Because You Are Buddhas

 

The Sixth Question:

No. That will be the jump of the drug, not yours; and the point is for you to take the jump, not the drug. Drugs are not in search of enlightenment; they are quite well as they are. If you take a drug, and something happens to you, it is happening to the drug really, not to you. It is happening just to the chemistry of the body, not to your consciousness. It is a dream phenomenon, a hallucination.

It can be beautiful sometimes -- sometimes, remember. Sometimes it can be the very hell. It depends. That s why I say a drug can only create a situation in the chemistry of your body, but if your mind was going through hell, the mind will continue going through hell. Now the hell will be stronger, that's all; because now the chemistry is different. You will move towards hell, but you will now go faster. The drug can give you speed. So it is good to call drugs "speed"; they give only speed, nothing else. If you were feeling beautiful and good, you will feel beautiful and good "with speed," but they cannot change you. Whatsoever you are you will remain the same.

And the danger is that you can be befooled by them. And once you are befooled and you think, "This is ecstasy, this is what was needed," then you are lost. Then you will think always in those terms: that take the drug and you experience God.

You are not experiencing anything, because God is not an experience at all. It is cessation of all experience. When all objects disappear -- experience is an object -- and when only the subjectivity remains, the consciousness -- nothing to know, but only the knower -- then there is God. God is not an object; God is pure subjectivity. No drug can give you that.

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The Seventh Question:

I am still dancing. If you have eyes you can see. If you don't have eyes what can I do?

There is no gradual enlightenment; enlightenment is always sudden. You can prepare gradually, you can prepare suddenly, but enlightenment is always sudden. It happens in a single moment. It is not that somebody is fifty percent enlightened, sixty percent enlightened, seventy percent enlightened, no. Just a moment before he was a hundred percent unenlightened, and just a moment afterwards he is a hundred percent enlightened. It happens suddenly: otherwise there would be degrees. There are no degrees.

It is just like death. It happens in a single moment. You cannot say that a man is half dead. Even if he looks half dead he is perfectly alive; that is only appearance. A man may be in a coma, lying unconscious, but then too he is perfectly alive, not half dead. Either you are dead or you are alive -- there is no other way -- either this or that. Enlightenment is always sudden.

And preparation? This is the very subtle point to understand. Preparation is not for enlightenment; preparation is for your courage. A courageous man can take it right now; a coward will take years to prepare himself. The whole problem is of fear. If the fear is dropped, you are in freedom. If you continue to nurse your fear and tend your fear, you will never be free. So make it a clear point in your mind: enlightenment needs no preparation. All preparation is only because you are afraid. So it depends on you. Whenever you decide to drop the fear, it can happen. It is not something outside you which has to be attained; you are already carrying it within you.

It is just like childbirth: a woman is carrying the pregnancy -- the child is already there, throbbing, alive, kicking. If the woman is very much afraid, the birth will take a long time. If she is very much afraid and tense, when the child wants to come out of the womb, she will clench her whole mechanism in fear and will not allow the child to come out. The child needs a relaxed passage to come out, and the woman is so tense that she won't allow the child to come out. The child wants to come out because now that is his only life. If he is in the womb for a few days more, he will be dead. So the child will make all the efforts to come out, and if the woman is tense, there will be a conflict. That conflict creates pain; otherwise no childbirth should be with pain. There is no need; it is not a necessity.

Go to the old, ancient tribes in India. Childbirth happens so easily, so naturally, that those people have never heard that there is any pain in it. A woman will be working in the field, and the child is born. Not a single person to look after her; she will look after herself. She will put the child under the tree, do her whole day's work -- there is no hurry to go back home -- then take the child back by the evening. Simple. Just simple, as it is happening in animals, no problem. The mother creates the problem. The mother is tense, afraid. That tension, and the child's effort to come out, creates a struggle. Then it takes time. The child is ready to come out any moment.

You have all passed the gestation period. As I see it, everybody is in the ninth month. Everybody has always been in the ninth month. Now, the whole problem is how to relax and let the child come out and be born. You can relax only if you are not afraid. Accept, don't be afraid. Accept life. It is the friend, not the enemy. This whole existence is a home; you are not strangers here. Forget all about what Darwin says -- survival, struggle, conquest. All nonsense. Listen to people who say it is a home, because they are true. Anything else is simply not the case. 

You are born in life -- how can it be against you? How can the mother be against the child? And you will return back to it. Just like a wave reaching high, dancing in the sun, and then falling back. How can the ocean be against the wave? In fact the whole strength of the wave is a gift from the ocean: it rises high, not that it rises, but because the ocean rises in it.

You are just waves in a cosmic ocean of consciousness. Accept it. Feel at home. You are not strangers here; you are the beloved to the existence. And then, suddenly, you gather courage because there is no fear. Enlightenment is always sudden. If you have to move gradually it is because of your nonaccepting mind, afraid, cautious.

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The Eighth Question:

Of course.

And I will also tell you that whenever you meet God, shoot him, because that will be the last barrier. Shoot him immediately so that you alone are left in your aloneness; otherwise he will become the world, the experience.

And the whole point - you have understood it well - is to drive you crazy. So crazy that you become fed up with your craziness and suddenly jump out of it; otherwise you won't jump. If you are at home in your craziness, how will you jump out of it? So I will make the whole situation so desperate, so intensely desperate, that you jump out of your skin, and then you are free.

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The Ninth Question:

But if you have experienced the nonbeing, what is the need to ask? There is no "if" if you have experienced. If you ask, you may have imagined that you experienced the state of nonbeing -- because from the state of nonbeing, no questions arise. They cannot; there is no possibility. Who will create the question in a state of nonbeing? Once you have known that sunya, that emptiness, nothing arises.

You must have imagined it. And it happens: before one achieves to the state, one imagines it many times. because of desire. Listening to me continuously, you create a desire: how to be enlightened, how to be free from all this suffering. That desire will create dreams. If the desire is very intense it will create such vivid dreams that they will look like visions. They will be more real than ordinary reality; and then you will be thinking that you have experienced.

No.

If experience of nonbeing happens, all questions dissolve -- not that they are solved, no question is ever solved, but because questions are absurd, they cannot be solved. All questions are absurd. When I say this, I mean: if somebody asks, "What is the smell of red color?" the question looks grammatically right, but it is absurd because red color, or any color for that matter, has no connection with any smell. But somebody asks, "What smell is red color?"..it is absurd. All questions are absurd; so they do not need to be solved.

Once you are silent, absolutely silent, you suddenly understand the foolishness of all the questions -- and all the philosophies, because all the philosophies depend on the notion that questions are worthwhile to be answered.

No. You can imagine; when you imagine, then this will happen.

But what is the need now? You say you have experienced the center of nonbeing. You say that you have achieved and experienced the state of ecstasy. This is enlightenment. Then any jump will be jumping out of it. So please, don't jump! Now jumping will be dangerous. You will jump into the world again. This is for worldly people that I am shaking -- "jump into enlightenment" -- not for buddhas, those who have attained. They should not jump. They should avoid all jump and all temptations to jump; otherwise they will be back in the world, and then again the trouble will arise.

Remember not to become victims of imagination. Imagination can play tremendous games -- not only with you; it has played with everyone. Whatsoever you demand, it can supply it to you.

It happened...

Mulla Nasrudin applied for a job on a ship. He was interviewed. The man who was taking the interview asked, "If there comes a storm, what will you do?" He said, "I will put down an anchor."

The man said, "There comes another storm, an even greater one than the first, what will you do?" He said, "I will put down another anchor." So on, so forth it went.

" The tenth storm!" And Nasrudin said, "I will put down another anchor."

The man said, "But from where are you getting these anchors?" He said, "From where are you getting your storms! The same place."

Enough for today.