Main Kaun Hun #9

Faith cannot be challenged by anyone. But what we call faith is not faith at all; it is only belief. And belief can be challenged by anyone.
It is essential to understand the slight difference between faith and belief.
Belief is a phenomenon of ignorance—what those who do not know take to be true is called belief. Faith is the ultimate flowering of knowing—those who know, in their very knowing there is faith. That cannot be challenged by any means. But what we call faith is not faith; it is belief—belief.
And remember, the one who believes never arrives at faith. If one is to reach faith, within belief itself one must take the support of doubt. To reach faith, instead of being blind, the eyes must be open. To reach faith, rather than accepting anything, one must search for what is.
We are all so weak that we accept without inquiring. What we have accepted without seeking can be shattered by any means. In fact, there is no need to break it; it is already broken. We know within ourselves that beneath our belief there is no foundation, no ground. Therefore, a person full of belief always remains fearful.

First, that truth which is eternal has never been expressed in words. And whatever is expressed in words becomes temporal; it is no longer eternal. The eternal, the timeless, is beyond the reach of the word. Whatever we express in language, in words, becomes time-bound, of an era; it does not remain eternal.

The Vedas, the Bible, the Gita, the Koran, what I am saying now, and whatever anyone will say in the future—all are truths of their time, not eternal. Certainly, those who spoke time-bound truths had known the eternal truth; but what is known cannot be said, and the moment it is said it becomes of time. What is known is one thing; what is said is another.

Rabindranath was dying, on his deathbed. An old friend came and said to him, You should be joyful, grateful; thank God that you have sung what you had to sing, you have said what you had to say. Rabindranath wrote six thousand songs. That man said, No one has ever written so many songs on the whole earth. Shelley, whom Europe calls a great poet, has only two thousand songs. You have written six thousand; all can be set to music—such songs! You are a great poet. Thinking he was offering great praise, he looked at Rabindranath and was astonished to see tears flowing from his eyes.

Rabindranath said, Do not say these things. What I wanted to sing I have not yet been able to sing. I have only tuned the instrument. Where has the music played yet? I merely knocked and tightened a few strings. I have not sung. And now the moment of departure has come! In the end he said, I know that even if I were given infinite time, I still could not sing what I experience within. For whenever I experienced something and sang it, the moment it entered words I saw it had become something else.

No eternal truth has descended into human language till today. It never will. Eternal means: we can know it, but we cannot say it. Speaking makes it temporal. All language is the language of time. All symbols are symbols of time. All saying belongs to time.

So there are no eternal truths anywhere that you can catch hold of and sit with. The eternal truth surely is; but to attain it, one has to let go of the grip of words. Whoever would go to the eternal truth must be free of all other truths—of scriptural truths. A man entangled in scriptural truths never attains the eternal. A mind tangled in words and doctrines cannot become so unconditioned as to know the formless. Words have their own form; every word has its own shape. And a mind filled with words can never rise beyond form.

Perhaps you do not know that every word has its own image. If you spread very fine grains of sand on a thin sheet of paper and utter a word beneath it—say, Ram—on that paper a particular pattern of waves, a particular lattice will form in the sand. Say, Allah—another lattice will form. Say, Om—another pattern will arise. Those grains of sand instantly divide into a pattern, a mold. Every word has its own sound. Every word has its own form. Every word has its own shape. Every word even has its own color. And every word occupies space within us. The more words there are inside—even if they come from very sacred scriptures, from holy texts—because of them the vision of the formless does not happen within. And the eternal is formless.

Only one who drops all words and enters the void comes to know the eternal truth.

But what we know in the void—if we go to say it in words, distortion is inevitable. It is as if you come to my house and I play something on the veena. You listen and return, and you reach people who are deaf. You say to them, The veena was full of delight, so much flavor, such beautiful sound, my life blossomed, flowers opened. They hear nothing. They say, Draw us a picture and we might understand a little. Deaf people. They have eyes. What I played in music—if you try to draw it on paper, whatever happens there, the same happens when we try to say in words what we know in the void. The medium changes.

Therefore no eternal truth has ever been said. Many times there have been attempts to say it. There have been many efforts to communicate, but eternal truth has not been spoken. And those who did speak also said alongside that what was to be said cannot be said in words. What was to be said is not obtainable through discourse. Na pravachanen labhya—It will not be attained by sermons; not by words.

Lao Tzu wrote no book his whole life. Whenever people said, Write what you have known, he said, When I go to write what I have known, it cannot be written; and what gets written is not what I have known. I will not get into this mess. In the end people would not relent. Lao Tzu was leaving the country, going toward the mountains. The emperor had him stopped at the toll gate and said, Until you write, we will not let you pass.

Under compulsion Lao Tzu wrote a small book—Tao Te Ching. In that little book he wrote a few things. And among those few things, the one most repeated is this: Do not believe what I am saying, because what I have known is something else. The very first line in that book says: Truth cannot be said, and what can be said ceases, upon being said, to be truth.

If eternal truths were in your hands, there would be no need to leave them. In the name of eternal truths, only temporal truths are in your hands. They may be from two thousand years ago, five thousand years ago, ten thousand years ago—it makes no difference. What we have is a collection of words that appeared in the stream of time—whatever name we give it: Veda, Bible, Gita, Koran. We have the glimmer, the outline that descended from the timeless into the current of time in the language of words. It is as if I stand on the bank of a river and my image forms in the mirror of the water and someone takes that reflection to be me and sits clinging to it.

The truths beyond time cast their reflections in the stream of time. We clutch those reflections. We sit holding them for thousands of years. Nothing remains in the hands—only the ripples of water; the reflection is gone. If someone, holding those reflections, thinks, We have the old truths; why search for the new?—no one could fall into a deeper delusion. There is no simpler trick for falling into untruth than to assume that truth has been handed down to us by eternal tradition, that we will live by holding it, and there is no need to seek.

Remember, each person who has known truth had to rediscover it anew. Each person must seek truth personally. Truth has no tradition. Truth has no proprietary right, no bequest. Truth is not received as heritage: the father dies and writes to the son, The ownership of my truths is now in your hands. Wealth can come from the father, because wealth is man-made arrangement. A house can come from the father, because a house is man’s contrivance. Truth does not come from the father, because truth is not man’s contrivance. Truth must be attained by each one for himself.

Therefore, when I say seek truth, I am not saying you will discover a new truth. You will discover the very same that always is. What Krishna discovered, what Christ discovered, what Mohammed beheld, what Zarathustra glimpsed—that is what you will glimpse. But when you glimpse, you will always have to glimpse through your own window. There is no way to stand at Mohammed’s window and peep. Therefore, to be a Muslim is meaningless. There is no way to stand at Krishna’s window and peep. Therefore, to be a Hindu is foolishness. There is no way to stand at Mahavira’s window and peep. Therefore, if someone is satisfied by being a Jain, he is unintelligent.

Truth will have to be sought by oneself. The truth is the same, but every time it must be tested with one’s own eyes. One must recognize it by opening one’s own eyes. We cannot live another’s life, we cannot die another’s death, and we cannot know another’s truths.

Certainly, when we too know, we come to see: This is exactly what the others had known. But before that, we do not know this either. The day you know, that day you will be able to say, Fine—whatever anyone else had known, that is what I too have known. But you cannot reverse it and say, Since someone else has known, what need have I to know? I will accept it and thereby know it. It cannot be so. Scriptures will become your witnesses. The day you know, that day all the scriptures of the world will bear witness that you have reached. That day you will understand the scriptures—that I too am standing where the one who uttered this scripture stood. Before that, there is no way. Before that, nothing can be got from scriptures.

I am not telling you to abandon old truths. Truth is neither old nor new. Only untruths are old and untruths are new. Truth simply is; it has nothing to do with old and new. But that which simply is must always be known by oneself. Truth is a personal experience—utterly personal. Like love is a personal experience. Yet in love there is still space for two; in truth there is not even space for two. In truth you are utterly alone; you remain solitary. Your father will have known love, his father will have known love, my father knew love; generation after generation people have known love. But because of all their knowing you will not say, Since so many have known love, why should I know love? I will read the story of Laila and Majnun. I will clasp Shirin and Farhad to my chest. Why should I go to know love? When so many have known the eternal truth, why should I know it? But even if you dissolve Shirin and Farhad into a drink and swallow them, you will get no clue to love. Love must be known afresh. Each person must know it.

Truth is like love—only with a small difference. In knowing love there are still two persons; that privacy is of two. Love is a flow between two. Truth is even more solitary; it is not a flow between two. Truth is the flow of one alone, the utter aloneness of one. It is total alone, totally alone—when someone remains absolutely alone in the void, then what he knows is truth; it is the eternal. It is for that eternal truth that I am speaking. I am not speaking for any new truth, and therefore not against any old truth. I am speaking for the eternal truth. It is precisely against that eternal truth that those truths now stand which once arose from that eternal itself. From the experience of the eternal, words once came forth; we have clutched those very words, and now we live in words.

Perhaps the greatest path of going astray in human life is the word. And words can mislead us in such a way that we forget there is a world outside words. We live, rise, sit, eat, drink in words. Around us is a massive wall of words. We never rise beyond it. We never cross that wall. Every person lives pressed under a thick layer of words and dies.

We have to rise a little above these words. Because where That-Which-Is is, there are no words—there is silence. Where That-Which-Is is, there is no doctrine—there is supreme life. But our difficulty is that we speak in words; we communicate in words. It is a compulsion. There is no other way either. But in talking and talking in words, only words remain with us, and we become a computer in which there are only words and inside there is nothing.

No, I am not saying you should drop words and become mute. I am only saying: beyond words, let there remain at least one doorway of your being open. Through that doorway the eternal descends; through that doorway truth descends. And the day truth comes through that door, that day you too know well that there is no way to say it in words.

I have heard that Farid set out on pilgrimage and passed by Kabir’s ashram. Farid’s companions said to him, Let us stop at Kabir’s ashram for two days. If you two speak with each other, our joy in listening will be great. Farid said, We will certainly stop; perhaps there will also be talk, but you will not be able to hear. Farid’s lovers did not understand. They thought, If there is talk, surely we will hear. When news reached Kabir’s ashram that Farid was passing, Kabir’s devotees said, Let us stop Farid; let him rest here for a few days. If you both talk, the gates of heaven will open for us. Kabir said, Talk? Whoever speaks will be the unknowing.

Then Farid came and stayed at Kabir’s ashram. They embraced, they laughed, they wept; they sat side by side for hours—but nothing was said. Two days passed. We can understand the plight of the devotees. The poor fellows sat waiting…waiting…waiting… Hours began to feel long, time crawled; Farid and Kabir would not speak. Sometimes they looked at each other and laughed; sometimes they looked at each other and wept; sometimes they embraced; sometimes they took each other’s hand in hand—but the silence would not break; no word would sprout. Then two days passed. And the farewell also happened.

As soon as the farewell was over, Kabir’s disciples caught hold of Kabir and said, What have you done? You put us through two days of torment! Why did you not speak?

Kabir said, If I had spoken, I would have been the unknowing. Because what I know cannot be spoken. And Farid also knows it. If I had said anything, it would have been wrong. With you I do say something; it is inevitably somewhat wrong—but it passes, because you have no idea of what is right. And with you it will not do without speaking. With Farid it was fine without speaking. We understood one another; we spoke to each other in silence.

Farid’s disciples, just outside the village, said to Farid, What have you done? What injustice! What cruelty toward us! Two days were impossible to pass! What boredom you created! Why did you not speak?

Farid said, I had told you beforehand that we would surely speak, but you would not be able to hear. There is another speaking which happens without words. And before a man like Kabir, who lives in the wordless, to make him speak in words—would you have me disgrace myself? Before one who has seen the real sun, what meaning is there in placing earthen lamps? And before one who has seen real gold, what would be shown of my wealth by displaying brass ornaments?

No, truth has not been said till today. In the place of truth, a gap—an empty space—has been left. Therefore, if you want to read the real scripture, then wherever there are letters, leave them; wherever there is empty space, read there—between the lines. Look carefully at the empty space between the words; perhaps there you may find truth. In the words you will not find it—there are only crooked lines drawn in ink. On the blank paper perhaps there is a hint; on the filled page there is no hint. Seek in the empty space, because within too it becomes available only in that empty space, to the blank mind.
Therefore, to the friend who has asked this: I am not advocating any new truths, nor am I opposing any old truths. Truths that are clung to turn into untruth; I speak against those. Only truths that are realized are true; I speak in their favor. To know the eternal, one must be free of the temporal.

This is an important question. It is useful to understand it a little.

First, understand why man wants to be unconscious. There has never been an age when man did not long to be unconscious. Whether it was the Vedic era’s soma, or alcohol, ganja, opium, bhang, or the modern age’s mescaline, LSD, marijuana—it makes no difference. Why does man want to be unconscious? From the stark Vedic seers to Aldous Huxley—why this urge to forget?

Surely man’s conscious life is not blissful; it is full of pain. Where man lives, there are afflictions and wounds. The way man lives—there is sorrow and more sorrow, poison and more poison. As man is, it is not a state one wants to remember. Man has always felt the need to forget.

He has found many ways to forget—chemical tricks, religious tricks, bodily tricks, mental tricks. Many devices. One person smokes ganja and forgets the life he was living, the people he is tied to, the burdens that lay like stones upon his chest. Another drinks and forgets the shop, the market, the business that pierced his being like arrows. Another eats opium and forgets the wife he thought would bring heaven, but with whom life became a hell. One takes mescaline, another LSD—there are a thousand devices by which he loses himself. For a little while he is not. And as civilization has advanced, this longing to forget has only intensified.

But some, without understanding, simply say intoxicants should be banned.

I am not among them. I hold that their vision is unscientific. I want suffering to lessen in life; I want joy to grow; I want the doors of delight to open—then intoxication will wither away on its own. I do not believe that by banning intoxicants, joy and rasa will increase. At most, if proper liquor is not available, people will drink bottles of industrial spirit and die.

As man is, he is not in a condition worth remembering. For me the question is: what should man become so that there remains no need to forget?

Remember: when you are joyous, you never want to forget. Only when you are miserable do you want to forget. You want to forget only when there is something you wish to turn your back on—whatever it may be.

Life needs to be shaped—and man’s life given such rules, such order, such direction—that there is so much rasa and joy that anyone who forgets life is proved a fool in his own eyes. But we do not create such a life. Instead, we want some law to stop these methods of forgetting. No law will succeed, because as man is today, this is his need. Hence thousands of years of sermons and moralizing bring no result. Some keep shouting, “It is sin; you will go to hell,” and others keep sinning merrily and travel toward hell unperturbed. Their shouting makes no difference.

Plainly man’s need is so deep that he is not frightened even by hell, nor by sin. And if you listen to these preachers fully, it is astonishing: here they tell people, “Do not drink,” but in paradise they make rivers of wine flow. They say in heaven streams of liquor gush forth—and here, for a cupful, they dispatch you to hell! Imagine the gods’ state by now, where fountains of wine are flowing! And this poor fellow here is asked to renounce a sip so that he may reach that place of waterfalls of wine. Here they warn, “Beware of women,” and there they promise apsaras who never age past sixteen. To obtain those apsaras, here you must run from women!

What madness is this? The very temptation you forbid here, you dangle there! Obviously man’s needs seem very deep. They know even your heaven will be rejected if it has no fountains of wine; and if the women there age beyond sixteen, people will say they prefer hell to such a heaven. The preachers too know what man’s basic needs are.

But there is no real concern to understand those needs. To me it seems there has been no compassion in truly understanding man’s fundamental needs. The great need is that his life should be a stream of joy, not of sorrow. And as long as sorrow flows, his seeking some kind of intoxication is forgivable; he is not a criminal.

And until we can create a form of life where a person’s days become joy, celebration, dance, I think governments should, rather than prohibition, try to produce good alcohol—alcohol that does not harm health, that does not bring hangovers, that is healthful, that does not lead to disease. And such alcohol can be made.

If man can reach the moon, it is nonsense to say such alcohol cannot be made. Science today understands enough to produce it. In fact, such psychoactives have already been found. But those who profit from the liquor trade do not allow them to reach the market—what would happen to their business?

The truth is that LSD or mescaline are very innocent intoxicants—truly quite harmless for most, and whatever harm there is can be managed. But governments the world over are against them. Those who experiment with them are punished and jailed. There are two fears—one, among liquor-sellers, that if there appears a psychoactive that is healthful and bliss-giving, without the errors and evils of alcohol, what will become of the global alcohol trade? And second, among preachers of anti-alcohol doctrines, that if an intoxicant appears with no ill effects, then what will we speak against? What vows will we administer? What will happen to the Anuvrat movements? It will be very difficult! So the preachers too oppose the discovery of such things.

There is yet another reason: the very people who want to forget themselves are the ones who go to temples and mosques as well. If they are of the new type, they go to the cinema; if of the old type, to temple or mosque. One who wants to forget finds many ways. One beats the cymbals and sings bhajans, another watches moving pictures on a screen and forgets himself. Two styles—old and new. Someone watches a Ramlila and forgets himself; someone else a film. The same triangle, the same quarrel of love, the same tension between one woman and two men—what happens in films happens in the Ramlila. But the old-style man looks religious; the new-style man looks irreligious. Their search is the same: to lose themselves somewhere in something.

This urge to forget—I look upon it with compassion. I believe we have not yet brought into human life a society, a science, a religion that fills it with joy. Therefore man wants to forget. There are two ways forward. One, we search in that direction—very difficult, because seeking it would wound thousands of our social arrangements.

Let me give one or two examples—because the subject is vast; if needed, I will speak again tomorrow.

Children who grow up with their mothers find happiness very difficult later in life. This will sound strange. In fact, the child who grows up with the mother must see two faces of her at once. Sometimes she is very happy, delighted, loving. Sometimes she is angry, upset, harried—she scolds, hits, is wrathful. The child loves the same mother, and when she is angry and hits him, he hates her too.

A calamity then befalls his life: toward one and the same person he holds both love and hate. His stance becomes double—love and hatred toward the same figure—and within this he grows up. Those who know say that so long as children grow up solely with their mothers, husband and wife can never be truly happy. Because that boy will become a husband, and the woman he loves he will also hate. His whole habit, learned with his mother, is to love and to hate one and the same woman. Whomever he loves, with one hand he will reach out in love; with the other he will keep the knife of hate ready. In the evening he will love, in the morning he will press the throat; at noon he will ask forgiveness, and by dusk love again. These double feelings toward one person prove very dangerous.

In Israel they tried a small experiment in the kibbutzim: they kept children away from the mother’s constant presence. “Away” does not mean they were not allowed to meet; the mother would visit the nursery. Then the child sees only one face of the mother—the loving one—and no inner split is created. Whenever she comes—fortnightly, monthly, weekly—she embraces him. The image of “woman” in his mind forms as pure love. When the mother is upset, disturbed, she does not come; she comes when she herself is joyous. The boy grows up in the nursery until eighteen or twenty. The mother meets him, the father meets him. His basic relation with the mother is love—and his future current toward woman will be one of love.

Second, he does not see his parents quarrel. If he lived at home, even a blind boy would see it—eyes are not needed! For moments of peace between parents are few, moments of war many; even blindness would not save him from seeing that they fight. When the child sees this from the beginning, fighting becomes part of life; and every child repeats his parents in his own life.

Naturally, girls repeat their mothers; boys repeat their fathers. Nearly the same story plays out in every generation. What your father did with your mother, you end up doing with your wife. There are minor differences, but not enough to matter; the same plot repeats.

In the kibbutz, when both parents visit, they do not quarrel in the nursery. If they have fought at home, they simply do not come that day. They come when both are in a good mood, friendly, not hostile—when love is flowing, not divorce. The image that forms in the child’s mind is of their mutual love. Such a child will live a very different life. He will probably need less alcohol. He may not feel the necessity to lose himself in intoxication.

This was just one facet. Life is multidimensional; it has many dimensions. Only when we explore them all can we bring forth a human being who does not need intoxication.

But Morarji-bhai Desai is not concerned with this. He is concerned that there should be no alcohol. He does not see that some people, by spinning a charkha for three or four hours, lose themselves in exactly the way another does by drinking. In fact, if you sit and spin for six hours, the charkha is a powerful intoxicant. Six hours of such boredom will dull the intellect. The wheel turns and turns; a trance is induced. The intellect has no work to do; it lies idle while the wheel goes on in a monotonous, repetitive hum—like someone muttering Ram-Ram, Ram-Ram, endlessly. In four to six hours the charkha gives the same pleasure that a drug gives.

One person forgets himself in the charkha; another in some other way. Man is forgetting—and will keep forgetting until he discovers a current of joy.

So either we find a new social order—who knows when that utopia will come?—or, each person, despite all obstacles, can discover the stream of joy within his own life. If one truly wishes, one can find the inner source of bliss.

I call the process of discovering that inner source “meditation.” We have within us richly juicy glands of joy—but we never go there. We live outside and die outside, never coming to know the treasure buried within. If someone finds that inner current through meditation, then there is no need for wine or drugs, no need for Ramdhun, no need to lose oneself at the spinning wheel, no need to lose oneself by contesting elections, nor in the “service of the poor,” nor by playing cards, nor by sitting in Rotary and Lions clubs. The need to forget departs when remembering arises—remembrance of the inner source of bliss. That source can be unearthed with the pickaxe of meditation.

One final question:

The purpose of meditation is that your life should no longer remain a tale of sorrow, but become a fountain of joy. Within you—within each one—there is such capacity and such infinite sources that if they all are revealed, flowers and fragrance will spread all around your life. The veena will begin to play around you. Then there will be no need to seek forgetfulness.

For friends who truly feel drawn to meditation and wish to understand something about it, there is a separate meeting at night. There are four or six more questions regarding meditation; I will speak about them in the night session. Because by understanding meditation nothing happens; by doing meditation something happens. Come at nine-thirty at night and do the meditation, go within and search for that treasure which is hidden within you. The day your hand touches that treasure, from that day you no longer need to forget yourself in the world.

For me, religion is self-remembering. And for me, apart from religion there is no person who does not seek some way to forget himself. The paths may differ, but a path must be found—into sex, into music, into cinema—somewhere or other one seeks a way to forget oneself. Because we are so afflicted that living with ourselves is very difficult. It’s a curious thing: if you are left alone in a room, you say, “It becomes very hard; living alone is very difficult.” But have you ever thought what it means that living alone is difficult? It means: living with yourself is difficult.

And the irony is that the friend with whom you are enjoying also finds it just as hard to live alone. If both find it difficult to live alone, how will the two together become blissful? The difficulty can double; bliss cannot. Like two beggars standing on the road and begging from each other—such are we all. Alone, everyone gets into trouble; with another, one appears to be in great joy. That appearance is only a show. In a little while the difficulty will come. Faces will drop, and the real things will be revealed. Then living with the other also becomes difficult.

In truth, living is difficult because we have no knowledge of the source of life. We know nothing of the secret of living, of the key to living. We have no idea of that palace at whose gate we stand. Its key can be sought. The search for that key is religion, and the name of that key is meditation.

Those friends who have a sense for that key, come tonight; make a little effort in its search. With just a little effort, that key is surely found.

Let me end with a small saying of Jesus. Jesus said: “Take one step toward God, and God is always ready to take a thousand steps toward you.” But we cannot take even that one step—this is our sorrow. If we can take that one step, an infinite shower of bliss descends upon us. Then you do not have to stop drinking; alcohol becomes meaningless. You do not have to renounce it; drinking becomes impossible.

Some more questions remain; I will speak with you about them tomorrow morning. I am grateful that you have listened to my words with such silence and love. And in the end I bow to the Divine seated within all. Please accept my salutations.