Turning the Key_

Society has been giving you toys to play with - just as when you give toys to the children so that they become involved in playing and then they don't disturb you. The parents are at ease, the father can read his newspaper, the mother can work in the kitchen. The child is involved in the toys.

In India, in the villages, this has been the usual practice. Poor women who have to go to work in the fields have to take their small children with them. If the children are big enough they can play on their own, but when they are very small they cannot play on their own. They are a constant distraction for the mother. They will cry - they are hungry, or they have wet the place or they are cold. And the mother has to come and care for them continuously and this is distracting to the work, and the boss won't allow it. So it has been the usual practice to give a little opium to the child. Then the child is fast asleep in the blissful slumber that the opium has given to him, dreaming beautiful dreams, and the mother can remain undistracted in her work. This is good for the work, this is good for the mother, this is good for the landlord, but this is very hazardous and dangerous for the health of the child - for his future also this is poisonous. But this is what has been happening.

Society gives you beliefs so that you need not experiment, so that you need not be distracted into the inquiry, because the inquiry will take so much of your energy that you will not be able to be a good clerk or a good stationmaster or a good collector or a good policeman. You will be distracted by your inquiry, you will become more interested in the inner and your interest in the outer will start disappearing.

Society wants you to live an extrovert life, society wants you to be efficient in the world, to be more productive in the world - whether the production is good or bad is not the point. If you work in a factory where bombs are created you have to be efficient and productive. If you work in the army you have to be efficient and always obedient. Wherever you are, whether the work is good or bad is not the question. Whatsoever the society has decided you have to follow, you have to fall in line.

If you become an inquirer, then there is danger; you will become more and more of an introvert. Your priorities will change, your values will be different. You may not care much about money, you may not care much about power, you may not remain ambitious, you may not be possessive anymore, your interest in property may disappear. You will start searching for inner riches, the inner kingdom of God.

But then you will become less and less efficient for society. And society cannot afford a world, although it will be a better one, where more people are introverted and are doing their own thing rather than being pulled and pushed by others to do their things. It will be a better world where people are more meditative. Then politicians will not be able to create as much mischief as they have been creating in the past. Wars will disappear automatically if people are more introverted.

Then who will care to fight and who will care to kill and murder?

And violence is being painted in such ways that it appears beautiful - murder in the name of 'nation', murder in the name of Islam, murder in the name of Christianity. And then murder becomes beautiful. Murder is murder; whether you murder for Christianity or the Church or the country or the nation doesn't matter. These are just excuses to murder, excuses to be destructive, excuses to be mad.

After every ten years a great world war breaks out upon the world, because in each ten-year period people gather so much pus in their beings that it has to be poured out. They gather so much poison in their beings that they cannot contain it anymore. A madness, a global madness, explodes.

If people are more introverted, wars will disappear, politics will disappear. If people are more introverted, of course they will not be so efficient, there is no need, but they will be happier. They may not be so continuously occupied, madly occupied, in things, but they will be more happy, more joyous, more celebrating. They will create enough of what is needed, they will not be concerned with the unnecessary.

But we have become too concerned with the unnecessary, with that which is not needed at all. We can afford to be without it, but yet we cannot, because our training has made it in such a way that we have to go on rushing and running. We don't know any other way to be.

Society drugs you with beliefs and kills your inquiry from the very beginning. Religion is to revive your inquiry again. Religion means taking you back to your original source.

And remember, it is not curiosity, it is a very sincere search. To live without knowing oneself is almost synonymous with being dead. How can one really live without knowing who one is? What will life mean if you don't know yourself? What will you do with yourself if you don't know who you are? How will you decide what is going to be your destiny? Yes, there will be much noise, but there will be no music. There will be much calculation, but there will be no celebration. And there will be much running and rushing hither and thither but no arrival. Between birth and death you will live in a kind of constant tension but you will not know the beauty, the benediction of life and existence, because you will not even have known the beauty and benediction of your inner being, which is the closest thing to know, the first thing to know.

The first step towards life is that of self-knowledge. It cannot be just curiosity. There are many people who inquire out of curiosity, but curiosity can never be life-transforming, again it is just an itch which can be satisfied very easily.

Once upon a time there was an innkeeper who, strange to say, was unable to make both ends meet. Nothing that he tried was of any effect. He tried to put his house under an entirely new management, but that too was in vain. So in despair he consulted a wise woman.

'It is quite simple,' she said, as she pocketed her fee. 'You must change the name of your inn.'

'But it has been "The Golden Lion" for centuries,' he replied.

'You must change the name,' she said. 'You must call it "The Eight Bells"; and you must have a row of seven bells as the sign.'

'Seven?' he said. 'But that's absurd; what will that do?'

'Go home and see,' said the wise woman.

So he went home and did as she told him. And straightaway every wayfarer who was passing paused to count the bells and then hurried into the inn to point out the mistake, each apparently believing himself to be the only one who had noticed it, and all wishing to refresh themselves for their trouble.

And the innkeeper waxed fat and made his fortune.

This is how people are. The name of the inn is 'The Eight Bells' and the symbol has only seven bells - enough to make people curious, enough to keep them occupied.

But this kind of curiosity is not going to lead you anywhere. People ask about God, people ask about truth, but you can see from their eyes, by the way they have asked, that they don't mean business.

Just as people talk about the weather, people talk about God too. It is 'polite' conversation. Nobody seems to be involved, nobody seems to be in a passionate search. And unless your search is of great passion, of tremendous commitment, of utter involvement, you will not be able to know the secrets of your being, because much work will have to be done. The curious person cannot do that much work. Curiosity is not enough to take you far away; its energy is very small, very tiny. Only a sincere passion to know can take you through all the trouble that will be needed. It is an uphill task.

So the first thing to understand with THE SECRET OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER is: not to be philosophic, not to be drugged by society, not to believe and not to disbelieve either. Remember, whenever I say, 'Don't believe,' I am not saying that you should disbelieve - disbelief is another kind of belief, a negative kind - when I say, 'Don't believe,' I am saying both belief and disbelief have to be dropped. You have to be simply open, with no conclusion. You have to be simply aware of your ignorance, with no knowledge hiding your ignorance. You have to be innocent, innocently ignorant, you have to say, 'I don't know.'

All right approaches begin with this 'I don't know'. If you 'know' anything already without knowing, if you are knowledgeable, then that very belief will hinder, that very belief will create experiences which are not true. And when you are drugged by a belief - and belief is like LSD, or marijuana, or hashish - when you are drugged by a belief, it creates its own projected world, it gives your imagination free play. And when your imagination starts playing around you, you are no longer part of reality, you have created a separate private world; you are an idiot.

That is the meaning of the word 'idiot': one who lives in a private world, who has his own reality, who has completely broken away from the real, whose imagination has become so real to him that reality has simply disappeared from his vision. And that's what happens when you take LSD, or marijuana, or other kinds of drugs. It creates a small fantasy world in you, very colourful - at least it looks colourful when you are lost in the drug. And when you are in the drug, all that you experience appears to be ultimate truth.

Every day somebody or other comes to me and he says, 'It is through drugs that I became aware how beautiful the world is.' What you became aware of is only your dream world. Drugs simply take away your critical faculty. Drugs only drug your reason and then your dream world opens all its doors and flows in all directions. And when there is no critical faculty functioning, when there is no reason functioning and the imagination has full play and absolute autonomous power, it feels as if it is the ultimate truth. It is not. It has nothing to do with truth.

Truth is available only to those who are completely undrugged - not only chemically, but religiously too - who are COMPLETELY undrugged. Only they have the capacity to know the truth.

I have heard...

Under the influence of nitrous oxide, the great psychologist, William James, came to an ultimate 'truth'. He was one of the first experimenters - and in those days there were no drug people around.

Under the influence of nitrous oxide, he felt that he had stumbled upon the ultimate truth. He was a great psychologist, and a great philosopher too, but he did one thing that very few people do: he immediately wrote it in his notebook. He still had that much sense to know that something of immense value had risen in his consciousness and it had to be written down immediately. Who knows? - once he was out of the drug experience he might forget it. So he wrote it down and he waited for the moment when the drug and its impact should disappear so that he could read what ultimate truth he had come upon. He was thinking that he had become a Buddha or a Christ, seen God or seen something which the seers of the Upanishads saw, or Lao Tzu, or Zarathustra, or Mohammed - something of that importance.

But he was very puzzled and surprised when he came back to his senses and looked at his notebook. What he had written was this:

This was the 'ultimate truth' that he had stumbled upon.

Any absurd thing can look ultimate when you are not in your senses, when the reason is not functioning, when the critical faculty has completely gone to sleep - any stupid thing. But in that moment it is not stupid, in that moment it looks like the ultimate truth.

Aldous Huxley says that when he first took LSD, he was sitting in a very ordinary room where just in front of him was a very ordinary chair. Once LSD started working into his system, into his chemistry, the chair started looking so beautiful that he could not believe his eyes. He had never seen anything so beautiful in his life. It was luminous: light was flowing from the chair in all directions, multicoloured, psychedelic. The chair is the same chair, it is just your imagination which is creating the whole game. It is just that LSD has driven you mad; it has taken away all possibility of being critical.

That's why I say belief is against doubt, but trust is not against doubt. Trust grows through doubt.

Belief grows by repressing doubt. That's why belief is a kind of drug. That's exactly what the drug does, it represses your doubting faculty, which only keeps you alert to not becoming an idiot, to not falling a victim of your own imagination. And that's what religions have been doing down the ages.

They say: Don't doubt. Doubt, and you will fall into hell. Believe. If doubt comes, repress it, throw it away. Just go on believing. And believing, they say, is seeing. If you believe, you will see.

Trust is a totally different phenomenon. It comes out of an undrugged consciousness, an open consciousness, neither believing nor disbelieving, with no conclusions tethered to it - just free, innocent.

Doubt remains useful. Until you arrive at truth, doubt helps. Doubt is a friend of trust. The very process of doubt helps you not to become a victim of your imagination; otherwise, imagination has been playing havoc.

For example, if you are a born Hindu and you have been reading about KUNDALINI, then your imagination can create the whole experience. Any day the snake will start uncoiling from down the spine and with a great hushing sound it will rush towards the seventh CHAKRA. And the experience will look so real that you cannot doubt it if you have ever believed in it. But Jesus never came across KUNDALINI, Mohammed never knew anything about it. Even Buddha, who was born a Hindu... But because he was a man of sincere inquiry and had dropped all kinds of belief he never came across KUNDALINI. Mahavir never knew anything about it, Zarathustra has not talked about it.

So what happened? Did they miss? It is a belief. If you believe in seven CHAKRAS, those seven CHAKRAS will become facts in your life. If you believe in anything, you will start seeing it.

Gopi Krishna, who has become a propounder of KUNDALINI energy in the modern age, says he was working for thirteen years, sitting and waiting for the KUNDALINI to arise. Thirteen years is a long time. If for thirteen years you can believe in KUNDALINI and you can wait and you can go on looking deep down into the spine, it is not a miracle if it happens.

Then one day it happened: the serpent uncoiled himself, rushed with great energy, and with a sound, the roaring sound of a waterfall, penetrated the brain. And since then Gopi Krishna thinks that his genius has been released. He thinks that if your KUNDALINI rises you will become a genius. But I don't see what his genius has done. Yes, he writes some stupid poetry, very ordinary, fourth-rate. If that is genius then it will be good if people keep their KUNDALINI deep down, repressed.

If everybody becomes a fourth-rate poet, that will not be a good situation. What kind of genius is released? These are not the ways, these are just imaginings. And if you believe in a certain thing, you will start seeing it - that is the danger. Don't start with belief.

That is the vision of Tao: inquire, experiment, and wait for the conclusion to come on its own.

 

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