/lit/ - Literature

These are the book i've read in the past 4 years

Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Book of Mirdad
Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach

Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu
The Parables of Chuang Tzu
The Sermon on the Mount
Bhagavad-Gita
Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore
The One Thousand Songs of Milarepa

The Book (of the Sufis)
The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran
The Book of Lieh Tzu
Dialogue on Socrates by Plato
The Notes of the Disciples of Bodhidarma
The Rubaiyat by Omar Khayyam
Masnavi by Jalaluddin Rumi
The Isa Upanishad
All and Everything by George Gurdjieff
In Search of the Miraculous by P. D. Ouspensky
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

The Dhammapada - Gautam the Buddha
Jaina Sutras - Mahavira
Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
The Declarations of Al-Hillaj Mansoor
The Fragments of Mahakashyapa
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
The Stories of Baal Shem
The Songs of Farid
Vigyana Bhairava Tantra - Shiva
Tatva Sutra by Uma Swati
The Songs of Naropa
The Destiny of the Mind by Haas
The Sayings of Eckhart
The Sayings of Boehme
The Sufis by Idries Shah
The Way of Zen by Alan Watts
This Is It by Alan Watts
The Sayings of Rinzai
The Lectures of Hazrat Inayat Khan
All of the books by Hazrat Ali Khan
Jesus, the Son of Man by Kahlil Gibran
The Madman by Kahlil Gibran
Being and Nothingness by Jean Paul Sartre
Time and Being by Martin Heidegger
Tractatus Logico Philisophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein
Vimalkirti Nirdesh Sutra
Commentaries on Living by J. Krishnamurti
Commentaries by Maurice Nicoll
Our Life with Gurdjieff by Hartmann
Shree Pasha by Ramanuja
The Future Psychology of Man by P.D. Ouspensky
The Book of Bahauddin
Lust for Life by Irving Stone
The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone
Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy
Notes on Jesus by Thomas
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
The Mother by Maxim Gorky
Fathers and Sons by Turgenev
The Phoenix by D.H. Lawrence
Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious by D.H. Lawrence
Light of Asia by Arnold
Bijak, Kabir's selection of songs
One Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse
The I Ching
Nadi Ke Dvip (Islands of a River) by Satchidanand Vatsyayana
The Art of Living by Lin Yutang
The Wisdom of China by Lin Yutang
The Talmud
Shunya Svabhava by Taran Taran
Siddhi Svabhava by Taran Taran
Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein
Psychosynthesis by Assagioli
Prose Poems by Kahlil Gibran
Thoughts and Meditations by Kahlil Gibran

What is fear? First: fear is always around some desire. You want to become a famous man, the most famous man in the world - then there is fear. What if you cannot make it? - fear comes. Now fear comes as a by-product of desire: you want to become the richest man in the world. What if you don't succeed? You start trembling; fear comes. You possess a woman: you are afraid that tomorrow you may not be able to possess, she may go to somebody else. She is still alive, she can go. Only dead women won't go; she is still alive. You can possess only a corpse - then there is no fear, the corpse will be there. You can possess furniture, then there is no fear. But when you try to possess a human being fear comes. Who knows, yesterday she was not yours, today she is yours. Who knows - tomorrow she will be somebody else's. Fear arises. Fear is arising out of the desire to possess, it is a by-product; because you want to possess, hence the fear. If you don't want to possess, then there is no fear. If you don't have the desire that you would like to be this and that in the future, then there is no fear. If you don't want to go to heaven then there is no fear, then the priest cannot make you afraid. If you don't want to go anywhere then nobody can make you afraid.

If you start living in the moment, fear disappears. Fear comes through desire. So basically, desire creates fear.

Look into it. Whenever there is fear, see from where it is coming - what desire is creating it - and then see the futility of it. How can you possess a woman or a man? It is such a silly, stupid idea. Only things can be possessed, not persons.

A person is a freedom. A person is beautiful because of freedom. The bird is beautiful on the wing in the sky: you encage it - it is no longer the same bird, remember. It looks like it, but it is no longer the same bird. Where is the sky? Where is the sun? Where are those winds? Where are those clouds? Where is that freedom on the wing? All have disappeared. This is not the same bird.

You love a woman because she is a freedom. Then you encage her: then you go to the law court and you get married, and you make a beautiful, maybe a golden, cage around her, studded with diamonds, but she is no longer the same woman. And now fear comes. You are afraid, afraid because the woman may not like this cage. She may hanker for freedom again. And freedom is an ultimate value, one cannot drop it.

Man consists of freedom, consciousness consists of freedom. So sooner or later the woman will start feeling bored, fed up. She will start looking for somebody else. You are afraid. Your fear is coming because you want to possess - but why in the first place do you want to possess? Be nonpossessive, and then there is no fear. And when there is no fear, much of your energy that gets involved, caught up, locked up in fear, is available, and that energy can become your creativity. It can become a dance, a celebration.

If you ask Muslims, they will say I have no right to talk on Sufis or on the Koran. Once in a town I was talking about Sufis, and the maulvi of the town approached me and he said, "You have no right. You are not a Mohammedan, you don't know Arabic. How can you talk on the Sufis and on the Koran?"
I said, "The Koran has nothing to do with Arabic. It has something to do with the heart, not with the language."

I have enjoyed thousands of encounters; Jaina, Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian, and I was ready to do anything just to have a good argument.
You will not believe me, but I went through circumcision at the age of twenty-seven, after I was already enlightened, just to enter a Mohammedan Sufi order where they would not allow anybody in who had not been circumcised. I said, "Okay, then do it! This body is going to be destroyed anyway, and you are only cutting off just a little piece of skin. Cut it, but I want to enter the school."

Even they were unable to believe me. I said, "Believe me, I am ready." And when I started arguing they said, "You were so willing to be circumcised and yet you are so unwilling to accept anything we say at all!"

I said, "That's my way. About the nonessential I am always ready to say yes. About the essential I am absolutely adamant, nobody can force me to say yes."

Of course they had to expel me from their so-called Sufi order, but I told them, "Expelling me, you are simply declaring to the world that you are pseudo-Sufis. The only real Sufi is being expelled. In fact, I expel you all."
Bewildered, they looked at each other. But that's the truth. I had gone to their order not to know the truth; I knew that already. Then why had I entered? Just to have good company to argue with.

Argument has been my joy from my very childhood. I will do anything just to have a good argument. But how rare it is to find a really good milieu for argument! I entered the Sufi order-this I am confessing for the first time-and even allowed those fools to circumcise me. They did it by such primitive methods that I had to suffer for at least six months. But I didn't care about that; my whole concern was to know Sufism from within. Alas, I could not find a real Sufi in my life. But that is true not only about the Sufis; I have not found a real Christian either, or a real Hassid

Patience is the greatest religious quality; if you have patience nothing else is needed. Patience is enough, enough unto itself. Patience means hope, trust, and without any hurry, without any impatience. Impatience simply shows that you are not trustful. Impatience simply shows that you want to impose yourself upon the will of God, that you want it right now. You don't want him to work on his own. Impatience means, "My will is greater than your will." Patience means, "I surrender my will to your will. Let you be my will, so whenever I am ripe, whenever - if it takes an eternity it is okay - I will trust, I will hope. I will not lose my heart, I will not be disheartened."

Just think of patience - it will bring meditation on its own. The man of patience becomes meditative because he becomes contented. He says, "God is looking after me so why should I worry?"

The more God has disappeared from the world, the more worries have entered the world. You can watch it, there is a certain relationship. When people are in trust, in faith, when people know that God is, that we are taken care of, that we are not strangers on this earth, that we belong, that there is some invisible hand that is always ready to take us in the right direction, that we can live without worry, contentment arises, peace, silence, tranquility, serenity.

All is lost now because trust in God is lost. The moment man loses God, he loses all because then he has to depend only on himself, and he is tiny, and existence is vast. Man is just an atom and the atom is trying to struggle with this infinite existence. There is bound to be tension, anguish, despair, frustration, worry, suicide, madness.

The religious person is one who is relaxed with existence, who does not push the river - on the contrary, who dissolves into the river and says to the river, "Take me wherever you are going because wherever you are going is the goal." The religious person, the person who is patient, is one who says, "I will not seek and search a goal of my own, I don't have a private goal to seek and search. Wherever this infinite universe is going I am also going." So whatever is the destiny of the whole is the destiny of the part. This is patience, this is sabr.

You ask me: What is the most fundamental error of all these religions? There are many errors and they are all fundamental, but first I would like to talk about the most fundamental. The most fundamental error of all the religions is that none of them was courageous enough to accept that there are things which we don't know. They all pretended to know everything, they all pretended to know all, that they were all omniscient.

Why did this happen? - because if you accept that you are ignorant about something then doubt arises in the minds of your followers. If you are ignorant about something, who knows? - you may be ignorant about other things also. What is the guarantee? To make it foolproof, they have all pretended, without exception, that they are omniscient.

The most beautiful thing about science is that it does not pretend to be omniscient.

Science does not pretend to be omniscient; it accepts its human limits. It knows how much it knows, and it knows that there is much more to know. And the greatest scientists know of something even deeper. The known, they know the boundaries of; the knowable they will know sooner or later - they are on the way.

The sheep are always in the crowd, hoping that being in the crowd will feel cozy. Being in the crowd one feels more protected, secure. If somebody attacks, there is every possibility in a crowd to save yourself - but alone? Only the lions move alone.

And every one of you is born a lion, but the society goes on conditioning you, programming your mind as a sheep. It gives you a personality, a cozy personality, nice, very convenient, very obedient.

Society wants slaves, not people who are absolutely dedicated to freedom. Society wants slaves because all the vested interests want obedience.

The people who are in power, the people who have riches, the people who are the heads of religions, they all want one thing: you should not raise your head. You should live like a slave, pulled and pushed to this side and that side. You should not resist. You should not assert your being, your intelligence, your individuality.

This is the fear, the reason why twenty-one countries are preventing me from entering their territories: because I am in absolute favor of personalities dying and individualities being regained. That is real resurrection.