I Mean Business Here!

The sixth question:

    Question 6:

Sir, go on losing your interest! That's perfectly good. Nothing is wrong in it. And be perfectly assured that no woman is going to miss you. On the contrary, they will all be very happy.

But in the West, particularly since Freud opened the Pandora's box, the idea has arisen that you have to remain sexual to the very end, because sex is synonymous with life. So even if you are seventy or eighty, you have to remain interested in sex. If you lose interest in sex, that means you are losing interest in life, that means you are no more needed, that means you are useless now. You can drop dead or go to the parliament, but you are useless.

This idea that sex and life are synonymous is utterly baseless. Sex and life are synonymous at a certain stage. In childhood they are not synonymous; in youth they are synonymous; in old age they are again not synonymous. There are phases. The child is not interested, the young man is interested - and the only interest is in sex.

But in the West there is an effort going on to remain young; you should not get old. People go on befooling themselves in many ways that they are still young. New panaceas have been found again and again, new kinds of elixirs that will keep you young forever. And people are so foolish that they are always ready to accept any nonsense to remain young. Old age is thought to be a kind of disease. To be old means you are ill - in the West. That is not right.

Old age has its own beauties, its own treasures, just as youth has its own beauties and treasures. And certainly the treasures that an old man comes upon are far more valuable than the treasures of youth. Because the old man has lived his youth, he has known all that, he has seen that, he has gone through it. He has lived the illusion and he has known the disillusionment of it all. Now he is wiser than he ever was; he is becoming innocent again. When sex disappears you attain to a kind of innocence. You become a child again, and a mature child.

In the East we have a totally different vision of life. In the East we have respected the old men, not the young, because the old are at the peak - life's journey reaching to its goal. In the West the old are just something to be discarded, the old are just to be thrown on some junkyard. You make houses - retirement centers - for the old where you go on piling them up, or hospitals. Nobody wants anything to do with old people - as if they were meaningless, worthless. And they have lived their whole life, and they have learnt many secrets of life. They can be great teachers - only they can be teachers.

In the East this has been the traditional way: that the old person should become the teacher of the young, because he has lived, grown, understood. He can give you a better direction, with more maturity, with more clarity. Old age is the age to prepare for death. And that is the greatest preparation because you will be going on the longest journey - into the unknown. If you remain interested in sex, it will keep you diverted from death. That's what is happening in the West.

In the West people have not accepted death yet as part of life. Death is a taboo, just as sex was a taboo just a hundred years ago. Nobody talked about sex a hundred years ago. It was impossible to talk about it or to write about it. It was such a taboo that in the Victorian age ladies used to cover the legs of their chairs too - because they are legs, and legs should not be shown.

Freud introduced a great revolution The world is waiting for another Freud to destroy the greater taboo of death. He destroyed the taboo of sex, and the world is far better because of it. Freud is one of the greatest benefactors. Another Freud is needed to destroy the other taboo - which is greater.

Death has to be accepted. With the acceptance of death you start accepting old age. And in acceptance there is relaxation. And once you are no more interested in sex, your whole attention can be focused on death. Remember, sex and death are polar opposites. If you remain interested in sex, when will you prepare for death? Your attention will remain focused on sex, and you will die without any preparation.

Meditation is a preparation for death. Now prepare for death. Meditate. You are no more interested in women - good. Now become interested in your own self. The woman is outside you; that is the interest in the other. Or, if you are a woman, then the man is outside you, and that is interest in the other. Now become interested in yourself. Now go into the discovery of the self, now go on an inward journey.

You ask:

Lose interest. Allow it to happen. Don't try to create it unnecessarily. If it is going on its own, it is beautiful.

I have heard...

Max, aged seventy-six, upon returning to his apartment late one night, was startled to find a girl of about eighteen ran-sacking the place.

'Young woman, you are a thief!' he said. 'I'm going to call the police.'

'Mister,' she pleaded, 'if I'm arrested again, I'll be sent away for years. Please don't call the police.'

'I'm sorry, but I have to do it!' Max replied.

'Look,' she cried, 'I'll do anything. I'll give you my body.'

'Okay,' said the senior citizen, 'take off your clothes and get in bed.'

The girl did and Max quickly followed. He tried and tried and tried for about twenty minutes.

Exhausted and in defeat, he finally gave up.

'It's no use,' sighed Max. 'I just can't make it. I'll have to call the police.'

And you ask me what to do...? 'What should I do?'

Do you want to call the police? Enough is enough. Now let that nonsense go. Let that obsession go. Now turn your energy towards death. Now look into death face to face. Now encounter death.

And to encounter death is the greatest experience in life. And if you can encounter death, you will come to know that you are deathless. To face death is the only way to know that you are deathless, that only the body dies, and you never die. And once you have known it, you are ready, ready for the journey, and when death comes, you will go laughing and dancing and singing into it.

And a man who can go laughing, dancing, and singing into death, prayerfully, meditatively, comes to know the greatest 0rgasm that is in the world. Sexual 0rgasm is nothing, because in sexual 0rgasm only a small, minute part of your life energy leaves your body, and you feel a great relaxation. In death your whole life energy leaves the body. No sexual 0rgasm can be compared with that cosmic 0rgasm, that total 0rgasm that death brings to you.

Don't miss death. Death is going to give you the greatest gift in life, the parting gift. But only a few people come to it because nobody is ready for it. Death takes you unawares. And you are so frightened, and you are so concerned with sex that you cling to life.

Do you know that it almost always happens...? In the East it has been one of the secrets to know about a man. When a man dies, if he is clinging too much to life and is still interested in sex, he will die with an erection. That shows that the poor fellow died without any readiness - even in death he was full of sex fantasies. It happens almost always. Unless you have become a great meditator, it is going to happen to you too - that while dying, you will fantasize about sex, you will be making love - at least in your imagination.

This is no way to die. This is very insulting to death, and insulting to God, and very insulting to yourself. Let sex disappear - it is time. Relax into non-sexuality. Non-sexuality will make you centred. Stop chasing women, and start chasing yourself. You cannot do both. And get ready.

Death may knock you down any moment; one never knows when it is coming. Prepare. Allow yourself to enjoy meditation as much as possible. Transform your sexual energy into meditative energy; it is the same energy, just the direction changes: it no longer flows downward and outward, it starts flowing inward and upward. And this same energy opens the bud of the Golden Flower in you. This is the whole secret.

Now you have come naturally to the right point, and you are asking me, 'What should I do?' You are asking for some recipes to again create the sexuality which is disappearing. You are asking for some props, you are asking for some help so that you can go on playing the same foolish game even in your old age.

It is good when you are young, because then you are foolish. It is very rare to become alert and aware and meditative when you are young. If you can become, you have a rare genius. But if you cannot become meditative even in old age, then you are just stupid, utterly stupid.

It is good to fool around when you are young. That foolishness is part of growth; it helps you. The woman or the man outside becomes the mirror; they reflect you, they help you to see who you are.

Love is very revealing. But finally one has to come to see oneself within, not in a mirror. Even the mirror has to be dropped. One has to be alone. And the purity of aloneness is infinite. And the bliss of aloneness is eternal.

Now the moment has come. Just let this interest in women go, and suddenly you will find another interest arising in you - it is almost simultaneous - the interest in meditation. And then you can have the last gift that life can give to you: a meditative death, a death in SATORI, in SAMADHI, in ecstasy. And you will know the total ogasmic experience. That experience is enough; then you will never be coming back into life, into the body, into this prison.

In the East this has been our goal: how not to be born again, because this whole process of being born and dying again and again is a boring process; it is utterly futile. In the final analysis it is just a dream, and not even a nice dream but a nightmare.

My suggestion to you is: you have lived your life, you have seen the pleasures of the body, you have looked into relationship and you have learned whatsoever was to be learned from it, now it is time to turn inwards.

The last question:

Question 7:

I don't know, and I don't think that anybody else knows either.

Philosophy is a useless passion. I am using Jean-Paul Sartre's words, he says 'Man is a useless passion.' I say man is NOT a useless passion but philosophy is.

You ask me:

Nobody has ever defined it. It has remained vague. Not that definitions have not been given to it, millions of definitions have been given; but THE definition is still missing. Each philosopher gives a definition, and others contradict it. It is a game, enjoying the gymnastics of logic, it is logic-chopping.

It is like chess - a very intellectual game, very absorbing - but there is no conclusion in it; it is non- conclusive. The game continues from generation to generation. Slowly slowly, out of this game two things have arisen: one is science, the other is religion. Science is objective, religion is subjective.

Science is experimental, religion is experiential. Philosophy is neither. It is just hanging in a limbo between the two. And slowly, slowly it is disappearing because that which is objective is being taken by science every day, and that which is subjective has already been taken by religion. Nothing is left for philosophy. So now modern philosophy only goes on thinking about language - language analysis.

The philosophers are asking the most absurd questions because they have lost all the meaningful questions. Either those questions have been covered by science or by religion. Philosophy is becoming more and more empty. They cannot find even their own questions now, so either they take questions from science and they think about them, or they take questions from religion and they think about them. Their questions are borrowed. Philosophy is a dying phenomenon. It will not be a surprise that one day you suddenly come to know that philosophy has died. It is on its deathbed. And you can go to any university and you can see philosophy on its deathbed.

But why have you asked the question? That is more relevant, more important to think about.

I am not teaching philosophy here. What I am saying has nothing to do with philosophy, it is absolutely experimental and experiential. My effort is to create a scientific religion - the psychology of the Buddhas. So I am giving you experiments and I am giving you possibilities to experience something that you have not experienced yet. This is a lab, a workshop. We are bent upon doing something. I mean business here! Philosophy is not the concern at all. I am very anti-philosophic and I avoid philosophy because it is playing with shadows, thoughts, speculation. And you can go on playing infinitely, AD INFINITUM, AD NAUSEAM; there is no end to it. One word creates another word, one theory creates another theory, and you can go on and on and on. In five thousand years much philosophy has existed in the world, and to no purpose at all.

But there are people who have the philosophic attitude. And if you are one of them, please drop it; otherwise you and your energy will be lost in a desert.

I will tell you about the four stages of philosophy in four stories.

The first stage of philosophy, the first story:

One of my favourite stories is that of a boy and girl in New England where sleigh riding is popular during the cold winters. While riding one Sunday afternoon, bundled up in their blankets, the girl snuggled up to the boy and said, 'Johnny, I'm cold.'

Johnny looked over to her and said, 'I'm cold, too, Jane. Why not tuck in the blankets?'

So Jane pulled the blankets closer, but pretty soon she moved even closer to Johnny and said, 'My hands are still cold.'

He didn't pay much attention to her and soon she nudged him with her elbow and said, 'Johnny, did you hear me? My hands are cold... and besides nobody loves me.'

This time he looked over to her and said, 'Jane, remember that God loves you, and you can always sit on your hands to keep them warm.'

This is the first stage of being philosophic.

The second stage, the second story:

A study group of philosophers had been meeting for years to study the Talmud. One member of the group had a pernicious habit of sipping a little brandy during the meeting. One night he drank just a little more than usual and became quite tipsy. His companions decided to teach him a lesson. While he was in his drunken stupor, they carried him off to the cemetery and laid him prone among the tombstones.

After a while the philosopher woke up. He looked about him, frightened and aghast. Then he started to reason, 'Am I alive? Or am I dead? If I'm alive, what could I be doing here in the graveyard on top of the graves? And if I'm dead, then why do I feel that I must go to the bathroom immediately?'

This is the second stage of philosophy.

And the third stage, the third story:

Professor Steinberg had been having his lunch in the same Lower East Side restaurant for twenty years. Every day he left his office at noon, went to the restaurant and ordered a bowl of chicken soup - never a change.

But one day the professor called the waiter back after receiving his soup.

'Yes, professor?' enquired the waiter. 'Waiter, please taste the soup.'

'What do you mean, taste the soup? For twenty years you've been eating the same chicken soup here, every day, yes? Has it ever been any different?'

The professor ignored the waiter's comments. 'Please, taste this soup,' he repeated.

'Professor, what's the matter with you? I know what the chicken soup tastes like.'

'Taste the soup,' the professor demanded.

'All right, all right, I'll taste. Where's the spoon?'

'Aha!' cried the professor.

This is the third stage.

And the fourth stage, the fourth story:

A woman went to a philosophic psychologist for treatment of her delusion that she was covered with feathers. After a few sessions the philosopher said to her, 'I feel that we have gotten to the root of this problem through our discussions and analysis, and it is now behind us. What do you think, Mrs Smith?'

'Oh,' said Mrs Smith, 'I think we have had some wonderful sessions and I do feel that the problem has been taken care of. But,' she added, 'the only thing that bothers me now is what I'm going to do with these feathers.'

She raised her hand to her shoulders and began to brush, and the psychologist, the philosopher, suddenly jumped back.

'Now, hold on just a minute, Mrs Smith, don't brush those feathers onto me.'

This is the fourth stage.

Slowly, slowly philosophy becomes a kind of madness. It leads you into neurosis because philosophy is a mind phenomenon. Science has taken the body, religion has taken the soul, only the mind is left for philosophy. And mind is potential madness. If you go on too much into the mind, you will be moving slowly slowly towards madness. It is very rare to find a philosopher who is sane. And vice versa is also true: it is very rare to find a madman who is not a philosopher.

I am not teaching philosophy here, because I am teaching no-mind. And if you become a no-mind all philosophy disappears: Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan, Buddhist - all philosophies disappear; Hegelian, Kantian, Russellian - all philosophies disappear. If the mind disappears, where can the philosophy exist? where can it grow? Mind is the breeding ground of philosophy.

Let the mind disappear. And the beauty is: when there is no mind and nobody to philosophize and nothing to philosophize about, one comes to know. Philosophy is the blind man's effort. It is said:

Philosophy is a blind man in a dark room on a dark night, searching for a black cat which is not there...