/lit/ - Literature

This English word tradition is very, very meaningful. You may not even be aware, but it comes from the same root as the word traitor; tradition comes from the same root as the word traitor. Tradition is a betrayal of life, it is treachery. Your mind betrays. If you can drop the mind everything is attained.

Dropping the mind is the essence of all religion. Sufism is nothing but how to drop the mind, the tradition, the past. That's why religion always looks revolutionary because it is always against tradition. It is always against the past. It is always against frozen words. It is always for life, flow.

No religion can be a tradition, but all religions have become traditions. That means they have become false; they are no longer religions. A religion remains religion only when it is true to existence and life - not true to any dogma, not true to any scripture: the Vedas, the Koran, the Bible. That's why Sufism was not understood by Mohammedans. How can they understand Sufism? Too book-oriented.

Of course, when the Koran descended on Mohammed it was a live moment, it was a fitting phenomenon. Suddenly Mohammed was in harmony with the universe, and the universe started unveiling its secrets to him. And the first word that came to Mohammed was, "Recite! Recite in my name!" The word Koran means recite because it is the first word that came to Mohammed. It is a beautiful word, if you can understand while it is alive; otherwise it is ugly when it is dead.

It is just like a beautiful woman passing, moving. The very gesture, the curves of her body, the life that is flowing in her, the radiance of her being - it is so beautiful. You can freeze her and make a statue out of her and put it in the garden but then there will be no more beauty because beauty was in her very aliveness. A frozen woman: how can she be beautiful? It is a corpse. Those curves, when they were moving and alive, had something of the divine. Now nothing is left; it is only matter, a dead body.

When for the first time, on the Mount of Hira, Mohammed heard this: "Recite! Recite in the name of thy Lord!" he was as if awakened from a deep sleep. He looked around. Who had spoken? There was nobody. Life is not somebody; life is this all, the whole. And Mohammed started reciting. He must have danced, he must have sung, in the name of the Lord.

In that moment there was music. In that moment there was dance. In that moment there was a heart, there was singing. In that moment there was celebration. Mohammed had been accepted. Mohammed had merged with the whole, and the whole had merged with him - the drop into the ocean and the ocean into the drop.

>>16488132
>Hegel


Hegel was thought to be a great philosopher - till he was understood! When he was understood, he was put aside as just a tricky fellow, who was only trying to mystify people. And he had succeeded. At least in his life, he enjoyed the idea of being a great philosopher. Only after his death slowly, slowly scholars looked into it and found that he says nothing. He says so much, but if you condense it, your hands are empty. There is nothing in it.

Whenever I have thought about Hegel, I have always remembered a man in my village_

He was almost a nutcase; he had crammed the whole Oxford dictionary, and he used to write letters to the president, to the prime minister, to the governor. He was living just near my house.

Once in a while he used to come to me to show me his letters - twenty pages, thirty pages, fifty foolscap pages typed out, but not a single sentence making any sense. He knew nothing about language; he knew everything about the dictionary, and that was the trouble. He would simply go on writing big words; it made no sense at all.

He was torturing me, so I said, "You do one thing. I don't have much time and your letters are too long, and it will be helpful also because this big letter the President is not going to read. So with the letter you should write a small summary, just ten lines, twelve lines at the most."

He said, "That's a good idea. I will write the summary. That is not a problem."

So he went to write the summary, but he left the letter with me. I was surprised; this is something strange, how is he going to write the summary? There was no problem for him; the dictionary was with him_so another ten lines of absolute absurdity. I said, "This is perfectly good. This explains everything! And I can say to you that this much the president is going to read. Twenty pages is too much. You write such great philosophy."

But nobody was answering his letters. He would come to me saying, "Now one month has passed and no answer, not even a receipt that they have received my letter! And I had been working so hard."

I said to him, "I don't think these politicians have intelligence enough to understand your great philosophy."

He said, "That is right. You are the only man who understands me. Nobody seems to understand."

Every day he was going to the collectorate with a new letter and the collector was tired. One day the collector met me in the library and he said, "Can't you stop this man? I never read any of his letters, but even to keep them on the table is a torture. One feels inside one's stomach some disturbance; just to read two or three lines is enough to drive anybody crazy."

I said, "It is very difficult to stop him, because I am the only man who understands him. If you have any difficulty, I can tell him, and he can explain."

He said, "I don't want you to mention it to him at all! He will come with a bigger explanation."

>>16050219
Why 'the only begotten son'? Are not trees, and the rivers, and the mountains, and the stars, and man, and animals, and birds created by God? Doesn't this whole existence come from God? Is it not flowing from his being? God is the totality of all. Rocks and rivers and mountains are as much his creations as you are, as Jesus is. There is no distinction. All beings participate in God. In fact, to BE IS to participate in God. Otherwise you cannot be - there is no other way to be!

TO BE is to be God!

Then what is the difference between you and Jesus? The difference is not of your being, the difference is only of your knowing, recognition, awareness. Jesus knows that he is the son of God, and you have not yet recognised it. That's the difference. You can recognise it any moment. In that very recognition_ the transformation, what Jesus calls metanoia. It is only a question of recognition.

You have become oblivious of your reality, he is aware - but there is no difference between the beings. You are as rich as he is; he knows it, you don't know. Because you don't know you remain poor, not because you are poor. You are not poor! How can you be poor when God is showering every moment on you? When he is beating in your heart, and circulating in your blood, and flowing into your consciousness, how can you be poor? You are not beggars. Everybody is an emperor, but you are not aware of the fact. You don't look inside yourself where God goes on making contact with you. You don't look into your source.

The word that Jesus uses for looking into your source is 'return'. That word 'return' has been translated as 'repent'. 'Repent' also means return, but it has fallen into wrong associations. It has become repentance. It has nothing to do with repentance. Return - turn into your own being, a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn, and suddenly you see the light that you have always been. You see the light that you are. You see God. And for the first time you recognize that you have never lost track of him; he was just behind your back. You were not looking at him.

It is as if the sun has risen and you are standing in the full morning with closed eyes. Just open your eyes. Jesus is standing just by your side with open eyes, and you are standing with closed eyes. That's the only difference, there is no other difference.

Jesus is man because you are God.

>>14983078


Wittgenstein has not written much, just two or three books, and those are all maxims, small sentences. One sentence says, “You should not speak about something that you don’t know – either for, or against. One should be silent if one has not a solid yes or no in his experience.” In another passage he says, “There are things which cannot be spoken of, hence you should resist the temptation to speak about them.”

The agnostic is the most superior. He does not commit himself, he remains uncommitted. It is better to remain uncommitted, because that keeps you alert that you have not started the search yet. The theist has arrived at a conclusion, the atheist has arrived at a conclusion; you have not even begun the search. The agnostic is the best of the three, comes closer to me. The theist is the farthest from me, the atheist a little closer, the agnostic much closer – but you can remain there. There is no necessity that you will move into the inquiry. You can say it is an ultimate question. That’s what agnostics say. Whenever the question is ultimate, you cannot say yes or no about it. But his silence is not the silence of a gnostic.

I had knowingly not included gnostic in the three categories I discussed. The word agnostic comes from the word gnostic. Agnostic means one who declares, “I am not certain this way or that.” Who is a gnostic? A gnostic is one who knows. That is the meaning of gnostic: the knower. The agnostic is silent because he does not know what is right and what is wrong; what is yes, what is no.

The gnostic is also silent – because he has come to experience a reality which is inexpressible.

I am a gnostic. And I would like you all to be gnostics, to come to a point of experience where things beyond words happen, where language is left far away, light years back, where there is no possibility to conceptualize your experience.

You cannot say, “God is,” you cannot say, “God is not.” You cannot say, “I cannot say these things.” You can be simply silent. And those who can understand silence will understand the answer. You can help people – that’s what gnostics can do – you can help people to come to silence. Call it meditativeness, awareness – those are just names, but the essential quality is absolute silence, nothing stirring in you, nothing wavering in you. And in that state, godliness is. It is all over the place. It is within you, it is without you.

So I had left out the category “gnostic” knowingly because the gnostic cannot be put with the other three categories. He is a totally different person. He knows – these three know not. One believes that he knows. One believes that he knows not; he knows that God does not exist. One knows certainly that he is not in a position to say yes or no. But all three are ignorant.

>>14259944
>>14259954
Can intuition be explained scientifically? Is it a phenomenon of the mind?

Intuition cannot be explained scientifically because the very phenomenon is unscientific and irrational. The very phenomenon of intuition is irrational. In language it looks okay to ask, "Can intuition be explained?" It means: can intuition be reduced to intellect? But intuition means something beyond the intellect, something not of the intellect, something coming from someplace where intellect is totally unaware. So intellect can feel it, but it cannot explain it.

The leap can be felt because there is a gap. Intuition can be felt by the intellect - it can be noted down that something has happened - but it cannot be explained, because explanation means causality. Explanation means: from where does it come? why does it come? what is the cause? And it comes from somewhere else, not from the intellect itself, so there is no intellectual cause; there is no reason, no link, no continuity in the intellect.

For example, Mohammed was an illiterate person. No one knew about him; no one ever felt that such a great thing as the Koran could come out of him. There was not a single act, not a single thought, that was special about him; he was just an ordinary man - absolutely ordinary. No one ever felt that something extraordinary was possible in him. Then, suddenly, this parable is recorded:

An angel appeared to Mohammed and said, "Read!"

Mohammed said to him, "How can I read? I do not know how; I cannot read, I am illiterate."

The angel repeated again, "Read!"

Mohammed again said, "But how can I read? I do not know anything about reading."

Then the angel said, "Read! By the grace of God, you will be able." And Mohammed began to read. This is intuition.

He returned to his house trembling, trembling because he could not conceive of what had happened. He could read - and he had read something inconceivable. The first ayat of the Koran had been given to him. He could not understand it because nothing in his whole past related to it. He could not feel the meaning of it; he had become the vehicle for something that was unrelated to his past, absolutely unrelated. Something from the unknown had penetrated him. It might have been related to something else, to someone else, but it did not relate to Mohammed at all. This is the penetration.

He came into his house trembling, he felt feverish; he just went on thinking, "What has happened?" He was unable to understand what had happened, and for three days he was in deep fever, trembling, because there was no cause for what had occurred. He could not even gather the courage to say something to anyone. He was an illiterate: who was going to believe him? He himself could not believe what had happened; it was unbelievable.

>>14141887
>Socrates definitions are a good focus when doing philosophy?

Socrates was a philosopher, not a sage; Socrates was a thinker, not a buddha. Socrates thought, contemplated, argued. He was a great intellect, but not an enlightened one. If he should argue with Buddha he would win; Buddha would be defeated. He was a rare genius. So when you think about Socrates, intellectually he is incomparable, but existentially he is nothing before a buddha. A buddha will laugh about his arguments and a buddha will say, "You go around and around, and you will never reach the center. And whatsoever you are talking is just talk. You argue; you are a logical man and you argue better than me," a buddha will say, "but you are wasting your life in arguments."

Socrates is not a person who has gone beyond his ego. He is a rare man with a rare, penetrating mind. Even if he talks about ego, that understanding is intellectual. He is not an existential, experienced man. So because of Socrates, the whole West has come to an intellectual climax - because of three men: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. The originator is Socrates. Socrates was the teacher of Plato and Plato was the teacher of Aristotle. These three have created the whole Western mind. This whole science, logic, philosophy of the West, belongs to these three men. They are the creators.

Buddha belongs to a totally different dimension. Socrates is an intellectual giant, but Buddha would have just laughed at him. He would have said, "You are a giant amidst children. You have reached a climax in intellect, but intellect is a barrier. You have touched the ultimate in intellect, but intellect leads nowhere."

Socrates is different, Meera is different. Meera is a surrendered soul - totally surrendered, totally effaced. When the poison is given to her she is not drinking it, Krishna himself is drinking it. There is no difference now, no distinction. And if this trust is there, poison will become useless. This seems miraculous, but it is not so miraculous. In hypnosis, if there is a deeply hypnotized person and you give him poison telling him that this is not poison, it will not affect him. What happens? If you give him ordinary water and say, "This is poison," he will die. This is total acceptance. Even in hypnosis this can happen.