The Fish in the Sea is Not Thirsty Talks on Kabir
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The society does not need intelligent people, hence it has created conditionings -- social, religious, political, educational -- great psychological strategies have been invented down the ages to reduce you to a thing, to reduce you to something pseudo, to reduce you so that you can become a commodity in the marketplace. You have to be aware, because you exist in a society which is against your intelligence. My sannyasins are trying to do... what the society has destroyed in them, they are trying to revive. What the society has done, they are trying to undo it. That's the whole work of sannyas -- and that has ALWAYS been the work of a real true religion.
ALIVE OF ALL IS INSIDE YOUR OWN HOUSE; AND SO YOU WALK FROM ONE HOLY CITY TO THE NEXT WITH A CONFUSED LOOK! YOU DON'T GRASP THE FACT THAT WHAT IS MOST ALIVE OF ALL IS INSIDE YOUR OWN HOUSE... YOU HAVE NOT BEEN TOLD. The secret has been hidden from you. Nobody has told you to go in; nobody has given you any chance to be in. Parents are not telling their children, "Sometimes just be. Don't do anything. Just sit silently under a tree, search in, ask 'Who am I?"' No school, no college, no university, is telling you to meditate. In fact, they think meditation has nothing to do with education. The government of India has written a letter. They don't recognize this commune as educational. Why? "Because what does meditation have to do with education?" And I say to them, "If meditation has nothing to do with education, then what else can become the foundation of a true education? What else?" But I know: some stupid fool in some office must have written that. He is not aware of what meditation is. Meditation simply means to be with yourself in your absolute aloneness, so that you can have a taste of your own being. To be with yourself is meditation. In my philosophy of life, only two things are valuable: one is meditation, the other is love. And both are complementary. Meditation means the joy of being alone, and love means the joy of being together with somebody. These are the two wings of a true education. Meditation means independence, freedom -- freedom from all, even from the beloved, because even the presence of the beloved encroaches on your space. It is good for the time being, it is good to overlap your space with somebody, it is good to meet and merge, but ultimately, AND fundamentally, you are alone. And you have to learn how to be alone, and not only how to be alone, but joyously alone, ecstatically alone. Meditation means sitting silently, doing nothing... just being! The world is too full of doing. The society teaches you to do this, to do that -- why? Because if you do this, you will have that; if you don't do this, you will not have that. Doing is a way of having more, and we are conditioned to have more and more and more -- as if by having more we will really be satisfied, contented; as if by having more we will really become rich. The truth is just the opposite: the more you have, the more you feel your inner poverty -- in contrast. The richer you become in the outside world, the emptier you feel inside, and no outer richness can fill the inner gap. Nothing from the outside can be taken in. You can have as much wealth as possible, but it will go on piling up outside you; and the bigger the heap, the more you will see your inner emptiness, nothingness, hollowness -- the more miserable you will become. Hence, the richer a society gets, the more and more it becomes interested in religion. Poor societies cannot be religious; it is almost impossible. I am not saying a poor person cannot be religious -- a poor person CAN be -- but a poor society cannot be. A poor person may be an exception: Kabir was a poor man -- and attained to the highest peak possible, became a Buddha. But the poor society as such cannot be religious. The poor society remains interested in having more and more, and if you want to have more you will have to do more. You will have to put your whole energy into doing -- and meditation is just the opposite of doing. Meditation is a state of non-doing, it is a state of utter passiveness. It is a state of being: one simply IS... and ENJOYING that simple isness. And then something starts happening inside -- without any doing on your part. SITTING SILENTLY, DOING NOTHING, THE SPRING COMES, AND THE GRASS GROWS BY ITSELF.... Something starts growing in you. One thing, the most important thing in life, is meditation. No education can be called real education. Even the word 'education' simply means to draw out that which is within you. This commune is educational, because our effort is to draw out whatsoever is in you. And your so-called universities are NOT educational; they don't fulfill the requirement of being educational. They stuff people from the outside; they don't draw out, they force in. Even literally they are not educational. The whole effort in the so-called educational institutions is to stuff people with more and more knowledge, because knowledge will help them to do more and do more efficiently, and if they can do things more efficiently, they will have more things. This is what you call education? This is not real education. Real education will teach a person the most fundamental truth: "I am alone. I come alone, I will go alone. And between coming and going, I can deceive myself that I am not alone, but that is only a deception. Intrinsically I remain alone. Aloneness is my intrinsic nature, so I have to fall in tune with it, I have to dive deep into it. I have to know exactly what it is -- what is this aloneness?" And it is tremendously beautiful, it is incredibly beautiful, unbelievably beautiful. When you enter into your aloneness, you start becoming aware of God, you start becoming aware of your treasures hidden within you. You start becoming aware of the kingdom of God that is within you. Kabir says: YOU DON'T GRASP THE FACT THAT WHAT IS MOST ALIVE OF ALL IS INSIDE YOUR OWN HOUSE... But nobody teaches you. The whole teaching is: "Go out! Search for money, for power, for prestige" -- and they are not found within. Peace is found within, silence is found within, stillness is found within, godliness is found within. But those are not the goals that you have been taught to fulfill; those are not your targets. It is said of a great Sufi mystic, Bayazid: One day, some people came to Sheikh Bayazid's door and knocked. He opened his upstairs window and looked out saying, "What do you want?" "Oh," they said, "we are looking for Bayazid." He said, "Well, I have been looking for Bayazid for ten years now, and I have not found him yet!" and closed the window.
And the other most important thing is love. Love means trying to find oneself reflected in the other. Love is a mirror. Meditation is a search without a mirror; love is nothing but seeing yourself in the eyes of the other you love, reflected in his being, and a way of enjoying the togetherness. We ARE alone, but we are not alone in the sense that we exist alone. We are alone, but there are other people around us -- who are ALSO alone! We exist with many people who are alone. Bridges have to be made. Love is the meeting of two alonenesses. One aloneness is immensely beautiful -- what to say about when two alonenesses meet and merge? A great flowering happens, life becomes more mysterious, more joyous. And then one learns the rhythm: sometimes be alone, enjoy yourself; sometimes be together, enjoy love, friendship. When tired of togetherness, escape into yom innermost being; when tired of your aloneness, escape into the being of the other. It is like walking on a tightrope: sometimes you lean towards the left, and then you know that if you lean any more you will fall, so you start leaning towards the right. Then again a point comes when you know that if you lean more towards the right you will fall, and you start leaning towards the left. That balance, the balance of the tightrope-walker, is the balance that gives richness to man. Walk between love and meditation, balancing each other. Become rich with meditation and love. But, remember, the first thing is meditation. If you don't know who you are, you will not be able to love either. If you don't know inner blissfulness you will not be able to share it with anybody else either. But people don't go in; they are running hither and thither -- they are running everywhere except inwards. And all this running is nothing but dreaming, desiring. Just watch your mind! What does your mind go on doing? In the night it dreams, in the day it dreams... it goes on running and running. It moves in circles, but those circles are all dreams. The truth is yom consciousness, not your mind. Your mind is created by the society: your consciousness comes from God. Move to the consciousness; change the gestalt. Your emphasis has to be changed -- that's what it means to be religious. That's what conversion is: changing your attention from the mind to consciousness. Mind is a social by-product -- the Hindu mind, the Christian mind, the communist mind, the Catholic mind -- these are social by-products. The society has put ideas in yom head: that is your mind. Shift your consciousness, your attention, to that which is God-created; otherwise you will live in dreams. And dreams cannot fulfill. Dreams are dreams -- they are not really there....
Morris exclaims that he too is in a similar shape for basically the same reason. It seems that every night he dreams that the door on the left side of his bedroom opens and in walks Sophia Loren. She strips stark naked and walks into the room and climbs into his bed. At the moment he turns on his left side, the door on the right side of the bedroom opens, and in comes Raquel Welch -- equally as naked -- she climbs into the other side of the bed. He turns to be with Raquel and Sophia taps his shoulder. He turns to her and there is Raquel touching him. All night long he is turning from one side to the other. He is a wreck when he wakes up. Saul immediately says, "For Christ's sake, why didn't you phone me? That's what friends are for. I would gladly come over and help you any night." Morris answers, "I did phone you several times -- but each time I called I was told you had just caught the train for Haifa." The mind goes on dreaming.... The mind keeps you un-aware of who you are, so many dreams that the truth is lost. In the rubbish of your dreams the diamond of your being is covered. Kabir says: YOU DON'T GRASP THE FACT THAT WHAT IS MOST ALIVE OF ALL IS INSIDE YOUR OWN HOUSE; AND SO YOU WALK FROM ONE HOLY CITY TO THE NEXT WITH A CONFUSED LOOK! YOU CAN SEE -- all faces look confused. It is very rare to find a face which does not look confused, which has a transparency to it, a clarity. And whenever a face has clarity, transparency, the face has beauty -- a beauty that is not of the physical body only, a beauty that is something from the beyond, a beauty that wells up from within. But look at people's faces -- just confused, split, schizophrenic. That's what their being is: their faces are only reflecting their being. Faces are mirrors. One part of yom being wants to go to the north, another part wants to go to the south, and another part to the east and another still to the west... and you are torn apart. Your faces show that -- a confused look. You don't know who you are, where you are, why you are. Everything seems to be just accidental. You feel like a driftwood with no direction, with no sense of direction even. Where are you going? Why are you? For what? The question mark is there on every face, and the reason? Kabir is right -- the reason is you have not looked at the deepest core of your being, where there is a space, a center of the cyclone, a space which is indivisible. In fact, that space known makes you an individual. 'Individual' means indivisible -- one who is not falling in parts, one who is one piece. And that center is there in everybody's being, but you never go there. And even if sometimes the desire to search within arises, you again start searching outside. Somebody goes to Kaaba, because a great desire has arisen in him to know who he is. Why are you going to Kaaba? Somebody goes to Kashi, somebody to Mathura, somebody to Tibet... and people go on. But still the search remains somewhere outside. Even if the right question arises, you move in wrong directions. If you really want to know who you are, you need not ask anybody else. Nobody can answer it. And even if somebody answers, that answer will not become your answer. That will become at the most information, but not knowing; and information is futile because you will interpret the information according to your own mind. You will read the Gita, you will read the Koran, you will listen to great teachers, but you will understand according to your own mind. You will translate everything according to yourself, according to your level of being. And then all gets lost. Not only will the information be of no help to you, it will create more confusion in you. The more learned a person is, the more confused he is. If you read the Vedas and the Koran and the Bible and the Dhammapada, you will become more and more confused, because each Buddha says, in his own way, the same truth, but it is said in millions of ways. But you will not be able to understand the truth, because you don't know what the truth is. The real process is first to know within and then go into the Vedas and the Gita and the Koran, and they will all become witnesses to your experience, they will authenticate your experience. They will witness that you are right, and you will witness that they are right. Otherwise, all reading, studying, is going to create more and more confusion, because who is going to interpret it? "Listen," the man said to his friend Albert, "I have got this female gorilla that I bought a while back. It cost me a lot of money. The problem is that I can't find any male gorilla to mate with it. I was wondering if you would mate with my gorilla for a hundred dollars." "Hmmm, let me think this over," replied Albert. The next day Albert went over to his friend's house and said, "I will do it, only under three conditions." "What are the conditions?" asked the friend. "One is that there is no hugging and kissing, and no foreplay. Two is that all the children are to be raised Catholic. Three is that you give me at least two weeks to come up with the hundred dollars."
That can happen within you. You need not go anywhere. KABIR WILL TELL YOU THE TRUTH: GO WHEREVER YOU LIKE, TO CALCUTTA OR TIBET; IF YOU CAN'T FIND WHERE YOUR SOUL IS HIDDEN, FOR YOU THE WORLD WILL NEVER BE REAL! If you live in dreams, your world will remain nothing but dreams, your world will remain unreal. In the East, the Buddhas have always called the world MAYA -- illusion, a magic show; nothing real, nothing substantial in it. They don't mean that these trees around the Buddha Hall are unreal; they don't mean that you can pass through the wall because the wall is unreal; they don't mean that whether you eat stones or bread, it doesn't matter because both are unreal. What they mean is totally different. They don't mean that this world is unreal -- they simply mean that unless you drop all your dreams you will be creating a world of your own, you will be projecting a world of your own. The real world will function only as a screen and you will project your dreams on it. You will never see the real world. The real world is God, but you will go on projecting your own dreams, and you will live in maya, in illusion. Mind is illusion, not the world. Let me emphasize it, because it has become a great misunderstanding around the world that the East teaches that the world is illusory -- that is a misunderstanding. The East teaches that the MIND IS illusory, and the world created by the mind is bound to be illusory -- because only an illusion can come out of another illusion. The true world -- that which is -- is not illusory. But you have not known it yet; you have no inkling of it. You can know it only when you drop all dreaming.
"Have no fear," said Kotzker. "They are not real women, nor are their stones real. They are mere phantoms." Rabbi Hirsh was silent for a moment, then asked, "Might we not be phantoms too?" "No," came Kotzker's answer, "as long as we have at some time had a genuine urge to repent." The word 'repent' has to be understood; it has been mis-understood down the ages. 'Repent' is repeated again and again by Jesus; he says again and again, "Repent! Repent! because the end of the world is close by." From the Greek, when Jesus statements were translated into English, a great misfortune happened -- to many words. This word 'repent' is one that has suffered the most. It is a translation of a Greek word 'metanoia'; 'metanoia' means turning in, 'metanoia' means meditation. 'Repent' also means return -- return to the source. It has nothing to do with the idea of repentance that you have been taught in your churches, that your priests have been telling you. 'Repent' has nothing to do with repentance. 'Repent' means: Turn in! Return back! Come to the source of your being! Come to the very core of your being! And Rabbi Kotzker's answer is immensely beautiful, of great value. He says, "No -- as long as we have at some time had a genuine urge to repent." If we have even a genuine urge to meditate, for metanoia, for turning back in, then we are real. But we are real only IN meditation; otherwise we are also unreal. Because in meditation dreaming stops -- that's what meditation is all about: stopping of the dreaming mind. No dreams, no thoughts -- a total silence. Nothing stirs. Absolute stillness. Not even a ripple. No content. Pure consciousness. Just the mirror... in that mirroring, you are real and whatso-ever you see is real. In fact, the seer and the seen are no more two: in that tremendous moment, the observer is the observed, the seer is the seen, the knower is the known. The distinction between the subject and the object disappears. That's what is called 'God-realization'. KABIR WILL TELL YOU THE TRUTH: GO WHEREVER YOU LIKE, TO CALCUTTA OR TIBET; IF YOU CAN'T FIND WHERE YOUR SOUL IS HIDDEN, FOR YOU THE WORLD WILL NEVER BE REAL! Go in! Turn in! Find out who you are! And you have started moving towards God. Moving towards one's own being moving towards God. I DON'T KNOW WHAT SORT OF A GOD WE HAVE BEEN TALKING ABOUT. KABIR SAYS: "People go on talking about God, but I DON'T KNOW WHAT SORT OF A GOD WE HAVE BEEN TALKING ABOUT" -- because if you have not known yourself, all talk about God is just rot, meaningless. It is nonsense. THE CALLER CALLS IN A LOUD VOICE TO THE HOLY ONE AT DUSK. In the Mohammedan mosque: THE CALLER CALLS IN A LOUD VOICE TO THE HOLY ONE AT DUSK. WHY? SURELY THE HOLY ONE IS NOT DEAD. We have created our own gods -- rather than looking at the reality we have imagined our own gods, we have dreamed our own gods. And we have made our own rituals. Now, calling loudly to the God simply means your God is deaf. In fact, no word is needed between you and your God -- loud or not loud -- no word is needed between you and your God, because God understands only one language. It is not German, it is not English, it is not Hindi, it is not Sanskrit, it is not Arabic, it is not Greek. God understands only one language: the language of silence. WHY? SURELY THE HOLY ONE IS NOT DEAF. HE HEARS THE DELICATE ANKLETS THAT RING ON THE FEET OF AN INSECT AS IT WALKS.
Prayer is a silent heart full of gratitude. GO OVER AND OVER YOUR BEADS, PAINT WEIRD DESIGNS ON YOUR FOREHEAD, WEAR YOUR HAIR MATTED, LONG, AND OSTENTATIOUS, BUT WHEN DEEP INSIDE YOU THERE IS A LOADED GUN, HOW CAN YOU HAVE GOD?
This is very strange! Prayer is on the lips, and a loaded gun in the heart. Unless your inner violence disappears, you cannot be prayerful. And why is there inner violence? Because there is competition: everybody is trying to outdo others; everybody is trying to go ahead of others. That's what you have been taught: to be ambitious. Ambition is the root cause of all violence, and ALL your education is that of ambition: "Be the first! Attain to the gold medal!" And then your whole life you are trying to be the first, to become the prime minister or the president. We teach people ambition, competition. And when you are ambitious, how can you be prayerful? And when you are ambitious, how can you turn in? Ambition has to be fulfilled there, outside -- in New Delhi, in Washington, in Moscow -- somewhere there.... These are the new holy places. The ambitious person cannot turn in; it is impossible. The competitive person cannot turn in; he is always looking at the other, he is always at war. How can he be loving? How can he be meditative? Kabir is right. He says, "You go on talking about God, great theology is created, great philosophical argument continues -- and in the heart a loaded gun?" The real question is a transformation in the heart. But up to now that has not happened. A very proper old lady bought a parakeet which was guaranteed to be able to speak, but all she could say was, "I am a whore, I am a whore!" very enthusiastically, while flapping her wings. The very proper woman complained to her minister, who told her of a couple in his congregation who owned two male parakeets who behaved very properly and could perhaps influence the woman's parakeet. The minister borrowed the couple's male parakeets and lent them to the woman. She put them in the cage and they settled together on a perch opposite that of the woman's parakeet. Very soon they lowered their heads and engaged in a beautiful, low-voiced prayer. The female parakeet flapped her wings and sang, "I am a whore, I am a whore!" |