JESUS
I Say Unto You Vol 2 09
Ninth Discourse from the series of 9 discourses - I Say Unto You Vol 2 by Osho.
You can listen, download or read all of these discourses on oshoworld.com.
John 14
Jesus said unto his disciples:
Let not your heart be troubled; ye believe in God, believe also in me.
In my Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.
And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.
And whither I go ye know, and the way ye know.
Thomas saith unto him, Lord, we know not whither thou goest; how can we know the way?
Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life; no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.
If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also; from henceforth ye know him, and have seen him.
I will not leave you comfortless; I will come to you.
Yet a little while, and the world seeth me no more, but ye see me, because I live, ye shall live also.
At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you.
Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you; not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.
Ye have heard how I said unto you, I go away, and come again unto you. If ye loved me, ye would rejoice, because I said, I go unto the Father; for my Father is greater than I.
Man’s evolution is from innocence to innocence. The first innocence is ignorant, the second innocence is luminous. The first innocence is a kind of sleep and the second innocence is an awakening. The first innocence is a gift of God. The second innocence is man’s own effort, his earning, his work upon himself. The first can be lost, the second cannot be lost. The first has to go – in the very nature of it, it cannot be eternal. The second, once it comes, remains forever – it is eternal. Remember, whatsoever you attain consciously, only that can you possess, only that. Whatsoever is given to you, and you receive unconsciously, will be taken away. Only that which you work hard for really happens to you. Only that which you create in your being belongs to you. You become master of it.
The first innocence in Christian terms is called Adam, and the second is called Christ. Jesus is just in between the two. Jesus is the bridge between the first innocence and the second innocence. Hindus call the second innocence “rebirth”: one becomes twice-born, dwij. And that’s what Jesus said to one of the famous professors and theologians of his time, Nicodemus: “Unless you are born again, you will not attain to the Kingdom of God.” Unless you are born again… The first birth has happened, the second birth has to happen. The first has happened without cooperation, the second cannot happen without your cooperation. The first birth was almost like an accident – it happened to you unawares. The second birth can only happen in immense consciousness; it cannot happen unawares, it can happen only in deep meditation.
Jesus is a bridge between Adam and Christ. That’s why the story of the virgin birth has a metaphoric meaning. Jesus is born innocent. Everybody is born innocent – there is no other way to be born. Every child is born in innocence. But that innocence is lost sooner or later and the more intelligent the child, the sooner it will be lost. If the child is stupid, imbecilic, idiotic, it may go on lingering for a long time; it may not be lost. If you are intelligent, you will start moving away from it. You will start exploring the world. You will start adventuring into the world, into the unknown; you will become a wanderer.
The more intelligent you are, the greater is the possibility that you will not follow the crowd, you will find your own way – you would like to do your “own thing.” You will not move on the superhighway, you will move on small footpaths into the jungle. Because intelligence wants to take risks. Intelligence wants to dare, intelligence wants to go into the unknown and the dangerous because it is only in danger that intelligence comes to its peak. It is only when you dare that your intelligence becomes a crystallization. It is only when you risk that you are. The more you risk, the more you are. Risk brings being. A man who never risks remains without a being.
George Gurdjieff used to say that not everyone has a soul. Because you have never dared, how can you get a soul? The soul comes only through daring. The only right way to attain a soul is to go into dangers, to risk all, to be a gambler, to go into the dark unknown.
The first innocence is going to go, has to go. It is good that it has to go. If it continued, you wouldn’t really be a man; you would be a vegetable or a cow or a buffalo, but you would not be a man. That is where man is different from the whole of nature. Nature lives in the first innocence and only man is capable of losing it. It is a great dignity, it is glory – only man is capable of sin, no other animal commits sin. You cannot call a dog a sinner, you cannot call a lion a sinner and you cannot call a tree a sinner. Only man can sin and because man can sin, only he can go beyond sin. Only man can go astray – that means only man can come back home.
Except for man, all the animals, birds and trees still exist in the Garden of Eden – they never left it. That’s why nature has such beauty, such peace, such silence. The Himalayas still exist in the Garden of Eden. So does the rosebush in your garden and so do the birds that come in the morning and sing songs around you. Nature is still there – it never left home, it never went astray, it never committed anything against God, it never disobeyed. It never dared and it is completely satisfied with the first birth. To be satisfied with the first birth is to remain unconscious. It is only through sin that you become conscious. It is only by going wrong that consciousness arises. This has to be understood.
So going wrong is not really going wrong because only through it does consciousness arise. All has to be lost. One has to come to the point where all is lost, God is lost, heaven is lost – one cannot believe in paradise and one cannot believe that innocence is possible. Only from that peak of frustration, anguish and anxiety is there a possibility of a one-hundred-and-eighty degree turn.
Adam is perfectly at ease, so is Christ. The problem is with Jesus. Jesus is troubled. Zen people are right when they say that for a man who has never heard of meditation, mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers. He is happy, he is in a kind of natural state. He has no anxiety because God has not yet become a challenge to him. He has no future goals, he has no destination. He eats, drinks and is happy – the first hedonism I was talking about the other day: “Eat, drink and be merry.” He lives in the body, he is the body; he knows nothing more than that. With the body there is a kind of peace and health that surrounds him.
You can always see that happiness around a child. The child is the first kind of hedonist. He believes only in eating, drinking and being merry. He simply lives the moment. He is completely abandoned in the moment: no anxiety, no clouds yet – his sky is clear.
For the people who have not heard of meditation and enlightenment, of nirvana and God, who have never pondered over these great problems, things are clean; they are not confused. “Mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers.” But once a man has become interested in meditation, in growth, in spirituality, in the other shore and in the other reality, problems will bubble up in their thousands. Problems will crowd in on him. Mountains are no longer mountains now and rivers are no longer rivers. Everything will become confused, everything will become topsy-turvy. Man will go into chaos. The old cosmos, the old innocence, simply falls to pieces; not even a trace is left. This is the meaning of the Christian parable of Adam’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden. He became interested in higher things, he became interested in knowing things.
He ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, he started becoming more conscious. He started trying to understand what this reality is. He moved into knowing and suddenly the doors of the garden were closed to him. Suddenly he found himself outside the garden and he didn’t know how to get back inside. He had to go farther and farther away. This is what people of Zen say: “Mountains are no longer mountains, rivers are no longer rivers. One has to go on a long journey. Tedious is the journey, full of miseries and nightmares. It is a wandering in a desert where oases are only dreams; they exist not. And then after a long, long journey – it may continue for many, many lives – one can come back. This time, coming back has a totally different meaning. Now one comes as a knowing consciousness. One is again innocent, but this innocence is no longer ignorant, it is luminous, it is full of light.” This is Jesus turning into Christ.
Adam found himself outside the garden. Jesus wandered in the world. One day, Christ suddenly found himself back in the garden. Adam, Jesus, and Christ – these are the three stages of human consciousness. Adam is absolutely unconscious. Jesus is half-conscious, half-unconscious – hence the conflict, the confusion, the division, the tension. Christ is absolute consciousness.
Before we enter into the sutras, this has to be understood because these sutras belong to the last night of Jesus’ earthly life – the departing message to his disciples. He is leaving them. He is going out of the world into God. He is going to die to the world and be reborn in God. He is going to become twice-born: the resurrection after the crucifixion. The resurrection can only be after the crucifixion. Adam dies to God and is born to the world. Christ dies to the world and is born into God again. Jesus remains in limbo – half-half, divided, split. Something he knows and something he does not know; something he understands and something he does not understand. There is a kind of cloudiness in the Jesus-consciousness.
Adam is clear but fast asleep. Jesus is half awake; his eyes are full of dreams. Yes, he can see a little bit because he is half awake. Just like in the morning when you are half awake and half asleep and you can hear the milkman knocking on the door. You can hear children getting ready for school and you can hear the neighbor’s radio. But you are not yet fully alert. Yes, these things are like ripples, they enter you – you kind of hear and yet you don’t hear them. You go on swinging between sleep and wakefulness. Sometimes you hear something and then you are drowned in sleep again. You cannot figure out what is happening. Then you are fully awake.
Adam dies to God and is born into the world. Jesus lives in the world. Christ dies to the world and is born into God again. These sutras belong to his last night, the departing message to his disciples. Before we enter into these sutras, a few things will be of great help.
Teilhard de Chardin believes that the evolution of consciousness depends on three steps. Chardin is one of the most important Christian thinkers of this century. But still he remains confined to Christianity; he cannot soar higher than Christian boundaries. These are the three steps that he talks about.
Ordinarily, consciousness is simple, innocent. After that there are three steps. First he talks about complexity. He says, “Consciousness grows through complexity.” That is true. The original mind is absolutely simple, its taste is one, it has no duality. Because there is no duality there is no possibility of dialogue, argument. And because there is no possibility of argument and dialogue, there is no possibility of understanding. With conflict, with friction, one evolves. So from one, man becomes dual – from unity, duplicity; from duplicity, triplicity; from triplicity, multiplicity. That’s how man goes on growing – complication.
Man’s consciousness is one in the original state and then it becomes many. Through the many – the growth. That is the Hegelian concept of growth and the Marxian too. Hegel calls it “the dialectical process”: thesis creates its antithesis; antithesis and thesis join into a synthesis. The synthesis becomes a thesis and creates its antithesis. This is how it goes on. You cannot grow if your consciousness is unitary. It has to create a conflict in itself. With the conflict, energy is created. Conflict creates energy, friction creates energy. You strike two stones and fire is born. You strike two dry pieces of wood and fire is possible. You rub your hands together and electricity is born. All energy is created through friction.
So the original human consciousness has to become divided, has to become split, has to become dual. The more evolved a mind man has, the more fragments he will have. So a thinker is almost a crowd. He is not one, he is not two, he is not three – he is many.
The second state Chardin calls “concentration.” Because once the unity is lost and man has become many, there arises chaos and one loses one’s identity. One does not know who one is. An identity is needed, a self is needed and an ego is needed to hold all the fragments together. Otherwise they will start falling apart and you will not be able to survive – hence the ego. The ego is an effort to create a kind of unity inside yourself. The natural unity is lost. Now you have to create an unnatural, synthetic unity. The ego is a synthetic self, a created self, a managed self. One part of your being becomes the master and forces the other parts to be slaves. A kind of government arises inside you.
Complexity creates energy. Concentration creates a possibility to use that energy; otherwise there will be no use for it. The energy will be there and it will kill you. It will be too much for you and it will be in many directions. All those directions have to be focused in one direction. The whole energy has to be channeled into one. This is what Chardin calls “concentration”: unification around a center – a self is born, the ego is born, discipline is born.
The third he calls “direction.” Once there is ego, once you have a kind of self, a kind of unity – although managed, but still a unity – the goal is possible. You can become an arrow, you can have a target in the future. These three steps Chardin thinks are enough to explain human consciousness. They are not. They are important but not complete. The Hindu vision of life is far more complete. Chardin’s vision is linear: unity, complexity, concentration and then direction. The direction goes on and on, the arrow goes on and on and on and there is no end to it. It is linear. The arrow goes on into infinity, it never comes back. This is not true. This is logical, but not natural.
The Hindu vision is circular. Hindus say everything moves in a circle not in a line. Nature moves in a circle, seasons move in a circle, stars move in a circle, man’s life moves in a circle. Everything natural moves in a circle. The circle is the way of nature. The linear is just a concept of the mind. The line does not exist in nature.
If you are aware of non-Euclidean geometry you will know this. Euclid believes in the line. Non-Euclidean geometry says that there is nothing like the line in existence. The line also is part of a bigger circle, that’s all. No line is straight and no line can be straight – you cannot draw a straight line. If you draw a straight line, that simply means you are sitting on a circular earth and drawing a straight line. Go on drawing the line from both ends. Go on drawing it and you will find one day that the line has become a circle around the earth. So that small straight line was just a part of a big circle. Hindus say it is circular.
To me, the Hindu concept is far truer than the Christian concept of linear progress. But still, my own suggestion is a little different to both. My suggestion is: spiral – neither linear nor circular; evolution is a spiral. In that way, both are joined together. In a spiral the progress moves as if it is moving in a line because it never comes to exactly the same point again.
Christ never becomes Adam again because Adam was ignorant and innocent and Christ is innocent and fully aware. He never comes back to Adam, exactly to Adam. So the Hindu concept misses something. But in another sense he becomes Adam again because the innocence is the same, just that now it is fully aware. Then it was not aware, it was asleep, now it is alert. In a sense, Christ becomes Adam again because it is the same innocence. So Hindus are right. In a sense, Christ never becomes Adam again because it is luminous innocence. In that sense Christians are right. But they are only half right.
To have the vision of the full truth, I would like to call evolution a spiral. It comes back to the original point but never on the same plane – on a higher plane. It comes again and again but always on a higher plane. If you have been trekking in the mountains you know what I mean. You walk on a path and the path moves around the mountain. You come to the same point again – the same rocks, the same valley, the same trees, but a little higher. It is a spiral.
To make it a spiral, I would like to add three more steps to it. Chardin says: “Complexity, concentration, direction.” Three more steps have to be added. The first is: awareness, meditation. Concentration is just the beginning. Concentration is not relaxed, it is tense. One cannot concentrate twenty-four hours a day; one will go mad. So concentration can never become natural, but one can meditate twenty-four hours a day. One can live in meditation. It can become natural, it can become like breathing. It can be relaxed.
Concentration is focused consciousness. Meditation is just aware consciousness. For example, if you are listening to me, you can listen in a concentrated way. It will tire you, it will exhaust you. If you are tense while listening because you don’t want to miss a single word, it will be tiring. But you can listen in a meditative way. That means you are relaxed open and vulnerable, that’s all. You will not be tired. Listening, for one and a half hours, rather than being tired, you will be enriched, rejuvenated. You will feel more energy afterward and you will feel more flowing in your being. So the fourth has to be awareness, meditativeness, openness.
Concentration is directional, meditation is non-directional. Concentration has an object, a content. Meditation has no object, no content; it is just an opening. You are listening to me, a bird starts singing – you listen to that too; a train passes by – you listen to that too. You are not listening to me exclusively. All is included. You are open from all sides, not only open to me. This is a higher stage of evolution than concentration is; it is de-concentration.
The fifth I call playfulness. Christianity has no idea of playfulness and Chardin has no idea of playfulness. “Direction, goal, purpose” – that is very businesslike, tiring and makes man sad and serious. Something like playfulness has to be added, because a really grown-up person is capable of play. A really grown-up person is sincere but not serious. Seriousness is a kind of illness because seriousness will create tension in you and it will never allow you to celebrate. Only playfulness can become celebration and joy.
There seems to be no space for joy in Chardin’s chart – nothing of playfulness. “Complexity, concentration, direction” – good as far as they go, but they don’t go far enough. And they don’t go into creating a happy, celebrating human being. Without celebration what is the purpose? All purpose leads to a purposeless play. You work, but you work finally to relax. You work hard, just so that you are able to play. You work five days, so that at the weekend you can rest on the beach. All purpose leads to purposeless play. So the fifth I call playfulness, non-seriousness, nonpurposiveness, celebration, joy.
The sixth I call egolessness. The ego is needed – because one falls into chaos and a synthetic self is needed. But that self is synthetic, plastic, it is not real. One day it has to be dropped. Use it, go beyond it and throw it away. One has to come to egolessness, one has to forget that one exists separately from existence. In that forgetfulness, in that dropping of the ego, one becomes Adam again in a totally new way. One becomes christ – again unity, again simplicity, again innocence, but luminous this time. You are twice-born. This way, one comes back again to the original simplicity, the original face. But it is higher than the first originality, hence I call it spiral. It is primal innocence, but not just primal innocence. It has immense light in it, it is not dark. It is not primitive, it is the highest point of consciousness. It is divine innocence. What Plotinus calls “the One” – this is the One. First the One was not aware of itself, now the One is aware of itself. God is born in you.
In Adam, God was a seed; in Christ, God has become a flowering. The seed has come to its full manifestation. This is the difference between the child and the sage. Adam is the child, Christ is the sage. They are both alike and yet not alike at all. Something similar and something absolutely different; similarity in innocence, dissimilarity in awareness, luminosity. Or you can call the first state “nature,” and the second state “God.” When nature realizes itself, it becomes God. When nature recognizes itself, it becomes God. The beginning and the end have to be the same in some way and yet not the same in some other way. The alpha has to be the omega and the omega has to be the alpha. And yet they have to exist on totally different planes. Adam is body, Christ is soul; Jesus is mind – a bridge just in between the two polarities.
This is the last night. Jesus is ready to depart. The scene of his departure is one of the most beautiful scenes in the whole history of human growth – the Last Supper. Jesus has gathered his disciples, the twelve. Among those twelve is Judas Iscariot, the one who is going to betray him. Jesus washes the feet of his disciples for the first time. They are very embarrassed. They ask again and again, “Why? Why are you washing our feet? You are our master, our Lord!”
But he says, “Because I want to give you my last commandment. The last commandment is the commandment to love.” Jesus is giving it in a very existential way, not verbally.
Just the other night a new sannyasin, Lola, was here. A few days ago, she took sannyas. I gave her the name Deva Lola. It means: “moved by God, possessed by God.” She was so thrilled on the day of her initiation that although I explained the meaning of her name to her, she could not follow it. She was so thrilled, she was so ecstatic – she was here and not here. She was flying high, she was drunk. She heard it and yet she could not remember anything. Last night she was here again, going back to the West and she asked, “Please tell me the meaning of my name again because I could not remember what you said on the first day.”
She has great potential. So I said to her, “Rather than giving you the meaning verbally, I will give you the meaning existentially.” I told her to raise her hands and be possessed by God and whatsoever happens, let it happen. Within a few moments she started swaying – swaying like a flower on the stem in the breeze. Faster and faster movements… And her hands started moving, her whole body started moving. She was possessed by the divine. Now this is an existential meaning, not a verbal one.
Jesus touched the feet of his disciples because he wanted to give them an existential meaning of love. In love, nobody is higher and nobody is lower; love knows no hierarchy. Jesus touched the feet of his disciples – the master touching the feet of his disciples. Jesus declared, “You are exactly like me, there is no difference. You and I are absolutely the same. I have known it, you have not known it, that is the only difference. There is no difference in our beings.” Those disciples were not yet twice-born, those disciples were yet seeds, they had not blossomed; Jesus had blossomed.
Only one who has blossomed can see that the seeds are going to blossom too. The seeds cannot recognize the flower because they have never known themselves as blossom, but the flower can recognize the seeds because he has known both the states. He has known himself as the seed and he has known himself as the flower; he can recognize both.
The same story happened in Buddha’s life. Buddha says: “Once, many, many lives ago, when I was not enlightened and I was as ignorant as anybody, I went to see a buddha – a man who had become enlightened. His name was Dipankara. When I touched the feet of Dipankara I was surprised because he touched my feet too. I felt very embarrassed because there was a great crowd around and everybody started looking: ‘What is the matter?’ I was very shy. I started feeling a little guilty too and I said to Dipankara, ‘Sir, what have you done? You have touched my feet. I am an ignorant man, a sinner. You are enlightened, you are a great master, thousands follow you. I have come just for your blessings and you have touched my feet! What have you done?’”
Dipankara laughed and said, “You don’t know it yet, but soon you are going to become enlightened. I can recognize it. You are in the state which I was once in and you will be in the state in which I am now. You cannot see, that I understand, but I can see.” The higher can see the lower, the lower cannot see the higher.
Jesus touched the feet of his disciples. That is a rare phenomenon, a great message – that there is no higher, no lower; that all hierarchies are of the mind, are political; that in spirituality there is no hierarchy. It is all one, it is all the same. It is one being all over the place. It is one heart beating in millions of hearts. It is one consciousness in every consciousness. It is one moon reflected in millions of pools, oceans, rivers, tanks, reservoirs – but it is one moon.
Jesus says, “This is to give you my last commandment – the commandment of love.” Then they ate and they drank. Jesus never divided the ordinary life from the spiritual life – his second message and what I was saying the other day, that the first hedonism has to be transformed into the second hedonism. Jesus is not an ascetic, Jesus is not in any way a masochist; he enjoyed life. There is no reason why one should not enjoy life. Enjoying life you will become capable of enjoying God. If you don’t enjoy life, you will become incapable of enjoying God too. Life has to be a training ground for enjoyment. God is going to be such a big blessing that if you don’t taste life’s small blessings you will not be ready for it. It will drown you, it will kill you. It will be too much. So increase your capacity.
Even on the last night Jesus was breaking bread, filling cups with wine for his disciples. They were enjoying themselves, they were eating and they were in a merry mood. Death was coming close, but celebration had not to be stopped for it because Jesus knew that this death was going to be the greatest celebration. He wanted to leave his disciples in celebration. He wanted it to be imprinted on their consciousnesses that he was a celebrant, that he was a man of feasting not of fasting; that he was a man who was thrilled by the small joys of life – the flowers, the birds, the rivers; that he liked the lilies in the field; that he liked people and that he was immensely thrilled – always immensely thrilled when looking into people’s eyes; that he loved and was not against life.
But still it happened – Christianity went against life. Christianity became monkish. Monasteries were created, masochists gathered there, self-torturers became dominant and the feasts of Jesus disappeared, or they remained only as rituals. Yes, still they are repeated.
Just the other evening, Musin took sannyas – the author that I talked about in the morning. Now he is Pramod, his name is Pramod – joy. He said to me that the ten days that he has been here have been the happiest in his whole life. He has never known such happiness. Now he is worried because he had promised his daughter that he would be back home at Christmas. I said to him, “Here is Christmas. Where are you going?”
Christians have completely forgotten what Christmas is or should be. It has become a ritual. It has to be a kind of inner glow, it has to be a love for life. It has to be a search into the ordinary for the extraordinary, into the mundane for the supramundane. It has to be the search for the spirit in the body. It has to be the search for God in nature, for the invisible in the visible.
Jesus’ last message is of love and joy. He left his disciples in a feasting mood, not crying, not making them sad. He hugged them all, he hugged even his betrayer. He kissed Judas because for a man of that consciousness there is no friend, there is no enemy. But the disciples were feeling a little bit scared. Rumors were going around and when Jesus said, “Only a little while longer and I will be gone – gone to my Father.” They became very frightened, afraid, sad. To comfort them, to give them hope, to give them courage, these sutras were spoken. These are of immense value. Meditate on them.
Jesus said unto his disciples:
Let not your heart be troubled; ye believe in God, believe also in me.
Their hearts were troubled. Their master was going to die, their master was going to be tortured to death. They would be lost in this dark night of existence, their light would no longer be with them. The one who had been guiding them, the one who had been taking them out of the wilderness, the one who was their path, their guide, their friend, would not be any longer. They had become so dependent on him that they couldn’t think of life without him. Their hearts were troubled. It was natural, it was human.
Jesus says: Let not your heart be troubled; ye believe in God, believe also in me. He says, “You know what belief is…” Belief is not the right translation for the Hebrew word. The right translation would be trust. “You know what trust is…” Trust means that God takes care and that we need not worry because someone is behind the scenes caring for us, that existence is mothering us, fathering us – that we are not orphans. That’s what trust means: that we are not orphans, that we are not strangers in this world. This is our home because this is our God’s home – it belongs to us. Jesus said: …ye believe in God… He says: “You know what trust is. If you know what trust is then you can trust in me too because it is not a question of whom you trust. Once you know the quality of trust, you simply trust.”
It is not a question of whether you trust in God or in Jesus or in Buddha – remember it. If you trust, you simply trust. If a Christian says, “I only trust in Jesus not in Buddha,” he has not known what trust is, because trust knows no distinctions. If you have trust in Christ you will have trust in Buddha too because you will not see any difference. Maybe the languages are different, maybe their ways of expression are different, but trust will be able to go directly to the heart of the matter, to the very core and will see that Christ and Buddha exist on the same plane. It is the same consciousness, the same awareness, the same enlightenment.
If you trust Buddha, you will trust Krishna and Mohammed. If you trust me, you will trust Christ, you will trust Zarathustra. Trust knows no address. It is not addressed. Trust is an inner quality. If it is there, it is there. It is like bringing a light, a lamp, into a room. The light will not only fall on the table, it will fall on the chair too. It will not only fall on the chair, it will fall on the walls and on the paintings hanging on the walls. It will not only fall on the walls, it will fall on the floor and on the roof too. When you bring light into a room, it simply falls on everything that is there. So it is with trust. It is a light. If trust is kindled in your heart, it makes no difference. You trust God, you trust Christ; you trust your wife, you trust your husband; you trust your son, you trust your friend and you trust your enemy. You trust nature, you trust death and you trust insecurity. In short, you simply trust.
Jesus says: Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God… I know you trust in God.
…believe also in me.
In my Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.
Now, again and again, these disciples were discussing who was the greatest out of them all. Even on that last night they were discussing who was going to take the second place to Jesus in the Kingdom of God.
Jesus says, “Don’t be worried…” In my Father’s house are many mansions… “There is space for everybody. Nobody will be rejected, all will be welcomed and accepted. God is spacious.” Don’t be worried about who will be next to God and who will be next to me. In God’s eyes everybody’s value is the same and he is spacious. His love is such that he can love all alike. He has so much to give that it can’t be exhausted. So you need not be worried because there is no question of scarcity. It is not that he has only so much love and that if I take it, you will not be able to get much. Or that a few people have taken his love, so a few people will miss because there will be no more love left. In my Father’s house are many mansions…
“He is spacious, his love is spacious. It is infinite. You can take as much as you want and still it remains infinite. You cannot exhaust it.”
…if it were not so, I would have told you. “Don’t be troubled. Don’t become anxious. Don’t be worried.”
I go to prepare a place for you. Jesus says, “I am going so that I can prepare a place for you.” He is consoling them, he is giving them courage and hope. They will need it. Dark days are going to come. They are going to pass through great difficulties – they will be haunted, they will be tortured, they will be persecuted; they will be among wolves. Their master is going and he will no longer be with them. He has been their protection, their solace. He has been their security. He was like an armor around them. They were secure with him, they were sheltered. Now the shelter is going to disappear. The rains will come and the hot days will come and there will be summer and winter. They don’t know what they are going to do. They will be very alone and feel very strange in the world.
Before any master leaves his disciples he has to put down foundations, so that in the days that will come… And those days are going to be difficult for them because the people who are going to kill Jesus are not going to leave his disciples in peace. If they are going to kill Christ himself, there will be many more difficulties for the disciples to face. He says: I go to prepare a place for you. “You trust in God. Trust in me too. I am going just for you, to make things ready there – in that other reality, on the other shore.”
And I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself…
“And don’t be worried. If you trust in me, I will be coming to welcome you unto myself.”
Yes, if you trust a master, if you love a master, he will remain available to you forever. He is forever. The real question is: “Do you trust? Do you love?” Have you really fallen into that relationship where your ego has disappeared, where you are surrendered? Where you are not and only the fragrance of the master fills your being? Then he is forever. Then the relationship between a master and a disciple is not a temporal relationship, it is not tentative; it is eternal. It has the quality of deathlessness, the quality of timelessness.
And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.
They are still wandering in the world. They are no longer Adams, they are not yet Christs. They are in great turmoil, in great confusion. Christ has to pull them out of that confusion. Christ has to become the presence through which they can come out of the darkness. He has to become the catalytic agent. He has to become a symbol, a light, a star so they can look up to it and start moving out of their dark night. …and receive you unto myself; that where I am, where ye may be also. That is the whole effort of a master. The master wants to destroy the disciple so that the disciple also becomes a master.
The master’s work is complex. First he persuades you to become a disciple. He “coos” to you, seduces you to become a disciple. Once you are a disciple, he starts killing and destroying you because unless you are destroyed as a disciple you will never become a master. The real master is one who wants you all to become masters. That is the goal. Everybody should become an emperor, a king, a queen. The slavery – visible, invisible – has to be completely destroyed. All kinds of imprisonments that are around you have to be burned down. Your freedom has to be utter, ultimate.
And whither I go ye know, and the way ye know.
Thomas saith unto him, Lord, we know not whither thou goest; how can we know the way?
Thomas was one of the most-loved disciples of Christ, one of the most innocent. The others were a little bit knowledgeable. When Jesus says, And whither I go ye know, and the way ye know, nobody else said anything. They must have kept quiet. Nobody knew where he was going, nobody knew which way to follow, but only the most innocent of them was ready to ask.
Thomas said: Lord, we know not whither thou goest; how can we know the way? We have never been there. Thomas was one of Jesus’ most intimate and closest disciples. When Jesus came to India, Thomas followed him. Indian Christianity is older than any other Christianity in the world. The Indian Church is the oldest Church in the world because Thomas was the first apostle to come to India. Indian Christianity was started by Thomas.
Thomas asked, “We know not where you are going and which way you are going. And how can we know? – we are ignorant.” The real disciple never pretends to be knowledgeable. If he does not know, he is ready to say he does not know because that is the only way to learn from the master. The knowledgeable disciples never learn a thing.
I have a few here too. When they ask questions, their questions have a different quality – as if they are asking for the others’ sake. They have no problems of their own. Sometimes they write in their questions: “This is not my question – just for the others’ sake…people will be enlightened. Many people have this question on their minds and it will be good if you discuss it. But it is not a personal question!” This is their question, but they cannot even confess that this is their question. “It will help others.” Tricky people.
Once a man came to me and he said, “One of my friends has become impotent. Can you suggest some meditation that would be helpful for him?”
I looked at the man and I continued looking at him. He started trembling and perspiring. He said, “Why are you looking at me so hard?”
I said, “Can’t you send your friend? He can say that one of his friends has become impotent. Can’t you even say that? Have you become so impotent that you cannot even say that a problem has arisen in your being?” Now, he wants to know what can be done, but he does not want to show that the problem is his. Some friend… He is being diplomatic. Many questions that come are diplomatic; the questioner knows already, there is no problem for him.
All the other disciples had kept quiet, only Thomas asked a question. And because of these small gestures, Thomas became closer and more intimate with Jesus.
…Lord, we know not whither thou goest; how can we know the way?
Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life; no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.
This statement is of immense importance and has been tremendously misunderstood and misinterpreted by Christians. This statement has become a protection for the priest, for the dogmatist, for the demagogue. Christians have taken it to mean that nobody ever comes to God unless he comes through Christ – that means Jesus, son of Mariam. Nobody comes to God unless he comes through Jesus. They have meant, or they have interpreted it in such a way, that Christianity has become the only right religion. All other religions have become wrong. All other religions are against God – only Christianity.
Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. What did he mean? The priests, missionaries and Christians who go on converting the whole world to Christianity, are they right? Is their interpretation right? Or did Jesus have something else? He had something utterly else.
In the Bhagavad Gita there is also a statement which Hindus go on misinterpreting. Krishna said to Arjuna… Almost the same quality of closeness existed between Arjuna and Krishna as between Jesus and Thomas – the same relationship. The same flowering had happened and the same statement had bubbled up out of that relationship. Krishna said to Arjuna: “Sarva dharman parityajya mamekam sharanam vraja. Drop all religions, forget all religions and come to my feet because it is only through me that one reaches to God.” Now, Hindus are happy with this statement. Krishna had said it so clearly: “Forget all religions. Drop all kinds of other religions and hold unto me. Hold to my feet – mamekam sharanam vraja. Come to my feet; they are the bridges to God – the only bridges.”
Both statements happened in the same kind of situation. Arjuna must have been very close when Krishna said this. So is the case with Thomas – he must have been very close. Christ must have been showering like flowers on Thomas when he said this. You will need that loving understanding of a Thomas, only then will you be able to understand the meaning of this. You will need that loving intimacy of an Arjuna, only then will you be able to understand the statement of Krishna. Both are the same, both mean the same – and both have been misinterpreted.
The misinterpretation comes from the priest and the politician – those who try to convert religion into organizational, political strategies. Jesus saith unto him, I am the way… “I am…” That has to be understood. It does not mean Jesus, it simply means the inner consciousness: “I am” – the inner life. This consciousness inside you, which you call “I am,” this “I am” is the only way. If you can understand this “I am”: what it is, what this consciousness is, you have found the way. It has nothing to do with Jesus, it has nothing to do with Krishna. When I say to you “I am the gate,” it has nothing to do with me. That “I am” is the gate. The gate is within you, the way is within you, the truth is within you. You have to understand who this is calling himself “I am” within you, what this consciousness is, what it consists of.
If you can go into your consciousness, if you can feel, see, realize the nature of your consciousness, it is the way. Meditation is the way – not Christ, not Krishna, nor Mohammed. Who am I? This question will become the way.
Raman Maharshi is right when he says that only one question is relevant: “Who am I?” Go on asking this question, let this question become a fire in you. Be aflame with it. Let every cell of your body and your being and every fiber of your existence pulsate, vibrate with it. Let this question arise from the deepest core: “Who am I?” Go on asking and don’t accept any answer that is given by the mind. You have been reading the Upanishads and in the Upanishads they say, “You are God.” Your mind will say, “Why are you asking again and again? I know the answer: You are God. Keep quiet!” Or if you are a Christian and have been reading the Bible again and again, you know that the Kingdom of God is within you. So, “Who am I?” – “The Kingdom of God. Now keep quiet!”
No answer from the head has to be accepted. No answer from the memory has to be accepted. No answer from knowledge has to be accepted. All answers have to be thrown in the whirlwind of the question “Who am I?” A moment comes when all answers have gone and only the question remains, alone like a pillar of fire. You are afire with it. You are just a thirst, a passionate quest: “Who am I?” When the question has burned all the answers, the question burns itself too, it consumes itself. Once the question has disappeared, there is silence. That silence is the answer. It is the door, the gate, the way, the truth.
Please be careful. When Jesus says, I am the way… he means the one who calls himself “I am” within you, is the way. It has nothing to do with Jesus. Just by holding the feet of Jesus you are not going to go anywhere. Just by praying to Jesus you are not going to go anywhere. Listen to what he is saying. Each master throws you back to yourself because ultimately God is hidden in you as much as in the master. You are carrying your light within yourself. You just have to turn back, you have to look inward. I am the way, the truth… Yes. In your very consciousness is the truth. When you become fully conscious you become the full truth. When you are absolutely conscious, it is not that you face truth as an object, you are the truth, it is your subjectivity, it is you. That’s what the Upanishads say: “Tattvamasi. Thou art that.”
…and the life… Jesus says three things: “It is the life – I am… consciousness, awareness.” This is life – the life that you know, the ordinary life. The second: I am the way – the way that joins the ordinary life with the extraordinary life, the way that joins Adam with Christ, the way that joins body with soul. The third thing: I am the truth… Jesus has said all the three things.
You are that right now because: “I am the life.” You have the way too, hidden behind you, within you: “I am the way.” You are the ultimate goal too, the destiny. You are the beginning and the middle and the end. You are Adam, Jesus and Christ. …no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. No man has ever entered into God unless he has entered into his consciousness, until he has entered into his “I am-ness.” This is the meaning. This is the meaning of Krishna and this is the meaning of Christ. This is the meaning of all the masters.
If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also; from henceforth ye know him, and have seen him.
A tremendously important statement. Within the single statement there comes a revolution. Meditate very, very silently over it. If ye had known me… Jesus was saying to Thomas: If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also… Because I and my Father are one. While Jesus was saying: If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also, something changed in Thomas’ being. While Jesus was saying this… And you know, when I say some things to you, something goes on changing in you. Sometimes you are very close to the truth. Sometimes a single word hits you deeply, shatters something; something changes. A radical change can happen sometimes. It happens all the time.
That is the whole purpose of being in the presence of a master. When Jesus was saying – he had not even completed the statement… The statement was half said, but Thomas had changed, so he had to change his statement. This is why I say this is such a beautiful statement. If ye had known me… There was an “if” in it because Thomas was hesitant. If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also. When he made this statement, there was a radical transformation in Thomas’ consciousness; he turned inward, he was converted – metanoia. Jesus had to change his statement. He said: …and from henceforth ye know him, and have seen him. The “if” had disappeared, because the “if” had disappeared in Thomas.
You know the phrase: “Doubting Thomas”? That comes from Jesus’ disciple Thomas. He used to doubt. But he was very innocent. If doubt was there, it was there; he would not hide it. But in that moment “Doubting Thomas” was no longer “Doubting Thomas”; doubt had disappeared.
Jesus had started with “if” because doubt was there. Thomas had been hesitant, Thomas did not agree. He was saying, “Okay, but it doesn’t appeal to me. You say that you are the truth? Maybe, but I am not convinced. You say that you are the way? I hope that it is true, but it has yet no validity in my being.” Maybe not in so many words – that is not the question – but there was a lurking doubt. Jesus had to use “if.” Once he saw that lurking doubt had disappeared under the impact of his great statement…
In India we call such statements mahavakyas – great statements. There are very few in the whole history of human consciousness. This is one of the great statements, a mahavakya. Jesus must have seen that the doubt had suddenly disappeared. The shadow of doubt was not there. Thomas had become trust. Something had transformed in him. Thomas was no longer the old Thomas; a new being was born, a new man was born. He had to change his statement in the middle of it because a master responds to the disciple. A master is a response. A master is a mirror. …from henceforth ye know him… Now there is no “if.” Jesus said: …from henceforth… From now onward you know him, you have seen him because you have seen me, because I and my Father are not two. I represent him; I am just a reflection of him, an echo.
I will not leave you comfortless; I will come to you.
Yet a little while, and the world seeth me no more…
Listen. Jesus says: Yet a little while… Only a few hours are left …and the world seeth me no more… And the world will not be able to see me.
…but ye see me, because I live, ye shall live also.
Jesus said: “Just a few more hours and I will disappear from the world, but for you Thomas, never. For you, never – because you have seen my reality which cannot be crucified. You have seen my truth which is immortal. The body will be crucified – a little while longer and the body will disappear. The world will not be able to see me any longer because the world recognizes me only as the body. But you will still see me because you have seen my luminosity, you have seen my eternity, you have seen the nontemporal being, you have seen my truth. Thomas you will go on seeing me. For you, I will never disappear.”
Love has eyes, trust has eyes to see the invisible. Only trust can penetrate deep enough to see the deathless. Only love can give you a glimpse of that which is beyond time. Yet a little while, and the world seeth me no more… “Be happy Thomas, you are blessed, you will continue to see me.” …but ye see me, because I live, ye shall live also. In this moment let this seed be sown in you that when I am going to live – even after the crucifixion, even when my body is destroyed – if I am going to live, you will also live. Let this trust be born in you too. It is not that only I will live. It is nothing special to me: everybody’s soul is immortal. If you can see my body disappearing and yet you can go on seeing me, let that become a new understanding in you, that you will also live even when you have died.
Death is only of the garments, death is only of the covering. The innermost core goes on living. It is life itself. How can it die? How can life die? Life goes on changing its abodes, true: one house becomes rotten, old, dilapidated, a ruin and you have to leave it to find another home. Your house is just a nest, an overnight stay. Yet a little while, and the world seeth me no more, but ye see me, because I live, ye shall live also. That is where the secret of resurrection is. There is proof – no proof as far as the world is concerned, but there is proof as far as the disciples are concerned. Jesus died as the body but remained as the soul for those who had trust in him, who had seen his true reality, who had seen his true being.
At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you.
Jesus says, “We are all intertwined because we are all one.” …I am my Father, and ye in me, and I in you. He is saying, “Thomas, you don’t know God, but you know me. I know God, you know me. I know that I am in my God and you know that you are in me because your love has made you part of me. I tell you that I am in you. Hence, we are all in God and God is in us all. We are all intertwined.”
The disciple only knows the master, the master knows God. The disciple loves the master and by and by gets dissolved into the master. The master is dissolved into God. Through the master the disciple is also joined with God. The master goes on pouring himself into the disciple, and because the master has become one with God, so God goes on pouring into the disciple in a very indirect way. This is the real trinity: the disciple, the master and God. They go on pouring into each other. The disciple is not aware of what is happening.
When I touch you, do you think I touch you? God has touched you. If I am in God, when I touch you, God has touched you. But to you it remains the master’s touch. The deeper your understanding goes, the deeper you will be able to see that the master is just instrumental – a flute through which God’s song goes on flowing. At that day ye shall know… Jesus is saying, “At the ultimate day of meeting when you will become enlightened, when you will also become a christ…” At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you.
Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you; not as the world giveth, give I unto you…
“…because I am pouring my peace into you and I am pouring it unconditionally, not as the world does.” In the world nobody gives you anything unconditionally; in the world everything is a bargain. Even if people give love to you, they give only to get; it is a bargain. Peace I leave with you… Jesus says, “Don’t be worried. I will be gone, but my peace will linger around you, will surround you. Whenever you remember me you will find peace showering on you. My peace will remain available to you.” To the trusting heart it is always available. Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you; not as the world giveth, give I unto you… Not like in the world where everything is given to get something.
Jesus is simply giving. There is no bargain. The master only gives – but not to get anything. What can the disciple give to the master? It is one-way traffic. The master goes on pouring. But that does not mean that he obliges you; he knows God is pouring into him. What can he do with it? All that comes through God he has to share. With God there is no bargaining, it is a pure gift.
Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you; not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it he afraid.
Ye have heard how I said unto you, I go away, and come again unto you. If ye loved me, ye would rejoice, because I said, I go unto the Father; for my Father is greater than I.
Jesus says: If ye loved me, ye would rejoice… Love knows no death. Love never comes across death. For love death does not exist.
So Jesus says, “If you trust, if you love…” This statement must have been made to all the disciples, not to Thomas alone because the “if” has entered again. These are subtle points to be understood. Nothing is mentioned in the Bible about who he is speaking to now, but the “if” has entered again. To Thomas he had said, “From henceforth you have seen God because you have seen me.” Now he says: If ye loved me, ye would rejoice… He must have turned to the other disciples, he must have been saying to them all, “If you love me, then there is no death. I will be crucified and you will still see me resurrected in the divine body. You will see me going into God, disappearing into God. I am going to meet the ultimate. Your master is going to meet the ultimate, you should rejoice. Let this be a celebration, a festival, a rejoicing.”
Ye have heard how I said unto you, I go away, and come again unto you… “But I will come again and again, whenever you call, whenever you are in need. Whenever your heart will be in prayer, without doubt you will find me close by.” If ye loved me, ye would rejoice, because I said, I go unto the Father… “So there is no question of being miserable, sad. I am not going to die, I am going to the divine.” To the ignorant, death is the death of life. To the knower, death is the beginning of real life. To the knower, death is a door into the divine.
This, his parting message is of immense value. Let it sink deep within you. Let it become your heartbeat. That is the only way to meditate upon it. That is the only way to come to its meaning. Forget all that Christians have been saying. Those dogmatic assertions are all chauvinistic. Forget what the theologians have put on top of Jesus’ pure statements. Put aside all that has been taught and go directly into these sayings and meditate. Immense will be the benefit. You will be blessed. This is one of the greatest stories of human transformation in human history – how Adam becomes Christ, how the unconscious becomes luminous, how the ordinary is transformed into the extraordinary, how the worldly becomes suffused with the other-worldly, how matter is transmuted into consciousness.
Enough for today.
Jesus said unto his disciples:
Let not your heart be troubled; ye believe in God, believe also in me.
In my Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.
And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.
And whither I go ye know, and the way ye know.
Thomas saith unto him, Lord, we know not whither thou goest; how can we know the way?
Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life; no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.
If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also; from henceforth ye know him, and have seen him.
I will not leave you comfortless; I will come to you.
Yet a little while, and the world seeth me no more, but ye see me, because I live, ye shall live also.
At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you.
Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you; not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.
Ye have heard how I said unto you, I go away, and come again unto you. If ye loved me, ye would rejoice, because I said, I go unto the Father; for my Father is greater than I.
Man’s evolution is from innocence to innocence. The first innocence is ignorant, the second innocence is luminous. The first innocence is a kind of sleep and the second innocence is an awakening. The first innocence is a gift of God. The second innocence is man’s own effort, his earning, his work upon himself. The first can be lost, the second cannot be lost. The first has to go – in the very nature of it, it cannot be eternal. The second, once it comes, remains forever – it is eternal. Remember, whatsoever you attain consciously, only that can you possess, only that. Whatsoever is given to you, and you receive unconsciously, will be taken away. Only that which you work hard for really happens to you. Only that which you create in your being belongs to you. You become master of it.
The first innocence in Christian terms is called Adam, and the second is called Christ. Jesus is just in between the two. Jesus is the bridge between the first innocence and the second innocence. Hindus call the second innocence “rebirth”: one becomes twice-born, dwij. And that’s what Jesus said to one of the famous professors and theologians of his time, Nicodemus: “Unless you are born again, you will not attain to the Kingdom of God.” Unless you are born again… The first birth has happened, the second birth has to happen. The first has happened without cooperation, the second cannot happen without your cooperation. The first birth was almost like an accident – it happened to you unawares. The second birth can only happen in immense consciousness; it cannot happen unawares, it can happen only in deep meditation.
Jesus is a bridge between Adam and Christ. That’s why the story of the virgin birth has a metaphoric meaning. Jesus is born innocent. Everybody is born innocent – there is no other way to be born. Every child is born in innocence. But that innocence is lost sooner or later and the more intelligent the child, the sooner it will be lost. If the child is stupid, imbecilic, idiotic, it may go on lingering for a long time; it may not be lost. If you are intelligent, you will start moving away from it. You will start exploring the world. You will start adventuring into the world, into the unknown; you will become a wanderer.
The more intelligent you are, the greater is the possibility that you will not follow the crowd, you will find your own way – you would like to do your “own thing.” You will not move on the superhighway, you will move on small footpaths into the jungle. Because intelligence wants to take risks. Intelligence wants to dare, intelligence wants to go into the unknown and the dangerous because it is only in danger that intelligence comes to its peak. It is only when you dare that your intelligence becomes a crystallization. It is only when you risk that you are. The more you risk, the more you are. Risk brings being. A man who never risks remains without a being.
George Gurdjieff used to say that not everyone has a soul. Because you have never dared, how can you get a soul? The soul comes only through daring. The only right way to attain a soul is to go into dangers, to risk all, to be a gambler, to go into the dark unknown.
The first innocence is going to go, has to go. It is good that it has to go. If it continued, you wouldn’t really be a man; you would be a vegetable or a cow or a buffalo, but you would not be a man. That is where man is different from the whole of nature. Nature lives in the first innocence and only man is capable of losing it. It is a great dignity, it is glory – only man is capable of sin, no other animal commits sin. You cannot call a dog a sinner, you cannot call a lion a sinner and you cannot call a tree a sinner. Only man can sin and because man can sin, only he can go beyond sin. Only man can go astray – that means only man can come back home.
Except for man, all the animals, birds and trees still exist in the Garden of Eden – they never left it. That’s why nature has such beauty, such peace, such silence. The Himalayas still exist in the Garden of Eden. So does the rosebush in your garden and so do the birds that come in the morning and sing songs around you. Nature is still there – it never left home, it never went astray, it never committed anything against God, it never disobeyed. It never dared and it is completely satisfied with the first birth. To be satisfied with the first birth is to remain unconscious. It is only through sin that you become conscious. It is only by going wrong that consciousness arises. This has to be understood.
So going wrong is not really going wrong because only through it does consciousness arise. All has to be lost. One has to come to the point where all is lost, God is lost, heaven is lost – one cannot believe in paradise and one cannot believe that innocence is possible. Only from that peak of frustration, anguish and anxiety is there a possibility of a one-hundred-and-eighty degree turn.
Adam is perfectly at ease, so is Christ. The problem is with Jesus. Jesus is troubled. Zen people are right when they say that for a man who has never heard of meditation, mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers. He is happy, he is in a kind of natural state. He has no anxiety because God has not yet become a challenge to him. He has no future goals, he has no destination. He eats, drinks and is happy – the first hedonism I was talking about the other day: “Eat, drink and be merry.” He lives in the body, he is the body; he knows nothing more than that. With the body there is a kind of peace and health that surrounds him.
You can always see that happiness around a child. The child is the first kind of hedonist. He believes only in eating, drinking and being merry. He simply lives the moment. He is completely abandoned in the moment: no anxiety, no clouds yet – his sky is clear.
For the people who have not heard of meditation and enlightenment, of nirvana and God, who have never pondered over these great problems, things are clean; they are not confused. “Mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers.” But once a man has become interested in meditation, in growth, in spirituality, in the other shore and in the other reality, problems will bubble up in their thousands. Problems will crowd in on him. Mountains are no longer mountains now and rivers are no longer rivers. Everything will become confused, everything will become topsy-turvy. Man will go into chaos. The old cosmos, the old innocence, simply falls to pieces; not even a trace is left. This is the meaning of the Christian parable of Adam’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden. He became interested in higher things, he became interested in knowing things.
He ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, he started becoming more conscious. He started trying to understand what this reality is. He moved into knowing and suddenly the doors of the garden were closed to him. Suddenly he found himself outside the garden and he didn’t know how to get back inside. He had to go farther and farther away. This is what people of Zen say: “Mountains are no longer mountains, rivers are no longer rivers. One has to go on a long journey. Tedious is the journey, full of miseries and nightmares. It is a wandering in a desert where oases are only dreams; they exist not. And then after a long, long journey – it may continue for many, many lives – one can come back. This time, coming back has a totally different meaning. Now one comes as a knowing consciousness. One is again innocent, but this innocence is no longer ignorant, it is luminous, it is full of light.” This is Jesus turning into Christ.
Adam found himself outside the garden. Jesus wandered in the world. One day, Christ suddenly found himself back in the garden. Adam, Jesus, and Christ – these are the three stages of human consciousness. Adam is absolutely unconscious. Jesus is half-conscious, half-unconscious – hence the conflict, the confusion, the division, the tension. Christ is absolute consciousness.
Before we enter into the sutras, this has to be understood because these sutras belong to the last night of Jesus’ earthly life – the departing message to his disciples. He is leaving them. He is going out of the world into God. He is going to die to the world and be reborn in God. He is going to become twice-born: the resurrection after the crucifixion. The resurrection can only be after the crucifixion. Adam dies to God and is born to the world. Christ dies to the world and is born into God again. Jesus remains in limbo – half-half, divided, split. Something he knows and something he does not know; something he understands and something he does not understand. There is a kind of cloudiness in the Jesus-consciousness.
Adam is clear but fast asleep. Jesus is half awake; his eyes are full of dreams. Yes, he can see a little bit because he is half awake. Just like in the morning when you are half awake and half asleep and you can hear the milkman knocking on the door. You can hear children getting ready for school and you can hear the neighbor’s radio. But you are not yet fully alert. Yes, these things are like ripples, they enter you – you kind of hear and yet you don’t hear them. You go on swinging between sleep and wakefulness. Sometimes you hear something and then you are drowned in sleep again. You cannot figure out what is happening. Then you are fully awake.
Adam dies to God and is born into the world. Jesus lives in the world. Christ dies to the world and is born into God again. These sutras belong to his last night, the departing message to his disciples. Before we enter into these sutras, a few things will be of great help.
Teilhard de Chardin believes that the evolution of consciousness depends on three steps. Chardin is one of the most important Christian thinkers of this century. But still he remains confined to Christianity; he cannot soar higher than Christian boundaries. These are the three steps that he talks about.
Ordinarily, consciousness is simple, innocent. After that there are three steps. First he talks about complexity. He says, “Consciousness grows through complexity.” That is true. The original mind is absolutely simple, its taste is one, it has no duality. Because there is no duality there is no possibility of dialogue, argument. And because there is no possibility of argument and dialogue, there is no possibility of understanding. With conflict, with friction, one evolves. So from one, man becomes dual – from unity, duplicity; from duplicity, triplicity; from triplicity, multiplicity. That’s how man goes on growing – complication.
Man’s consciousness is one in the original state and then it becomes many. Through the many – the growth. That is the Hegelian concept of growth and the Marxian too. Hegel calls it “the dialectical process”: thesis creates its antithesis; antithesis and thesis join into a synthesis. The synthesis becomes a thesis and creates its antithesis. This is how it goes on. You cannot grow if your consciousness is unitary. It has to create a conflict in itself. With the conflict, energy is created. Conflict creates energy, friction creates energy. You strike two stones and fire is born. You strike two dry pieces of wood and fire is possible. You rub your hands together and electricity is born. All energy is created through friction.
So the original human consciousness has to become divided, has to become split, has to become dual. The more evolved a mind man has, the more fragments he will have. So a thinker is almost a crowd. He is not one, he is not two, he is not three – he is many.
The second state Chardin calls “concentration.” Because once the unity is lost and man has become many, there arises chaos and one loses one’s identity. One does not know who one is. An identity is needed, a self is needed and an ego is needed to hold all the fragments together. Otherwise they will start falling apart and you will not be able to survive – hence the ego. The ego is an effort to create a kind of unity inside yourself. The natural unity is lost. Now you have to create an unnatural, synthetic unity. The ego is a synthetic self, a created self, a managed self. One part of your being becomes the master and forces the other parts to be slaves. A kind of government arises inside you.
Complexity creates energy. Concentration creates a possibility to use that energy; otherwise there will be no use for it. The energy will be there and it will kill you. It will be too much for you and it will be in many directions. All those directions have to be focused in one direction. The whole energy has to be channeled into one. This is what Chardin calls “concentration”: unification around a center – a self is born, the ego is born, discipline is born.
The third he calls “direction.” Once there is ego, once you have a kind of self, a kind of unity – although managed, but still a unity – the goal is possible. You can become an arrow, you can have a target in the future. These three steps Chardin thinks are enough to explain human consciousness. They are not. They are important but not complete. The Hindu vision of life is far more complete. Chardin’s vision is linear: unity, complexity, concentration and then direction. The direction goes on and on, the arrow goes on and on and on and there is no end to it. It is linear. The arrow goes on into infinity, it never comes back. This is not true. This is logical, but not natural.
The Hindu vision is circular. Hindus say everything moves in a circle not in a line. Nature moves in a circle, seasons move in a circle, stars move in a circle, man’s life moves in a circle. Everything natural moves in a circle. The circle is the way of nature. The linear is just a concept of the mind. The line does not exist in nature.
If you are aware of non-Euclidean geometry you will know this. Euclid believes in the line. Non-Euclidean geometry says that there is nothing like the line in existence. The line also is part of a bigger circle, that’s all. No line is straight and no line can be straight – you cannot draw a straight line. If you draw a straight line, that simply means you are sitting on a circular earth and drawing a straight line. Go on drawing the line from both ends. Go on drawing it and you will find one day that the line has become a circle around the earth. So that small straight line was just a part of a big circle. Hindus say it is circular.
To me, the Hindu concept is far truer than the Christian concept of linear progress. But still, my own suggestion is a little different to both. My suggestion is: spiral – neither linear nor circular; evolution is a spiral. In that way, both are joined together. In a spiral the progress moves as if it is moving in a line because it never comes to exactly the same point again.
Christ never becomes Adam again because Adam was ignorant and innocent and Christ is innocent and fully aware. He never comes back to Adam, exactly to Adam. So the Hindu concept misses something. But in another sense he becomes Adam again because the innocence is the same, just that now it is fully aware. Then it was not aware, it was asleep, now it is alert. In a sense, Christ becomes Adam again because it is the same innocence. So Hindus are right. In a sense, Christ never becomes Adam again because it is luminous innocence. In that sense Christians are right. But they are only half right.
To have the vision of the full truth, I would like to call evolution a spiral. It comes back to the original point but never on the same plane – on a higher plane. It comes again and again but always on a higher plane. If you have been trekking in the mountains you know what I mean. You walk on a path and the path moves around the mountain. You come to the same point again – the same rocks, the same valley, the same trees, but a little higher. It is a spiral.
To make it a spiral, I would like to add three more steps to it. Chardin says: “Complexity, concentration, direction.” Three more steps have to be added. The first is: awareness, meditation. Concentration is just the beginning. Concentration is not relaxed, it is tense. One cannot concentrate twenty-four hours a day; one will go mad. So concentration can never become natural, but one can meditate twenty-four hours a day. One can live in meditation. It can become natural, it can become like breathing. It can be relaxed.
Concentration is focused consciousness. Meditation is just aware consciousness. For example, if you are listening to me, you can listen in a concentrated way. It will tire you, it will exhaust you. If you are tense while listening because you don’t want to miss a single word, it will be tiring. But you can listen in a meditative way. That means you are relaxed open and vulnerable, that’s all. You will not be tired. Listening, for one and a half hours, rather than being tired, you will be enriched, rejuvenated. You will feel more energy afterward and you will feel more flowing in your being. So the fourth has to be awareness, meditativeness, openness.
Concentration is directional, meditation is non-directional. Concentration has an object, a content. Meditation has no object, no content; it is just an opening. You are listening to me, a bird starts singing – you listen to that too; a train passes by – you listen to that too. You are not listening to me exclusively. All is included. You are open from all sides, not only open to me. This is a higher stage of evolution than concentration is; it is de-concentration.
The fifth I call playfulness. Christianity has no idea of playfulness and Chardin has no idea of playfulness. “Direction, goal, purpose” – that is very businesslike, tiring and makes man sad and serious. Something like playfulness has to be added, because a really grown-up person is capable of play. A really grown-up person is sincere but not serious. Seriousness is a kind of illness because seriousness will create tension in you and it will never allow you to celebrate. Only playfulness can become celebration and joy.
There seems to be no space for joy in Chardin’s chart – nothing of playfulness. “Complexity, concentration, direction” – good as far as they go, but they don’t go far enough. And they don’t go into creating a happy, celebrating human being. Without celebration what is the purpose? All purpose leads to a purposeless play. You work, but you work finally to relax. You work hard, just so that you are able to play. You work five days, so that at the weekend you can rest on the beach. All purpose leads to purposeless play. So the fifth I call playfulness, non-seriousness, nonpurposiveness, celebration, joy.
The sixth I call egolessness. The ego is needed – because one falls into chaos and a synthetic self is needed. But that self is synthetic, plastic, it is not real. One day it has to be dropped. Use it, go beyond it and throw it away. One has to come to egolessness, one has to forget that one exists separately from existence. In that forgetfulness, in that dropping of the ego, one becomes Adam again in a totally new way. One becomes christ – again unity, again simplicity, again innocence, but luminous this time. You are twice-born. This way, one comes back again to the original simplicity, the original face. But it is higher than the first originality, hence I call it spiral. It is primal innocence, but not just primal innocence. It has immense light in it, it is not dark. It is not primitive, it is the highest point of consciousness. It is divine innocence. What Plotinus calls “the One” – this is the One. First the One was not aware of itself, now the One is aware of itself. God is born in you.
In Adam, God was a seed; in Christ, God has become a flowering. The seed has come to its full manifestation. This is the difference between the child and the sage. Adam is the child, Christ is the sage. They are both alike and yet not alike at all. Something similar and something absolutely different; similarity in innocence, dissimilarity in awareness, luminosity. Or you can call the first state “nature,” and the second state “God.” When nature realizes itself, it becomes God. When nature recognizes itself, it becomes God. The beginning and the end have to be the same in some way and yet not the same in some other way. The alpha has to be the omega and the omega has to be the alpha. And yet they have to exist on totally different planes. Adam is body, Christ is soul; Jesus is mind – a bridge just in between the two polarities.
This is the last night. Jesus is ready to depart. The scene of his departure is one of the most beautiful scenes in the whole history of human growth – the Last Supper. Jesus has gathered his disciples, the twelve. Among those twelve is Judas Iscariot, the one who is going to betray him. Jesus washes the feet of his disciples for the first time. They are very embarrassed. They ask again and again, “Why? Why are you washing our feet? You are our master, our Lord!”
But he says, “Because I want to give you my last commandment. The last commandment is the commandment to love.” Jesus is giving it in a very existential way, not verbally.
Just the other night a new sannyasin, Lola, was here. A few days ago, she took sannyas. I gave her the name Deva Lola. It means: “moved by God, possessed by God.” She was so thrilled on the day of her initiation that although I explained the meaning of her name to her, she could not follow it. She was so thrilled, she was so ecstatic – she was here and not here. She was flying high, she was drunk. She heard it and yet she could not remember anything. Last night she was here again, going back to the West and she asked, “Please tell me the meaning of my name again because I could not remember what you said on the first day.”
She has great potential. So I said to her, “Rather than giving you the meaning verbally, I will give you the meaning existentially.” I told her to raise her hands and be possessed by God and whatsoever happens, let it happen. Within a few moments she started swaying – swaying like a flower on the stem in the breeze. Faster and faster movements… And her hands started moving, her whole body started moving. She was possessed by the divine. Now this is an existential meaning, not a verbal one.
Jesus touched the feet of his disciples because he wanted to give them an existential meaning of love. In love, nobody is higher and nobody is lower; love knows no hierarchy. Jesus touched the feet of his disciples – the master touching the feet of his disciples. Jesus declared, “You are exactly like me, there is no difference. You and I are absolutely the same. I have known it, you have not known it, that is the only difference. There is no difference in our beings.” Those disciples were not yet twice-born, those disciples were yet seeds, they had not blossomed; Jesus had blossomed.
Only one who has blossomed can see that the seeds are going to blossom too. The seeds cannot recognize the flower because they have never known themselves as blossom, but the flower can recognize the seeds because he has known both the states. He has known himself as the seed and he has known himself as the flower; he can recognize both.
The same story happened in Buddha’s life. Buddha says: “Once, many, many lives ago, when I was not enlightened and I was as ignorant as anybody, I went to see a buddha – a man who had become enlightened. His name was Dipankara. When I touched the feet of Dipankara I was surprised because he touched my feet too. I felt very embarrassed because there was a great crowd around and everybody started looking: ‘What is the matter?’ I was very shy. I started feeling a little guilty too and I said to Dipankara, ‘Sir, what have you done? You have touched my feet. I am an ignorant man, a sinner. You are enlightened, you are a great master, thousands follow you. I have come just for your blessings and you have touched my feet! What have you done?’”
Dipankara laughed and said, “You don’t know it yet, but soon you are going to become enlightened. I can recognize it. You are in the state which I was once in and you will be in the state in which I am now. You cannot see, that I understand, but I can see.” The higher can see the lower, the lower cannot see the higher.
Jesus touched the feet of his disciples. That is a rare phenomenon, a great message – that there is no higher, no lower; that all hierarchies are of the mind, are political; that in spirituality there is no hierarchy. It is all one, it is all the same. It is one being all over the place. It is one heart beating in millions of hearts. It is one consciousness in every consciousness. It is one moon reflected in millions of pools, oceans, rivers, tanks, reservoirs – but it is one moon.
Jesus says, “This is to give you my last commandment – the commandment of love.” Then they ate and they drank. Jesus never divided the ordinary life from the spiritual life – his second message and what I was saying the other day, that the first hedonism has to be transformed into the second hedonism. Jesus is not an ascetic, Jesus is not in any way a masochist; he enjoyed life. There is no reason why one should not enjoy life. Enjoying life you will become capable of enjoying God. If you don’t enjoy life, you will become incapable of enjoying God too. Life has to be a training ground for enjoyment. God is going to be such a big blessing that if you don’t taste life’s small blessings you will not be ready for it. It will drown you, it will kill you. It will be too much. So increase your capacity.
Even on the last night Jesus was breaking bread, filling cups with wine for his disciples. They were enjoying themselves, they were eating and they were in a merry mood. Death was coming close, but celebration had not to be stopped for it because Jesus knew that this death was going to be the greatest celebration. He wanted to leave his disciples in celebration. He wanted it to be imprinted on their consciousnesses that he was a celebrant, that he was a man of feasting not of fasting; that he was a man who was thrilled by the small joys of life – the flowers, the birds, the rivers; that he liked the lilies in the field; that he liked people and that he was immensely thrilled – always immensely thrilled when looking into people’s eyes; that he loved and was not against life.
But still it happened – Christianity went against life. Christianity became monkish. Monasteries were created, masochists gathered there, self-torturers became dominant and the feasts of Jesus disappeared, or they remained only as rituals. Yes, still they are repeated.
Just the other evening, Musin took sannyas – the author that I talked about in the morning. Now he is Pramod, his name is Pramod – joy. He said to me that the ten days that he has been here have been the happiest in his whole life. He has never known such happiness. Now he is worried because he had promised his daughter that he would be back home at Christmas. I said to him, “Here is Christmas. Where are you going?”
Christians have completely forgotten what Christmas is or should be. It has become a ritual. It has to be a kind of inner glow, it has to be a love for life. It has to be a search into the ordinary for the extraordinary, into the mundane for the supramundane. It has to be the search for the spirit in the body. It has to be the search for God in nature, for the invisible in the visible.
Jesus’ last message is of love and joy. He left his disciples in a feasting mood, not crying, not making them sad. He hugged them all, he hugged even his betrayer. He kissed Judas because for a man of that consciousness there is no friend, there is no enemy. But the disciples were feeling a little bit scared. Rumors were going around and when Jesus said, “Only a little while longer and I will be gone – gone to my Father.” They became very frightened, afraid, sad. To comfort them, to give them hope, to give them courage, these sutras were spoken. These are of immense value. Meditate on them.
Jesus said unto his disciples:
Let not your heart be troubled; ye believe in God, believe also in me.
Their hearts were troubled. Their master was going to die, their master was going to be tortured to death. They would be lost in this dark night of existence, their light would no longer be with them. The one who had been guiding them, the one who had been taking them out of the wilderness, the one who was their path, their guide, their friend, would not be any longer. They had become so dependent on him that they couldn’t think of life without him. Their hearts were troubled. It was natural, it was human.
Jesus says: Let not your heart be troubled; ye believe in God, believe also in me. He says, “You know what belief is…” Belief is not the right translation for the Hebrew word. The right translation would be trust. “You know what trust is…” Trust means that God takes care and that we need not worry because someone is behind the scenes caring for us, that existence is mothering us, fathering us – that we are not orphans. That’s what trust means: that we are not orphans, that we are not strangers in this world. This is our home because this is our God’s home – it belongs to us. Jesus said: …ye believe in God… He says: “You know what trust is. If you know what trust is then you can trust in me too because it is not a question of whom you trust. Once you know the quality of trust, you simply trust.”
It is not a question of whether you trust in God or in Jesus or in Buddha – remember it. If you trust, you simply trust. If a Christian says, “I only trust in Jesus not in Buddha,” he has not known what trust is, because trust knows no distinctions. If you have trust in Christ you will have trust in Buddha too because you will not see any difference. Maybe the languages are different, maybe their ways of expression are different, but trust will be able to go directly to the heart of the matter, to the very core and will see that Christ and Buddha exist on the same plane. It is the same consciousness, the same awareness, the same enlightenment.
If you trust Buddha, you will trust Krishna and Mohammed. If you trust me, you will trust Christ, you will trust Zarathustra. Trust knows no address. It is not addressed. Trust is an inner quality. If it is there, it is there. It is like bringing a light, a lamp, into a room. The light will not only fall on the table, it will fall on the chair too. It will not only fall on the chair, it will fall on the walls and on the paintings hanging on the walls. It will not only fall on the walls, it will fall on the floor and on the roof too. When you bring light into a room, it simply falls on everything that is there. So it is with trust. It is a light. If trust is kindled in your heart, it makes no difference. You trust God, you trust Christ; you trust your wife, you trust your husband; you trust your son, you trust your friend and you trust your enemy. You trust nature, you trust death and you trust insecurity. In short, you simply trust.
Jesus says: Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God… I know you trust in God.
…believe also in me.
In my Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.
Now, again and again, these disciples were discussing who was the greatest out of them all. Even on that last night they were discussing who was going to take the second place to Jesus in the Kingdom of God.
Jesus says, “Don’t be worried…” In my Father’s house are many mansions… “There is space for everybody. Nobody will be rejected, all will be welcomed and accepted. God is spacious.” Don’t be worried about who will be next to God and who will be next to me. In God’s eyes everybody’s value is the same and he is spacious. His love is such that he can love all alike. He has so much to give that it can’t be exhausted. So you need not be worried because there is no question of scarcity. It is not that he has only so much love and that if I take it, you will not be able to get much. Or that a few people have taken his love, so a few people will miss because there will be no more love left. In my Father’s house are many mansions…
“He is spacious, his love is spacious. It is infinite. You can take as much as you want and still it remains infinite. You cannot exhaust it.”
…if it were not so, I would have told you. “Don’t be troubled. Don’t become anxious. Don’t be worried.”
I go to prepare a place for you. Jesus says, “I am going so that I can prepare a place for you.” He is consoling them, he is giving them courage and hope. They will need it. Dark days are going to come. They are going to pass through great difficulties – they will be haunted, they will be tortured, they will be persecuted; they will be among wolves. Their master is going and he will no longer be with them. He has been their protection, their solace. He has been their security. He was like an armor around them. They were secure with him, they were sheltered. Now the shelter is going to disappear. The rains will come and the hot days will come and there will be summer and winter. They don’t know what they are going to do. They will be very alone and feel very strange in the world.
Before any master leaves his disciples he has to put down foundations, so that in the days that will come… And those days are going to be difficult for them because the people who are going to kill Jesus are not going to leave his disciples in peace. If they are going to kill Christ himself, there will be many more difficulties for the disciples to face. He says: I go to prepare a place for you. “You trust in God. Trust in me too. I am going just for you, to make things ready there – in that other reality, on the other shore.”
And I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself…
“And don’t be worried. If you trust in me, I will be coming to welcome you unto myself.”
Yes, if you trust a master, if you love a master, he will remain available to you forever. He is forever. The real question is: “Do you trust? Do you love?” Have you really fallen into that relationship where your ego has disappeared, where you are surrendered? Where you are not and only the fragrance of the master fills your being? Then he is forever. Then the relationship between a master and a disciple is not a temporal relationship, it is not tentative; it is eternal. It has the quality of deathlessness, the quality of timelessness.
And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.
They are still wandering in the world. They are no longer Adams, they are not yet Christs. They are in great turmoil, in great confusion. Christ has to pull them out of that confusion. Christ has to become the presence through which they can come out of the darkness. He has to become the catalytic agent. He has to become a symbol, a light, a star so they can look up to it and start moving out of their dark night. …and receive you unto myself; that where I am, where ye may be also. That is the whole effort of a master. The master wants to destroy the disciple so that the disciple also becomes a master.
The master’s work is complex. First he persuades you to become a disciple. He “coos” to you, seduces you to become a disciple. Once you are a disciple, he starts killing and destroying you because unless you are destroyed as a disciple you will never become a master. The real master is one who wants you all to become masters. That is the goal. Everybody should become an emperor, a king, a queen. The slavery – visible, invisible – has to be completely destroyed. All kinds of imprisonments that are around you have to be burned down. Your freedom has to be utter, ultimate.
And whither I go ye know, and the way ye know.
Thomas saith unto him, Lord, we know not whither thou goest; how can we know the way?
Thomas was one of the most-loved disciples of Christ, one of the most innocent. The others were a little bit knowledgeable. When Jesus says, And whither I go ye know, and the way ye know, nobody else said anything. They must have kept quiet. Nobody knew where he was going, nobody knew which way to follow, but only the most innocent of them was ready to ask.
Thomas said: Lord, we know not whither thou goest; how can we know the way? We have never been there. Thomas was one of Jesus’ most intimate and closest disciples. When Jesus came to India, Thomas followed him. Indian Christianity is older than any other Christianity in the world. The Indian Church is the oldest Church in the world because Thomas was the first apostle to come to India. Indian Christianity was started by Thomas.
Thomas asked, “We know not where you are going and which way you are going. And how can we know? – we are ignorant.” The real disciple never pretends to be knowledgeable. If he does not know, he is ready to say he does not know because that is the only way to learn from the master. The knowledgeable disciples never learn a thing.
I have a few here too. When they ask questions, their questions have a different quality – as if they are asking for the others’ sake. They have no problems of their own. Sometimes they write in their questions: “This is not my question – just for the others’ sake…people will be enlightened. Many people have this question on their minds and it will be good if you discuss it. But it is not a personal question!” This is their question, but they cannot even confess that this is their question. “It will help others.” Tricky people.
Once a man came to me and he said, “One of my friends has become impotent. Can you suggest some meditation that would be helpful for him?”
I looked at the man and I continued looking at him. He started trembling and perspiring. He said, “Why are you looking at me so hard?”
I said, “Can’t you send your friend? He can say that one of his friends has become impotent. Can’t you even say that? Have you become so impotent that you cannot even say that a problem has arisen in your being?” Now, he wants to know what can be done, but he does not want to show that the problem is his. Some friend… He is being diplomatic. Many questions that come are diplomatic; the questioner knows already, there is no problem for him.
All the other disciples had kept quiet, only Thomas asked a question. And because of these small gestures, Thomas became closer and more intimate with Jesus.
…Lord, we know not whither thou goest; how can we know the way?
Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life; no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.
This statement is of immense importance and has been tremendously misunderstood and misinterpreted by Christians. This statement has become a protection for the priest, for the dogmatist, for the demagogue. Christians have taken it to mean that nobody ever comes to God unless he comes through Christ – that means Jesus, son of Mariam. Nobody comes to God unless he comes through Jesus. They have meant, or they have interpreted it in such a way, that Christianity has become the only right religion. All other religions have become wrong. All other religions are against God – only Christianity.
Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. What did he mean? The priests, missionaries and Christians who go on converting the whole world to Christianity, are they right? Is their interpretation right? Or did Jesus have something else? He had something utterly else.
In the Bhagavad Gita there is also a statement which Hindus go on misinterpreting. Krishna said to Arjuna… Almost the same quality of closeness existed between Arjuna and Krishna as between Jesus and Thomas – the same relationship. The same flowering had happened and the same statement had bubbled up out of that relationship. Krishna said to Arjuna: “Sarva dharman parityajya mamekam sharanam vraja. Drop all religions, forget all religions and come to my feet because it is only through me that one reaches to God.” Now, Hindus are happy with this statement. Krishna had said it so clearly: “Forget all religions. Drop all kinds of other religions and hold unto me. Hold to my feet – mamekam sharanam vraja. Come to my feet; they are the bridges to God – the only bridges.”
Both statements happened in the same kind of situation. Arjuna must have been very close when Krishna said this. So is the case with Thomas – he must have been very close. Christ must have been showering like flowers on Thomas when he said this. You will need that loving understanding of a Thomas, only then will you be able to understand the meaning of this. You will need that loving intimacy of an Arjuna, only then will you be able to understand the statement of Krishna. Both are the same, both mean the same – and both have been misinterpreted.
The misinterpretation comes from the priest and the politician – those who try to convert religion into organizational, political strategies. Jesus saith unto him, I am the way… “I am…” That has to be understood. It does not mean Jesus, it simply means the inner consciousness: “I am” – the inner life. This consciousness inside you, which you call “I am,” this “I am” is the only way. If you can understand this “I am”: what it is, what this consciousness is, you have found the way. It has nothing to do with Jesus, it has nothing to do with Krishna. When I say to you “I am the gate,” it has nothing to do with me. That “I am” is the gate. The gate is within you, the way is within you, the truth is within you. You have to understand who this is calling himself “I am” within you, what this consciousness is, what it consists of.
If you can go into your consciousness, if you can feel, see, realize the nature of your consciousness, it is the way. Meditation is the way – not Christ, not Krishna, nor Mohammed. Who am I? This question will become the way.
Raman Maharshi is right when he says that only one question is relevant: “Who am I?” Go on asking this question, let this question become a fire in you. Be aflame with it. Let every cell of your body and your being and every fiber of your existence pulsate, vibrate with it. Let this question arise from the deepest core: “Who am I?” Go on asking and don’t accept any answer that is given by the mind. You have been reading the Upanishads and in the Upanishads they say, “You are God.” Your mind will say, “Why are you asking again and again? I know the answer: You are God. Keep quiet!” Or if you are a Christian and have been reading the Bible again and again, you know that the Kingdom of God is within you. So, “Who am I?” – “The Kingdom of God. Now keep quiet!”
No answer from the head has to be accepted. No answer from the memory has to be accepted. No answer from knowledge has to be accepted. All answers have to be thrown in the whirlwind of the question “Who am I?” A moment comes when all answers have gone and only the question remains, alone like a pillar of fire. You are afire with it. You are just a thirst, a passionate quest: “Who am I?” When the question has burned all the answers, the question burns itself too, it consumes itself. Once the question has disappeared, there is silence. That silence is the answer. It is the door, the gate, the way, the truth.
Please be careful. When Jesus says, I am the way… he means the one who calls himself “I am” within you, is the way. It has nothing to do with Jesus. Just by holding the feet of Jesus you are not going to go anywhere. Just by praying to Jesus you are not going to go anywhere. Listen to what he is saying. Each master throws you back to yourself because ultimately God is hidden in you as much as in the master. You are carrying your light within yourself. You just have to turn back, you have to look inward. I am the way, the truth… Yes. In your very consciousness is the truth. When you become fully conscious you become the full truth. When you are absolutely conscious, it is not that you face truth as an object, you are the truth, it is your subjectivity, it is you. That’s what the Upanishads say: “Tattvamasi. Thou art that.”
…and the life… Jesus says three things: “It is the life – I am… consciousness, awareness.” This is life – the life that you know, the ordinary life. The second: I am the way – the way that joins the ordinary life with the extraordinary life, the way that joins Adam with Christ, the way that joins body with soul. The third thing: I am the truth… Jesus has said all the three things.
You are that right now because: “I am the life.” You have the way too, hidden behind you, within you: “I am the way.” You are the ultimate goal too, the destiny. You are the beginning and the middle and the end. You are Adam, Jesus and Christ. …no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. No man has ever entered into God unless he has entered into his consciousness, until he has entered into his “I am-ness.” This is the meaning. This is the meaning of Krishna and this is the meaning of Christ. This is the meaning of all the masters.
If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also; from henceforth ye know him, and have seen him.
A tremendously important statement. Within the single statement there comes a revolution. Meditate very, very silently over it. If ye had known me… Jesus was saying to Thomas: If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also… Because I and my Father are one. While Jesus was saying: If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also, something changed in Thomas’ being. While Jesus was saying this… And you know, when I say some things to you, something goes on changing in you. Sometimes you are very close to the truth. Sometimes a single word hits you deeply, shatters something; something changes. A radical change can happen sometimes. It happens all the time.
That is the whole purpose of being in the presence of a master. When Jesus was saying – he had not even completed the statement… The statement was half said, but Thomas had changed, so he had to change his statement. This is why I say this is such a beautiful statement. If ye had known me… There was an “if” in it because Thomas was hesitant. If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also. When he made this statement, there was a radical transformation in Thomas’ consciousness; he turned inward, he was converted – metanoia. Jesus had to change his statement. He said: …and from henceforth ye know him, and have seen him. The “if” had disappeared, because the “if” had disappeared in Thomas.
You know the phrase: “Doubting Thomas”? That comes from Jesus’ disciple Thomas. He used to doubt. But he was very innocent. If doubt was there, it was there; he would not hide it. But in that moment “Doubting Thomas” was no longer “Doubting Thomas”; doubt had disappeared.
Jesus had started with “if” because doubt was there. Thomas had been hesitant, Thomas did not agree. He was saying, “Okay, but it doesn’t appeal to me. You say that you are the truth? Maybe, but I am not convinced. You say that you are the way? I hope that it is true, but it has yet no validity in my being.” Maybe not in so many words – that is not the question – but there was a lurking doubt. Jesus had to use “if.” Once he saw that lurking doubt had disappeared under the impact of his great statement…
In India we call such statements mahavakyas – great statements. There are very few in the whole history of human consciousness. This is one of the great statements, a mahavakya. Jesus must have seen that the doubt had suddenly disappeared. The shadow of doubt was not there. Thomas had become trust. Something had transformed in him. Thomas was no longer the old Thomas; a new being was born, a new man was born. He had to change his statement in the middle of it because a master responds to the disciple. A master is a response. A master is a mirror. …from henceforth ye know him… Now there is no “if.” Jesus said: …from henceforth… From now onward you know him, you have seen him because you have seen me, because I and my Father are not two. I represent him; I am just a reflection of him, an echo.
I will not leave you comfortless; I will come to you.
Yet a little while, and the world seeth me no more…
Listen. Jesus says: Yet a little while… Only a few hours are left …and the world seeth me no more… And the world will not be able to see me.
…but ye see me, because I live, ye shall live also.
Jesus said: “Just a few more hours and I will disappear from the world, but for you Thomas, never. For you, never – because you have seen my reality which cannot be crucified. You have seen my truth which is immortal. The body will be crucified – a little while longer and the body will disappear. The world will not be able to see me any longer because the world recognizes me only as the body. But you will still see me because you have seen my luminosity, you have seen my eternity, you have seen the nontemporal being, you have seen my truth. Thomas you will go on seeing me. For you, I will never disappear.”
Love has eyes, trust has eyes to see the invisible. Only trust can penetrate deep enough to see the deathless. Only love can give you a glimpse of that which is beyond time. Yet a little while, and the world seeth me no more… “Be happy Thomas, you are blessed, you will continue to see me.” …but ye see me, because I live, ye shall live also. In this moment let this seed be sown in you that when I am going to live – even after the crucifixion, even when my body is destroyed – if I am going to live, you will also live. Let this trust be born in you too. It is not that only I will live. It is nothing special to me: everybody’s soul is immortal. If you can see my body disappearing and yet you can go on seeing me, let that become a new understanding in you, that you will also live even when you have died.
Death is only of the garments, death is only of the covering. The innermost core goes on living. It is life itself. How can it die? How can life die? Life goes on changing its abodes, true: one house becomes rotten, old, dilapidated, a ruin and you have to leave it to find another home. Your house is just a nest, an overnight stay. Yet a little while, and the world seeth me no more, but ye see me, because I live, ye shall live also. That is where the secret of resurrection is. There is proof – no proof as far as the world is concerned, but there is proof as far as the disciples are concerned. Jesus died as the body but remained as the soul for those who had trust in him, who had seen his true reality, who had seen his true being.
At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you.
Jesus says, “We are all intertwined because we are all one.” …I am my Father, and ye in me, and I in you. He is saying, “Thomas, you don’t know God, but you know me. I know God, you know me. I know that I am in my God and you know that you are in me because your love has made you part of me. I tell you that I am in you. Hence, we are all in God and God is in us all. We are all intertwined.”
The disciple only knows the master, the master knows God. The disciple loves the master and by and by gets dissolved into the master. The master is dissolved into God. Through the master the disciple is also joined with God. The master goes on pouring himself into the disciple, and because the master has become one with God, so God goes on pouring into the disciple in a very indirect way. This is the real trinity: the disciple, the master and God. They go on pouring into each other. The disciple is not aware of what is happening.
When I touch you, do you think I touch you? God has touched you. If I am in God, when I touch you, God has touched you. But to you it remains the master’s touch. The deeper your understanding goes, the deeper you will be able to see that the master is just instrumental – a flute through which God’s song goes on flowing. At that day ye shall know… Jesus is saying, “At the ultimate day of meeting when you will become enlightened, when you will also become a christ…” At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you.
Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you; not as the world giveth, give I unto you…
“…because I am pouring my peace into you and I am pouring it unconditionally, not as the world does.” In the world nobody gives you anything unconditionally; in the world everything is a bargain. Even if people give love to you, they give only to get; it is a bargain. Peace I leave with you… Jesus says, “Don’t be worried. I will be gone, but my peace will linger around you, will surround you. Whenever you remember me you will find peace showering on you. My peace will remain available to you.” To the trusting heart it is always available. Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you; not as the world giveth, give I unto you… Not like in the world where everything is given to get something.
Jesus is simply giving. There is no bargain. The master only gives – but not to get anything. What can the disciple give to the master? It is one-way traffic. The master goes on pouring. But that does not mean that he obliges you; he knows God is pouring into him. What can he do with it? All that comes through God he has to share. With God there is no bargaining, it is a pure gift.
Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you; not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it he afraid.
Ye have heard how I said unto you, I go away, and come again unto you. If ye loved me, ye would rejoice, because I said, I go unto the Father; for my Father is greater than I.
Jesus says: If ye loved me, ye would rejoice… Love knows no death. Love never comes across death. For love death does not exist.
So Jesus says, “If you trust, if you love…” This statement must have been made to all the disciples, not to Thomas alone because the “if” has entered again. These are subtle points to be understood. Nothing is mentioned in the Bible about who he is speaking to now, but the “if” has entered again. To Thomas he had said, “From henceforth you have seen God because you have seen me.” Now he says: If ye loved me, ye would rejoice… He must have turned to the other disciples, he must have been saying to them all, “If you love me, then there is no death. I will be crucified and you will still see me resurrected in the divine body. You will see me going into God, disappearing into God. I am going to meet the ultimate. Your master is going to meet the ultimate, you should rejoice. Let this be a celebration, a festival, a rejoicing.”
Ye have heard how I said unto you, I go away, and come again unto you… “But I will come again and again, whenever you call, whenever you are in need. Whenever your heart will be in prayer, without doubt you will find me close by.” If ye loved me, ye would rejoice, because I said, I go unto the Father… “So there is no question of being miserable, sad. I am not going to die, I am going to the divine.” To the ignorant, death is the death of life. To the knower, death is the beginning of real life. To the knower, death is a door into the divine.
This, his parting message is of immense value. Let it sink deep within you. Let it become your heartbeat. That is the only way to meditate upon it. That is the only way to come to its meaning. Forget all that Christians have been saying. Those dogmatic assertions are all chauvinistic. Forget what the theologians have put on top of Jesus’ pure statements. Put aside all that has been taught and go directly into these sayings and meditate. Immense will be the benefit. You will be blessed. This is one of the greatest stories of human transformation in human history – how Adam becomes Christ, how the unconscious becomes luminous, how the ordinary is transformed into the extraordinary, how the worldly becomes suffused with the other-worldly, how matter is transmuted into consciousness.
Enough for today.