna one will need to have a special symbol and an inner suggestion given to him in his meditative state.
Before persons like Buddha, Mahavira and Krishna, depart from this earth, they leave such techniques and instructions with their most trusted group of disciples; those who are worthy of it.
This generation of disciples takes full advantage of this special transmission. And if this generation passes it on to a second generation of disciples, it can work their statues. It was for this purpose that their statues were first made.
To explain this esoteric science I would like you to know something about hypnosis. You must have watched a magician demonstrating his magical plays by the wayside. One of these plays is like this.
He makes a boy, who happens to be his assistant, lie down on the ground, and covers him with a piece of thick cloth. Then he puts a talisman on his chest which sends the boy into hypnotic sleep.
He then asks him many strange questions, and to the amaze ment of the spectators the sleeping boy answers them The magician then moves to one of the spectators and asks him to whisper his name into his ear. The spectator whispers his name so that even the person next to him can hardly hear It, but the sleeping boy immediately relays his name to the whole gathering. The magician moves to another spectator who happens to have currency in his pocket. He asks the boy to tell the note's number, and he shouts out the exact number. This casts a spell on the gathering, and then the magician tells them it is the power of the talisman that works through his sleeping aide. And he sells a few talismans - which are his only source of earning.
The magician uses hypnosis here, but he lies when he says that it is the power of the talisman. So when you take the talisman home and try it you meet with disappointment. The talisman is absolutely useless, except that it brings the magician some money. The magic really lies in hypnosis. In this case, it is post-hypnosis.
There is a simple technique for post-hypnosis. You put a person into hypnotic sleep through suggestions, and it is a very simple thing to do. After he goes into sleep - which is different from ordinary sleep - you ask him to look closely at the talisman and then tell him that whenever this talisman is put on his chest while he is lying down, he will go into sleep. This suggestion will sink so deep in the person's with them as well. But with the passage of time usually the science, the technique is lost and only statues and their rituals remain in the hands of succeeding generations.
Then it turns into a dead and fossilized tradition without any significance.
Now whatever you do sitting before a statue of Krishna, nothing is going to happen. Now no rituals are worthwhile, they are a sheer waste of time and energy. It is as if you buy a talisman from a street magician and it does not work, because you don't have the necessary technique - the post-hypnotic suggestion with you.
As I said, a statue, an icon works as an esoteric bridge between the disciple and his departed master's soul, his spirit. In the same way an awakened master's name can be used as an esoteric bridge, provided the name is received in a meditative state. Now any number of gurus are going about whispering name-bearing mantras into their disciples' ears, which is of absolutely no use.
It is not a matter of whispering a name in one's ear; that is just stupid. If a competent master transmits a symbolic word to his disciple, who is in a meditative state, the word becomes alive with esoteric energy. And when the disciple remembers it rightly, chants it, his whole consciousness is transformed. Such words are called beej shabda or seed words, and they are packed with something subtle, sublime.
If Krishna's name is really your seed word, it means that it has been sown in the innermost depth of your psyche when you were in a meditative state and that the necessary suggestions have been associated with it. Remember, a seed is always sown in such a way - it lies underground for a while and then alone it sprouts and grows into a tree, which is always above the ground. Such words are pregnant with immense possibilities. Because of such a seed word Ramakrishna was often put into any number of troubles. It became difficult for him to pass through a street without going through such troubles.
Once he was going somewhere and on the way someone greeted him with the words, "Jai Rama"
- meaning victory to Rama - and he immediately fell down and passed into samadhi, the highest state of meditation. At another time he visited a temple where devotees were chanting the name of Rama, and he again sank into deep samadhi. Rama's name was like a seed word for him; it was enough to transform his consciousness.
Since it will be difficult for you to understand the case of Ramakrishna, I will explain it to you in your own framework. There are situations which work like seed words for many people. Hearing some bad news, someone becomes worried and immediately puts his hand on his forehead. If you prevent him from taking his hand to his head, he will become restless. Another person sits up in a particular posture the moment he is faced with a serious problem. He will be in chaos if you prevent him from sitting in that posture.
Mr. Harisingh Gaud, a renowned lawyer of his time, has mentioned an extraordinary episode in his memoirs. He was once arguing a case before the Privy Council in London. He had a strange habit.
whenever he was faced with a complex and difficult point of law and he needed some inspiration to help argue his case rightly, his hand almost instinctively reached for the top button of his coat and turned it right and left, and soon he got on very nicely. Those who had worked with him in the legal profession knew that as soon as Dr. Gaud started turning his coat button his argument took on a new and powerful thrust. Then he was unbeatable. It was a big case, and the lawyer on the opposite side was smarting under the power of Mr. Gaud's arguments. So he bribed Gaud's chauffeur, asking him to remove the top button of his master's coat before he came to the court the following day.
The next day Dr. Gaud was going to conclude his case. When he was proceeding before the court with his argument, a moment came when his hand automatically moved to his coat button. He was shocked to find the button was missing. Dr. Gaud could not proceed any further, he just collapsed into his chair. He later wrote in his diary that for the first time in his life, to his chagrin, his brain stopped functioning and he found himself in a vacuum. He then requested the court to adjourn the hearing until the following day on the plea that he had no energy left to proceed further.
It seems strange that a little button had so much power over the mind of a mighty lawyer. This is what psychological association does. If a mind is used to being activated by the touch of a button, it is bound to fail if the button is not available to it. This syndrome is known as conditioned reflex in psychology.
In this same way a name, or a seed word, or a mantra can be used. Like Dr. Gaud's button - which for him was not just an ordinary coat button but a powerful lever to turn his mind on and off - a name can be used to transform your consciousness. But an empty word won't do; it has to he charged with a master's energy; it must be a seed word. A seed word is one that is implanted in the innermost depth of your unconscious in such a way that its very remembrance can bring about a mutation in you.
The names of men like Krishna and Buddha and many other words and mantras have been used for this purpose. But now people are repeating them meaninglessly. You repeat "Rama, Rama" a thousand times and it doesn't work. If it were a seed word it would work at the first chanting. And it is not necessary that only names like Rama and Krishna can be used; any word can be transformed into a seed word and implanted in the depth of your unconscious. But unless a word or a mantra is charged with meditative energy, it won't work as a transforming factor in your life. The difficulty is that very often the basic know how is lost and we are left with empty words and superficial rituals.
Day in and day out someone is chanting "Rama, Rama", and another is chanting "Krishna, Krishna"
and nothing happens. Do what you can till the end of time, nothing will happen.
You also want to know what kirtan, or singing hymns of praise to Krishna can do to enhance devotion.
It can do a lot if we do it rightly. The way we are doing the second stage of Dynamic Meditation can be used for singing or dancing as well. It has been used in the past by those who knew its real meaning. Those who don't know the real meaning just dance and shout - which is a waste of time. If kirtan can be done in the way of the second stage of the Dynamic Meditation, it can be of tremendous help.
If you can dance with abandon, you will begin to see yourself and your body as separate from each other. Soon you will cease to be a dancer; instead you will become a watcher, a witness. When your body will be dancing totally, a moment will come when you will suddenly find that you are completely separate from the dance.
In the past many devices were designed to bring about this separation between a seeker and his body, and singing and dancing was one such device. You can dance in such a way and with such abandon that a moment comes when you break away from dancing and clearly see yourself standing separate from the dance. Although your body will continue to dance, you will be quite separate from it as a spectator watching the dance. It will seem as if the axle has separated itself from the wheel which continues to keep moving - as if the axle has come to know that it is an axle and that which is moving is the wheel, although separate from it.
Dancing can be seen in the same way as a wheel. If the wheel moves with speed, a moment comes when it is seen distinctly separate from the axle. It is interesting that when the wheel is unmoving you cannot see it as separate from the axle, but when it moves you can clearly see them as two separate entities. You can know by contrast which is moving and which is not.
Let someone dance and let him bring all his energy to it, and soon he will find there is someone inside him who is not dancing, who is utterly steady and still. That is his axle, his center. That which is dancing is his circumference, his body, and he himself is the center. If one can be a witness in this great moment then kirtan has great significance. But if he continues to dance without witnessing it, he will only waste his time and energy.
Techniques and devices come into being and then they are lost. And they are lost for the simple reason that man as he is tends to forget the essential and hold on to the non-essential, the shadow.
The truth is that while the essential remains hidden and invisible like the roots of a tree, the non- essential, the trunk of the tree is visible. The non-essential is like our clothes, and the essential is like our soul. And we are liable to forget that which is subtle and invisible and remember the gross, the visible. It is for this reason when someone comes to me to know if kirtan can be useful, I emphatically deny it and ask him not to indulge in it. I know that now it is a dead tradition, a corpse without soul, as if the axle has disappeared and only the wheel remains
KRISHNA WENT TO WEST
This event has deeper implications.The movement for Krishna Consciousness is growing fast in America and Europe. Like the villages of Bengal of Chaitanya's days, the streets of New York and London today are resounding with God's songs. And this is not accidental.
The whole of the West today has collectively reached a point where Chaitanya had once reached individually. It is the same last frontier of mind and intellect, where Chaitanya absolutely tired of thinking and realized that it leads nowhere. In the same way the West is now tired of thinking. From Socrates to Bertrand Russell, the West has long tried to find truth through thinking. It was a great and unique adventure to search for reality through reason and logic, and the West has consecrated all its energy to this quest. The West has always refused to accept that truth is beyond the boundary of intellect and reason, that reality is illogical and unthinkable. It has trusted only mind and intellect.
For twenty-five hundred years the West has traveled the path of intellect with dedication, and yet failed to have a glimpse of reality. Many times its great minds felt reality was within reach, but it continued to elude them. Each time they had only ideas and concepts in their hand, not truth. And now the whole of the West feels fed up with mentation.
Today the collective consciousness of the West is exactly where Chaitanya had found himself individually a few centuries ago. It is now on the brink of an explosion, a transformation which is every day coming closer. The first flowers of spring have already blossomed and new winds are blowing. Cracks have appeared in the old order and the young generation is rebelling against old ways and decaying values - against tradition itself. And they are now turning their ears to the music and message of that which is unthinkable the mysterious.
And if the West has to go in the direction of the mysterious, Krishna is going to be its hero. He is the best representative of the truth that is beyond mind and its logic, that is mysterious. Mahavira and Buddha cannot serve that purpose. Mahavira is very logical; even when he speaks about the mysterious he uses the language of logic and reason; he sticks to the process of consistent and logical thinking. As far as Buddha is concerned, he persistently refuses to speak about the mysterious whenever he is asked about it. He just says it is inexplicable. He goes only as far as logic, not beyond.
The mental stress and tension the West is suffering from today is the direct result of too much thinking. The anxiety and anguish of the West comes from thinking stretched to its ultimate; it is suffering under the crushing weight of the mind. Consequently the younger generation is in revolt.
And it is natural that when a whole generation rebels it does so in many different ways. On their journey to the unthinkable, some are singing "Hare Krishna, Hare Rama" and many others are taking drugs like LSD and mescaline. The same people are now traveling across India and wandering through the Himalayan mountains. In the search of the achintya, the unthinkable, they will go to Japan and squat in its Zen monasteries. The quest is the same all over.
In its search for the mysterious, it seems the western world will be coming increasingly close to Krishna. LSD cannot take them far; travels to India and Japan are not going to last long. Eventually they will have to discover their own consciousness, their own soul; they cannot live long on credit.
That is why their boys and girls are restless chanting "Hare Krishna" in the streets of New York, London and Berlin.
It is remarkable that when young men and young women of the West dance and do kirtan, they do it with an abandon and joy that cannot be found anywhere in India today. Go round this country where kirtan has been in vogue for centuries and you will nowhere come across that enthusiasm and joy among people who do kirtan here. For us it is a well-traveled road, a routine. For us the kirtan is now a worn out coin; we know it is worthless. For the westerners it is a new coin which is valuable. When a group passes through the streets of London singing and dancing, even the traffic police watch them in amazement. They think their youth are going crazy. No one in India will think like that; here it is an accepted ritual.
But remember, real religion is run by mad people, it is not the job of the so-called wise. Whenever and wherever a breakthrough happens it always happens with the help of those who are called crazy by their contemporaries. Now singing and dancing is not thought to be strange in India. It was considered strange when Chaitanya danced through the towns and villages of Bengal; people thought he had gone out of his mind. But tradition sucks down everything that comes its way and puts it in its closet. Even madness is tamed by tradition.
The West is on the brink of an explosion, a breakthrough, a revolution. That is why when young people in the West move through the streets dancing and singing, there is a newness and simplicity, beauty and charm in their performance. Certainly it is a preparation, but not for Krishna's birth; it s a preparation for the birth of Krishna consciousness in the West.
Krishna consciousness has nothing to do with Krishna. It is a symbolic term which means that now a consciousness is dawning in the West which will make them give up work and embrace celebration as their way of life. It is just symbolic. Work has become meaningless. The West has done plenty of hard work and hard thinking; it has done everything that man is capable of doing, and now it is tired, utterly tired of all that. Either the West will have to die or it will enter into Krishna consciousness.
These are the two choices before the West. And since death is not possible, because nothing really dies, Krishna consciousness is inescapable.
Christ has ceased to be relevant for the West, and the reason is again tradition. For the West, Christ symbolizes tradition and Krishna represents anti-tradition. Christ is an imposition on them and Krishna is their free choice. And then Christ is very serious, and the West is fed up with seriousness. Too much seriousness turns into a disease ultimately. So the West is trying hard to get rid of its seriousness; the cross has proved much too heavy on its soul. Jesus hanging on the cross seems dreadful, and the West in its heart feels disturbed, uneasy with it. So the cross is being taken down and the flute ushered in. And what can be a better substitute for the cross than the flute?
For these reasons Krishna's appeal to the West is growing, and it will continue to grow. Every day it is going to come nearer and nearer to Krishna.
There are some other reasons for Krishna's incursion into the West. Only an affluent society can gather around Krishna; a poor society cannot afford him. A society steeped in poverty and misery cannot have that leisure and ease so necessary to dance and play a flute. The society in which Krishna was born was highly prosperous in its own way. There was no lack of food, clothes and other necessities of life; milk and yogurt and butter were available in abundance - so much that when Krishna wanted to play pranks with his numerous girlfriends, who were milkmaids, he went on breaking their containers full of milk and yogurt.
Judging by the standard of living of his time, Krishna's society was at the peak of affluence. People were happy, they had plenty of leisure; a whole family lived well on the earnings of one of its members. It is only in such a society that flute and raas and celebration take center stage. The West today is at that height of affluence which the world has never known before. It is not surprising that Krishna has such a great pull on the western mind.
Ironically, Krishna no longer has any appeal for the present day India, ravaged by poverty, squalor and disease. She will have to wait long to deserve him. At the moment Christ has more attraction for this country. It is natural that a country hanging on the cross should think of Christ as the right person to alleviate their pain and suffering. That is why a striking and unexpected event is taking place: Jesus' influence in India is growing every day, while it is declining in the West. And it is not enough just to say that Christian missionaries are proselytizing Indians through devious and questionable means. What is equally true is that the Christian symbol of the cross comes closest to the agonized mind of this country. It is because of this affinity between the two that the missionaries are succeeding here in their efforts.
On the other hand the golden statues of Rama and Krishna, symbolizing royalty and richness are becoming out of tune with the poverty stricken people of this country. The day is not far off when the poor of India will not only mount an assault on the rich but also on the statues of Krishna and Rama.
It is just possible, because they can no longer put up with their glittering gold. And they are going to fall in love with Christ on the cross, symbolizing their pain and misery. The possibility of India turning to Christ and of the West turning to Krishna is growing every day.
For the western mind the cross has lost its significance, because people there are no longer in suffering and pain; they have everything they ever longed for. The truth is that now their only pain is that which stems from affluence. Their affluence is frightening; they don't know what to do with it.
Now for certain a singing and dancing religion is going to be very close to the western heart. So it is not surprising that youth in the West are chanting Krishna's name with great enthusiasm.
The whole of the West today has collectively reached a point where Chaitanya had once reached individually. It is the same last frontier of mind and intellect, where Chaitanya absolutely tired of thinking and realized that it leads nowhere. In the same way the West is now tired of thinking. From Socrates to Bertrand Russell, the West has long tried to find truth through thinking. It was a great and unique adventure to search for reality through reason and logic, and the West has consecrated all its energy to this quest. The West has always refused to accept that truth is beyond the boundary of intellect and reason, that reality is illogical and unthinkable. It has trusted only mind and intellect.
For twenty-five hundred years the West has traveled the path of intellect with dedication, and yet failed to have a glimpse of reality. Many times its great minds felt reality was within reach, but it continued to elude them. Each time they had only ideas and concepts in their hand, not truth. And now the whole of the West feels fed up with mentation.
Today the collective consciousness of the West is exactly where Chaitanya had found himself individually a few centuries ago. It is now on the brink of an explosion, a transformation which is every day coming closer. The first flowers of spring have already blossomed and new winds are blowing. Cracks have appeared in the old order and the young generation is rebelling against old ways and decaying values - against tradition itself. And they are now turning their ears to the music and message of that which is unthinkable the mysterious.
And if the West has to go in the direction of the mysterious, Krishna is going to be its hero. He is the best representative of the truth that is beyond mind and its logic, that is mysterious. Mahavira and Buddha cannot serve that purpose. Mahavira is very logical; even when he speaks about the mysterious he uses the language of logic and reason; he sticks to the process of consistent and logical thinking. As far as Buddha is concerned, he persistently refuses to speak about the mysterious whenever he is asked about it. He just says it is inexplicable. He goes only as far as logic, not beyond.
The mental stress and tension the West is suffering from today is the direct result of too much thinking. The anxiety and anguish of the West comes from thinking stretched to its ultimate; it is suffering under the crushing weight of the mind. Consequently the younger generation is in revolt.
And it is natural that when a whole generation rebels it does so in many different ways. On their journey to the unthinkable, some are singing "Hare Krishna, Hare Rama" and many others are taking drugs like LSD and mescaline. The same people are now traveling across India and wandering through the Himalayan mountains. In the search of the achintya, the unthinkable, they will go to Japan and squat in its Zen monasteries. The quest is the same all over.
In its search for the mysterious, it seems the western world will be coming increasingly close to Krishna. LSD cannot take them far; travels to India and Japan are not going to last long. Eventually they will have to discover their own consciousness, their own soul; they cannot live long on credit.
That is why their boys and girls are restless chanting "Hare Krishna" in the streets of New York, London and Berlin.
It is remarkable that when young men and young women of the West dance and do kirtan, they do it with an abandon and joy that cannot be found anywhere in India today. Go round this country where kirtan has been in vogue for centuries and you will nowhere come across that enthusiasm and joy among people who do kirtan here. For us it is a well-traveled road, a routine. For us the kirtan is now a worn out coin; we know it is worthless. For the westerners it is a new coin which is valuable. When a group passes through the streets of London singing and dancing, even the traffic police watch them in amazement. They think their youth are going crazy. No one in India will think like that; here it is an accepted ritual.
But remember, real religion is run by mad people, it is not the job of the so-called wise. Whenever and wherever a breakthrough happens it always happens with the help of those who are called crazy by their contemporaries. Now singing and dancing is not thought to be strange in India. It was considered strange when Chaitanya danced through the towns and villages of Bengal; people thought he had gone out of his mind. But tradition sucks down everything that comes its way and puts it in its closet. Even madness is tamed by tradition.
The West is on the brink of an explosion, a breakthrough, a revolution. That is why when young people in the West move through the streets dancing and singing, there is a newness and simplicity, beauty and charm in their performance. Certainly it is a preparation, but not for Krishna's birth; it s a preparation for the birth of Krishna consciousness in the West.
Krishna consciousness has nothing to do with Krishna. It is a symbolic term which means that now a consciousness is dawning in the West which will make them give up work and embrace celebration as their way of life. It is just symbolic. Work has become meaningless. The West has done plenty of hard work and hard thinking; it has done everything that man is capable of doing, and now it is tired, utterly tired of all that. Either the West will have to die or it will enter into Krishna consciousness.
These are the two choices before the West. And since death is not possible, because nothing really dies, Krishna consciousness is inescapable.
Christ has ceased to be relevant for the West, and the reason is again tradition. For the West, Christ symbolizes tradition and Krishna represents anti-tradition. Christ is an imposition on them and Krishna is their free choice. And then Christ is very serious, and the West is fed up with seriousness. Too much seriousness turns into a disease ultimately. So the West is trying hard to get rid of its seriousness; the cross has proved much too heavy on its soul. Jesus hanging on the cross seems dreadful, and the West in its heart feels disturbed, uneasy with it. So the cross is being taken down and the flute ushered in. And what can be a better substitute for the cross than the flute?
For these reasons Krishna's appeal to the West is growing, and it will continue to grow. Every day it is going to come nearer and nearer to Krishna.
There are some other reasons for Krishna's incursion into the West. Only an affluent society can gather around Krishna; a poor society cannot afford him. A society steeped in poverty and misery cannot have that leisure and ease so necessary to dance and play a flute. The society in which Krishna was born was highly prosperous in its own way. There was no lack of food, clothes and other necessities of life; milk and yogurt and butter were available in abundance - so much that when Krishna wanted to play pranks with his numerous girlfriends, who were milkmaids, he went on breaking their containers full of milk and yogurt.
Judging by the standard of living of his time, Krishna's society was at the peak of affluence. People were happy, they had plenty of leisure; a whole family lived well on the earnings of one of its members. It is only in such a society that flute and raas and celebration take center stage. The West today is at that height of affluence which the world has never known before. It is not surprising that Krishna has such a great pull on the western mind.
Ironically, Krishna no longer has any appeal for the present day India, ravaged by poverty, squalor and disease. She will have to wait long to deserve him. At the moment Christ has more attraction for this country. It is natural that a country hanging on the cross should think of Christ as the right person to alleviate their pain and suffering. That is why a striking and unexpected event is taking place: Jesus' influence in India is growing every day, while it is declining in the West. And it is not enough just to say that Christian missionaries are proselytizing Indians through devious and questionable means. What is equally true is that the Christian symbol of the cross comes closest to the agonized mind of this country. It is because of this affinity between the two that the missionaries are succeeding here in their efforts.
On the other hand the golden statues of Rama and Krishna, symbolizing royalty and richness are becoming out of tune with the poverty stricken people of this country. The day is not far off when the poor of India will not only mount an assault on the rich but also on the statues of Krishna and Rama.
It is just possible, because they can no longer put up with their glittering gold. And they are going to fall in love with Christ on the cross, symbolizing their pain and misery. The possibility of India turning to Christ and of the West turning to Krishna is growing every day.
For the western mind the cross has lost its significance, because people there are no longer in suffering and pain; they have everything they ever longed for. The truth is that now their only pain is that which stems from affluence. Their affluence is frightening; they don't know what to do with it.
Now for certain a singing and dancing religion is going to be very close to the western heart. So it is not surprising that youth in the West are chanting Krishna's name with great enthusiasm.
RICH SOCIETY IN WEST
No, I did not say that no one was poor in Krishna's time, or that no one is poor in the present-day West. There are poor people in the West, but their society as a whole is affluent. In the same way, although poor men like Sudama existed in Krishna's time, his society was very prosperous. A poor society is one thing; the existence of a handful of poor people in a rich society is different. The Indian society today is definitely poor, although there are Tatas and Birlas among us. The presence of Tatas and Birlas does not make the society affluent. Similarly, in spite of the Sudamas, Krishna's society was prosperous and rich.The question is whether a society on the whole is rich or poor. There are rich people even in an utterly poor society like India's, and similarly there are poor people in the very affluent society of America. The society of Krishna's time was rich; good things of life were available to the vast majority of people. The same is true in today's American society. And only an affluent society can afford celebration; a poor society cannot.
As a society sinks into poverty it ceases to he celebrative, to be joyous. Not that there are no festivals in a poor society, but those festivals are lack-luster, as good as dead. When the Festival of Lights - Diwali - comes here, the poor have to borrow money to celebrate it. They save their worn out clothes for Holi - the Festival of Colors. Is this the way to celebrate a festival like Holi? In the past, people came out in their best clothes to be smeared with all kinds of colors; now they go through it as if it is a kind of compulsory ritual. The festival of Holi was born when Indian society was at the peak of prosperity; now it is only dragging its feet somehow. In the past people were pleased when someone poured colors on their clothes; now in the same situation they are saddened, because they cannot afford enough clothes.
The West now can well afford a festival like Holi. They have already adopted Krishna's dance; sooner or later they are going to adopt Holi as well. It does not need an astrologer to predict it.
They have everything - money, clothes, colors and leisure - which is necessary to celebrate such a festival as Holi. And unlike us they will celebrate with enthusiasm and joy. They will really rejoice.
When a society on the whole is affluent, even its poor are not that poor; they are better off than the rich people of a poor society. Today even the poorest of America does not cling to money in the way the richest of India does. Living in a sea of poverty, even the rich people of this country share the psychology of the poor. Their clinging to money is pathetic.
I have heard that on a fine morning a beggar appeared at the doors of a house. He was young and healthy and his body was robust and beautiful. The housewife was pleasantly surprised to see such a beggar, he was rare, and she gave him food and clothes with an open heart. Then she said to the beggar, "How is it that you are a beggar? You don't seem to be born poor."
The beggar said, "It seems you are also going the same way. I gave away my wealth in the same way you gave me food and clothes a little while ago. You will not take long to join me in the street."
Clinging to money is characteristic of a poor society; even its rich people suffer from this malady.
And clinging disappears in a rich society; even its poor can afford to spend and enjoy what little they have. They are not afraid, they know they can make money when they need it.
It is in this sense that I said Krishna consciousness happens in an affluent society, and the West is really an affluent society.
The questioner also wants to know why the revolt, the breakthrough in the West is being led by people like Ginsberg, who are irrationalists. It is true that all the young rebels the West, whether they are existentialists, the Beatles, the beatniks, or the hippies or the yippies, are irrationalists who represent a revolt against the excessive rationalism of their older generations. It is also true that the intellectuals of the West are yet uninfluenced by these offbeat movements. In fact, irrationalists appear only in a society that goes to the extreme of rationalism. The West has really reached the zenith of rationalism. Hence the reaction; it was inevitable.
When a society feels stifled and strangled by too much logic and rationalism, it inevitably turns to mysticism. When materialism begins to crush a people's sensitivity they turn to God and religion. And don't think that Ginsberg, Sartre, Camus, and others who speak about the absurd, the illogical are like illiterate and ignorant villagers. They are great intellectuals of irrationalism.
Their irrationalism, their turning to the unthinkable is not comparable to the ways of the believers, the faithful. It is a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn, like Chaitanya who after stretching thinking to its extremity, found that it was unthinkable.
So if Ginsberg's statements and his poetry are illogical and irrational, it has nonetheless a system of its own. Nietzsche has said somewhere, "I am mad, but my madness has its own logic. I am not an ordinary madman; my madness has a method." This irrationalism is deliberate. It stands on its own ground, which cannot be the ground of logic. It is a candid, ingenuous refutation of rationalism.
Certainly it will not base its assault upon logic; if it does, it will only support rationalism. No, it opposes rationalism through an irrational lifestyle.
Somewhere Ginsberg is reading his poetry to a small gathering of poets. His poetry is meaningless; there is no consistency between one concept and another. All its similies and metaphors are just inane. Its symbolism is utterly unconventional; it has nothing to do with poetic tradition. It is really a great adventure; there is no greater adventure than to be inconsistent and unconventional. He alone can have the courage to be inconsistent who is aware of his innate consistency, his inner integrity, whose innermost being is consistent and clear. He knows that however inconsistent his statements may be, they are not going to affect the integrity and consistency of his being.
People lacking in spiritual consistency and innate harmony weigh every word before they make a statement, because they are afraid that if two of their statements contradict each other their inner contradictions will be exposed. One can afford to be inconsistent only when one is consistent in his being.
This Ginsberg is reading a poem which is full of inconsistencies and contradictions. It is an act of rare courage. Someone from among his listeners rises up in his seat and says, "You seem to be an audacious person, but to be audacious in poetry is nothing. Do you have the courage to act with audacity?"
And Ginsberg looks up at the questioner, takes off his clothes and stands naked before his listeners saying, "This is the last part of my poetry." Then he says to the man who has interrupted him, "Now please take off your clothes and bare yourself."
The man says, "How can I? I cannot be naked."
The whole audience is in a state of shock. No one had thought that poetry reading would end like this, that its last part would come in the form of the nude poet. When they asked him why he did this he said, "It just happened; there was nothing deliberate about it. The man provoked me to act audaciously, and I couldn't think of anything else. So I just concluded my poetry reading this way."
This is a spontaneous act; it is not at all deliberate. And it is wholly illogical; it has nothing to do with Ginsberg's poetry. No Kalidas, no Keats, no Rabindranath could do it; they are poets tied to tradition.
We cannot think of Kalidas, or Keats, or Tagore baring himself the way Ginsberg does. Ginsberg could do it because he rejects logic, he refuses to confine life into the prison of syllogisms. He does not want to reduce life to petty mathematical calculations. He wants to live and live in freedom, and with abandon.
A man like Ginsberg cannot be compared with a gullible villager. He represents the climactic point of a profound rationalist tradition. When a rationalist tradition reaches its climax and begins to die, people like Ginsberg come to the fore to repudiate the rational. I think Krishna too, represents the peak point of India's great rationalist tradition. This country had once scaled the highest peaks of rationalist intelligence and thinking. We had indulged in hair-splitting analysis and interpretation of words and concepts. We have with us books that cannot be translated into any other languages of the world, because no other language possesses such refined and subtle words as we have. We have such words that only one of them can cover a whole page of a book, because we use so many adjectives, prefixes and suffixes to qualify and refine them.
Krishna comes at the pinnacle of a rationalist, intellectual culture that had left no stones unturned.
We had thought everything that could be thought. From the VEDAS and Upanishads we had traveled to vedant where knowledge ends. VEDAS itself means the end of knowledge. Giants like Patanjali, Kapil, Kanad, Brihaspati and Vyas had thought so much that a time came when we felt tired of thinking. Then comes Krishna as the culmination, and he says, "Let us now live, we have done enough of thinking."
In this context it is good to know that Chaitanya happened in Bengal exactly at a similar time. Bengal reached the zenith of dialectics and reasoning in the form of the navya nyaya, the new dialectics.
Navadip, the town in which Chaitanya was born, was the greatest center of learning and logic. It was called the kashi of the logicians. All logical learning of India found its apex in Navadip, and it became known as navya nyaya, which represents the Everest of dialectical reasoning. The West has yet to reach that peak. Western logic is old; it is not new. It does not go beyond Aristotle. Navadip took logic beyond Aristotle and carried it to its last frontier.
It was enough to say anywhere in the India of those days that such-and-such a scholar comes from Navadip - nobody dared enter into a debate with him. He was supposed to be invincible as a dialectician; nobody could think of defeating him in polemics. Students from all over India went to Navadip to learn logic. Scholars of logic went there to debate with their counterparts, and if once someone won a debate he immediately became famous all over the country; he was acclaimed as the greatest pundit - the scholar laureate of India. Often enough it happened that someone who went to Navadip to debate got defeated at the hands of some scholar and became his disciple. It was impossible to defeat Navadip; the whole town was full of logicians; every home was the home of a scholar. If someone defeated one scholar there was another round the comer ready to challenge him. The town was a beehive of scholars.
Chaitanya was born in Navadip, and was himself a towering scholar of logic. He was the top logician of the Navadip of his time, held in great respect by all. The same Chaitanya one day said goodbye to scholarship and went dancing and singing ecstatically through the streets of Navadip saying that everything is unthinkable. When such a person says something it is bound to have tremendous significance. Chaitanya too represents the climactic point of a great tradition. After exploring and analyzing every nook and comer of thinking and intellectual understanding, after going to the very roots of words, concepts and their meanings, he renounces knowledge and returns to his basic ignorance and declares he is now going to sing and dance like a madman. He said that he would not argue any more, not search truth through logic, he would simply live and live with abandon.
Life begins where logic ends.
As a society sinks into poverty it ceases to he celebrative, to be joyous. Not that there are no festivals in a poor society, but those festivals are lack-luster, as good as dead. When the Festival of Lights - Diwali - comes here, the poor have to borrow money to celebrate it. They save their worn out clothes for Holi - the Festival of Colors. Is this the way to celebrate a festival like Holi? In the past, people came out in their best clothes to be smeared with all kinds of colors; now they go through it as if it is a kind of compulsory ritual. The festival of Holi was born when Indian society was at the peak of prosperity; now it is only dragging its feet somehow. In the past people were pleased when someone poured colors on their clothes; now in the same situation they are saddened, because they cannot afford enough clothes.
The West now can well afford a festival like Holi. They have already adopted Krishna's dance; sooner or later they are going to adopt Holi as well. It does not need an astrologer to predict it.
They have everything - money, clothes, colors and leisure - which is necessary to celebrate such a festival as Holi. And unlike us they will celebrate with enthusiasm and joy. They will really rejoice.
When a society on the whole is affluent, even its poor are not that poor; they are better off than the rich people of a poor society. Today even the poorest of America does not cling to money in the way the richest of India does. Living in a sea of poverty, even the rich people of this country share the psychology of the poor. Their clinging to money is pathetic.
I have heard that on a fine morning a beggar appeared at the doors of a house. He was young and healthy and his body was robust and beautiful. The housewife was pleasantly surprised to see such a beggar, he was rare, and she gave him food and clothes with an open heart. Then she said to the beggar, "How is it that you are a beggar? You don't seem to be born poor."
The beggar said, "It seems you are also going the same way. I gave away my wealth in the same way you gave me food and clothes a little while ago. You will not take long to join me in the street."
Clinging to money is characteristic of a poor society; even its rich people suffer from this malady.
And clinging disappears in a rich society; even its poor can afford to spend and enjoy what little they have. They are not afraid, they know they can make money when they need it.
It is in this sense that I said Krishna consciousness happens in an affluent society, and the West is really an affluent society.
The questioner also wants to know why the revolt, the breakthrough in the West is being led by people like Ginsberg, who are irrationalists. It is true that all the young rebels the West, whether they are existentialists, the Beatles, the beatniks, or the hippies or the yippies, are irrationalists who represent a revolt against the excessive rationalism of their older generations. It is also true that the intellectuals of the West are yet uninfluenced by these offbeat movements. In fact, irrationalists appear only in a society that goes to the extreme of rationalism. The West has really reached the zenith of rationalism. Hence the reaction; it was inevitable.
When a society feels stifled and strangled by too much logic and rationalism, it inevitably turns to mysticism. When materialism begins to crush a people's sensitivity they turn to God and religion. And don't think that Ginsberg, Sartre, Camus, and others who speak about the absurd, the illogical are like illiterate and ignorant villagers. They are great intellectuals of irrationalism.
Their irrationalism, their turning to the unthinkable is not comparable to the ways of the believers, the faithful. It is a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn, like Chaitanya who after stretching thinking to its extremity, found that it was unthinkable.
So if Ginsberg's statements and his poetry are illogical and irrational, it has nonetheless a system of its own. Nietzsche has said somewhere, "I am mad, but my madness has its own logic. I am not an ordinary madman; my madness has a method." This irrationalism is deliberate. It stands on its own ground, which cannot be the ground of logic. It is a candid, ingenuous refutation of rationalism.
Certainly it will not base its assault upon logic; if it does, it will only support rationalism. No, it opposes rationalism through an irrational lifestyle.
Somewhere Ginsberg is reading his poetry to a small gathering of poets. His poetry is meaningless; there is no consistency between one concept and another. All its similies and metaphors are just inane. Its symbolism is utterly unconventional; it has nothing to do with poetic tradition. It is really a great adventure; there is no greater adventure than to be inconsistent and unconventional. He alone can have the courage to be inconsistent who is aware of his innate consistency, his inner integrity, whose innermost being is consistent and clear. He knows that however inconsistent his statements may be, they are not going to affect the integrity and consistency of his being.
People lacking in spiritual consistency and innate harmony weigh every word before they make a statement, because they are afraid that if two of their statements contradict each other their inner contradictions will be exposed. One can afford to be inconsistent only when one is consistent in his being.
This Ginsberg is reading a poem which is full of inconsistencies and contradictions. It is an act of rare courage. Someone from among his listeners rises up in his seat and says, "You seem to be an audacious person, but to be audacious in poetry is nothing. Do you have the courage to act with audacity?"
And Ginsberg looks up at the questioner, takes off his clothes and stands naked before his listeners saying, "This is the last part of my poetry." Then he says to the man who has interrupted him, "Now please take off your clothes and bare yourself."
The man says, "How can I? I cannot be naked."
The whole audience is in a state of shock. No one had thought that poetry reading would end like this, that its last part would come in the form of the nude poet. When they asked him why he did this he said, "It just happened; there was nothing deliberate about it. The man provoked me to act audaciously, and I couldn't think of anything else. So I just concluded my poetry reading this way."
This is a spontaneous act; it is not at all deliberate. And it is wholly illogical; it has nothing to do with Ginsberg's poetry. No Kalidas, no Keats, no Rabindranath could do it; they are poets tied to tradition.
We cannot think of Kalidas, or Keats, or Tagore baring himself the way Ginsberg does. Ginsberg could do it because he rejects logic, he refuses to confine life into the prison of syllogisms. He does not want to reduce life to petty mathematical calculations. He wants to live and live in freedom, and with abandon.
A man like Ginsberg cannot be compared with a gullible villager. He represents the climactic point of a profound rationalist tradition. When a rationalist tradition reaches its climax and begins to die, people like Ginsberg come to the fore to repudiate the rational. I think Krishna too, represents the peak point of India's great rationalist tradition. This country had once scaled the highest peaks of rationalist intelligence and thinking. We had indulged in hair-splitting analysis and interpretation of words and concepts. We have with us books that cannot be translated into any other languages of the world, because no other language possesses such refined and subtle words as we have. We have such words that only one of them can cover a whole page of a book, because we use so many adjectives, prefixes and suffixes to qualify and refine them.
Krishna comes at the pinnacle of a rationalist, intellectual culture that had left no stones unturned.
We had thought everything that could be thought. From the VEDAS and Upanishads we had traveled to vedant where knowledge ends. VEDAS itself means the end of knowledge. Giants like Patanjali, Kapil, Kanad, Brihaspati and Vyas had thought so much that a time came when we felt tired of thinking. Then comes Krishna as the culmination, and he says, "Let us now live, we have done enough of thinking."
In this context it is good to know that Chaitanya happened in Bengal exactly at a similar time. Bengal reached the zenith of dialectics and reasoning in the form of the navya nyaya, the new dialectics.
Navadip, the town in which Chaitanya was born, was the greatest center of learning and logic. It was called the kashi of the logicians. All logical learning of India found its apex in Navadip, and it became known as navya nyaya, which represents the Everest of dialectical reasoning. The West has yet to reach that peak. Western logic is old; it is not new. It does not go beyond Aristotle. Navadip took logic beyond Aristotle and carried it to its last frontier.
It was enough to say anywhere in the India of those days that such-and-such a scholar comes from Navadip - nobody dared enter into a debate with him. He was supposed to be invincible as a dialectician; nobody could think of defeating him in polemics. Students from all over India went to Navadip to learn logic. Scholars of logic went there to debate with their counterparts, and if once someone won a debate he immediately became famous all over the country; he was acclaimed as the greatest pundit - the scholar laureate of India. Often enough it happened that someone who went to Navadip to debate got defeated at the hands of some scholar and became his disciple. It was impossible to defeat Navadip; the whole town was full of logicians; every home was the home of a scholar. If someone defeated one scholar there was another round the comer ready to challenge him. The town was a beehive of scholars.
Chaitanya was born in Navadip, and was himself a towering scholar of logic. He was the top logician of the Navadip of his time, held in great respect by all. The same Chaitanya one day said goodbye to scholarship and went dancing and singing ecstatically through the streets of Navadip saying that everything is unthinkable. When such a person says something it is bound to have tremendous significance. Chaitanya too represents the climactic point of a great tradition. After exploring and analyzing every nook and comer of thinking and intellectual understanding, after going to the very roots of words, concepts and their meanings, he renounces knowledge and returns to his basic ignorance and declares he is now going to sing and dance like a madman. He said that he would not argue any more, not search truth through logic, he would simply live and live with abandon.
Life begins where logic ends.
LET GO OF YOURSELVES.
Words are not the truth. Not even the word truth is truth.Truth is found in a state of wordlessness, in utter silence. Even if one has to express truth, words cannot do it. Truth is best expressed through silence. Silence, not word, is the language of truth. As I said this morning, silence is the voice of truth.
If it is so then a question arises how a word, as I say, can serve as a seed and a basis for spiritual discipline. There is no contradiction in the two statements; in fact, they are just different dimensions of approaching the same thing. I said this morning that words are not the truth, but if those surrounded by untruth want to attain to truth they will have to take the help of untruth, there is no other way. Of course, if they can make a leap, they can go straightaway from word to silence.
But in case they lack the courage to make a leap, they will have to get rid of words gradually, step by step.
When one is given a seed word, it means with the help of this single word he has to drop all other words which infest his mind. If one does not have the courage to drop all words together, once and for all, he is asked to hold on to a seed word, and to get rid of all other words with its help. But ultimately he will have to get rid of the seed word as well. The seed word cannot take him to the truth, but it can certainly take him to the gate of the temple of truth. At the gate you will have to leave this word, just as you leave your shoes there. You cannot take it into the temple's inner sanctuary.
Even the seed word will impede your entrance into the temple, because however tiny, it is after all a part of noise. All words are noisy, and a seed word is no exception.
Even those who stress the importance of seed words say that in the final stage of their practice the seekers themselves disappear; this is the measure of their fulfillment. From japa or chanting one has to go to ajapa or no-chanting - wordless chanting. A moment comes in their discipline when even japa drops and ajapa, silence, enters. It is the same whether you drop words at the very first or the last moment. All words have to go, so that silence happens. Silence is the ultimate, there is nothing higher than silence. A courageous person will give up all words together, but one who cannot should for the time being hold on to a seed word. dropping all others. But in the end even this last word will have to go.
As far as I am concerned, I am in favor of a complete jump from word to silence. As far as possible a seeker should avoid getting involved in things like japa, because they are likely to turn into an impediment in the last stage. It really happened with Ramakrishna, and it would be good to understand it.
Ramakrishna's spiritual journey begins with remembrance - the chanting of the Mother's name. He has been worshipping God in the form of divine Mother Kali, and a moment comes while chanting the Mother's name when he reaches the final stage of the journey - the name has to be dropped.
Beyond this stage there is no way to go on with the name; now he can enter the sanctum sanctorum all alone. Mother Kali serves him well traveling the path, but when he reaches the temple itself, Ramakrishna must face the problem of parting with the Mother. It becomes the biggest problem of his spiritual life. For years he has given all his love and devotion to Kali; he has grown with her, he has danced and laughed and cried with her, so much that she has entered into his blood and bones, has become his very heartbeat. And when he is asked to drop her altogether, he finds himself in a terrible dilemma.
At this stage, Ramakrishna is under the guidance of a non-dualist yogi named Totapuri, who insists that he give up the name, part with the Mother. According to Totapuri, a name, a seed word, a symbol has no meaning whatsoever for a seeker who wants to attain the non-dualist state, the one, the absolute. Ramakrishna closes his eyes again and again and tells Totapuri that he cannot give up Kali; he can easily give himself up but he cannot part with his Mother. His Master persuades him to try again and again - because if he gives himself up and not the Mother, he will be left on the doorstep of the temple the Mother will be inside it. It will do him no good. If one is to attain to the non-dualist state, nothing short of absolute aloneness will do. Two are not allowed to enter its inner sanctum - the passage is utterly narrow. Ramakrishna tries again and again for three days, but fails and declares his helplessness.
Totapuri now threatens to leave Ramakrishna, he is not going to waste his efforts on him.
Ramakrishna begs for another opportunity; he is aware of his thirst for the unknown, the ultimate reality. His life cannot be fulfilled without knowing it.
Totapuri comes to Ramakrishna the next day and brings with him a sharp-edged glass. Ramakrishna sits before him with closed eyes and his Master says, "With this glass I am going to make a cut on your forehead exactly above the seat of the third eye, the ajnachakra. The moment you feel the pain of it you take up a sword and cut your mother in two."
Ramakrishna is startled. He protests, "What do you say? How can I behead my Mother with a sword? It is impossible. I can behead myself if you ask me to do so, but how can I raise a sword at Mother? And then where am I going to find a sword?"
Then Totapuri says to Ramakrishna, "You are crazy. You have to find a sword from the same source where you discovered the Mother who is not. If your imagination, your will can materialize a non- existent Mother, it can also materialize a sword. It is not that difficult. I know you are skilled in this art. It needs an imaginary sword, a false sword to kill a false Mother. She was never real."
Ramakrishna is still hesitant, but he knows Totapuri will leave him if he does not listen to his instructions. He is aware that this Master does not believe in gradual progress, he stands for a headlong leap, for sudden enlightenment. He closes his eyes again, hut he still feels reluctant. Then Totapuri says reproachfully, "Shame on you!" and cuts his forehead with the edge of the glass.
As soon as Ramakrishna feels the hurt he gathers courage to take up a sword and behead the Mother And as soon as the Mother's image vanishes, he enters the state of samadhi - the supreme state. And on his return from this state he exclaims, "The last barrier is down."
The seed word, the mantra is going to be the last barrier for all those who use it as their spiritual discipline. And like Ramakrishna, one day they will have to take up swords to finish it too. And it is going to be a painful process. That is why I don't recommend it, because I am aware that both you and I will have to work hard at the end. It is better to be finished with it from the beginning.
You also want to know if aum is a word or something else. You quote Krishna as saying, "If someone can remember me in my aum form and live in aum at the time of his death, he will attain to the ultimate, the eternal."
This aum is an extraordinary word, a rare word. It is extraordinary just because it has no meaning whatsoever. Every word has some meaning, this aum has none. For this reason this word cannot be translated into any other language of the world, there is no way. If it had a meaning, it would be easy to find an equivalent word with the same meaning in any language, but being meaningless this aum is beyond translation. This is perhaps the only word on earth which has no meaning whatsoever.
People who discovered aum were in search of something which could be a bridge, a link between the word and silence. While the word has a meaning, silence is neither meaningful nor meaningless; it is beyond both, it is the beyond. Really aum came as a bridge between the word and silence. It is constituted with the help of three basic sound forms: a, u, and m. A, u, and m are the basic sounds of the science of phonetics: all other letters of the alphabet are their extensions and combinations.
And the same a, u, and m constitute the word aum, although it was not written as a word; it remains a distinct and distinguished symbol. Aum in its original form is available in Sanskrit, where it is a pictorial representation of aum; it is neither a word nor a letter. Aum is not a word but a picture. And it represents the space where the finite world of the word - of sound - ends, and the infinite world of silence begins. It forms the fron-tier, the borderline between the word and the wordless; there is no word beyond aum.
Therefore. Krishna says if someone can think of him in his aum form - which is beyond word and meaning - at the moment of his death, he will attain to reality, to truth. Because aum is at the boundary line of the world and the beyond, one who can re member it at the time of his departure from the world is destined to be carried to the beyond.
India's genius has packed this word aum with far-reaching meanings and immense significance.
Aum became tremendously meaningful - so much so that it has no more any meaning. And its significance is limitless, infinite.
But aum is not meant to be uttered and chanted; it has to be really heard and experienced. When you go deep into meditation, when all words disappear, the sound of aum will begin to vibrate. You don't have to say it; if you say it you can have the illusion while meditating that you are hearing it. Then you will miss the authentic aum. For this reason I have not included aum in the Dynamic Meditation. If you chant it during meditation you can miss the real music of aum, which is very subtle.
This real aum is heard when all words disappear, all noises cease. When mind and intellect, thought and word all come to an end and silence begins, then an extraordinarily subtle vibration remains, which this country has interpreted as aum. It can be interpreted in other ways too, but they all will be our interpretations. It is like you are traveling in a railway coach and you hear whatever you want to hear in the rattling noise of the moving wheels of the train. The wheels are not making noise for you, nor do they have any message for you, but you hear whatever you want to hear. It is all your projection, your construction imposed on the sound of the wheels.
When the immense emptiness comes into being, it has its own sound, its own music. It is called the sound of the cosmic silence, it is called the anahat, the unstruck, the uncaused sound. It is not caused by anything. It is the aum. When you clap your hands, the sound of clapping is created by striking one hand against the other. This sound is caused; so is the sound of a drum which you beat with your hands. But meditation is a journey into silence; when all sounds disappear, when there is no duality, when you are utterly alone, then the causeless sound comes into being. India's sages have called it aum.
Variants of aum are found in other lands and languages. Christians use a word "amen" which is a variation of aum. Mohammedans also say "amin" which is the same. Every invocation of the Upanishads begins with aum and ends with "Aum shantih, shantih, shantih." A Mohammedan ends his prayer with the word Amin. This amin is also meaningless; it is the same sound of cosmic silence.
The English language has three words: omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent - all of which are constituted with the word aum. Philologists may not be aware that omniscient means that one who has known the aum, omnipresent means the one who is present in the aum, and omnipotent means the one who has become as powerful as the aum.
The aum has been found in many forms all the world over. It is available in both the ancient sources of religion - Hinduism and Judaism. If there is anything common between Hinduism and Jainism it is the aum. Aum occupies the same exalted place in Buddhism as in Jainism. It is the one universal word. Amin and aum are words that are not manmade; they have been heard in the depth of meditation. It is difficult to say which of the two, amin and aum, is the more authentic, but one thing is certain that they are one and the same. It is the ultimate sound. When all caused sounds disappear the uncaused aum comes into being. It is the cosmic sound.
Zen sages ask their disciples to go and find out the sound of one hand clapping. The sound of one hand clapping is something unheard of! This is Zen's own way of saying the same thing - the anahat, the unstruck sound. So Zen Masters direct seekers to go in search of one hand clapping - which really means the uncaused sound. Clapping with two hands make for sound, and one hand clapping is aum or amin.
Knowingly I did not give aum a place in our meditations. It is deliberate, because if you utter aum it is caused by you, it cannot be the uncaused aum. I wait for that real aum which will appear when you completely disappear. This aum will arise from your inmost depths, but it will not be caused by you:
And Krishna is right in saying that if one comes to know aum rightly and lives aum with awareness till his last breath, he will attain to the ultimate. But this is not the aum that you will utter with your mouth; it will be a waste of efforts if you keep chanting aum at the time of your death. Then you will not even die peacefully.
The real aum is an explosion; it emerges from the depths of your innermost being. And it happens.
Let us now sit for meditation. And I hope you will now begin your journey to the real aum.
Don't talk, and sit at some distance from one another. Stop talking altogether, and leave some space between you and the other persons sitting next to you... Those who are just spectators should leave the compound and watch, if they want to, from the outside. Spectators should not remain inside the enclosure. Please move out.
I want you to sit at some distance from one another so that if someone falls down on the ground in the course of his meditation, he does not disturb his neighbors. There is enough space here, so you need not be miserly. Please spread out all over the place. Friends may fall down, and many are going to fall down, so make room for them. And don't think others will move, other's don't move.
Each one of you has to move and make room for others.
Spectators are requested not to talk; they should remain completely silent so they don't cause any disturbance in meditation.
Before you begin please understand a few things rightly. You have to meditate in a sitting posture.
This will be very useful and good.
For the first ten minutes we will breathe deeply. After ten minutes deep breathing your body will begin to shake; then allow it to shake freely. Someone will feel like shouting and screaming, another will feel like crying, Allow yourself to yell and cry without inhibition. After ten minutes, begin to ask yourself, "Who am l?n "Who am l?" This will continue for another ten minutes - with the difference that you will do so sitting. If someone falls in the meantime, he should not worry about it, he should just fall down.Inside the compound no one will keep his eyes open.
Now, fold your two palms together and utter this pledge, this resolve. "I resolve with God as my witness that I will bring all my energy to meditation."
"I resolve, with God as my witness, that I will bring all my energy to meditation."
"I resolve, with God as my witness, that I will bring all my energy to meditation."
Now, constantly remember your resolve, and remember that God remembers it.
For ten minutes breathe deeply. Deep breathing will stimulate and arouse a great deal of energy, a lot more than when you breathe standing... With the stroke of breaths the energy is bound to rise... and it will run through your body... electricity will run through the whole length of your body...
Breathe with energy... Don't withhold yourselves. If the body shakes let it shake, let it tremble.
Breathe deeply and energetically. Energy is beginning to rise, let it. Breathe deeply and let energy rise. It is going well, very well. Let each one of you do his best, no one should lag behind... Energy is rising, allow it. Let the body do what it wants to do, but keep sitting.
Deep breathing, more deep breathing, still more deep breathing. Cooperate with your rising energy.
Don't withhold yourselves. Breathe deeply.
Breathe deeply, breathe deeply, breathe very deeply. It is going well. More and more friends are being energized. Let your energy rise freely, don't hinder it. Let go of you. Hit your energy with deep breathing, deeper and deeper breathing.
Be blissful, be filled with joy and bliss... Breathe deeply and joyously... Breathe deeply and be blissful. Breathe deeply. more deeply, still more deeply. And rejoice.
Your bodies are getting electrified. Cooperate with your bodies... Breathe deeply and joyously. Be filled with bliss and breathe... breathe deeply.
Intensify breathing and bring greater and greater joy... Be joyous and breathe more deeply, still more deeply. Bring all your energy to breathing... Don't withhold. Be totally into it. Then we will enter the second stage. There are four minutes to go; put all your strength into it.
It is gaining momentum; cooperate with it fully. Exert your best. Sometimes one misses it just by a fraction of an inch, so bring all your energy into deep breathing. And breathe joyously, blissfully.
There are three minutes to go... Go ahead and ahead. Bring all your strength together and breathe deeply and joyously. Go inside your being, enter your interiority, and breathe deeply.
Energy is rising. Let go of you. Your bodies will shake and dance. Keep sitting and dance if you feel like dancing. You will feel as if you are not your body. Let it shake, let it tremble, let it dance.
Don't hinder... Don't withhold... Breathe deeply and more deeply... Everything is going well... Keep breathing deeply. Let the body shake.
It is getting into the right momentum, bring all your energy with great joy and bliss. Only two minutes are left, breathe deeply... Breathe deeply and more deeply... When I say one, two, three, then put all your energy, every bit of your energy into it. Be filled with joy... Rejoice... breathe deeply and let the body shake.
Let go of yourselves.
If it is so then a question arises how a word, as I say, can serve as a seed and a basis for spiritual discipline. There is no contradiction in the two statements; in fact, they are just different dimensions of approaching the same thing. I said this morning that words are not the truth, but if those surrounded by untruth want to attain to truth they will have to take the help of untruth, there is no other way. Of course, if they can make a leap, they can go straightaway from word to silence.
But in case they lack the courage to make a leap, they will have to get rid of words gradually, step by step.
When one is given a seed word, it means with the help of this single word he has to drop all other words which infest his mind. If one does not have the courage to drop all words together, once and for all, he is asked to hold on to a seed word, and to get rid of all other words with its help. But ultimately he will have to get rid of the seed word as well. The seed word cannot take him to the truth, but it can certainly take him to the gate of the temple of truth. At the gate you will have to leave this word, just as you leave your shoes there. You cannot take it into the temple's inner sanctuary.
Even the seed word will impede your entrance into the temple, because however tiny, it is after all a part of noise. All words are noisy, and a seed word is no exception.
Even those who stress the importance of seed words say that in the final stage of their practice the seekers themselves disappear; this is the measure of their fulfillment. From japa or chanting one has to go to ajapa or no-chanting - wordless chanting. A moment comes in their discipline when even japa drops and ajapa, silence, enters. It is the same whether you drop words at the very first or the last moment. All words have to go, so that silence happens. Silence is the ultimate, there is nothing higher than silence. A courageous person will give up all words together, but one who cannot should for the time being hold on to a seed word. dropping all others. But in the end even this last word will have to go.
As far as I am concerned, I am in favor of a complete jump from word to silence. As far as possible a seeker should avoid getting involved in things like japa, because they are likely to turn into an impediment in the last stage. It really happened with Ramakrishna, and it would be good to understand it.
Ramakrishna's spiritual journey begins with remembrance - the chanting of the Mother's name. He has been worshipping God in the form of divine Mother Kali, and a moment comes while chanting the Mother's name when he reaches the final stage of the journey - the name has to be dropped.
Beyond this stage there is no way to go on with the name; now he can enter the sanctum sanctorum all alone. Mother Kali serves him well traveling the path, but when he reaches the temple itself, Ramakrishna must face the problem of parting with the Mother. It becomes the biggest problem of his spiritual life. For years he has given all his love and devotion to Kali; he has grown with her, he has danced and laughed and cried with her, so much that she has entered into his blood and bones, has become his very heartbeat. And when he is asked to drop her altogether, he finds himself in a terrible dilemma.
At this stage, Ramakrishna is under the guidance of a non-dualist yogi named Totapuri, who insists that he give up the name, part with the Mother. According to Totapuri, a name, a seed word, a symbol has no meaning whatsoever for a seeker who wants to attain the non-dualist state, the one, the absolute. Ramakrishna closes his eyes again and again and tells Totapuri that he cannot give up Kali; he can easily give himself up but he cannot part with his Mother. His Master persuades him to try again and again - because if he gives himself up and not the Mother, he will be left on the doorstep of the temple the Mother will be inside it. It will do him no good. If one is to attain to the non-dualist state, nothing short of absolute aloneness will do. Two are not allowed to enter its inner sanctum - the passage is utterly narrow. Ramakrishna tries again and again for three days, but fails and declares his helplessness.
Totapuri now threatens to leave Ramakrishna, he is not going to waste his efforts on him.
Ramakrishna begs for another opportunity; he is aware of his thirst for the unknown, the ultimate reality. His life cannot be fulfilled without knowing it.
Totapuri comes to Ramakrishna the next day and brings with him a sharp-edged glass. Ramakrishna sits before him with closed eyes and his Master says, "With this glass I am going to make a cut on your forehead exactly above the seat of the third eye, the ajnachakra. The moment you feel the pain of it you take up a sword and cut your mother in two."
Ramakrishna is startled. He protests, "What do you say? How can I behead my Mother with a sword? It is impossible. I can behead myself if you ask me to do so, but how can I raise a sword at Mother? And then where am I going to find a sword?"
Then Totapuri says to Ramakrishna, "You are crazy. You have to find a sword from the same source where you discovered the Mother who is not. If your imagination, your will can materialize a non- existent Mother, it can also materialize a sword. It is not that difficult. I know you are skilled in this art. It needs an imaginary sword, a false sword to kill a false Mother. She was never real."
Ramakrishna is still hesitant, but he knows Totapuri will leave him if he does not listen to his instructions. He is aware that this Master does not believe in gradual progress, he stands for a headlong leap, for sudden enlightenment. He closes his eyes again, hut he still feels reluctant. Then Totapuri says reproachfully, "Shame on you!" and cuts his forehead with the edge of the glass.
As soon as Ramakrishna feels the hurt he gathers courage to take up a sword and behead the Mother And as soon as the Mother's image vanishes, he enters the state of samadhi - the supreme state. And on his return from this state he exclaims, "The last barrier is down."
The seed word, the mantra is going to be the last barrier for all those who use it as their spiritual discipline. And like Ramakrishna, one day they will have to take up swords to finish it too. And it is going to be a painful process. That is why I don't recommend it, because I am aware that both you and I will have to work hard at the end. It is better to be finished with it from the beginning.
You also want to know if aum is a word or something else. You quote Krishna as saying, "If someone can remember me in my aum form and live in aum at the time of his death, he will attain to the ultimate, the eternal."
This aum is an extraordinary word, a rare word. It is extraordinary just because it has no meaning whatsoever. Every word has some meaning, this aum has none. For this reason this word cannot be translated into any other language of the world, there is no way. If it had a meaning, it would be easy to find an equivalent word with the same meaning in any language, but being meaningless this aum is beyond translation. This is perhaps the only word on earth which has no meaning whatsoever.
People who discovered aum were in search of something which could be a bridge, a link between the word and silence. While the word has a meaning, silence is neither meaningful nor meaningless; it is beyond both, it is the beyond. Really aum came as a bridge between the word and silence. It is constituted with the help of three basic sound forms: a, u, and m. A, u, and m are the basic sounds of the science of phonetics: all other letters of the alphabet are their extensions and combinations.
And the same a, u, and m constitute the word aum, although it was not written as a word; it remains a distinct and distinguished symbol. Aum in its original form is available in Sanskrit, where it is a pictorial representation of aum; it is neither a word nor a letter. Aum is not a word but a picture. And it represents the space where the finite world of the word - of sound - ends, and the infinite world of silence begins. It forms the fron-tier, the borderline between the word and the wordless; there is no word beyond aum.
Therefore. Krishna says if someone can think of him in his aum form - which is beyond word and meaning - at the moment of his death, he will attain to reality, to truth. Because aum is at the boundary line of the world and the beyond, one who can re member it at the time of his departure from the world is destined to be carried to the beyond.
India's genius has packed this word aum with far-reaching meanings and immense significance.
Aum became tremendously meaningful - so much so that it has no more any meaning. And its significance is limitless, infinite.
But aum is not meant to be uttered and chanted; it has to be really heard and experienced. When you go deep into meditation, when all words disappear, the sound of aum will begin to vibrate. You don't have to say it; if you say it you can have the illusion while meditating that you are hearing it. Then you will miss the authentic aum. For this reason I have not included aum in the Dynamic Meditation. If you chant it during meditation you can miss the real music of aum, which is very subtle.
This real aum is heard when all words disappear, all noises cease. When mind and intellect, thought and word all come to an end and silence begins, then an extraordinarily subtle vibration remains, which this country has interpreted as aum. It can be interpreted in other ways too, but they all will be our interpretations. It is like you are traveling in a railway coach and you hear whatever you want to hear in the rattling noise of the moving wheels of the train. The wheels are not making noise for you, nor do they have any message for you, but you hear whatever you want to hear. It is all your projection, your construction imposed on the sound of the wheels.
When the immense emptiness comes into being, it has its own sound, its own music. It is called the sound of the cosmic silence, it is called the anahat, the unstruck, the uncaused sound. It is not caused by anything. It is the aum. When you clap your hands, the sound of clapping is created by striking one hand against the other. This sound is caused; so is the sound of a drum which you beat with your hands. But meditation is a journey into silence; when all sounds disappear, when there is no duality, when you are utterly alone, then the causeless sound comes into being. India's sages have called it aum.
Variants of aum are found in other lands and languages. Christians use a word "amen" which is a variation of aum. Mohammedans also say "amin" which is the same. Every invocation of the Upanishads begins with aum and ends with "Aum shantih, shantih, shantih." A Mohammedan ends his prayer with the word Amin. This amin is also meaningless; it is the same sound of cosmic silence.
The English language has three words: omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent - all of which are constituted with the word aum. Philologists may not be aware that omniscient means that one who has known the aum, omnipresent means the one who is present in the aum, and omnipotent means the one who has become as powerful as the aum.
The aum has been found in many forms all the world over. It is available in both the ancient sources of religion - Hinduism and Judaism. If there is anything common between Hinduism and Jainism it is the aum. Aum occupies the same exalted place in Buddhism as in Jainism. It is the one universal word. Amin and aum are words that are not manmade; they have been heard in the depth of meditation. It is difficult to say which of the two, amin and aum, is the more authentic, but one thing is certain that they are one and the same. It is the ultimate sound. When all caused sounds disappear the uncaused aum comes into being. It is the cosmic sound.
Zen sages ask their disciples to go and find out the sound of one hand clapping. The sound of one hand clapping is something unheard of! This is Zen's own way of saying the same thing - the anahat, the unstruck sound. So Zen Masters direct seekers to go in search of one hand clapping - which really means the uncaused sound. Clapping with two hands make for sound, and one hand clapping is aum or amin.
Knowingly I did not give aum a place in our meditations. It is deliberate, because if you utter aum it is caused by you, it cannot be the uncaused aum. I wait for that real aum which will appear when you completely disappear. This aum will arise from your inmost depths, but it will not be caused by you:
And Krishna is right in saying that if one comes to know aum rightly and lives aum with awareness till his last breath, he will attain to the ultimate. But this is not the aum that you will utter with your mouth; it will be a waste of efforts if you keep chanting aum at the time of your death. Then you will not even die peacefully.
The real aum is an explosion; it emerges from the depths of your innermost being. And it happens.
Let us now sit for meditation. And I hope you will now begin your journey to the real aum.
Don't talk, and sit at some distance from one another. Stop talking altogether, and leave some space between you and the other persons sitting next to you... Those who are just spectators should leave the compound and watch, if they want to, from the outside. Spectators should not remain inside the enclosure. Please move out.
I want you to sit at some distance from one another so that if someone falls down on the ground in the course of his meditation, he does not disturb his neighbors. There is enough space here, so you need not be miserly. Please spread out all over the place. Friends may fall down, and many are going to fall down, so make room for them. And don't think others will move, other's don't move.
Each one of you has to move and make room for others.
Spectators are requested not to talk; they should remain completely silent so they don't cause any disturbance in meditation.
Before you begin please understand a few things rightly. You have to meditate in a sitting posture.
This will be very useful and good.
For the first ten minutes we will breathe deeply. After ten minutes deep breathing your body will begin to shake; then allow it to shake freely. Someone will feel like shouting and screaming, another will feel like crying, Allow yourself to yell and cry without inhibition. After ten minutes, begin to ask yourself, "Who am l?n "Who am l?" This will continue for another ten minutes - with the difference that you will do so sitting. If someone falls in the meantime, he should not worry about it, he should just fall down.Inside the compound no one will keep his eyes open.
Now, fold your two palms together and utter this pledge, this resolve. "I resolve with God as my witness that I will bring all my energy to meditation."
"I resolve, with God as my witness, that I will bring all my energy to meditation."
"I resolve, with God as my witness, that I will bring all my energy to meditation."
Now, constantly remember your resolve, and remember that God remembers it.
For ten minutes breathe deeply. Deep breathing will stimulate and arouse a great deal of energy, a lot more than when you breathe standing... With the stroke of breaths the energy is bound to rise... and it will run through your body... electricity will run through the whole length of your body...
Breathe with energy... Don't withhold yourselves. If the body shakes let it shake, let it tremble.
Breathe deeply and energetically. Energy is beginning to rise, let it. Breathe deeply and let energy rise. It is going well, very well. Let each one of you do his best, no one should lag behind... Energy is rising, allow it. Let the body do what it wants to do, but keep sitting.
Deep breathing, more deep breathing, still more deep breathing. Cooperate with your rising energy.
Don't withhold yourselves. Breathe deeply.
Breathe deeply, breathe deeply, breathe very deeply. It is going well. More and more friends are being energized. Let your energy rise freely, don't hinder it. Let go of you. Hit your energy with deep breathing, deeper and deeper breathing.
Be blissful, be filled with joy and bliss... Breathe deeply and joyously... Breathe deeply and be blissful. Breathe deeply. more deeply, still more deeply. And rejoice.
Your bodies are getting electrified. Cooperate with your bodies... Breathe deeply and joyously. Be filled with bliss and breathe... breathe deeply.
Intensify breathing and bring greater and greater joy... Be joyous and breathe more deeply, still more deeply. Bring all your energy to breathing... Don't withhold. Be totally into it. Then we will enter the second stage. There are four minutes to go; put all your strength into it.
It is gaining momentum; cooperate with it fully. Exert your best. Sometimes one misses it just by a fraction of an inch, so bring all your energy into deep breathing. And breathe joyously, blissfully.
There are three minutes to go... Go ahead and ahead. Bring all your strength together and breathe deeply and joyously. Go inside your being, enter your interiority, and breathe deeply.
Energy is rising. Let go of you. Your bodies will shake and dance. Keep sitting and dance if you feel like dancing. You will feel as if you are not your body. Let it shake, let it tremble, let it dance.
Don't hinder... Don't withhold... Breathe deeply and more deeply... Everything is going well... Keep breathing deeply. Let the body shake.
It is getting into the right momentum, bring all your energy with great joy and bliss. Only two minutes are left, breathe deeply... Breathe deeply and more deeply... When I say one, two, three, then put all your energy, every bit of your energy into it. Be filled with joy... Rejoice... breathe deeply and let the body shake.
Let go of yourselves.
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