Riding on a Miracle_

Dream of the impossible. Dream of surpassing yourself. Dream of NIRVANA, dream of MOKSHA, dream of the kingdom of God; only then will you start working and moving towards it, and only then with that dream, will your feet have the quality of dance.

Without the dream you will become dull. That's why people are dragging. How can they dance? For what? Just to go every day to the office and work, and come back home and quarrel with the wife and listen to all the complaints of the children? And next day the same rut starts again - year in, year out. What is there to dance about? In fact, it is a miracle how man goes on living, why he does not commit suicide. What does he live for?

There is nothing that is awaiting him, there is nothing that he can look up to. There is no star in the night; it is all darkness. It is a miracle how man goes on living, how he manages. The people who commit suicide seem to be more logical. The people who go on living seem to be very illogical.

Miserable, bored, dragging - but they go on living. But it shows something. It shows one thing: that your innermost being knows that the possibility is there. Any day you may become alert about the potential, about the possible. Any day, the dream will possess you. And then there will be meaning and there will be dance.

'Religion is art,' said William Blake. 'Religion is art, not money.'

This is a very very pregnant statement. And only a man like William Blake could have made it. He is a mystic poet.

What is art? 'Art is a way,' he says, 'of doing something': painting, poetry, dancing, sculpture, music, pottery, weaving. 'Art is a way of doing something.' He does not say anything about creating oneself.

But that is exactly what religion is. It is not painting, it is not poetry, it is not sculpture, it is not music, but something on the same lines, something beyond - creating oneself.

Religion is a way of doing something also - living, loving, seeing, being. All art is 'making'. It is helping God to create. That's why I call the angel who said to God, 'Can I help?' the religious one.

If you want to know the creator you will have to become a creator in some measure on your own.

Poetry may not be religion proper but it points in the right direction. When a poet is really in a creative state, he knows something of religion - a faraway distant music, because when he is in a creative state, he is no more himself. He participates - although in a very small measure, but he participates in God.

Just a drop of divinity enters into him. That's why great poets have always said, 'When we write poetry, we are not the creators of it. We become possessed. Some unknown energy enters, sings, dances in us. We don't know what it is.' When a painter is lost into his painting, he is utterly lost into his painting, his ego disappears. Maybe only for moments, but in those egoless moments God paints through him.

If you participate in God, God participates in you. Art is an unconscious form of religion. Religion is conscious art. Art is as if you are religious in a dream, but it is pointing in the right direction. The artist is the nearest to the religious. But it is not understood that way. You don't think of a poet as religious or a painter as religious, on the contrary, if somebody fasts, tortures his body, makes his being ugly, you start thinking that HE is religious. He is simply being violent with himself. He is just suicidal, he is neurotic, and you think he is religious.

Neurotics become MAHATMAS; they are respected and worshipped as saints. They are not religious at all. The difference between a so-called saint and a murderer is not much. The murderer murders somebody else, and your so-called saint murders himself. But both do the same thing: both are violent, both are destructive. And whenever you are destructive you are farthest from God, because God is creativity. To me, aesthetics is the closest neighbour of religiousness, not ethics.

Lenin is reported to have said, 'Ethics will be the aesthetics of the future.' I say: No, just the contrary; aesthetics will be the ethics of the future. Beauty is going to be the truth of the future, because beauty can be created. And a beautiful person, who loves beauty, who lives beauty, who creates beauty, is moral - and with no effort. His morality is not a cultivated morality, it is just his aesthetic sense that makes him moral. He cannot kill because he cannot think of killing as being beautiful. He cannot cheat, he cannot be dishonest because all these things make him feel ugly. His criterion is beauty.

And I agree with William Blake that religion is art.

All art is making. All making necessitates a kind of faith. You see what is not there, and work in such a way that what was invisible, intangible, inaudible, is given shape in time and space. What is produced will be apparent to the senses - a painting, a poem, or a garden. Art is not to be confused, however, with the object it produces.

It is a beautiful distinction to be remembered. It will help you immensely to understand religion.

Art is not a painting or a piece of sculpture. What art dealers buy and sell are works of art, not art itself. Works of art are a form of property. Just as art is not the same thing as works of art, so religion is not to be confused with the objects and effects its produces - such as dogmas, doctrines, Bibles, Korans, Gitas, churches, temples, cathedrals. These are WORKS of art. You can call them works of the art of religion, but religion should not be confused with them.

A church is a church. It may be beautiful, but it is not religion in itself. It is a by-product, a spin-off.

A Koran is a beautiful poem, but as a work of art, a spin-off. Something happened in Mohammed's heart - that was religion, but that remains invisible. Because something stirred in his soul, he started singing, he went into a mad expression. That's exactly what he thought when for the first time alone on the mountains he started feeling the presence of God. He became so frightened, so afraid, he thought he had either gone mad or become insane. He rushed home. He was in a feverish state, trembling. His wife thought he had suddenly got a high fever. She asked, 'What has happened to you?' And he said, 'Either I have gone mad or I have become a poet. Something tremendously great is happening, and I don't know what it is or from where it is coming. And I am so unworthy of it... I cannot believe my own eyes, and I cannot believe my own heart - what I am feeling. It is so immensely beautiful, so great, so vast, I am incapable of conceiving it.'

That was religion.

A few days fever, and Mohammed cooled down and settled into his new state, his ecstasy, his SAMADHI. And then the flow started: the beautiful Koran was born. But the Koran is a by-product, so is the Gita, so is the Dhammapada. Remember always that no scripture contains religion - cannot contain it. All scriptures are by-products of religion - shadows, footprints, left on the banks of time. But footprints are footprints.

When Buddha walks on a sea beach, naturally, he will leave footprints, but those footprints are not Buddha himself, those footprints are beautiful because they belong to Buddha. Bow down to them! But don't forget they are just by-products. And you have to be a Buddha, not just the worshipper of a footprint .

Works of art are a form of property, that's why you can sell them, purchase them; but you cannot sell art and you cannot purchase art. If you ask Pablo Picasso to sell you his art, it will be impossible.

You may be ready to pay any fantastic price for it, but he cannot sell it. He can sell his paintings, but he cannot sell his art. There is no way of selling it because it is not a thing. It remains always invisible. Only effects become visible.

God remains invisible, only in the world does he becomes visible. You are invisible, only the body is visible.

That's why Blake says religion is not money. He is right. He means religion is not property. Religion is not like that, religion is like love - you cannot buy it, sell it, or keep it in a bank. You cannot possess it; on the contrary, it possesses you.

The work of art can be possessed; it is property, it is dead. You can learn the Koran and the Gita and the Bible, but you cannot learn religion. You have to live it - there is no way of learning it. You have to be possessed by God, you have to become available to God. You have to open up your being. You have to withdraw. You have to become empty so that God can enter and possess you totally. In that very possession, you have transcended humanity. You are no more a human being, you are a god, a Christ, a Buddha.

 

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