The Perfect Master, Vol 1 Talks on Sufi Stories

A Sufi Master is drunk, soft, a shower of love. You will find with a Zen Master great compassion, but not love. Compassion because of his awareness, because of his enlightenment. But the Sufi is full of love. His God is love. For the Zen Master there is no God -- there is only utter nothingness. For the Sufi there is nothing else but God -- he breathes God, he eats God, he drinks God, he lives in God like a fish lives in the ocean. How can remain undrunk? You can see in the way he walks, the way sits, that he is completely drunk.

It is not accidental that wine became one of the most significant metaphors of Sufism. Oman Khayyam is a Sufi Master -- totally misunderstood by the West, because the translators, particularly Fitzgerald, took every word of Omar Khayyam literally. And they are metaphors! they are not literal. When Omar Khayyam talks about 'the woman' he is talking about the God, because Sufis think of God AS woman, not as man.

Hindus also think of God as woman sometimes, but always as 'the Mother'. Sufis think of the woman as the beloved. When the woman is your mother, the relationship is of respect, not really of love. When the woman is your mother, you are full of reverence, but not full of love. When the woman is your beloved, it is a totally different relationship. Sufis are the only people on the earth who have been daring enough to call God 'the Beloved'.

And when Sufis talk about wine, they are talking of the love of God that flows into you if you allow, if you are ready to receive the gift. If you are in a let-go, it comes -- it comes absolutely, it comes certainly. If it is not coming, that only shows that your doors are closed.

One learns, living with a Master, how to open one's doors. It is not a question of learning knowledge: it is a question of learning a different kind of being -- an open being, not a closed being.
A WANDERING SEEKER SAW A DERVISH IN A REST-HOUSE...
This word 'rest-house' is also significant, because one who is drunk with God is at home, he is at rest. He knows what rest is; nobody else knows.

In I905, Albert Einstein declared that there is no absolute rest, and since then there has been none. Albert Einstein is right: as far as the outer world is concerned, there is no absolute rest. Things are always moving, even things which seem to be static are moving. Even the wall of your house is in a constant turmoil, in a chaos. All is change! Nothing abides and remains the same, not even the Himalayas. They are also changing, continuously changing. Maybe our lives are very short and we cannot see the change. Scientists say: If we can condense the whole history of the Himalayas into twenty-four hours, then you will see the Himalayas are nothing but like changing waves in the ocean. The change is slow compared to our life span, but the change is there. There was a time when the Himalayas didn't exist.

You may be surprised to know that the Himalayas are the youngest mountains in the world, adolescent, and still growing, still becoming higher every year -- by inches only, but change is continuous.

Either a thing goes on growing upwards or it starts falling downwards, but change is the only thing that never changes. And Albert Einstein is true about the outside world, but he does not know anything about the inner. If he had known anything of the inner, he could not have said this, that there is no absolute rest -- there IS!

It is not there outside: it is in the heart, in the deepest core of your being. I KNOW it! I am in it. You can also know it. And the man is only fulfilled when he comes to know about the absolute rest in himself. Call it soul, call it God, call it Nirvana, or what you will, but there is a point, at the deepest, at the ultimate core of your being -- that point is the center of the cyclone. There is rest.

These Sufi stories are metaphorical. The dervish is at the rest house and the seeker is a wandering seeker. The seeker is searching, the dervish has arrived. He is a SIDDHA -- he has arrived. There is nowhere to go. He has come home! He is at home.

He creates a situation. In that situation, something that was not functioning before in you starts functioning, that's all. But he does not give you anything. He is a catalytic agent. He gives you only that which you had already, and from the very beginning, but you had become unaware of it, you had forgotten about it. He reminds you. He provokes something in you which is asleep. He digs a well in you -- but the water is yours! He breaks, blasts, rocks within you, but that which comes welling up is yours, authentically yours. He gives you your own being.

The seeker said to the dervish:
"I HAVE BEEN IN A HUNDRED CLIMES AND HEARD THE TEACHINGS OF A MULTITUDE OF MENTORS."
He has been moving from one door to another, he has been like a beggar with a begging bowl, asking for truth, searching for truth. He has learnt much. He knows many doctrines, scriptures. He has become very very efficient in philosophizing. He says:
"I HEARD THE TEACHINGS OF A MULTITUDE OF MENTORS. I HAVE LEARNT HOW TO DECIDE WHEN A TEACHER IS NOT A SPIRITUAL MAN."
And all that he has learnt is doubt. All that he has learnt is a negative kind of mentality. All that he has learnt is worthless as far as Sufism is concerned. He has learnt how to know that a certain man is not a really spiritual man. He has learnt to detect the illness. He has learnt criticism. He has become critical.

That's what happens to a knowledgeable man: he becomes critical. And that is NOT the way to reach God. One has to become loving. To be critical is basically rooted in hatred, in antagonism. To be critical is part of your destructiveness.

Now, this man has moved, wandered, listened, learnt many things, and the total result is that he has only become capable of deciding when a certain Master is NOT really spiritual. What kind of richness is this? How are you going to be enriched by it? But this is what happens.

Unless you live with a Master long enough, you will learn the negative. The negative is on the surface. The positive is at the core. The negative can be on the surface because it has no value. The positive is a treasure. If you go to a Master and only listen to what he says and not to what he is, you will not know the positivity of it.

That's what happened to this man. This calamity happens to
"I HAVE BEEN IN A HUNDRED CLIMES AND HEARD THE TEACHINGS OF A MULTITUDE OF MENTORS. I HAVE LEARNT HOW TO DECIDE WHEN A TEACHER IS NOT A SPIRITUAL MAN. I CANNOT TELL A GENUINE GUIDE, OR HOW TO FIND ONE, BUT HAT THE WORK COMPLETED IS BETTER THAN NOTHING."
He is consoling himself. There is a famous statement of Friedrich Nietzsche. He was a madman, but sometimes mad people say beautiful things: sometimes they have glimpses of truth. He says: It is better not to know at all than to know in a half-hearted way -- better to know not at all than to know m part. Better to know not at all than half know. Why? The ordinary logic will say: It is better to know at least something than not to know at all. That is not so.

To know the useless will create great sadness in you, hopelessness in you, meaninglessness in you. To know the negative will dry you of all life and life's juices. You will start freezing. You will become cold. You will become unloving. You will start losing all hope. You will be in despair, in anguish. And that's what has happened to many people.

For example, Sigmund Freud -- he knew only the negative. He knew what is wrong with the mind of man, but he was never aware about anything that can be right. He depended on the negative side. He became very very expert on all kinds of illnesses of the mind -- abnormalities, perversions, diseases, neuroses, psychoses, and all that. But he completely forgot that there have been Buddhas too. In fact, slowly slowly, the more he became accustomed to the abnormal, the perverted, the ill, the unhealthy, the more he started suspecting whether Buddhas can even exist. He started suspecting Jesus. Not only that: psychoanalysts have written books, treatises, proving that Jesus is neurotic. They have not worked so hard on Buddha, but if they work, the same will be the case with Buddha. Maybe they will use some other word for him -- 'repressed'. If they think about Ramakrishna, they will say 'hysterical'. And the same they will say about Mohammed -- 'neurotic', 'crazy'.

Why is Jesus neurotic? Because he talks with God. He is neurotic because he hears voices in the sky. He is neurotic because he feels something which we cannot see, only he can see. We cannot trust him, because whatsoever HE feels, he cannot prove objectively. He must be mad.

Just think of the implications of what Freud is saying. Health is impossible, health is suspect. A healthy, whole, holy man is suspect. Not only suspect -- condemned. Then what is left? Then the whole of humanity has to live in despair, without hope.

And that's what Freud says, that there is no hope for man, that at the most man can endure but cannot enjoy. In fact, he himself never enjoyed -- he endured life. He himself was neurotic in many ways. He was very much afraid of death; he had many phobias. He was a very angry person, so much so that when he would get into a rage he would fall on the floor in a swoon. He was SO afraid of death that even a mention of death was enough to make him tremble. And he was so ambitious and so political that he was continuously afraid of others conspiring against him. He was a paranoid. He destroyed many of his disciples because of suspicion, because he was not able to tolerate anybody coming closer to him -- closer in the sense of intelligence, understanding. He wanted only slaves. And whenever there was an intelligent disciple -- and there were people like Jung, Adler and others -- the only way for them was to escape from the master. His presence was not nourishing but poisoning. And this man goes on giving judgments on Buddha and Lao Tzu and Zarathustra and Jesus and Mohammed. And these are the few people who were really healthy.

Just think of one thing: if illness exists, that is proof enough that health is also possible -- at least possible. If darkness is there, light is possible. And if death is there, life is possible. In fact, how can death be if there is no life? How will you decide that somebody is ill if there is no health? If there is no Buddha in the world, how will you decide who is mad? Then everybody is mad! Maybe DIFFERENT kinds of madness, but everybody is mad.

Freud became very skillful about the negative, an expert about illness and disease. Naturally, his experience was such that he had to deny -- he never came across a Buddha. That is not the way you come across a Buddha. Buddha will not come to Freud for psychoanalysis. For forty years he was only analyzing ill people suffering from a thousand and one kinds of mind projections, phobias. Naturally, forty years watching, listening to people's dreams and phobias and fears and split people and schizophrenic and hysterical -- naturally, after forty years if he decides that "I have never seen a single healthy person" in a way it is right. He HAS never seen a single healthy person. And forty years is enough time: he has watched thousands of people. But he has forgotten one thing: that a Buddha is not going to come and lie down on his couch and talk about his dreams, because in fact he has no dreams!

It happened once:
A man was brought to me who is a well-known psychic. His capacity to read people's thoughts is immense. Just sitting in front of you for a few moments, he will become silent and concentrate and he will start saying what thoughts are moving in your mind.

Somebody brought him to me and he wanted to read my mind. I said, "Okay, you read." Half an hour passed and then he opened his eyes and he said, "But there is nothing! -- what can I do?" "You read nothing...?"

For what will Buddha go to Vienna? There seems to be no reason. In fact, sooner or later, one day Freud will have to come to a Buddha. You will find many psychoanalysts here. They HAVE to come -- because they are losing ALL perspective.

Listening to people's miseries day in, day out, they are losing all hope. A Buddha can give them hope again. A Buddha can help them to be ecstatic again. They have lived with agony too much. Do you know that psychoanalysts commit suicide more than any other profession, almost double? And psychoanalysts go mad more than any other profession, almost double. This should not be so! A psychoanalyst should not commit suicide and should not go mad. But they go mad more and they commit suicide more.
But I understand. I have all compassion for them. Their whole life's work is such -- agony and agony and agony -- seeing people's wounds in the soul and the pus oozing day in, day out, they live in a kind of hell.

I have heard:

He said, "I am a psychoanalyst. I have to get accustomed slowly slowly. Heaven will be too much right now. I will not be able to BELIEVE in it. First let me live in hell for a few days, let me get accustomed to better things."

But it happens if you go on collecting knowledge WITHOUT becoming more and more rooted in the being, you will become despair itself, you will be anguish itself.

The man said:
"I HAVE I LEARNT HOW TO DECIDE WHEN A TEACHER IS NOT A SPIRITUAL MAN. I CANNOT TELL A GENUINE GUIDE, OR HOW TO FIND ONE, BUT HALF THE WORK COMPLETED IS BETTER THAN NOTHING.'
That is not so. Just to become skillful in the negative, skillful in doubting, skillful about the wrong side of things, skillful and expert about thorns, is not going to help in any way to know about flowers. You can know as much as you want about thorns, but that will not help you to know anything about the flowers. In fact, if you know too much you will start disbelieving flowers. Even if they bloom, you will think they are imaginary. That's what Freud says: Buddha is imagining that he has attained -- because there is no attainment! Krishna is imagining that he has arrived, and Jesus is just hallucinating, talking to God and angels.

I can understand why it happens. And if you also understand, it will help you tremendously.

"Why don't you have them stretched?" suggested Lulu.

"Nothin' do in'," replied the rancher. "These boots are too tight and that's the way they're going to stay. Every morning I gotta get up and round up all the cattle that busted out during the night, and mend the fences they tear down, and watch my ranch blowing away in the dust, and then spend the evening listening to my wife nag me about moving to the city. When I get ready for bed and pull these tight boots off, that's the only real pleasure I get all day."
The negative person becomes enclosed in a prison, and the only pleasure he gets sometimes is to forget all about it. He goes and drinks too much -- and the boots are off, those tight boots. Or in sex -- somewhere where he can lose himself and his tightness. That is his only pleasure in life: whenever he can forget himself.

Now, this is stupid, because there are ways you can forget yourself for ever. Sufism is one of the ways -- you can drown yourself for ever. There is no need to search for drugs. Sufism gives you the ultimate drug: God himself. Once the ego is gone for ever, there is no pain, no agony, no suffering, no hell.

That was his only speciality, but of great significance, because deep sleep is very close to samadhi, just the threshold of samadhi. That has been my speciality too.

It was almost a problem in my college in university -- because I would fall asleep. My teachers were very angry, because who wants somebody falling asleep? And I was a student of philosophy, and there were not many people because very few people go to study philosophy. In my MA class we were only three students, Sol would be sleeping just in front of the teacher. And he would come and shake me up.

Sometimes it would happen that I would be the only person, the other two had not come. And just looking at me he would say, "Finished! You go home. And I will go home, I can sleep myself. What is the point?"

Deep sleep is the threshold. That's why this incident was possible. Somebody died; Ramana was only seventeen and he thought, "What is death? Let me experience it." He threw his clothes, simulated death, fell on the floor. He had seen the relative lying on the floor; so just the same way he fell on the floor, closed his eyes, and started thinking, "I am dying, I am dying, I am dying."

And he died! The ego disappeared. And here the ego disappeared and there God appeared -- the primal awareness. And when he opened his eyes he was no more the same person. He left the home, immediately, without saying anything to anybody. It was not a renunciation. He simply left the home because there was no point. It was not that he was against the world or anything. There was no point any more. He went out and NEVER came back. The mother searched for him for years; finally, after ten years, she found him in Arunachal in a mountain cave. But he was a totally different man. And the mother asked him, "Why didn't you inform me?"

And he said, "But the thought never came to me. In fact, thoughts have stopped coming to me. I sit and sit and days pass, and there are no thoughts coming. Good that you have come! Live with me.... "
This primal awareness is God, thoughtless awareness is God. This is the wine Sufis talk about, and once you have drunk of this wine, nothing else is needed for you to forget yourself -- because you are no more, there is no need to forget.
THE DERVISH RENT HIS GARMENTS AND SAID, "MISERABLE MAN! BECOMING AN EXPERT ON THE USELESS IS LIKE BEING ABLE TO DETECT ROTTEN APPLES WITHOUT LEARNING THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SOUND ONES."
RENDING THE GARMENTS is a Sufi expression. In fact, Sufis do that. They are so passionately in love with humanity that when they see that you are trapped in a kind of misery unnecessarily they become so concerned, they become so anxious for you, yes, they rend their garments.
THE DERVISH RENT HIS GARMENTS AND SAID, "MISERABLE MAN!"
And this is how misery is created. It is doubt, it is negativity, that creates misery. It is entrust that creates misery. The root cause of all misery is there.
"BECOMING AN EXPERT ON THE USELESS IS LIKE BEING ABLE TO DETECT ROTTEN APPLES WITHOUT LEARNING THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SOUND ONES."
Just the other night I was reading about a philosopher. He writes:
"I used to wonder why a rotten apple placed in a barrel of sound apples would make the sound apples rotten, while a sound apple placed in a barrel of rotten apples would NOT make all the rotten apples sound. I also wondered why a man infected with smallpox, when turned loose in a gathering of sound people, would by his mere presence make many of the sound people sick, while a sound man walking through a hospital of sick people would not by his mere presence make the sick people well.

In other words, I wondered why God, if he were a good God, had made a universe in which soundness and health seemed futile, and rottenness and sickness seemed contagious.

But one day I stopped wondering and examined the so-called sound apple, and I found it was NOT sound. Oh, I knew the grocer would contradict me, he would see no defect. He might even sue me for slander if I persisted in spreading the report that he was selling apples that were not perfect. But if he pressed me for proof, I could prove it. I would ask him to look beyond the apple to the stem. There, in the most vital, the most crucial spot of all, he would find the mortal wound that I refer to. He would find that the apple had been torn away from its parent vine, it had been hopelessly separated from its source of life.

When I discovered this, I learnt one of the truest facts of life: that nothing, whether it be fruit or vegetable or man, when separated from its source of life is sound!"

That's why the whole of humanity is ill. And Freud and company are right about ninety-nine point nine percent of people: people are ill! They are no more connected with the source of life. But that point one percent is the hope. There are people who are connected with life.

And I would like to say to this philosopher: there are people whose health is contagious. When a Buddha moves, his very movement heals people.

That is the meaning of the miracles of Jesus -- the miracles that he heals blind people and suddenly eyes are there, and he heals the deaf and dumb and they start listening and tallying, and he heals the crippled and they are no more crippled. These are payables. It is not about the physical crippledness: it is something about the spiritual crippledness. And whenever a man of God moves, or people who are fortunate come and live in the company of a man of God, they ARE healed, spiritually healed. Their spiritual wounds start disappearing, they again start growing roots. And soon the roots find the sources of life, the waters of life, and all is green again, and all is blooming again. And the spring has come, and the celebration.