MEMORY. …………
We have been using our memory a lot. I maintain ( you may question this; and the experts in the field of brain psychology may question it ; but one of these days they will have to accept what I am trying to say) that the brain plays a very minor role in the functioning of the body. It is not a creator at all. It is just a reactor. What this memory is we really don’t know yet. One of these days the experts who are dealing with this problem of memory will have to come out with answers to questions like what these neurons are. I maintain that memory is not located in any particular area of the body. Every cell in our body is involved. And my feeling is that we have come to a point in the history of mankind where we have to confront the problem of people who have lost their memories. We have put our memory and our brain to such use for which they are not intended. This is one of the reasons why we find that Alzheimer’s disease, or whatever you want to call it, is on the increase. One in two of those in the eighty- year- old bracket are affected by it. There are six hundred thousand people are already affected by this problem.
WHAT IS LANGUAGE
The problem is really with the language. We can manage with three hundred basic words. Even less. Children can express all emotions. If they can’t use words, they are still able to express their emotions so beautifully, in simple ways. Their whole bodies express their joy, each in a different way. But we are proud of the words we use because for us they are instruments of power. For us knowledge is power. ” I know, and you don’t know” . That gives you power. There is no such thing as knowledge for knowledge’s sake. It is good to write an essay on knowledge for knowledge’s sake or art for the sake of art. Is their beauty ? What is beauty ? Only when it is framed, you call it beauty. It is thought that has framed something, the nature of which we really don’t know . To use your word, there is no way of comprehending. We don’t even know what is going on there. It is not a value judgement. Nice, horrible, detestable– we have plenty of these words. There is no need for a verb. It is the verb that creates a problem. For purpose of communication we have to rely upon words. But when I say” He is a nasty fellow ” , it is not a value judgement but a descriptive sentence. That is the way you describe or fit the actions of that individual into the framework of nastiness. I have to use that word, but it is not a value judgement in my case. Not that I am placing myself on a higher or superior level. ” what is the good man good for?”- I don’t know. Maybe for society a good man is a useful citizen, and for bad man a good man is good because he can exploit him. But as far as I am concerned what a good man is good for I wouldn’t know. The problem with language is, no matter how we try to express ourselves; we are caught up in the structure of words. There is no point in creating a new language, new lingo to express anything. There is nothing there to be expressed except to free yourself from the stranglehold of thought. And there is nothing that you can do to free yourself either through any volition of yours or through any effort of yours. And to understand anything we have to use the same instrument that is used to understand this mechanical computer that is there before me. It’s working can be understood through repeatedly trying to learn to operate it.you try again and again. If it doesn’t work, there is someone who can tell you how to operate it, take it apart and put it together. You yourself will learn through a repeteitive process – how to change this, improve this, modify this, and so on and so forth. This instrument (thought) which we have been using to understand, has not helped us to understand anything except that every time you are using it you are sharpening it. Someone asked me, ” what is philosophy ? How does it help me to live in this day -today existence ?” It doesn’t help you in anyway except that it sharpens the instrument of the intellect. It doesn’t in any way help you to understand life.
Whether you are interested in moksha, liberation, freedom, transformation, you name it, or you are interested in happiness without one moment of unhappiness, pleasure without pain, it’s the same thing . Whether one is here in India or in Russia or in America or anywhere, what people want is to have one (happiness) without the other (unhappiness). But there is no way you can have one without the other. This demand is not in the interest of the survival of this living organism. There is an extraordinarily alert, and alacritous quality to it (the organism). The body is rejecting all sensations. Sensations have a limited life; beyond a particular duration the body cannot take them. It is either throwing them out or absorbing them. Otherwise they destroy the body. The eyes are interested in seeing things but not as beauty; the ears hear things but not as music. The body does not reject a noise because it is the barking of a dog or braying of an ass. It just responds to the sound. If you call it a response to the sound, then we got into trouble. So you don’t even know that it is a sound. Anything that is harsh, anything that would destroy the sensitivity of the nervous system, the body cuts out. It is like a thermostat. To some extent the body has a way of saving itself from heat, cold, or anything that is inimical to it. It takes care of itself for a short period, and then thought helps you to take the next step to cover yourself, or to move yourself away from the dangerous situation you find yourself in , you will naturally move away from the cement mixer that is making a loud noise and is destroying the sensitivity of your nervous system. The fear that you would be destroyed because the sound is bad, or that will become a nervous wreck, and so on and so forth, is part of your paranoia. There is only reaction and you are reacting, if the reaction is not there, it is a different matter. Unfortunately, it seems to be there all the time. But response that I am talking about is something that cannot be experienced by you at all. If I say that the response to a stimulus is spontaneous and that is a pure action, then that action is no action at all in any ordinary sense of the word. It is one unitary movement. It (response) cannot be separated(from the stimulus). The moment you separate them (the stimulus and the response) and say that this is the response to that stimulus; you have brought the element of reaction into the picture already. Let us not fool ourselves that there is a spontaneous action, pure action, and all that kind of nonsense. Evolution implies the simple becoming complex. They say that the brain power of all the ants in an anthill is much more than the brain power of a human being. Whether that is there in the human body is the result of what has been passed on from one species to another. We use thought not only for our self – aggrandisement but we also use it to destroy, for no reason, other species of life around us . Physical fear is totally different from the fear of losing what you have, the fear of not getting what you want. You can call it physiological fear. So the simple becomes complex.we don’t even know if there is any such thing as evolution. We rule out spiritual evolution. Those who assumed that there is a such a thing as spirit or soul or center , or whatever you want to call it, say that it also goes through the evolutionary process and perfects itself. And for that you have to take one birth after another. I don’t know how many births there may be, 84 million or your God knows what the figure is.
We can survive . All the species have survived for millions of years, and we have evolved out of them. Without them probably we wouldn’t be here today. To know that you are happy, you are bored, that you are not free, that you are enlightened or not enlightened , that you cannot have pleasure all the time– the whole lot. Even the demand to know , “How did you stumble into this ?” Is the same . You want to know the cause. You want to know what I did and what I did not do. You see you are trying to establish a cause-and – effect relationship between the two. You do this for the simple reason that you want ‘that’ to happen to you. Your background is totally different from my background. Somebody was saying that my background, my life story is dramatic. But your background is equally dramatic. The impossibility of what is there to express itself is really the problem. What it is that is making it impossible.? What prevents the uniqueness, which is the end product of millions and millions of years(of evolution), to express itself? It(the mind) is just two thousand years old. It is too silly to think that it is going to succeed. It is not going to succeed. You don’t go about calling yourself unique. I don’t go around the world telling everyone that I am an unique man. No, not in that sense. But you are unique. The two uniques don’t even bother to compare how unique they are. I have to use that word uniqueness because it is really unique. Even two human bodies are not the same. Now they(scientists) have come to that conclusion. Unfortunately, all that understanding is the result of the research and experiments in crime laboratories to track down the culprits through their finger prints. Not only through prints, but they can track down a man from the smell, or a teeny-weeny bit of his hair. You saliva is different, your tissues are different, and your semen is different from everyone else’s. No two faces are the same. I have knowledge about botany. When you study the leaves under a microscope, you can see that no two leaves are the same. Our whole attempt, for idiotic reasons, to fit every individual into a common mould is not going to succeed. If we push it too hard, we will probably blow ourselves up. That is inevitable because we have in our possession tremendous instruments of destruction, for surpassing the capacity of the so-called mind to deal with them.
WHAT IS THE MEANING OF LIFE?
THERE ARE LOT OF WORDS.
We have a plethora of words. You know it is said that Shakespeare, that great playwright and poet, had a vocabulary of only four thousand words. I don’t know if that is true. But we have now many thousands of words. We come up with every kind of phrase to cover up this impossibility of trying to use words to understand the reality of things. That is where the real problem is. Thought has not succeeded so far in understanding reality, but that(thought) is all that we are left with. We cannot question thought. We cannot brush it aside. We know in a way that it cannot help us, but can only create problems. We are not ready to throw it out and find out if there is any other way, if there is any answer.
The word ‘Religion’ means ‘to connect you back to source ‘ . On the other hand, religion has created schisms. It has been responsible for tremendous destruction of life and property. It is very unfortunate. But, nevertheless, the fact does remain that religion has failed in its purpose. We live in the hope and die in hope that somehow the very same thing that has failed us will one day rescue us. You cannot conceive of the impossibility of creating a harmony between humans and the life around through thought. When all the systems have failed, when a void is created, there is the danger of a demand for the religious stuff stepping into it and trying to tell us, ” we have the answers to your problems “. But the revolutions have failed. I am not against any value system, but the demand to fit ourselves into it (a value system) is the cause of man’s suffering. It is only an assumption that we know about life. Nobody knows anything about life. We have only concepts, ideations, and mentations about life. Even the scientists who are trying to understand life and its origin come up with only with theories and definitions of life. You may not agree with me, but all thought, all thinking is dead. Thinking is born out of dead ideas. Thought or thinking mechanism trying to touch life, experience it, capture, and give expression to it are impossible tasks. What we are concerned about is living. Living is our relationship with our fellow beings, with the life around. When we have everything that we can reasonably ask for, all the material comforts that you have in the West, the question naturally arises; “is that all ? ” The moment you pose that question to yourself, we have created a problem. If that’s all there is, what then is the next step to take?. We do not see any meaning in our life, and so we pose this question to ourselves, and throw this question at all those who you think have the answers. What is the meaning of life?. What is the purpose of life?. It may have its own meaning, it may have its own purpose. By understanding the meaning of life and the purpose of life we are not going to improve, change, modify, or alter our behaviour patterns in any way. But there is a hope that by understanding the meaning of life, we can bring about a change
There may not be any meaning of life. If it has a meaning, it is already in operation there. Wanting to understand the meaning of life seems to be a futile attempt on our part. We go on asking these questions. We have been for centuries told what to do. Why are we asking the same question., “What to do?” What to do in relation to what? What I am emphasising is that the demand to bring about a change in ourselves is the cause of our suffering. I may say that there is nothing to be changed. But the revolutionary teachers come and tell us that there is something there in which you have to bring about a radical revolution. Then we assume there is such a thing as soul, spirit, or the ‘I’. What I assert all the time is that I haven’t found anything nor by anybody like the self or soul there.” There must be something more, and we have to do something to become part of the whole thing “. Such demands have arisen because of our assumption that we have been created for a grander purpose than that for which other species on this planet have been created. That’s the fundamental mistake we have made. Culture is responsible for our assuming this. We thus come to believe that the whole creation is for the benefit of man. The demand to use nature for our purposes has created all the ecological problems. It is not such an easy thing for us to deal with these problems. We have reached a point where there is no going back. The point is , we have probably arrived at a place where there is no going back. What is the fate of mankind and what is one to do? Anything that is born out of thought is destructive in its nature. That is why I very often say in my conversations that thought, in its birth, in its nature, in its expression, and in its action, is fascist. Thought is interested in protecting itself, and is always creating frontiers around itself. And it wants to protect the frontiers. That is why we create frontiers around us: our families, our nations, and then this planet.
The way the world is moving, there seems to be no hope. If the world or mankind has to free itself from the chaos of its own making, then man should come up with other ways. As I see it, the whole thing is heading in a direction where there is no way that we can stop or reverse it. As a matter of fact, I have been pleading that the world has to be saved from all the saviours of mankind. Individually there seems to be nothing that you can do to change, alter or reverse anything. And ‘ collectively ‘ means war. We have unfortunately placed the politicians in the seats of power. Political consciousness is all that we are left with. But the religious people are still trying to talk in terms of the divine, humanity, ancient culture, Ramarajya , this, that, and the other. Politicians also use these things for purpose of elections, and thus try to win people over to their side. But if we think in terms of something that is already dead, we don’t have any future to think of . Take the case of Gorbachev. Gorbachev is a traitor to the cause of communism. Millions of people died for the cause of communism, and when he looked towards West for the solutions to his problems proved horribly wrong. The answers have to be found within the framework of U. S. S . R.. The West is not in a condition to offer him anything except McDonald’s or organically grown potatoes or Pepsi Cola. Actually it is not our ideas of freedom or of humanity that have brought about a change there but it is Pepsi Cola. It has conquered Russia. And it is Coca Cola that has made a tremendous impact on China. What I am trying to say is that thought has a tremendous control over us. Thought in its birth, in its content, in its expression and in its action is fascist. It wants to control everything. And thought is not an instrument that will help us to solve the problems that we are facing today. We can only ask questions and find out if there are any answers individually. Collectively means, I have one idea, you have another idea, and there is going to be a battle between us.
Answering to questions like wanting to know ‘ to know’ ” why are we here” ” What will happen to us when we die” I say , go back to Gurus and they will give you some comforts to which you state that no, they all spin yarns which don’t make sense to rational human beings. But, don’t you think that wanting to know something is really the problem ? Wanting to know is what has created this identity of ours. I am not asking you to suppress it. What I am saying is that ‘ wanting to know ‘ may not be the answer. Wanting to know more and more is only strengthening and fortifying the very thing, which has not helped us to solve the problem individually or collectively. I am only asking that question. ‘Knowing ‘ is not something mysterious or mystical. It simply means to know that this is a chair, or I am happy or unhappy. We have to accept the reality of the world as it is imposed on us. Although it is questionable, this reality is functional in its value. That is the only way we can function sanely and intelligently. Then there is a question posed by Adi shankara. He asked himself, ” where did I come from ” in a very simple language. This question seems irrelavant because it does not in any way help us to understand the situation we find ourselves in , as the movement of thought is only interested in establishing a causal relationship. I dismiss the questions because the question is based on the assumption that there is a cause for everything. To me every event is an independent unit. We link up many events in our life and create a story or philosophical structure out of them, and say that every event in one’s life is not an accident but that some destiny may be shaping the events, shaping one’s life. I don’t think that is the way we are functuoning. This very demand to know either the cause of our own origins or the cause of the origin of the world is an idle demand, the answer for which, however interesting they may be , are of no importance in dealing with the problems of living.
THE BODY AND THE INTELLECT ARE SEPARATE. …………………
SEX HAS TO BE PUT IN IT’S PROPER PLACE
We are not honest, decorous and decent enough to admit that all relationships are built on the foundation of ‘ What do I get out of this relationship? ‘ It is nothing but mutual gratification. If that is absent no relationship is possible. You keep the relationship going for social reasons and for reasons of children, proprty and security. All this is part and parcel of the relationship business but when it fails and does not give us what we really want we superimpose on it what we call love. So it is just not possible to have any relationship on any basis except on the level of mutual gratification.
We always want to fill this emptiness, this void, with all kinds of relationships with people around us. That is really the problem. We have to use everything– an idea, a person, anything we can get hold of, to establish relationships with others. Without relationships we are lost, and we don’t see any meaning; we don’t see any purpose.
RELATIONSHIP IS DIVISION
DO YOU LISTTEN TO ANYBODY?
THE WORLD IS NO DIFFERENT AND NO NEED TO CHANGE. ……
WHAT IS ‘ NATURE ‘ IS THERE A PURPOSE TO IT ?
The whole thing that is there. The life forms around; the assemblage of life around this planet. You are not different from all that. You are saying that there is a purpose. I am not saying that there is a purpose. It may not have any purpose at all. The question implies that there must be some reason for all that. What I see is what is happening here and now. But you want to establish a cause-and-effect relationship between the two events. That is the way logical thinking functions in us. Logic is used by us to win an argument over somebody. That is also a destructive weapon; and when logic fails, there is violence. So to ask the question, ‘ where have we failed? Why have we taken this wrong turn? ‘ to me has no meaning. But an important question that we have to ask is something else: ” Are there any answers? Are there any solutions for our problems? ” The body does not want to learn anything or know anything, because it has that intelligence– native, innate intelligence– that helps you to survive. If this body is in a jungle, it will survive; if it doesn’t, it’s gone. But it will fight to the last. That’s the way the human body is functioning. If there is some danger to it , the body throws in everything that is available and tries to protect itself. If it cannot it gives in..But in a way the body has no death. The atoms in it are put together and what happens at death is a reshuffling of the atoms. They will be used somewhere else. So the body has no birth or death, because it has no way of experiencing that it is alive or that it will be dead tomorrow. You call this a table, and that you call a dead corpse: but actually there is life there. You see the decomposition that is taking place in the dead body is a form of life, of course that’s no consolation to the one who lost his near and dear. Please don’t get me wrong. When death has provided the basis for the continuity of life, how can you call it death? It’s a different matter that it is no consolation to me or to the one who has lost his near and dear one. But you can’t say that it (corpse) is dead. Now they are saying that the hair keeps growing, the nails keep growing, and brain waves continue for a long time even after the so-called clinical death. That is the reason why now they are trying to define death in the courts- there in France and other countries. They find it so difficult to define death. And now in the United States they have gone one step further. They keep the dead bodies in deep freeze so that one day medical science will come up with a cure for the disease that was responsible for the death of that body. Do you know what they will do? They are not going to leave their money to their children. The money will be blocked and it is going to create a tremendous economic stagnation of the movement of money. It’s very strange. They call that cryonics. It’s gaining ground there in the United States. Where do you draw the line between life and death ? The definition of death is eluding the legal profession; so far they are unable to define what death is. For all practical purposes we have to consider that it’s the same as clinical death. But in nature there is no birth and there is no death. Nothing is ever born, and nothing ever dies. So if that (idea) is applied to the body, which is not separate from the totality of life around, there is neither death nor birth for it.. I am not talking metaphysics. We don’t seem to understand the basic fact that we are not able to control these things at all. The more we try the more troubles we are creating. ..I may sound cynical, bu a cynic really a realist. I am not complimenting myself. I am talking if cynics in general. Cynicism will help you to have a healthy look at the way things are going on in the world . In this particular time frame, all events are independent, and there is no continuity among them. Each event is an independent frame, but you are linking up all these ( frames) and trying to channel the movement of life in a particular direction for your ulterior motives. But actually you have no way of controlling the events. They are outside of you. All you can do is establish a relationship with particular events, or put them all together and create a tremendous structure of thought and philosophy.
WHAT KIND OF A HUMAN BEING YOU WANT TO BE AND EVERYONE THINKS IN TERMS OF A CHANGE AND GET TO A HIGHER LEVEL OR IMPROVING ONESELF ?
The moment we ask the question “Is there something more to our life than what we are doing ? ” It sets the whole questioning mechanism going. Unfortunately, what has created this interest in western nations is the so-called Hippy generation. When they tried drugs, the drugs produced a change in what they called their ‘ level of consciousness ‘. For the first time they experienced something outside the area of their normal experiencing structure, when once we experience something extraordinary, which actually it is not, we look around for varieties of experiences. . More and more of the same. That has created a market for all those people from the Eastern countries, India, China, and Japan, to flood into these countries and promise to provide answers for their questions. But actually they are selling shoddy pieces of goods. What people are interested in are not some answers to their problems but some comforters. As I said before , they are selling ice packs to numb the pain and make you feel comfortable. Nobody wants to ask the basic question: What is the real problem ? What is it that they want ? What are they looking for ? And this situation is taken advantage of by the people from the East. If there is anything to what they claim( that they have the answers and solutions for the problems that we are all facing today) , it doesn’t seem to be evident in the countries from where they come. The basic question that the westerners should throw at them is , ” Have your answers helped the people of your countries ? Do your solutions operate in your lives? ” Nobody is asking them these questions. The hundred different techniques that they offer to you have not been subjected to test. You don’t have any statistical evidence to prove that there is something to what they claim. They exploit the gullibility and credulity of the people. When once you have everything that you need, the material goodies , you look around and ask the questions , “is that all there is to it “? And those people exploit that situation. They don’t have any answers for the problems facing us today. What is responsible for the human tragedy or the malady that we are confronted with today is that we are interested in maintaining the identities that are created by our culture. We have tremendous faith in the value system that is created by our culture or society or whatever you want to call it. We never question that . We are only interested in fitting ourselves into that value system. It is that demand from the society or culture to fit us all into that value system that is the cause of man’s tragedy. Somewhere along the line there occurred in human consciousness the demand to find out the answer for loneliness , the isolation that human beings suffer from the rest of the species on this planet . I don’t even know if there is any such thing as evolution. If there is, somewhere along the line in that evolutionary process man separated or isolated himself from the rest of the creation on this planet . In that isolation , he felt so frightened that he demanded some answers , some comfort , to fill that loneliness , that isolation from the rest of the life around him. Religious thinking was born out of this situation, and it has gone on for centuries. But it has not really helped us to solve the problems created by mankind. Even the political systems that we have today are nothing but the outgrowth of the spiritual , religious thinking of man. Unfortunately they have failed, and a void has been created. There has been a total failure of our political and economic ideologies. There is a tremendous danger facing mankind today. The void created by the failure of all these ideologies will be taken advantage of by the religious organisations. They will preach and shout that we all have to go back to the great traditions of our own countries. But what has failed for them is not going to help us to solve our problems. I would say the same to psychologists and scientists that ” you have come to the end of your tether. If you want answers for your problems, you have to find them within your own framework and not look elsewhere, especially the ancient dead cultures of the past ” Going back or looking back to those systems and techniques that have failed us is only goig to put us on a wrong track , on a merry-go-round . The situations we are facing today is only the result of the past, and if we are looking back to the past we are already dead. We have no future at all as long as we try to get the answers from the past that is dead. Anybody who says, ” Look back or go back “, has no answers to offer us. The future is blocked if someone tells us ” You have to look back “, because it is the past that has put us in the present awkward situation. But we are not ready to brush the whole thing aside. All the techniques, the ancient techniques of meditation, Yoga, Tantra, Zen Buddhism, Catholicism, you name it all of them totally failed. Otherwise we wouldn’t be where we are today. If there were anything to their claims, we would have created a better and happier world. But we are not ready to accept the fact that it is they that are responsible for creating the sorry mess that we are all facing today .
It is just a rehash of the past , the dead past. We only give new names and put new labels. But basically and essentially it (the religious teaching) has not helped us and it is not going to help us. It is not a question of replacing our ideas with new ideas, our thoughts with new thoughts, our beliefs with new beliefs , for the whole belief structure is very important to us. We do not want to free ourselves from this illusion. If we free ourselves from one illusion, we always replace it with another. If we brush aside or drop one belief, we will always replace that belief with another belief. The fact is that we don’t want to be free. What is responsible for our problems is the fear of losing what we have and what we know. All these therapies, all these techniques, religious or otherwise, are only perpetuating the agony of man. It is very comforting for people to believe that somehow, through some miracle, they are going to be freed from the problems that they are confronted with today. There is no way out of this because we are wholly and solely responsible for the problems that we have created for ourselves and for others. But again we are not ready to accept that what has created the problems cannot itself solve them. What we are using to solve our problems is what we call ‘ thought’ . But thought is a protective mechanism. Thought is only interested in maintaining the status quo. we may talk of change, but when actually the time comes for us to change things, we are not ready for it. We insist that change must always be for the better and not for the worse. We have a tremendous faith in the mechanism that has created the problems for us. After all, that is the only instrument that we have at our disposal, and we don’t have any other instrument. But actually it cannot help us at all. It can only create problems , but cannot solve them. We are not ready to accept this fact because accepting it will knock out the whole foundation of human culture. We want to replace one system with another. But the whole structure of culture is pushing us in the direction of completely annihilating all that we have built with tremendous care.
We don’t want to be free from fear. Anything you do to free yourself from fear is what is perpetuating the fear. Is there any way we can be freed from fear? Fear is something that cannot be handled by thought; it is something living. So we want to put on our gloves and try to touch it, play with it. All that we want to do is to play games with it and talk about freeing ourselves from fear. Or go to this therapist or that, or fallow this technique or that. But in that process, what we are actually doing is strengthening and fortifying the very thing that we are trying to be free from, that is, fear. If the tremendous amount of energy that we put into solving this problem is released-I say, ‘ if’- if it is released, what is it that you cannot do ? But there is no way you can do anything about it . If you were lucky enough to find yourself in the situation where you are freed from this ( fear) and that energy is released, living in this world would be very simple and easy. SO WE LIVE IN A SOCIETY BASED ON FEAR. EVEN OUR INSTITUTIONS-POLICE, BANKS, DOCTORS, INSURANCE, AND EVERY THING WE HAVE CREATED- ARE BASED ON FEAR ? YES , fear. But what is the point in telling ourselves that we are going to be freed from fear ? If that fear comes to an end, you will drop dead. Physically! Clinical death will take place ! Of course you and your fear are not two different things . It is comforting to believe that you and fear are not two different things . You are frightened of certain things, or you do not want this or that thing to happen . You want to be free from fear. All this is very comforting, but there is no way you can separate yourself from fear and do anything to free yourself from it. If the fear comes to an end, ‘ you ‘ as you know yourself, ‘ you ‘ as you experience yourself , are going to come to an end , and you are not ready for that sort of thing . The plain fact is that if you don’t have a problem, you create one. If you don’t have a problem, you don’t feel that you are living. So the solutions we have been offered by the teachers, in whom we have tremendous faith; are not really the solutions. If they were the solutions, the problems wouldn’t be there at all. If there were no solutions for the problems , even then the problems wouldn’t be there . We would like to live with those problems, and if we are free from one problem, we create another., as if without problems you would be bored. Boredom is a bottomless pit . There is no way you can be freed from boredom. You love your boredom, but all the time you are trying to free yourself from boredom. As long as you think there is something more interesting, more purposeful, more meaningful to do than what you are actually doing, you have no way of freeing yourself from boredom. So, it goes on and on. If you don’t entertain yourself with a cowboy movie or a James bond movie, you might go to a temple and pray , you might go to a church and pray, or you might want to listen to a holy man telling you all kinds of stories. He will sell you some shoddy pieces of goods , ” stand on your head, stand on your shoulders, do this and do that” and you will be all right. But the basic question which none if us is willing to ask is: What is it that we want ? Whether you are in India , in America or in Africa, anywhere, what you are really interested in is the quest for permanent happiness. That is all that we are interested in, all these religious people, the gurus, and the holy men, who are marketing these shoddy pieces of spiritual goods, are telling us that there is some way you can have eternal and permanent happiness. But that doesn’t happen. We invest our faith in them so that it gives us hope, and we go on doing the same thing over and over again. And we continue to live in that hope. But it does not help us to get what we are really interested in , namely, to be permanently happy. There is no such thing as permanence at all, let alone permanent happiness. The quest for permanent happiness is a lost battle, but we are not ready to accept that fact. What we are left with is some moments of happiness and some moments of unhappiness. If we are not ready to accept that situation, and still demand a non-existing permanent happiness, we are not going to succeed. It is just a question of succeeding, or wanting to be in a permanent state of happiness, but that demand is the enemy of this living organism. The organism is not interested in happiness at all. It is only interested in its survival. What are necessary for the survival of this living organism are it’s sensory perceptions along with the sensitivity of the senses and nervous system . The moment you find yourself in a happy situation and tell yourself that you are happy; the demand that this happiness should continue for a longer time is bound to be there. And the more you try to prolong that sensation of happiness beyond its natural duration, the more there is danger for this system which is only interested in maintaining its sensitivity. So, there is a battle going on between your demand for permanent happiness and the demand of the body to maintain its sensitivity. You are not going to win this battle; yet you are not ready to give it up.
DOES MEDITATION AFFECT THE BODY ?
Yes, the body suffers. You put your body to unnecessary torture.It is not interested in your techniques of meditation , which actually are destroying the peace that is already there. It is an extraordinarily peaceful organism. It does not have to do anything to be in a peaceful state. By introducing this idea of a peaceful mind, we set in motion a sort of battle and the battle goes on and on. But what you feel, what you experience as the peaceful state of mind , is a war-weary state of mind. You want more and more of the same. This creates problems for the body. You harm the body. And you pay a heavy price. The body learns on its own like a crying of a baby. If you let the baby cry it will eventually stop. Automatically the baby will be exhausted. The baby cries because it is trying to express through that crying some discomfort. But we don’t understand what the discomfort is. We are interested only in our comfort, and that is why we try to stop the baby from crying. We have created a neurotic situation for the baby from the very start. We don’t have the energy to deal with the problems of living beings, and the child is a living thing. It would be more interesting to learn from children than try to teach them how to behave, how to live and how to function. Because we suppress everything in us , we want to suppress everything in the growing child. We have already created problem for the child instead of finding out what actually is his problem. We don’t have the energy to deal with the problems of children. We curse them and then we push them to fit into this framework of ours, created by us for our own reasons. This is what we call culture . Culture is not anything mysterious. It is your way of life and your way of thinking. All the other cultural activities we consider to be very creative are part and parcel of your way of living and thinking. And your way of thinking is the thing that has created all these problems for you. There is no way you can free yourself from the problems created by thinking except by setting in motion another kind of thinking . But that cannot be of help. Actually there are no thoughts there(within you) . Thoughts are not self- generated. They are not spontaneous. We never look at a thought. Whatever is there is ABOUT Thought but not thought itself. We are ready to question that and face the fact that thoughts are not spontaneous. They come from– outside in the sense that when there is a sensory response to a stimulus , we translate that sensation within the framework of our knowledge, and tell ourselves that that(the translation) is the sensation. You recognise the sensation and give a name to it. That is what memory is all about. What is there is only memory. Where is that memory? Really, nobody knows where memory is. You can say that it is in the neurons . When once the sensory perceptions activate the senses that are involved, they in their turn , activate the memory cells. We capture every movement there(in the sensation) within the framework of the memory structure and translate it. Naturally, memory is born out of our demand to isolate ourselves, censor the sensory perceptions and filter them in order to maintain the status quo and continuity of the movement of our knowledge. We may talk of freeing ourselves from knowledge. But whatever we are doing is not freeing us from the movement of knowledge. On the contrary, it is strengthening and fortifying the very thing that we believe trying to be free from .
WHAT THE QUANTEM PHYSICISTS TALK ABOUT ? OUR THINKING ABOUT THE UNIVERSE IS VERY LIMITED .
We are creating the universe ourselves. We have no way of looking at the universe at all. The model that we see is created by our thought. Even the scientists who say that they are observing certain things have actually no way of observing anything except through the mirror of their own thinking. The scientist is influencing what you are looking at . Whatever theories he comes up with are only theories; they are not facts to him. Even if you are looking at the object physically, without the interference of thought and without translating what you are looking at , the physical looking is affecting the object that you are looking at . Actually there is no way you can capture, containe and give expression to what you are looking at. You dare not look at anything. Scientists can come up with all kinds of theories, hundreds and hundreds of them. You can only reward them with Nobel prizes or give them some prestigious awards, and that is all that they are interested in . But, are we ready to accept the fact that there is no way that you can look at anything? You are not looking at anything at all. Even the physical looking is influenced by your thought. There is no way you can look at anything without the use of the knowledge that you have of what you are looking at. In fact it is that(the knowledge) that is creating the object. It is your thinking that is creating the observer. So this whole talk of the observer and the observed is balderdash. There is neither the ‘ observer’ nor the ‘ observed ‘ . The ‘ perceiver ‘ and the ‘ perceived ‘ , the ‘ seer ‘ and the ‘ seen’ is all bosh and nonsense. These themes are good for endless metaphysical discussions. There is no end to such discussions . And to believe that there is an observation without the observer is a lot of baloney. There is no way you can look at anything without the ‘ looker ‘, who is the product of this thinking. At times they hold meetings in which scientists from all over the world from different disciplines- people from the spiritual world and the world of industry and economics come together to talk about the similarities among their respective disciplines instead of differences., and that all of them should support each other instead of focusing their energies only on differences of opinions etc is all in futility because first of all , the scientists, by looking or asking for help from all these religious people, are committing the biggest of all blunders . They have come to the end of their tether. If they have problems in their systems they have to solve them by and for themselves. These religious people have no answers for the problems created by the scientific thinking of man. I do not know if by coming together and exchanging their views or giving speeches they are going to achieve anything. I may sound cynical when I say nothing is going to come out of it except that they will make speeches and feel comfortable that they are trying to understand each other’s point of view. When you say something to someone, he will say that that is your point of view. But he does not realise that his also is a point of view. So, how can there be any communication between two people who have different points of view ? The whole purpose of the conversation or dialogue is only to convert the other man to your point of view. If you have no point of view, there is no way he can convince or convert you to his point of view. So this dialogue is between two points of view and there is no way you can reconcile them. Such conferences would be very interesting. They can come all together, talk about that ( what is common to their different disciplines) and exchange their views, and that would be that. It would be something like the United Nations. ( The United Nations is the biggest joke of this century. If each one is trying to assert his own rights there, how can there be a United Nations ?) The problem is that thought creates frontiers every where. That’s all it can do. Differences. So it is thought that has created the world; and you draw lines on this planet, ” This is my country, that is your country ” . So , how can there be unity between two countries ? The very thing that is creating frontiers and differences cannot be the means to bridge the different view points. It is an exercise in futility.
They know in their hearts that nothing will come out ( of their deliberations ). We are not ready to accept the fact that thought can only create problems. That instrument cannot be of any help to us. The talk of intuition and insight is another illusion. Every insight you have is born out of your thinking. The insights strengthen and fortify the very thing you are trying to be free from . All insights, however extraordinary they may be, are worthless. You can create a tremendous structure of thought from your own discovery, which you call insight. But the insight is nothing but the result of your own thinking, the permutations and combinations of thought. Actually there is no way you can come up with anything original there. There is no thought that you can call your own. I don’t have any thoughts which I call my own- not one thought, not one word, not one experience. Everything comes from outside. If I have to experience anything, I have to depend upon the knowledge that is put in here. Otherwise there is no way you can experience anything. What you do not know, you cannot experience. There is no such thing as new experience at all. I even question the idea of consciousness. There may not be any such thing as consciousness at all , let alone the subconscious, the unconscious and all the other levels of consciousness. How do you become conscious of a thing ?. You become conscious of a thing only through your memory. First, you recognise it. And the recognition and naming are all that are there. You can trick yourself into the belief that recognition and naming are two different things . But actually they are not. The very fact that you recognise something as an object even without naming it means that you already know about it . The memory that has captured it says that it is an object. The talk about recognition without naming is a very clever way of playing a game. It is only sharpening your intellect. Actually you are not trying to understand what the problem is or how to deal with it. The instinct is an idea invented by thought. Whatever we experience is thought induced. What you do not know you cannot experience. To experience a thing you have to ” know”.
The recognition of yourself as an entity is possible only through the help of the knowledge ( you have about yourself ) . We start this process with children. You tell a child ” show me your teeth, show me your nose, show me your ears, or tell me your name “. That is where identity starts. The constant use of memory to maintain that identity is the situation we find ourselves in. We do not want that identity to come to an end .we do everything possible to maintain it. But the effort to maintain your identity is wearing you out. The constant use of memory to maintain our identity will put us all ultimately in a state where we are forced to give up. When someone gives up the attempt to fit him or herself into the value system, you call that person crazy. He ( or she as the case may be) has given up. Some people don’t want to fit into that framework. We push them to be functional. The more we push to be functional, the crazier they become. Actually, we are pushing them to suicide. The alternatives before mankind are either suicide or the fashionable disease, what we call Alzheimer’s disease. Whether the disease occurs due to damaged tissue in the brain or through the use of aluminium vessels, as some claim, they really don’t know yet. But this seems the fate of mankind. These are the only ways your identity can be destroyed. It is amazing how thousands and thousands of people are affected by it. Even middle-aged people are affected. The constant use of memory to maintain your identity , whether you are asleep, awake or dreaming, is what is going to destroy not only the human species, but also all forms of life on this planet. It is not a happy prophecy. I am not a prophet. I am not prophesying anything. But from what we know and what is happening today, that seems to be the fate of mankind. No discovery ever can help. Even if we discover the laws of nature, for whatever reason we are interested in doing so, ultimately they are used to destroy everything that nature has created. It is the idea of paradise, the idea of creating a heaven on this earth, which has turned this beautiful paradise that we already have on this planet into a hell. We are solely responsible for what is happening. And the answers for our problems cannot come from the past and its glory, or from the great religious teachers of mankind. Those teachers naturally claim that you have failed and that they have the answers for the problems that we are confronted with today . I don’t think that they have any answers . We have to find out the answers, if there are any, for ourselves and by ourselves.
YOUR IMAGE IS YOUR BEST FRIEND .
There are no questions according to me but only answers. We already have the answers . I don’t have any question of any kind. How comw you have questions? The only kind of questions I have are ones like ” How does this microphone work ? ” I ask that because I don’t know its working . I have questions only as to how these mechanical things are operating. For living situations we have no answers at all. You cannot apply this mechanical, technical know how, which we have acquired through repeated study, to solve the problems of living . We are not really interested in solving the latter kind of problems. We don’t know a thing about life. Nobody knows . You can only give a definition. What we know is that our living has become terribly boring. We want a way out of that situation. So we have invented all kinds of ways of entertaining ourselves, whether it is the church, temple or politics or entertainment or music or something else. Yet there is no end to that at all. You need more and more . There comes a time when you will not be able to find anything to free yourself from this boredom of life.
The basic question that we have to all ask is : What kind of human being you want in this world ? Or where we want to be. Society is trying to create the human beings. That is what society has done. You and I have been created by the society, solely and wholly to maintain its continuity, its status quo. You have no way of establishing your own individuality. You have to use that ( society and all its heritage ) to experience yourself as an entity and to function in this world. If you don’t accept the reality of the world as it is imposed on us, you will end up in the loony bin . But we have to accept that. The moment we question the reality of what has been imposed on us we are in trouble. What I am trying to say is that you have to answer this question for yourself, ” what do we want” ? This was my problem. I asked myself, ” is there anything I want other than what THEY wanted me to want ? Is there anything I want to think other than what They wanted me to think? Nobody could help me in this area, and that was my problem. I had no way of finding out an answer. Wanting not to want what the others wanted me to want was also a want. It never occurred to me that this was no different from all the other wants. Somewhere along the line the question somehow disappeared; I don’t know how. What I am left with is something that I have no way of experiencing, and no way of communicating or transmitting to anybody. I have no way of communicating the certainty that occurred in me that there is no way I can understand anything through the instrument which I used for years and years, the instrument being the intellect. It has not helped me to solve any problem. No understanding is possible through that instrument, but that is the most powerful instrument and the only instrument we have. You cannot brush that aside and throw it away . But that is not the instrument , and there is no other instrument . The talk of intuition only puts us on a merry-go-round. It doesn’t lead us anywhere.
WHAT DO THEY MEAN WHEN THEY SAY THAT THE ‘ HEART ‘ UNDERSTANDS ?
You are making this assumption that to have a ‘ heart ‘ is better than to use your head . The whole religious thinking is built on the foundation of having a good heart and giving supremacy and importance to it, and not to what your’ head ‘ is doing. But what I want to say is that the heart is there only to pump blood. It is not interested in your kindly deeds. If you indulge in kindly deeds, doing good unto others, having a good ‘ heart’ you will only create problems for the heart. It is the beginning of your cardiac problems! That is going to be a real problem. It is your kindly deeds that are responsible for the cardiac arrests and heart failures, and not any (mal ) functioning of the heart. The tremendous importance that we have given to the ‘ heart ‘ is totally irrelavant. To make a distinction between the ‘ head ‘ and the ‘ heart ‘ is interesting, and in the long run it is not going to help us. The reality of the matter is that even your feelings are thoughts. If you tell yourself that you are happy , you are translating that sensation of happiness within the framework of the knowledge you have. So that too is a thought. There are no pure feelings at all. What you are stuck with are only thoughts, and those thoughts are put in there by your culture. We have also invented this idea of freeing yourself from thoughts. How are you going to succeed in freeing yourself from thoughts? It is only through the help of another thought. Actually there are no thoughts there at all. What you find there is that the very question that we ask ourselves and ask others, namely, ” Is there a thought ? ” is itself born out of thought. If you want to look at thought and find out for yourself if there is any such thing as thought, what you will find there is ( a thought) About thought but not thought itself. So, we really don’t know if there are any thoughts, let alone good thoughts or bad thoughts. And there is no thinker there either. The thinker, the non – existent thinker, comes into being only when you use your thoughts to achieve your goals . It doesn’t matter what the goal is, or whether it is material or spiritual . When once you use thoughts to achieve a goal, we create a non-existent thinker. But actually they is no thinker. There is no body who is talking now. There is only ‘ talking ‘, there is only ‘seeing’, there is only ‘ listening’ . But the moment you translate that listening, interpret it in terms of the framework of your reference point; you have created a problem. Its ( thought’s) interest is to interpret and translate. It helps only to strengthen and fortify the very thing, which you are trying to free yourself from. It is like a dog chasing its own tail; or like your trying to overcome your own shadow. But you never ask how this shadow is cast. With the help of the light. Your wanting to over take your own shadow is an exercise in futility . We are not taking any thing seriously. This is all frivolous.
IS TIME IS MONEY ?
Because money is the most important factor in our lives. They say that money is the root cause of all evil. But actually it is not the root cause of evil; it is the root cause of our existence, of our survival. I sometimes say that if you worship that God, the money God, you will be amply rewarded . If you worship the other God – whether he exists or not is anybody’s guess- you will be stripped of everything you have , and he will leave you naked in the streets.it is better to worship the money god. Yes money god . You will amply be rewarded. Tell me one person who is not thinking of money. Not one person on this planet. Even the holy ones who talk about their indifference to money are concerned about it. How do you think they will get ninety-two RollsRoyces? You try and buy one Rolls Royce car, you will know how difficult it is . For the religious people it is easy because other people deny themselves and gives their money to them. So you can be rich at other man’s expense. How much money you need is a different matter . Each one has to draw his own line. But when once your goals and needs are the same, then the problem is very simple.
YOU STAY MORE OR LESS HERE, IN THIS MOMENT, AND DEAL with what happens right now.
POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE , DO THEY EXIST ?
They don’t exist at all. If they do, they exist in the same frame . That is what these scientists are talking about . If you observe the universe , there is chaos in it. The moment you say there is chaos; in the same frame, there is also order . So , you cannot, for sure, say that there is order or chaos in the universe. Both of them occuring simultaneously. That is the way the living organism also operates. The moment thought is born; it cannot stay there. Thought is Matter. When once the matter that is necessary for the survival of the living organism is created, that matter becomes part of energy. Similarly life and death are simultaneous processes. It is thought that has seperated and created the two points of birth and death. Thought has created this space and this time. But actually birth and death are simultaneous processes. You cannot say whether you are born or dead. You cannot say that you are alive or dead. But if you ask me the question , ” Are you alive? ” I would certainly say, ” I am alive “. So my answer is the common knowledge you and I have about how a living being functions. That is how I say that I am a living being and not a dead person. But we give tremendous importance to these ideas. We sit and discuss them everlastingly and produce a tremendous structure of thought around them.
Going back to our topic on CHANGE IN HUMAN BEINGS ?
Yes, what kind of human being do you want ? Culture, society, or whatever you want to call it , has placed before us the model of a perfect being, which is the model of the great spiritual teachers of mankind. But it is not possible for everyone of us to be like that . You are unique in your own way. There is no way you can copy those men. That is where we have created the tremendous problem for the whole of mankind. Like the Buddha or like Jesus. Thank god, you cannot be like Jesus because there is one and only one Jesus. To that extent many people are saved from trying to be like Jesus. But in India they accept Jesus also as one of the great teachers of mankind. They tell themselves and others that Jesus is there to enable you to become a Christ and not a Christian. But that is not acceptable by the Christians, because it destroys the whole foundation of the church; it destroys the whole foundation of Christianity. If there was a Christ, you have to accept his word when he says, ” I am the way, I am the truth, and I am the life, Through me you will reach the eternal father “. That statement, whether he made it or someone else put it in his mouth, has created the foundation for the whole church. You cannot exonerate the leaders of the church and only blame the fallowers for the sorry mess of things they have created for us. The whole ethical culture and everything that we have created to rule ourselves which are born out of thinking of man. We are not ready to accept the fact that nature probably is interested in creating only perfect species and not perfect individuals. Nature does not use any model. It creates something; then it destroys it, and creates something else. The comparative process characteristic of thinking seems to be absent. So, what kind of human being do you want ? The whole ethical culture that is built by us to shape the actions of man has totally failed. The commandment, ” Thou shall not steal ” , has not helped. If you want to free a human being from thieving tendencies we have to find some other way of doing it, whatever your reasons are to free him from those tendencies. Probably you haveto find a drug to change the chemistry of those who have the tendencies. Like there is a biotechnology coming out now, but there and then again there is also a danger, a tremendous danger. When once you perfect genetic engineering and transform human beings through chemical means or genetic engineering, you will certainly hand the means over to the state. Then it becomes easy for the state to control people without brain washing them. Brain washing takes decades and decades , probably even centuries. The fact that we have outlawed murder has not put an end to murder. It’s only on the increase. I am not for a moment saying that murder is not outlawed, there will be fewer murders. In spite of outlawing murder, murder is on the increase . Why is that so? Your argument will be that if it is not outlawed, there will be more murders. But I am not impressed by that logic at all. Why is murder on the increase ? Because you are putting energy into it. The moment you condemn certain things; people have ways and means of overcoming them… Whatever we are doing to free ourselves from the problems that we have created is what is perpetuating them.
Perfection and perceptions are the enemies of the body. The body is not interested in your perceptions. It is not interested in learning anything from you or knowing anything from you. All the intelligence that is necessary for this living organism is already there. Our attempts to teach this body, or make it function differently from the way it is programmed by nature, are what are responsible for the battle that is going on. There is a battle between what is put in by culture and what is inherent there in the body . The body knows what is good for itself. It can survive and HAS survived for millions of years. It is not concerned about your pollution or your ecology, or about the way you are treating it. What it is concerned with is in its own survival. And it will survive. There is no doubt about it . When the time comes, it will probably flush the whole thing ( the cultural input) out of its system. That would be the luckiest day for mankind. That is something that cannot be achieved through any volition or effort, or through the help of any teacher who says that there are ways and means of freeing you from the stranglehold of your thoughts. The solution for the problems is to accept the fact that there is no way out. And out of that (acceptance) something can come. Sometimes it so happens that when you give up everything without any expectations the problem gets automatically resolved. , like this happens to all those who are working out some mathematical or scientific problem. They go to sleep when they are exhausted, and that gives some time for the mechanism that is involved, and you are ready with the answer. It is not some miraculous thing. You give sometime for the computer to work out a solution to your problem. On its own it comes out with the answer, but only if there is an answer. If there is no answer then that is the end of the story.
Our language structure is such that there is no way you can be free from a dualistic approach to problems. I don’t want to use the word ‘dualistic’ because it again has religious connotations. And in response to a question like what is the relationship between words and reality ?. None. There is nothing beyond words. And memory is playing a trick with itself because it tells you that it is not the words that you are left with but something other than the words. But the fact that you remember something of what has gone on between us both implies that the impact of the words is translated by memory, which then tells you that it (the memory) is something other than the words. Memory field or thoughts are outside the body. The brain has nothing to do with creativity at all in my observation. The brain is just a reactor and a container. What is memory after all ? No body knows what it is. You can give a definition as a student of psychology. ‘ Memory is the mental response of recalling a specific thing at a specific time ‘ . That was the definition that I had learned in psychology books. But that is too silly a definition because no body knows what memory is or where it is located. You can examine the brain after you are dead, after I am dead. But you won’t see any difference between the brain of a genius and the brain of a low-grade moron. So we really don’t know. A scientist comes out with some theory. You may award him a Nobel Prize. Then someone else comes along, blasts his theory and offers another one. Every leap year there is a new theory. And now about the morphogenetic theory. The whole motivation, if I may use the word , behind all this is that you still want to do something, change something. All the research projects are geared to the idea of learning something about the way memory operates and the way the human body is functioning , so that you can then apply what you have discovered, which is very limited in the first place. It ( the subject matter of life, the human body, and memory) is such a vast thing that what you know is only a teeny-weeny bit of what there is. Your only interest is to bring about a change . But we are not ready to accept that there is nothing to be changed . Scientific discoveries are microscopic compared to the destructive use we put them to. What we have discovered of the laws of nature is only used for destructive purposes. We have tremendous weapons of destruction today. If the church has these instruments of destruction, I don’t think you and I would be here, much less evolve any other way of dealing with our problems and our lives.
‘JAPAN ‘ IS FOUNDED ON DISCIPLINE, WHAT ABOUT DISCIPLINE AND IS LIFE DIFFICULT ?
The whole thought of religious thought is built on the foundation of discipline. Discipline to me means a sort of masochism. We are all masochists. We torture ourselves because we think that suffering is a means to achieve our spiritual goals. That’s unfortunate. Life is difficult. So discipline sounds very attractive to people. With great honour we say, ” He has suffered a lot ” . We admire those who have suffered a lot to achieve their goals. As a matter of fact, the whole religious thinking is built on the foundation of suffering. We have got all this at the Cross. If not for religion, you suffer for the cause of your country in the name of patriotism. .. For your town, for your family. Those who impose that kind of discipline on us are sadists. But unfortunately we are all being masochists in accepting that. We torture ourselves in the hope of achieving something. . We are slaves of our ideas and beliefs. We are not ready to throw them out. If we succeed in throwing them out, we replace them with another set of beliefs, another body of discipline. Those who are marching into the battlefield and are ready to be killed today in the name of democracy, in the name of freedom, in the name of communism, are no different from those who threw themselves to the lions in the arenas. The Romans watched that fun with great joy. How are we different from them ? We love it. To kill and to be killed is the foundation of our culture.
HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS HAVE BECOME A KIND OF COMMERCIAL EXCHANGE,
In the sense of, ” If you give me something, I will give you something “. Yes. That’s a fact . We do not want to accept it because it destroys the myth that human relationships are something marvellous and extraordinary. We are not honest, decorous and decent enough to admit that all relationships are built on the foundation of, ” What I get out of this relationship ? “. It is nothing but mutual gratification . If that is absent no relationship is possible. You keep the relationship going for social reasons, or for reasons of children, property, and security. All this is part and parcel of the relationship business. But when it fails and does not give us what we want, we superimpose on it what we call ” love “. So it is just not possible to have any relationship on any basis except on the level of mutual gratification. The whole culture has created, for its own reasons, this situation for us through its value system. The value system demands that relationship be based on love. But the most important element is security and then possessiveness. You want to possess the other individual. When your hold on the other becomes weaker for various reasons, your relationship wears out. You cannot maintain this lovy-dovey relationship all the time . The relationship between a man and a woman is based on the images that the two create for themselves of each other. So, the actual relationship between the two individuals is a relationship between the two images. But your image keeps changing, and so does the other person’s . To keep the image constant is just not possible. So, when everything else fails, we use this final , last card in the pack. ” love “, with all the marvellous and romantic ideations around it. To me, love implies two ( persons). Wherever there is a division, whether it is within you or without you, there is conflict. That relationship cannot last long. As far as I am concerned , relationships are formed and then they are dissolved immediately. Both these things happen in the same frame , if I may use that word. That is really the problem . You may think I am a crude man, but if anybody talks to me about love, to me it is a four -letter – word . That is the only basic relationship between man and woman. But it is a social problem for us as to what kind of a relationship you should have. Even in the days of my youth it was not possible amongst the kshatriyas to marry unless the couple belonged to the same sub-caste. It was worse than the racial stuff in other countries. They had a strange idea of maintaining family traditions. What is tradition after all ?. It is unwillingness to change with the changing time. We change a little when we are forced to by conditions. But the fact is that change is not in the interests of the mechanism of our thinking. Unfortunately, we have blown this business of sex out of proportion. It is just a simple biological need of the living organism. The body is interested in only two things- to survive, and to reproduce one like itself. It is not interested in anything else. But sex has become a tremendous problem for us, we turned the basic biological functioning of the body into a pleasure movement. You see, if there is no thought, there is no sex at all. The second problem is that it is not just the sex act that is important( to us ) , but the build-up that is there, the romantic structure that we have built around the love play. If you look at a beautiful woman, for example, the moment you say that it is a woman; you have already created a problem — “A beautiful woman”! Then it is more pleasurable to hold her hands than just to look at her. It is more pleasurable to embrace her, even more pleasurable to kiss her, and so on. It is the build-up that is really the problem. The moment you say that she is a beautiful woman; culture comes into the picture.
What is there is only the physical attraction . You can be free from that. All those people- these saints- are tortured with the idea of controlling that natural attraction. But that natural attraction is something that should not be condemned. You don’t tell yourself that you are a Godman, a realised man, an enlightened man or a saint, and that you should not think these thoughts. That ( telling yourself) is really the problem . They are not honest enough to admit that . So whenever a saint comes to me, or who practices celibacy, I am very ruthless with him. I ask him ” Do you really mean to say that you never have wet dreams” ? I tell him ” To practice celibacy in the name of your spiritual pursuit is a crime against nature ” If the man is impotent or if for some reason the woman happens to be barren, then it is a different story. Why religious thinking of man has emphasised denial of sex, as a means to his spiritual attainment is something that I cannot understand. May be because that is the way you can control people. Sex is the most powerful drive. Sex is a natural thing.you see, if you don’t have sex, the semen probably goes out through your urine or some other way. After all, the sex glands have to function. If they don’t function normally, you are an abnormal individual. But we are not ready to accept these facts, because it undermines the very foundation of the human culture. We cannot accept the fact that we are just biological beings and nothing more. It is something like saying that in the field of economics you are not controlled by the laws of supply and demand. But actually, in the field of economics you are . Likewise, in the political field the laws of politics control us. But we are not ready to accept the basic, fundamental fact that we are just biological beings, and all that is happening within the body is a result of hormonal activity. It is pure and simple chemistry. If thete is any problem there ( in the body ) it is too presumptuous on my part to tell you , as you are a sex therapist. Problems in that area cannot be solved in any other way than by trying to change the chemistry of the whole body. I think our whole thinking has to be put on a different track. I don’t know . I am just suggesting. It is all chemical. If, as they say, desires are harmones, then the whole ethical code and culture that we have created through centuries to control the behaviour of human beings are false . So, desire cannot be false. Anything that is happening within the ( human ) organism cannot be false.
There is no sex at all without thought. Thought is memory. These experts make fun of me when I say that the most important of all glands is the thymus gland. When I discussed this subject with some physiologists and doctors they made fun on me. Naturally so, because according to them, the gland is inactive. If it is activated through external means, it would be an abnormal situation. But, you know, the thymus is the most important gland, and feelings operate there without the element of thought. Yes, from the thymus. Medical technology has ignored that for a very long time . They considered an unusual condition of the gland to be an abnormality and tried to treat it. It is true that when you reach the adolescent age, it becomes inactive, and then your feelings are controlled by your ideas , by culture rather than by natural biology. It is cultural. ” The heart is more important than the head ” and all such nonsense are absolute poppycock. As experienced by some who have gone through the natural state of mind it is expressed that it is not only the thymus gland activated but all other glands such as the pineal and the pituitary are also activated. Sex has to be put in its proper place as one of the natural functionings of the body. It is solely, mainly and wholly for the purpose of reproducing or procreating something like it’s own. It has no other place in the functioning of the body. In response to a question like if one is only interested in procreating, then one wouldn’t find any other function for Sexuality? I would say there is no way you can go back now, because thought always interferes with sex . The whole thing is built on your ideas it is psychological or spiritual or so discriminative in your sexual indulgence that the whole thing is built on ideas. I am not advocating incest as a way of life. For the body there is no such thing as incest at all. It is the guilt problem, the psychological problem, the religious problem, which says that it has to be this way and not that way. If it is possible for a human being to have sex without a second thought, without any regret with the ones that is against culturally allowed then this sex is finished once and for all. It falls into its proper place . I am not suggesting it as a therapy. Please don’t get me wrong. What I am trying to say is that it is just not possible to have sex with your wife or with anybody without the build-up. So sex goes after that. Thereafter, what you are left with is the natural functioning of the sex glands. If they are not used, the semen will go out through urine. All these claims of the spiritual teachers that it will move from the Muladhara to the Sahasrara are rubbish. Don’t believe all that nonsense. If the semen is not used, it goes out through urine whether you are a saint or a godman or a sinner. You may or may not have wet dreams, but it still goes out.
It is more psychological. So, we have to revise all our ideas about this whole business of sex. We give a tremendous importance to sex, and the denial of it becomes such an obsession with people. In India they even moved away from that denial and created what is called Tantric sex. It was the highest pleasure that human beings could have. Sex through Tantra was considered the highest. That was the reason why they created in Brazil, and probably in some other countries too, the coupling of the male and the female organs. We have in India all that nonsense- the temples, and then a temple for the bull, a symbol of virility. All these were admired and worshipped. This is the other extreme ( to denial of sex ); indulgence in sex became a spiritual pursuit. They talked of achieving spiritual goals, enlightenment, or what have you, through sex, and called it Tantric sex. Whether it is ordinary sex or Tantric sex, or you go and have sex with a prostitute, it’s all the same.
WHY PEOPLE WOULD BE INTERESTED IN SEX AS A MEANS TO ATTAIN THE SO-CALLED SPIRUTUALITY, OR IS IT BECAUSE AT THE MOMENT OF INTENSE SEXUAL INVOLVEMENT OR ORGASM, PEOPLE HAVE THE FEELING THAT THEY ARE NOT THERE ANY MORE……….
That feeling is temporary, very temporary. It is just for a flash of a second. Not even a flash of a second. Even there, the division cannot be absent. Even in extreme grief you get the feeling that you are not there. What happens if the body goes through unbearable pain? You become unconscious. It is then that the body has a chance of taking care of the pain. If it cannot, then you go. The fact is that the person is very much there even at the moment when there is peak sex experience. The experience has already been captured by your memory. Otherwise you have no way of experiencing that as a peak moment. If that peak moment remained as a peak moment; that would be the end of sex; that would be the end of everything. The fact that you remember it as a peak moment and want to repeat it over and over again implies that it has already become part of your experiencing structure. You want it always and then want to extend it for longer and longer periods of time. This is one of the most idiotic things to do. I read somewhere that a long time ago they tortured a woman to have a continuous orgasm for half an – hour or one hour, I don’t know. But why put her through that torture ? What for ? What do you prove by that ? It is also a fad for people there in the West. They want to make it last longer. It is just for a fraction of a second, whether it is in the female or in the male. You probably know more than I do. But I think that there is no justification for extending the orgasm longer than its natural duration. It has become an obsession with some people, and if they don’t have it, their sex act seems very futile. It becomes an addiction as well. Like any other addiction. All these things I observed myself. I did not learn from anyone. I saw them happen in my own life.
Sex is violence. But it is a necessary violence for this body. it’s a pain. As far as procreation is concerned all creative things are painful. The birth of a child is a natural thing. But to call it a traumatic experience and build up a tremendous structure of theories around it is something I am not concerned with . It cannot be a traumatic experience. That is why, after all this violence you go to sleep. You feel tired. That is how nature functions. All creations in nature are like that. I don’t call it pain or violence. Volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, storms and overflowing rivers are all part of nature. You cannot say that there is only chaos or that there is only order. Chaos and order happen almost at the same time . Birth and death are simultaneous processes. I am not against promiscuity, nor am I against celibacy. But I want to emphasise one basic thing , that is, in the pursuit of your spiritual matters it doesn’t really make any difference whether you practice celibacy or indulge in sex and call it Tantric sex . It is comforting to believe that you are having Tantric sex and not sex with a call girl or a prostitute. To say that there is more ‘ feeling ‘ or more closeness when you have sex for spiritual reasons is absolute gibberish. So there is nothing to Tantric sex at all. There are so many people who are doing this kind of thing in the name of enlightenment. That is detestable to me. They are not honest enough to admit that thay are using that ( the lure of enlightenment) for fulfilling their lust. That is why they are running these brothels. Such kind of gurus are pimps. I would say that the world has never seen such a pimp nor it will ever see one in future like Rajneesh. Such a thorough professional he is , he combined western therapies, the Tantric system, and everything you could find in the books. He made a big business out of it. He took money from the boys; he took money from girls, and kept it for himself. He is dead and so we don’t say anything. Nil nisi bonum( of the dead speak not unless it be good ) .
What I want to say is that unfortunately, society, culture, or whatever you want to call it, has seperated the sex activity and put it on a different level, instead of treating it as a simple functioning of the living organism. It is a basic thing in nature. Survival and reproduction are basic things in the living organisms. And the rest is an artificial build-up. You can change the areas, you can change the ideas, and you can write books. It really doesn’t matter. As far as I am concerned, I don’t tell anybody what he or she should or should not do. My interest is to point out that this is the situation and say, ” Take it or leave it “.
Anything we touch we turn into a problem; and sex even more so, this is the most powerful drive there. If you translate it ( into pleasure ) and push it into an area where it does not belong, namely, the pleasure movement, we will then create problems. When once you create a problem, the demand to deal with that problem within that framework is bound to arise. So, that is where you come in ( with sex therapy etc. ). I have nothing against sex therapists, but the problem ( sex as pleasure ) has to be solved by people. Otherwise they become neurotic. They don’t know what to do with themselves. Not only that, but everything, God, truth, reality, liberation, moksha, is ultimate pleasure. We are not ready to accept that. But sex is very concrete ? Very concrete. It is tangible. That is why it has become a very powerful factor in our lives. That is why there is also a demand to put limitations on it by culture, first in the name of religion, and then in the name of the family, law, war, and a hundred things. This ( the demand to limit sex) is nothing but the outgrowth of the religious thinking of man. What’s the difference.
IN SPITE OF ALL THESE LAWS THEY JUST CANNOT DO ANYTHING. IT JUST GOES ON AND ON …..
Yes. It goes on. You talk of the sacredness of life and condemn abortion. This is the same old idiotic religious idea persisting, which turned every woman into a criminal. And then you go and kill hundreds and thousands of people in the name of your flag, in the name of patriotism. That is the way things are. Not that it is in your interest to change it, but change is something, which this structure ( thought) is not interested in. It only talks of change. But you know things are changing constantly. THIS ARTIFICIAL BUILD-UP OF SEXUAL EXCITEMENT IS ACTUALLY DAMAGING THE BODY, BUT THERE ARE LOT OF PEOPLE WHO THINK THAT , BECAUSE TENSION IS RELEASED AND YOU FEEL MORE RELAXED, IT IS GOOD FOR HEALTH.? You first create tension. All this fantasy, all this romantic nonsense, is building up tension. When once the tension is built, it has to dissolve itself. That is why rest becomes essential and you go to sleep. You fall asleep because you are tired and exhausted. … The aftereffects are bound to fallow. That’s fine, but it’s wearing you out in the long run.
THE DIFFERENCE IN SEXUAL BEHAVIOUR BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN …
You may be referring to the feminist movement. It’s a joke. It’s really unfortunate that man got away with everything for centuries while society ignored women. Half the population of this planet is neglected, humiliated and treated as doormats. Even the Bible tells you that the woman is made out of the rib of man. What preposterous nonsense ! You see, women’s intelligence is lost for this culture. Not only in one country, it’s the same everywhere. The feminist movement and the women behind should realise the very fundamental thing that as long as you depend on man for your sexual needs, so long you are not a free person. What I am saying is a fact. As long as you depend upon something or somebody there is scope for exploitation. I am not against feminist movement. They ought to have every right. Even today, in the same job a woman is paid less in the United States than a man. Why ? Is that culture ? There was a time when I believed that if women were to rule this world, it would be a different story. We had a woman prime minister in India and a woman prime minister in Sri Lanka. There was a lady prime minister in England. I don’t know whether that will happen in America and whether a woman will be the president of the United States. But I tell you they ( women ) are as ruthless as any others. In fact, more ruthless. So this dream of mine was shattered when I saw that woman there in Jerusalem Gold a Meir. So, it is not a question of a man running the show or a woman running the show, but it is the system that corrupts.
Power games are part of culture. Is there any biology involved ? Now they are talking of harmones. They say it is the harmones that are responsible for the violence. If that is so what do we do ? Assuming for a moment that the advantage that we (men ) have had for centuries is not a culturally instigated thing, but a hormonal phenomenon, you have to deal with it in a different way and not put that person on the couch, analyse him, and say his mother or great grandmother was responsible for his aggression. That is too absurd and silly. So, we have to find some way. The basic question we have to ask ourselves is : What kind of human being do you want ? But unfortunately we have placed before ourselves the model of a perfect being. The perfect being is a Godman or a spiritual man or an avatar, or some such being. But forcing everyone to fit into that mould is the cause of our tragedy. It is just not possible for us all to be like that . Once upon a time, the sceptre and the crown, the church, and the pontiffs, were all worshipped. Later the kings revolted against that, and then the royal family came to be admired and worshipped. Where are they now ? Others have eliminated royalty and have created the office of the president. We are told that you should not insult the head of the state. Until yesterday, he was your neighbour, and now he becomes the president of your country. Why do you have to worship a king or a president ? The whole hierarchical structure, whether of the past or of the present, is exactly the same . BUT THERE SEEM TO BE A NEED IN A PERSON TO SEEK FOR SOME THING WHICH HE THINKS IS HIGHER THAN HIMSELF. .. That something what we would like to be. That is why we admire and worship someone. The whole hierarchical structure is built on that foundation. It is all right with the politicians, let alone the monarchy and the church. Even the top tennis player , a movie star is a hero. They are models for us .And the culture is responsible for this situation. It is not only the physiological differences, the hormonal differences, if there are any, but the whole commercialism has that effect. You walk into any store or watch any commercial on the television; they ( the ad men) are always telling you how you should dress, how you should beautify yourself. Now half the stores contain cosmetics for men. I am not condemning it, but pointing out that that is the way of our life. So the ad man is telling you what kind of clothes you should wear, and what colours should match what other colours. He is telling you all the time. So, you are influenced by what he is telling you. And you want what he wants you to want. How are we going to deal with this problem? I don’t know. It’s not for me to answer. It is for those people who want to deal with these problems.
WHY DONT YOU LEAVE THE BODY ALONE ?.
What we are actually doing is trying to treat the symptoms of what we call a disease. But my question is, and I always throw this question at the people who are competent enough – the doctors, what is health? what is disease? Is there any such thing as disease for this body ? The body does not know that it is healthy or unhealthy. You know, we translate the ‘ malfunctioning ‘ ( of the body ) to mean that there is some imbalance in the natural rythm of the body. But we are so frightened that we run to a doctor or to somebody who we think is in the know of things and can help us. We do not give a chance to the body to work out the problems created by the situation we find ourselves in. We do not give enough time to the body. But what actually is health ? Does the body know ? Or does it have any way of knowing, that it is healthy or unhealthy ?
What is pain ? I am not asking a metaphysical question. To me pain is a healing process. But we do not give enough chance or opportunity to the body to heal itself or help itself, to free itself from what we call pain. We are frightened. We are afraid that something terrible will happen to us. And that is where we become gullible. And this is being taken advantage of by some fakes and commercials. They are exploiting the gullibility and credulity of people .It is not that I am saying that you should not go to doctor or take the help of medicine. I am not one of those who believe that your prayers will help the body to recover from whatever disease it has, or that God is going to be the healer. Nothing like that. Pain is part of the biological functioning of the body, and that is all there is to it. And we have to rely or depend upon the chemistry of this body, and the body always gives us a warning. In the early stages we do not pay any attention, but when it becomes too much for the body to handle, there is panic and fear. Maybe it is necessary for us to go to a person who is in the know of affairs and get a helping hand from him. That’s all we can do. The patient can be given a helping hand. All treatment, whether traditional or alternative, is based upon the account of the symptoms narrated by the patient. Doctors are not above all these problems. Doctors need more reassuring than others. Doctors too have pain in their knees. My advice to the doctors in that they should heal themselves first. It’s so surprising that many of the heart specialists have died of heart failure. It’s also very interesting to learn that psychiatrists have tended to commit suicide more often than others. So, they do need psychiatric help. There is a saying in India that a snake always bites the snake charmer, and that will be his end. It’s very strange. He can get away with playing with the snake for a long time, but ultimately his end is always through the bite of a cobra or some other snake.
The basic problem is that we have unfortunately divided pain into physical and psychological pain. As I see it , there is no such thing as psychological pain at all. There is only physical pain. Some people feel nervous or have anxiety where Valium is probably the most prescribed medication in this country. It puts you to sleep. When the physical pain is unbearable and you have no way of freeing yourself from it, the body becomes unconscious. In that unconscious state, if the body still has any chance of renewing itself to function normally, it tries to help itself. If it cannot, that’s the end of the story. So the pain seems more acute than what it actually is because we are linking up all these sensations of pain and giving them continuity. Otherwise the pain is not so acute as we imagine it to be. Another problem is that we don’t give a chance to the body to recuperate. We just run to the corner drugstore or a doctor and buy medicines. That’s probably one of the things that are making it difficult for the body to handle it’s problems in its own way. When confronted with pain, the average person tries to take a shortcut. There is a shortcut because you have made tremendous progress in surgery. But surgery sometimes makes the problem worse. All surgical corrections disturb the natural rythm of the body. I am not for the moment saying that you should not take advantage of the tremendous strides made in the field of surgery. The basic question we should all ask, ” What for and why are we so eager to prolong life ? “. Now they are saying that it is possible for us to live beyond eighty -five. The dream of living for a hundred years, which has been the goal of every Indian, has come true. Every time you meet any elderly person there, he blesses you by saying, ” May you live for a hundred years”. But so far they have not succeeded. And in spite of the blessings of all the sages, saints, and saviours of mankind, the average age of an Indian has remained twenty-three-and-a-half years for centuries. But suddenly, I don’t know why , it has jumped to fifty – three and odd years. May be because of the rich food they are eating. THE DEATH RATE IS ALSO LESS. BUT PEOPLE DON’T ACTUALLY LIVE LONGER IN THE OLDER AGE GROUPS. We place so much importance on the statistical truths of this, that, and the other. Statistics can be used either way. Either in favour or against someone’s opinion.
As regards the quantity of food consumption and the quality of the same there are no hard and fast rules applicable to anyone. My suggestions to all these nutritionists and doctors is that they should rethink the matter and try to look at the functioning of this human body in a different way . But that will take a lot of jettisoning of our ideas that we have taken for granted. All these people who have tremendous investment in drugs and belong to the medical associations here and everywhere in the world will naturally oppose the suggestion. We have to look at things in a different way. We have to come to terms with the basic situation that this body of ours, which is the product of thousands and thousands of years of evolution, has enough intelligence to help itself survive under any circumstances. All that it is interested in is its survival and reproduction. All the cultural inputs that you have imposed on this organism have absolutely no value for this body. It really does not want to learn or know anything from us. That being the situation, all the things that we are doing to help it to live longer, happier, and healthier are only creating problems for it. How long all this can go on I really don’t know. Yes, leave the body alone. Don’t get frightened and rush here, there, and everywhere. In any case, there is no way you can conquer death at all. PEOPLE ARE TRYING SUBCONCIOUSLY TO PREVENT DEATH. Our pushing people into a value system is a very undesirable thing, you know. You want to push everybody into a value system. We never question that this value aystem, which we have cherished for centuries, may be the very thing that is responsible for our misery which may be the very thing that is generating disease. Disease and conflict in our lives. We really don’t know. Another thing I want to emphasise is that what we call identity, the ‘ I ‘ the ‘me’ the ‘ you ‘ , the ‘center’ , the ‘psyche’, is artificially created. It does not exist at all. It has been culturally created. We are doing everything possible to maintain that identity, whether we are asleep, awake, or dreaming . The instrument that we use to maintain this identity strengthens, fortifies and gives continuity to it. The constant use of memory is wearing you out. We really do not know what memory is, but we are constantly using it to maintain that non-existent identity of ours. Nobody has come up with any definite and positive answer to the question of what memory is. You may say it is all neurons, but there is this constant use of memory to maintain identity. MEMORY IS A MAJOR PROBLEM NOW BECAUSE PEOPLE ARE LOS ING IT. That’s what we call Alzheimer’s disease; and that is going to be the fate of mankind. You may kid yourself and tell everybody that it is caused by the use of aluminium vessels and all that ….But why do we say that it is the fate of mankind? Because it ( memory ) is consuming tremendous amounts of energy. EVERYONE IS USING MEMORY ALL THE TIME NEVER-ENDINGLY. A certain amount of the use of memory is absolutely essential; but to use it to live forever, to be fit and to be healthier, will create complications.
It is that ( memory which maintains our identity) that is responsible for turning us all into neurotic individuals. The constant use of that is going to be the tragedy of mankind. Because of this overuse we don’t have enough energy to deal with the problems of living. It is consuming tremendous amounts of energy. But there are no hard and fast rules, so much so that anybody can offer us ways and means of freeing ourselves from this danger that we are all going to face one of these days. Is it more like that memory is almost like a muscle that is wearing out. It is being worn out by constant use. Yes. I maintain that there is some neurological disorder in the nervous system. Although computers may help to certain extent the burden of memory but soon you will be jobless by your dependence on such technology that because the computer will analyse all your symptoms and tell you what to do. And the robots will take the place of specialist surgeons and perform operations. I suggest that you should make enough money and retire before such an event occurs. The pineal gland , twenty five years ago, they were saying in America that this gland had no use. They now realise the importance and significance of the same gland which in India it is called the Ajna chakra. They have to revise all their opinions and ideas about these glands. Because of the constant use of the memory, which is thought, to maintain identity, many of these glands, which are very essential for the functioning of the living organism, have remained dormant, inert, and inactive. Some people who are interested in religious things try to activate them, and feel that they are getting somewhere. But if you try to activate any of those through some techniques that are adopted in countries like India or elsewhere, it might be dangerous. They ( techniques) might shatter the whole nervous system. Instead of helping people they might just give you a ‘ high ‘ . One danger in playing with these glands is that we might create more problems for this body rather than to help it function normally, sanely, and intelligently. That danger is there.
Trying to activate these glands somehow will generate a whole series of problems. For example, the pituitary gland. They say ( I don’t know myself) that it is responsible for the height of the body. Through manipulation or activation of that gland, you can grow taller. You are given growth harmones. It’s good for the research scientists to indulge in such things, and they will be amply rewarded by the society. But we don’t know whether they are really helping us . There is not enough research done on these things, and it may be highly dangerous to rush into doing something with them. The pineal gland which is called the AJNA CHAKRA in sanskrit is important and which is injured by thought, yet they are using thought to investigate it . But they are not going to succeed. Probably they will use it for healing purpose or for something else. But what most people are doing is actually injuring their own pineal gland. If it is activated in a natural way, it will take over and give directions to the functioning of this body without thought interfering all the time. So, we come back to the same point that thought is your enemy. Thought is a protective mechanism. It is interested in protecting itself at the expense of the living organism. It is thought that is creating all our problems,, and it is not the instrument to help us solve the problems created by itself.
IT’S TERROR, NOT LOVE, THAT KEEP US TOGETHER
What is this state that is entirely natural to man. Can the natural state be aquired by effort- if it can be acquired at all– or is it simply a chance occurrence ? When I use the term ‘ natural state’ it is not a synonym for ‘ enlightenment’ ‘ freedom’ or ‘ God – realisation’ and so forth. Not at all. When the totality of mankind’s knowledge and experience loses its stranglehold on the body- the physical organism– then the body is allowed to function in its own harmonious way. Your natural state is a biological, neurological and physical state. Do the genes control our behaviour and destinies ? I can make no definitive statements about the part genes play in the evolutionary process, but at the moment it appears that Darwin was atleast partially wrong in insisting that acquired characteristics could not be genetically transmitted. I think that they are transmitted in some fashion. I am not competent enough to say whether the genes play any part in the transmission. Anyway the problem lies in our psyche. We function in a thought -sphere, and not in our biology. The separative thought structure, which is the totality of man’s thoughts, feelings, experiences and so on – what we call psyche or soul or self – is creating the disturbance. That is what is responsible for our misery; that’s what continues the battle that is going on there ( in the human being) all the time. This interloper, the thought sphere, has created your entire value system. The body is not in the least interested in values, much less a value system . It is only concerned with intelligent moment- to – moment survival , and nothing else. Spiritual ‘values’ have no meaning to it. When , through some miracle or chance, you are freed from the hold of thought and culture, you are left with the body’s natural functions, and nothing else. It then functions without the interference of thought. Unfortunately, the servant, which is the thought structure that is there, has taken possession of the house. But he no longer control and run the household. So he must be dislodged . It is in this sense that I use the term ‘natural state’ , without any connotation of spirituality or enlightenment.
From the scientist point of view in question is that ‘whether someone can demonstrate that state to an individual ( scientist ) whether it is possible to reproduce it ? Nature does not use models. No two leaves are the same; no two human beings are the same. I understand the querist’s problem of scientific proof. Your interest to use this natural state in your misguided efforts to change or ‘ save ‘ mankind. I say that no change is necessary. Your corrupt society has put into you this notion of change, that you are this and you must be that. Any thing that insists that you be something other than what you in fact are is the very thing that is falsifying you and the world. A natural state of mind will be stumbled into by someone on his own and cannot under any circumstances transmit to others. It has no social, political, commercial or transformational value to any one. He does not sit up on platforms haranguing you, demanding that you change the world, As things are, you and the world – which are not two separate things- cannot be any different. All these attempts on the part of man to change himself go entirely against the way the nature is operating .
BEIHIND THE CHANGE OF NATURE THERE MAY BE SOME KIND OF PURPOSE ?
I don’t see any plan or purpose at all!. There is a process– I wouldn’t necessarily call it evolution- but when it slows down then a revolution ( revaluation) takes place. Nature tries to put together something and start all over again, just for the sake of creating. This is the only true creativity. Nature uses no models or precedents, and so has nothing to do with art per se. Artists find it comforting to think that they are creative. ‘ Creative art ‘, ‘ creative ideas’ and ‘ creative politics’. It’s nonsense. There is nothing really creative in them in the sense of doing anything original, new or free. The artists pick something here and something there, put them together, and think they have created something marvellous. They are using something that is already there; their work is an imitation. Only, they are not decorous enough to admit that . They are all imitating something that is already there. Imitation and style are the only ‘creativity’ we have. We each have our own style according to the school we attended, the language we are taught, the books we have read, and the examinations we have taken. And within that framework again we each have our own style. Perfecting style and technique is all that operates there.
The framing of what there is by the mind is what you call beauty. Beauty is (in) the frame (ing). The framing creates the conclusion, the thought, which it then calls beauty. Otherwise there is no beauty at all. Beauty is not in the object. Nor is it in the eye of the beholder. To say, like the Upanishads do, that the absence of the self is beauty is a lot hogwash!. The act of capturing and framing, which thought creates for us, is what we call beauty. Perhaps I am going off on a tangent….
It is the constant demand for permanence that cripples the society. Because we all seek permanence inwardly, we demand that those things, which we perceive to lie outside ourselves- society, humanity, the nation, and the world- also be permanent. We seek our permanence through them. All forms of permanence, whether personal or collective, are your own creation. They are all an extension of the very same demand for permanence. But nothing is permanent. Our efforts to make things permanent go entirely against the way of nature. Somehow you know that you will not succeed in your demand for permanence. Yet you persist.
THE persisting question still remain that what life is , if it has any meaning ?
Life is something, which you cannot capture, contain, and give expression to. Energy is an expression of life. What is death? It is simply a condition of the human body. There is no such thing as death. What you have are ideas about death, ideas that arise when you sense the absence of another person. Your own death or the death of near and dear ones, is not something you can experience. What you actually experience is the void created by the disappearance of another individual, and the unsatisfied demand to maintain the continuity of your relationship with that person for a non- existent eternity. The arena for the continuation of all these ‘ permanent relationships is the tomorrow- heaven, next life and so on. These things are the inventions of a mind interested only in its undisturbed, permanent continuity in a ‘self’ generated, fictitious future. The basic method of maintaining the continuity is the incessant repetition of the question ” How? How ? How ?”How am I to live ? How can I be happy ? How can I be sure I will be happy tomorrow? This has made life an insoluble dilemma for us. We want to know and through that knowledge we hope to continue on with our miserable existence forever. Society cannot be interested in what I am talking about. Society is after all two individuals or a thousands of them put together. Because I am a threat to you individually- as you know and experiance yourself- I am also a threat to society. How can society possibly be interested in this sort of thing? Not a chance. Society is the sum of relationships, and despite what you may find agreeable to believe, all these relationships are sordid and horrible . This is the unsavoury fact; take it or leave it. You cannot help but superimpose over these horrible ugly relationships a soothing fictitious veneer of ” loving ” ” compassionate” ” brotherly ” and ” harmonious ” or some other fancy relationships. Actual relationship and all that is pure bunk. All you know is separateness and duration, and space and time, which is the ‘ frame ‘ superimposed by the mind over the flow of life. But anything that happens in space and time is limiting the energy of life. What life is I don’t know; nor will I ever. You can say that life is this, that, or the other and give hundreds of definitions. But the definitions do not capture life. It’s like a flowing river. You take a bucket full of water from it, analyse it into its constituent elements, and say that the river is the same ( as the bucketful of water ). But the quality of flow is absent in the water in the bucket. So, as the ZEN proverb says ” you can never cross the same river.twice ” . It’s flowing all the time. You cannot talk of life or of death because life has no beginning or end, period. You can say there is life because you are responding to stimuli. But what happens after you are dead ? The word dead is only a definition– a condition of your body. The body itself, after what is called clinical death, no longer responds to stimuli the way in which we know it now. It is still probably responding in some fashion ; the brain waves continue for a long time after clinical death takes place.
Through your death you are giving continuity to life or whatever you call it. I can’t say you are dead: only that you are not useful to me any more. If you Bury a dead body, something is happening there; if you burn the body, the ashes are enriching the soil; if you throw in water, the fish will eat it ; if leave it there in vulture-pit, the vultures will eat it. You are providing the means for the continuity of life.
So, you can’t say the body is dead. It is not metaphysics that I am talking about here. It is only your fear of something coming to an end that is the problem. Do you want to be free from that fear ? I say, ‘No’. The ending of fear is the ending of you as you know yourself. I am not talking of psychological, romantic death of ” dying to your yesterdays” . That body of yours, I assure you, drops dead on the spot the moment the continuity of knowledge is broken.
SCIENTISTS !
INDIA — ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT– MINDSET– HANDICAPPED.
What happens to an individual when he is paying attention to the discourses on religion and spiritual heritage of the past that we see everyday on TV and read in news media is that the individual is so effected by his gullibility of falling under the influence of the same that he is taken into past which is dead. This is making him lose his present ground effecting his materialistic productivity which in turn effecting the economic progress of our country. When the individual productivity drops down, the country at large has to pay penalty by lagging behind others globally. The religion and the spirutuality or the useless belief in them which even otherwise proven that are baseless and the value system that has come out of it has failed .The state that seems to be patronising such frivolous activities cannot expect to develop economically and will remain handicapped forever. The irresponsibility of the media is of no less contribution to the present state of affairs. The state falling at the feet of criminal fake godmen or such fake gurus is incomprehensible and detestable. who ever is responsible in particular the fake religious criminal gurus are to be dealt with such punishable act so as to ensure elimination of misguidance in order to come back on to the track of real development to cover the lost ground on International level but as on to day we are yet to get rid of the crutches of the illusory, useless value system imposed on us by the society. The religious man is the culprit who is unfortunately patronised by the State.
THE Scientific researchers are exploited by the state or politicians. EINSTEIN encouraged Roosevelt to drop the atom bomb. ” If you don’t do it , they will “, he said. Out of his contempt for Germany and gratitude to the United States, which helped him flourish in his work and produce tremendous results, he gave that advice. He came to regret that advice later on. That doesn’t matter. The atmosphere is polluted due to result of the chemical researchers to say that pollution goes in hand in hand with the research. Where you draw the line. The objective may be something different but it goes uncontrollable. These environmental problems have been allowed to escalate into huge crises, so huge that in fact they are beyond what any individual or even ecologists can tackle any more. The sickening fumes, the poisonous air. The factories are pumping out millions of tons, of deadly wastes. There is more pollution here than in Western countries. To clean up the exhaust fumes from all the contaminating chemicals takes huge amounts of money. These companies are not going to voluntarily clean up the mess. Do you think General Motors and the others give a damn ? If I had any shares in a company, and I don’t actually, I would want dividends, not a bill for clean- up costs. Any management team that advocated corporate responsibility would be run out of office at once. As a shareholder I would want income, I wouldn’t give a damn for all the people, animals, and plants that are there. Now it has become fashionable to become an ecologist. Philips talk of saving the whales is a joke. And queen Anne talks of saving the seals! Why are they concerned about whales and seals ? If what I read is true, only fifteen percent of all the animal species that ever lived are alive today. All the other species have become extinct. Only five percent of all the plant species that ever existed exist now. So, extinction of species is the regular order of things in nature. Perhaps man should have become extinct long ago. I don’t know. It’s too late now. This one species alone is increasing the rate of extinction of all other species beyond what could have been thought possible. The self-consciousness in the human species, the idea that the world was created for man alone, is the real problem. The useless ecologists, form groups, attend meetings, collect funds, start foundations, build organisations worth millions with presidents and vice-presidents, and they all make money. It may sound very cynical to you, but the fact of the matter is that they have no real power. The solutions do not lie with them. The problem is out of their hands. Governments have the power to do something, but they are not interested.
HUMANITY RESTORED NOT THROUGH SCIENCE BUT LOVE
I still maintain that it is not love, compassion, humanism, or brotherly sentiments that will save mankind. No, not at all. It is the sheer terror of extinction that can save us, if anything can. Each cell of a living organism cooperates with the cell next to it. It does not need any sentiment or declarations of undying love to do so. Each cell is wise enough to know that if its neighbour goes, it also goes. The cells stick together not out of brotherhood, love and that kind of thing, but out of the urgent drive to survive.
It is the same with us, but only in a larger scale. Soon we will all come to know one simple thing: If I try to destroy you, I will also be destroyed. We see the superpowers of today signing arms control pacts, rushing to sign no – first strike accords, and the like. Even the big bull boys, who have among them controlled the world’s resources, no longer talk about a winnable nuclear war. Even the arrogant, swashbuckling United States has changed its tune. It no longer talks– as it did twenty years ago under Dulles and other cold warriors- of massive retaliation. If you read the Time Magazine now, it doesn’t talk about the United States as the mightiest, the richest, the most powerful, and the most invincible of all nations. It refers to it as ” one of the superpowers” .
You scientists do what you have to, but don’t conveniently place it under the fabric of humanitarianism, brotherly love, self – sacrifice, and such other comforting ideas. At the same time I am telling you that the fate of the planet is in the hands of today’s scientists, not in the hands of the mystics and holymen, who come talking of changing the world, of creating a heaven on earth. It is these ideas, full of absolute and poetic fancy, that have turned this place into a hell. I have entrusted the whole thing to the scientists. I have more faith in you than these people that are going around ‘ saving ‘ mankind. We need to be saved from the self appointed saviours of mankind. They are the ones who are responsible for the terrible situation we find ourselves in today. We don’t realise that it is they who have created this mess for us. They had their day, and have utterly, totally failed. Still they refuse to take a back seat. That’s it. We are stuck. You study the history of mankind: monarchies, revolutions, democracies, and more revolutions. Everything has failed us; everything is over. Not one ideology will survive. What’s left for us? Democracy the noble experiment is over. Everything is over. We find ourselves in a situation where your boss will decide these issues.
YOU SEE SOME ONE STARVING, AND WOULD LIKE TO DO SOME THING ABOUT IT ..
To me the question of whether God exists or not is irrelavant and immaterial. We have no use for God. We have used God to justify the killing of millions and millions of people. We exploit God. You might say it is the negative aspect of it. But that’s the positive aspect of it, not the negative. In the name of God we have killed more people than in the two world wars put together. In Japan millions of people died in the name of the sacred Buddha. Here in India, five thousand Jains were massacred in a single day. This is not a peaceful nation! You don’t want to read your own history: it’s full of violence from the beginning to the end. The biological instinct is very powerful , and the fear of extinction, not love and compassion, will probably be the saviour of mankind . The invention of God with all those other beliefs may have served mankind’ instinct to survive for some time in the past, but not now. It’s the extension of the same survival mechanism that now operates through the fear of extinction.
IS THERE SUCH A THING AS TRUTH
Truth is a movement. You can’t capture it, give expression to it or use it to advance your interests. The moment you capture it, it ceases to be the truth. What is the truth for me is something that cannot under any circumstances, be communicated to you. The certainty here cannot be transmitted to another. For this reason the whole guru business is absolute nonsense. This has always been the case, not just now. Your self- denial is to enrich the priests. You deny yourself your basic needs while the man travels in a Rolls Royce car, eating like a king, and being treated like a potentate. He and the others in the holy business, thrive on the stupidity and credulity of others. The politicians similarly thrive on the gullibility of man. It is the same everywhere.
Whatever you do in the pursuit of truth or reality takes you away from your own natural state in which you always are. It’s not something you can acquire, attain or accomplish as a result of your effort. All that you do makes it impossible for what already is there to express itself. That’s why I call this your natural state. You are always in that state. What prevents what is there from expressing itself in its own way is the search. The search is always in the wrong direction.
Because you are not interested in the everyday things and happenings around you, you have invented beyond, timelessness, God, truth, reality, entertainment or whatever, and search for it.
There may not be ultimate truth. You don’t know a thing about it. Whatever you know is what you have been told, what you have heard, and you are projecting that information. What you call something is determined by the learning you have about it, and whatever knowledge you have about it is exactly what you will experience. The knowledge creates the experience and the experiance then strengthens the knowledge. What you know can never be the ultimate reality.
There is nothing there , only your relative, experiential data, your truth. There is no such thing as objective truth at all. There is nothing which exists outside or independent of our minds.
It is not only your past. It is the entire past, entire existence of every human being and every form of life. It is not such an easy thing. It is like trying to stop this flow of the river through all those artificial means. It will inundate the whole thing.
Understanding yourself is one of the greatest jokes, perpetrated on the gullible and credulous people everywhere, not only by the purveyors of ancient wisdom- the holy men- but also by the modern scientists. The psychologists love to talk about self- knowledge, self- actualisation, living from moment to moment and such rot. These absurd ideas are thrown at us as if they are something new. You have been brainwashed by all those holy men , Gurus, teachers and the so called enlightened people that the past should die, should come to an end. ‘If you attain this’ life would be hunky- dory- full of sweetness. You have fallen for all that romantic stuff. If you try to suppress the past and try to be in the present, it will drive you crazy . You are trying to control something which is beyond your control .
The holy men talk very best of money as if it has no importance for them, when in fact it is one of the most important things in their lives. These holy men are greedy,jealous and vindictive., just like everybody else. You want to live through your work, and through your children. These people want to live through their religious institutions. What these Gurus in the marketplace do is to sell you some ice packs and provide you with some comforters. The holy men talk very best of money as if it has no importance for them, when in fact it is one of the most important things in their lives. These holy men are greedy,jealous and vindictive., just like everybody else. You want to live through your work, and through your children. These people want to live through their religious institutions. What these Gurus in the marketplace do is to sell you some ice packs and provide you with some comforters. The holy men talk very best of money as if it has no importance for them, when in fact it is one of the most important things in their lives. These holy men are greedy,jealous and vindictive., just like everybody else. You want to live through your work, and through your children. These people want to live through their religious institutions. What these Gurus in the marketplace do is to sell you some ice packs and provide you with some comforters.
You are not interested in solving the problem because that will put an end to you. You want the problem to remain. You want the hunger to remain because if you are not hungry you will not seek this food from all these holy men. What they Are giving you are some scraps, bits of food, and you are satisfied.
THERE IS NO FREEDOM OF ACTION
MAN IS MEMORY
There is always a space between perception and memory. Memory is like sound. Sound is very slow, whereas light travels faster. All these sensory activities or perceptions are like light. They are very fast. But for some reason we have lost the capacity to kick that(memory) into the background and allow these things to move as fast as they occur in nature. Thought comes, captures it (the sensory perception) and says that it is this or that. That is what you call recognition, or naming , or whatever you want to call it. The moment you recognise this as the tape recorder, the name tape recorder also is there. So recognition and naming are not two different things. We maintain the separation and keep up a non – existing identity. That is the reason why you have to constantly use your memory, which is nothing but the neurons, to maintain your identity. Who am I ? What is the meaning of life? Does God exist? Or is there an afterlife? — all these questions spring only from memory. That is why I ask whether you have a question of your own. Can you become conscious of anything except through the medium of memory and thought? Memory is knowledge. Even your feelings are memory. To attempt to be free from memory is withdrawal, and withdrawal is death.
After all, you don’t exist, and I don’t exist. You and I have been created by the totality of those experiances, and we have to use them in order to function sanely and intelligently in this world. One thing that is to be emphasised is that it is culture that has created us all for the sole purpose of maintaining its status quo and it’s continuity. So in that sense I do not see that there are any individuals at all. At the same time, the same culture has given us hope that there is something that you can do to become an individual and that there is such a thing as free will. Actually, there is no free will at all.
DO YOU EXIST ?
The whole of culture has created this situation for us through its value system. The value system demands that relationships be based on love, but the most important elements are security and possessiveness. When your hold on the other weakens, the relationship wears out. You cannot maintain this lovely- dovey relationship all the time.
The relationship between a man and a woman is based on the images that the two create for themselves of each other. So the actual relationship between the two individuals is a relationship between the two images. But your image keeps changing and so does the other person’s. To keep the image constant is just not possible. So when everything else fails we use this final, last card in the pack, love, with all the marvellous and romantic ideations around it.
MARRIAGE IS POSSESSIVENESS
LOVE IS FASCIST
What after all is this world ? The world is the relationship between two individuals. But that relationship is based on the foundation of’ What do I get out of a relationship ? ‘ Mutual gratification is the basis of all relationships. If you don’t get what you want out of a relationship, it goes sour. What there is in the place of what you call a ‘ loving relationship ‘ is hate. The whole music of our age is all around that song , love love, love…But love is fascist in its nature, in its birth, in its expression and in its action. It cannot do us any good. We may talk of love but it doesn’t mean anything.
SEX IS THOUGHT
ISN’T THE HEART DIFFERENT FROM THE MIND ?
I am just pointing out the use to which we are putting that simple biological function. I am not condemning it. It is there, you see. Your talk of that as an expression of love has no meaning. We would love to put it that way because it is comforting. If sex is used only for biological purpose it is not really a devastating situation. If you leave it as it is it wouldn’t be so horrible, the way you would like to put it, it would fall into its proper place. That is why we have invented all these other things– God-Truth and reality–which are nothing but ultimate pleasures.
Sex has to be put in its proper place as one of the natural functionings of the body. It is solely mainly and wholly for the purpose of reproducing or procreating something like this. It has no other place in the functioning of the body. Thought always interferes with sex. It has become a pleasure movement. I am not saying anything against it. After that it goes. Thereafter what you are left with is the natural functioning of the glands. So we have to revise all our ideas about this whole business of sex. We give a tremendous importance to sex and so the denial of it becomes suxh an obsession with people. In India, they even moved away from that denial and created what is called tantric sex. It was the highest pleasure that human beings could have, sex through tantra was considered the highest. The fact is that the person is very much there even at the moment when there is peak sex experience. The experience has already been captured by your memory. Otherwise, you have no way of experiencing that as a peak moment. If that peak moment remained as peak moment that would be the just end of sex. That would be the end of everything. The fact that you remember it as a peak moment and want to repeat it over and over again implies that it has already become part of your experiencing structure. You want it always and then want to extend it for longer and longer periods of time.
DESIRE AND SELFISHNESS
You hope that you will be able to resolve the problem of desire through thinking, because of that model of a saint who you think has controlled or eliminated desire. If that man has no desire as you imagine, he is a corpse. Don’t believe that man at all. Such a man builds some organisations and lives in luxury, which you pay for. You are maintaining him. He is doing it for his livelihood. There is always a fool in the world who falls for him. Once in a while he allows you to prostrate before him. You will be surprised if you live with him. You will get the shock of your life if you see him there. That’s why there are all aloof- because they are afraid you will catch them some time or the other. The rich man is always afraid that you will touch him for money. So too the religious man- he never,never comes in contact with you. Seeing him is far more difficult than seeing the president of your country- that is a lot easier than seeing a holy man. He is not what he says he is, not what he claims he is.
As long as there is a living body there will be desire. It is natural. Thought has interfered and tried to suppress, control, and moralise about desire, to the detriment of mankind. We are trying to solve the ‘ problem’ of desire through thought. It is thinking that has created the problem. You somehow continue to hope and believe that the same instrument can solve your other problems as well. You hope against hope that thought will put you through, but you will die in hope just you have lived in hope.
DOES THE BRAIN RECORD EVERY EXPERIENCE IN YOUR LIFE………..?
THERE is no such thing as the totality of experiences. Memory is in frames. In order to explain what I mean when I say that it is all in frames and that the whole human body is functioning from moment to moment. I must point to one basic thing, that is how the senses are operating. What is there is only response to a stimulus. The response is not translated by anything that is there, except that it registers the stimuli in the same way as information is registered when transferring images from one floppy disc to another. There is no linking up of all these responses. Each one is an independent frame. A lot of imagination is involved in our trying to understand what is actually happening there. I give you the example of what a friend wanted me to do when I was in a hill resort. He said that when he reached the top of a particular mountain he would have a 360- degree view of the whole place. So he dragged me to the top. Unwillingly, I pushed myself to the top of that hill and tried to experience what he called a 360-degree view of the place. I said to myself, ‘ that fellow is kidding himself and imagining things. How is it possible to experience the 360-degree view of this place? I can see only 180 degrees. So what he thinks he is experiencing is born out of his own imagination’ . Translating the sensory perceptions into images is the cultural input there. When my eyes are not looking at you, there is no way that this organism can create the image of what you look like. The problem is in the creation of images which is born out of our imagination and mostly out of what is put in there by our culture. So, what I am trying to say is that what the brain does is to translate these sensory perceptions into the framework of memory. Memory is not a constant factor. What happens is that when the light falls on the object and activates your optic nerve, it throws an image on the retina. This is what we have learnt from the study of our biology, and that is what the physiologists have taught us in our schools. But actually if you want to experiance the fact, that is, the image of what you are looking at, it is something which cannot be experienced by you. Why I give this example is to free us from the many of the ideas we have of what memory is. When once the optic nerves are activated they in their turn activate the neurons in the brain, bring the memory into operation, and tell us that the object is this or that. So the next frame is quite different from the previous frame. Let me give you the example of a movie camera. The movie camera captures whatever is happening in frames. You take, for example, the movement of my hand from here to there— it has ten different frames to show that the hand has moved from here to there. And in order to see the movement on the screen you have to use an artificial thing called the projector. And only then do you see the movement of hand artificially created through the help of the projector. The sound is something like what they do in movie industry. The sound is ninteen-and-a-half frames behind the corresponding picture frame. There is a gap between the picture you take and the sound-ninteen-and-a-half frames. In exactly the same way, thought is very slow. By the time it comes and captures this ‘whatever is there’ within its framework, your eyes have moved somewhere else, and that other thing is completely wiped out. Just think of television. There the picture never really there. It is just a collection of dots. It required the brain to put the picture together. The brain is operating exactly the same way. The whole thing is registered as dots and the pictures ate taken in frames. There is an illusion that there is somebody who is looking at the things. Actually there is nobody who is looking at things. It may sound very strange to you when I say that there is nobody who is talking. You are the one who is making me talk when engaged in conversation, there is nobody here who is talking. There is nobody. It may sound very strange to you but that is the way it is. It is so mechanical, yet we are not ready to accept the mechanical functioning of this living organism.
We are using the neurons, our memory, constantly to maintain our identity, whether you are awake or asleep or dreaming, this process is carried on. But it is wearing you out. That is why I say that the tragedy that is facing mankind is not Aids or cancer but Alzheimer’s disease.
All our experiences, spirutial or otherwise, are the basic cause of our suffering. ……The body is not interested in anything that you are interested in. That is the battle that is going on all the time. . There seems to be no way out. ..
There are many people who talk of rebirthing. It has become fashionable for people to indulge in that kind of fantasy. You know in Japan they have some techniques in which by manipulating certain nerves at the base of your head they will make you go through the experience of your own birth. I have always maintained that the experiencing structure is totally absent at the time of our birth. And, always questioned the psychologists including Freud when he made a statement that birth is a traumatic experience, when that is not a traumatic experience at all because there is no experiencing structure there at all. Actually it is very difficult to say as to when the experiencing structure in babies comes into operation. I am one of those who believe that the influence of environment is very limited on us although I am not an authority on such things, but the experiencing structure is genetic in its origin and in its expression. Everything is genetically controlled. If we really want to change individuals, the only way we can do it is not by changing the environment, not through changing the cultural input, but by trying to understand what really is the part that genes play in us. May be through some kind of genetic engineering we can create perfect human beings. I am at the same time conscious of the fact that it is a very dangerous thing that we are indulging in. When once we perfect these engineering techniques, we will hand them over to the state. Thereafter it will be a lot easier for the state to manipulate individuals and turn them into mere robots.(I am not against robots as we are actually robots, whether we like it or not) . The state will make people do things, which they are unwilling to do. Usually it takes a lot of time and a lot of Brainwashing to teach something to people– to make people believe in God., to make people believe in a particular political ideology, conversely, to free them from some kind of belief we have to brainwash them all over again. It is a very elaborate and long process. But it is a lot easier and faster for us to use these techniques of genetic engineering to change individuals than it is possible otherwise.