Weblog von Hans-Wolfgang

The rivers go on flowing never asking where they are going. They reach the sea. If they start asking, they might not; their energy might be lost on the way. They might become so anxious about where they are going -- where is the goal, what is the purpose -- so obsessed with the problem that they might go mad. But they go on flowing, unworried about where they are going, and they always reach the sea.

When trees and rivers can do this miracle, why can't you do it? This is the whole of Chuang Tzu's philosophy, his whole way of life: When everything is happening, why are you worried? Allow it to happen. When rivers can reach, man will reach. When trees reach, man will reach. When this whole existence is moving, you are part of it. Don't become a whirlpool of thinking, otherwise you go round and round, round and round, and the flow is lost. Then there is no oceanic experience in the end.

Life is a riddle to you because you look through the mind; if you look through the no-mind, life is a mystery. Life is already dead if you look through the mind; and life never dies if you look through the no-mind. Mind cannot feel the alive. Mind can only touch the dead, the material. Life is so subtle and mind is so crude -- the instrument is not as subtle as life. And when you touch with that instrument it cannot catch the throbs of life. It misses. The throbbing is very subtle -- you are the throbbing.

Chuang Tzu is on his deathbed, and when a man like Chuang Tzu is on his deathbed the disciples should be absolutely silent. This moment is not to be missed, because death is the peak. When Chuang Tzu dies, he dies at the peak. It happens rarely that consciousness reaches its absolute fulfilment. The disciples should be silent; they should watch what is happening; they should look deep into Chuang Tzu and should not allow the mind to interfere, nor start asking foolish questions. But the mind always starts asking. They are worried about the funeral and Chuang Tzu is still alive. But the mind is not alive, it is never alive; the mind is always thinking in terms of death. For the disciples the master is already dead. They are thinking about the funeral -- what to do, what not to do. They are creating a problem which doesn't exist at all because Chuang Tzu is still alive.

Everything great that has happened in the world has been an idea first. Sometimes it took hundreds of years for it to become a reality, but the joy of having a vision, an insight into the future, is immense. The people should rejoice that they can see a possibility of the old rotten world disappearing and a new fresh human being taking its place. Just the vision will change you at least, will shift your being from the past to the future. In a certain way you will start living the new man, who has not yet come. You will start living the new man in small ways, and each moment of that living will be a blessing. And as you become acquainted, within yourself, with the explosion of the new and the destruction of the old, you are changing, you are going through a revolution. Who cares about what is going to happen after a hundred years? Something must be going to happen, but it is not our business. The future will go on for eternity, but if your mind can be cleaned of the past rubbish, and if you can see the faraway rising sun.... That very hope will become a seed in you. The new man will come whenever it has to come. But the new vision can come right now. And with the new vision you participate in a subtle way with the man who has not come yet, with the humanity who is still in the womb. You start having a synchronicity, a certain relationship. Your roots from the past start dropping, and you start growing your roots into the future.

In California you can have enlightened insurance policies. In California everything is possible! But there is no insurance, no guarantee for enlightenment. You have to earn it, you have to deserve it. Nobody can give it to you; it is not a commodity. Nirvana is certainly one of the words which are unpolluted. There is a reason why it remained unpolluted. The first reason that it remained unpolluted was its meaning. Unless you have come to a deep understanding of yourself and existence, the word nirvana will create fear in you. It is a negative word. Literally it means "blowing out the candle." Gautam Buddha used the word for the ultimate state of consciousness. He could have chosen some positive word, and in India there were many positive words for it: moksha, freedom, liberation; kaivalya, aloneness, absolute aloneness; brahmanubava, the experience of the ultimate. But he chose a strange word, which has never been used in spiritual contexts: "blowing out the candle."

It is so simple to change the whole poverty of the world that it is simply amazing, it is so obvious, why it goes on missing people. One thing, no population growth for thirty years. And simple methods are available, just people have to be made aware that if you go on listening to Mother Teresa and pope and shankaracharya -- who are against birth control -- then half the world will be starving, and we will not have any way what to do. And still you went on supporting Mother Teresa, went on giving her rewards and awards and Nobel prizes -- without even seeing into the fact that these are the people responsible for poverty. All religious people who are teaching people against birth control should be imprisoned immediately. It should be a crime, the greatest crime, to teach people against birth control; otherwise the whole world is going to die. You sentence to death a man who murders a single person, and your pope and your Mother Teresa and your shankaracharyas are going to kill half a billion people by the end of this century in this country only. If your government has any guts, the pope should be told clearly that he cannot teach against birth control, against abortion. He can teach about spiritual things, that is his business; but he should not teach anything that makes this world more poor. If he teaches, he should be thrown out immediately. That is the long-range program so we don't get on whatever we do is undone by the population; so we prepare beforehand for thirty years absolute control. And for the time being, every country is devoting so much money and labour, intelligence, science, technology, to war -- which should be absolutely stopped. Neither Russia is very rich -- people are poor. The dream of becoming rich for eighty years has remained a dream, it has not come true. Even in America thirty million people are on the streets, and still they go on pouring all their energy and their technology and their science and their best minds in creating more and more nuclear weapons. For what? Already they have got enough to kill humanity seven hundred times. What is the use of creating more? So if all war efforts can be dropped -- and they will have to be dropped, it is a simple question of intelligence -- then the whole energy can be moved to make the poor come out of their poverty. We have so much money and power wasting in war efforts that that whole money, if relieved, the poverty can disappear.

If you tell an ignorant person that he is nothing like the body his search ceases. He will say, "Now be quiet. I am not the body, you say. But I do not experience anything else but body. I feel that there is only body, there is nothing like a soul." He is not saying anything wrong; he is speaking of his experience. The knower is speaking of his experience; the ignorant is speaking of his experience. Have you ever known yourself to be anything but the body? Have you ever had any glimpse that may make you realize that you are not the body? Are you completely sure that if your head is cut off it is not you who will be cut? Have you even a little understanding that when your body will be burned on a funeral pyre it is not you who will be burning? Impossible! Because whenever a small thorn pierces the foot, it pierces you; if the hand is burned, you feel you are burned, so when your whole body will be burning, it is an impossible hope that you will feel that you are not burning. When even the slightest hurt, even a small abuse pierces you and affects you, then you cannot think that when death penetrates you you will remain unaffected, untouched.

You have no experience that you are anything other than the body; your only experience is that you are the body. Yes, you may believe that you are the soul and that you will not die, but that is only your belief -- and a belief that is very deceptive and a belief that is part of our ignorance.

Every man likes to believe that he will not die. Nobody wants to die. Take note of this simple thing -- that nobody wants to die. And whosoever does not want to die knows for certain that he will have to die -- that is the reason why the feeling arises in the first place that he does not want to die.

The knower wants to die; the ignorant does not want to die. The knower wants to die because he knows that nothing dies on death. A knower wants to enter death because he knows that on entering death he will have the purest experience of deathlessness.

Where the opposite is present, the experiencing becomes easier. You draw a white line on a blackboard: it shines more clearly. When there are dark clouds and the lightning flashes, it is seen more clearly. Let it flash in white clouds during the day -- you may not even see it.

There are men who have found the truth and remained silent, because they don't know how to express it. Kahlil Gibran is just the opposite -- he has not found the truth, but he is capable of expressing. And for the humanity which lives in darkness, even his poetry appears as if it is coming from the source of self-knowing. It is not so, and you will see that it is not so....

In Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet he writes:

AND A MAN SAID, SPEAK TO US OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE.

The first thing to be noted.... Do you see the difference when a woman asks from when a man asks? A woman asks about that which is intimate, close; she's deeply rooted in the earth. Man is a vagabond; he's curious about many things, he wants to know everything. The woman is satisfied to know a few essential things which will transform her being, but man's curiosity knows no limits.

The very question shows that the man is not a meditator; he is not even aware that nobody can speak about self-knowledge. He seems to be a learned scholar... this is exhibitionism. How can he ask about ordinary, mundane things? His questions must show to the world that here is a man who is asking the question which is the most important. His very question may befool the ignorant, but to me it exposes him and his ignorance.

AND HE ANSWERED, SAYING: YOUR HEARTS KNOW IN SILENCE THE SECRETS OF THE DAYS AND THE NIGHTS.

Kahlil Gibran never goes deeper than the heart -- and the heart is not you, and the heart cannot contain self-knowledge. It is better than the head, but self-knowledge means going beyond both mind and heart, going beyond both thinking and feeling. Only then do you know what silence is.

Neither the mind knows silence -- it is a marketplace -- nor the heart knows silence, because it is so full of emotions, sentiments. You don't hear them because the heart can only whisper; it is not so articulate, because it has not been educated. Mind has been trained to express, the heart has been ignored. The heart is a midway station, it is not the terminus. The terminus is your being; there the road ends, because there is nowhere else to go.

Dogen said:

“When Hsuan-sha became enlightened he said to other monks, "the whole universe is a brilliant jewel of the buddha-mind ...."

Dogen continued: this brilliant jewel is originally nameless, but provisionally we gave it such a name. This jewel is eternally unchangeable. Really, our body and mind, grass and trees here and there, or mountains and rivers between heaven and earth -- all this is nothing but a brilliant jewel ....

It is boundless from beginning to end. After all, the whole universe is one brilliant jewel, not two or three. The whole jewel is the Buddha's eye, truth itself, one phrase of truth, the light of enlightenment. At this time it never hinders the whole one, and it is round and rolls about. The function of this brilliant jewel is so clear that the sentient beings are saved by present-day Avalokitesvara or Maitreya, just by seeing their look or hearing their voice; and also the Buddhas, ancient and modern, expound the dharma with their body.

A sutra says that someone was lying drunk, when his great friend sewed a jewel in his robe, secretly. We must never fail to give this jewel to our intimate friend.

We are never drunk without being given such a jewel. Such a brilliant jewel is identical with the whole universe.

Therefore, a brilliant jewel is a brilliant jewel itself whether it rolls or not. Our realization that such is a jewel is also a jewel itself; so audible and visible is it. Therefore, it is no use wondering if we are a brilliant jewel. Whether we doubt or discern it, it is only a small, provisional viewpoint. To say more precisely: a brilliant jewel only pretends a small viewpoint.

We cannot help setting a great value on this jewel -- so brilliant is the color and light of it. Who could snatch it? Who could cast it away in a market, regarding it as a tile?

We must not worry about whether we transmigrate in the six realms of existence on the law of causality. A brilliant jewel never sets aside the law of causality from beginning to end. This is the face of a brilliant jewel.”´