Osho,
You said one night that awareness brings knowledge and knowledge makes man aware of many problems and sufferings within himself. But isn't it true that awareness and knowledge give more richness, growth and depth to man's life?
Please explain about this dialectical situation in man and the way to transcend the knowledge also.
Ignorance is blissful because one is not aware of any problems, but one is not aware of the blissfulness either. It is a bliss, like when you are in a deep sleep. No suffering is there, no anxiety is there, because no problems are possible when you are asleep. With knowledge one begins to be aware of many problems, and much suffering happens. This suffering will remain unless one transcends knowledge also.
So these are three states of the human mind: ignorance – you are blissful but you are not aware; knowledge – you are aware but you are not blissful; and enlightenment – you are aware and you are blissful. Enlightenment is in one sense just like ignorance and in another sense just like knowledge. In one sense it is like ignorance because it is blissful, and not like knowledge because there is no suffering. In another sense it is like knowledge because there is awareness, and not like ignorance because ignorance is absolute absence of awareness.
Enlightenment is blissfulness with awareness. Knowledge is a passage, it is a journey. You have left ignorance, you have not achieved enlightenment. You are in between. That’s why knowledge is a tension. Either you fall back to knowledge or go beyond. And falling back is not possible. You have to struggle to go beyond.
It is asked whether knowledge also gives richness, growth and depth to man’s life. Of course, it gives. It gives a richness because the moment you become aware, with the expanding awareness you are expanded, with the widening awareness you go on becoming greater and greater – because you are your awareness. Ignorant, you are as if you are not. You don't know that you are. Existence is, but without any depth, without any height. With knowledge you begin to feel your multidimensional being. But this richness is also given by suffering.
Suffering is not something contrary to richness. Suffering makes you rich. Suffering is painful, but suffering gives you depth. Someone who has not suffered at all will be just superficial. The more you suffer, the more you have touched deeper realms. That’s why a more sensitive man suffers more, a less sensitive man suffers less. A shallow mind will not suffer at all. The deeper the mind, the deeper becomes your suffering. Suffering is also richness.
Animals cannot suffer, only man suffers. Animals can be in pain, but pain is not suffering. When mind begins to feel the pain and think about it and the meaning of it and the possibility to go beyond it, then it becomes suffering. If you simply feel pain, it is a very shallow thing.
They have observed that rats have a four-minute range of thinking. They can think four minutes into the future and they can think four minutes back into the past. Beyond four minutes there is nothing for them. Their range of thinking is that much. There are other animals whose range is twelve hours. Monkeys have a range of twenty-four hours. So the world that was twenty-four hours before drops from their consciousness, and the world that may be twenty-four hours ahead is not. So their mind has a twenty-four-hour limit; it cannot go deep.
Man has a very wide range. From childhood to death, the whole life is his range. And those who are more sensitive, for them the range is still greater. They can remember their past lives and they can probe beyond this life into the future. With this range depth is gained, but also suffering.
If a rat cannot go beyond four minutes, to suffer for the future is impossible, to suffer for the past is impossible. Within these four minutes the whole world exists. So if there was pain four minutes before, it has disappeared; no memory can be maintained. If there is fear four minutes ahead, it cannot be thought about, it cannot be contemplated, it cannot be perceived. It is not.
With man, suffering deepens because mind can move to the past and can conceive of the future. Not only that: the mind can feel someone else suffering also. Animals cannot feel this. Higher animals have certain glimpses which lower animals cannot feel. With lower animals, if some member of the group dies they just forget about it. They will move on. Death is not a problem. Neither can they conceive of their own death, nor can they conceive that something has happened to some member of their group. It is impossible. It is as if it is not. But man conceives, feels, contemplates his own suffering and also others’ suffering.
And the more sensitive a mind is, the more sympathy can even become empathy. You are in deep pain – I feel that you are in pain. I understand. I am sympathetic. But if my mind is even more keen, more sensitive, I may begin to feel the same pain. Then it is empathy.

Ramakrishna was crossing the Ganges one day in a boat and suddenly he began to scream and cry, “Don’t beat me!”
No one was beating him. All those who were present with him were his disciples, devoted disciples. They said, “What are you saying? Who is beating you? Who can beat you?”
And tears were coming down from his eyes and he was weeping and he was crying, “Don’t beat me!” They were all puzzled.
And then Ramakrishna showed them: just on the other bank one man was being beaten by a crowd. And then he showed his back – his back had been beaten. And when they reached to the other shore, they went to the man who had been beaten there. They saw his back. They were just wonderstruck. It was a miracle: the same marks on his back as on Ramakrishna’s back.

This is empathy. Now Ramakrishna will suffer more than you, because now it is not only his suffering; in a subtle way now the whole world’s suffering has become his own. Now wherever suffering is, Ramakrishna will suffer. But this will give depth to Ramakrishna. Suffering itself is depth. So knowledge gives suffering, knowledge gives depth, it gives richness to life.
Socrates is reported to have said, “Even if a pig is absolutely happy, I would still prefer to be a Socrates and unhappy than to be a pig and happy.”
Why? If a pig is happy, then be a pig! Why be a Socrates and unhappy? The reason is depth. A pig is just without any depth. Socrates has suffering – more than anyone else – but still he chooses to be a Socrates with his suffering. His suffering, too, has a richness. A pig is just poor.
It is like this: someone is in a coma, unconscious – he has no suffering. Would you like to be in a coma, unconscious? Then you will be without suffering. If that is the choice, then you will choose yourself, whatsoever the suffering may be. Then you will say, “I will remain conscious and suffer rather than be in a coma and not suffer, because that not-suffering is just like death.” Suffering is there, but still a richness – the richness of feeling, the richness of mind, the richness of living.
Tennyson has said somewhere, “‘Tis better to have loved and lost than not to have loved at all.” Love has its own suffering. Really, a life without love has less suffering, so if you can avoid love you can avoid much suffering. If you are vulnerable to love, you will suffer more. But love gives depth, richness, so if you have not suffered love you have not really lived. Love is a deeper knowledge.
One knowledge, which we call knowledge, is just acquaintance – knowing someone, something, from the outside. When you love someone, you begin to know him from the inside. Now it is not acquaintance; now you have gone deeper into someone and now you will suffer more, but love will give you a new dimension of life.
So a person who has not loved has not really lived on the human plane. And because love brings so much suffering, we avoid it. Everyone is avoiding love. We have invented many tricks to avoid love because love brings suffering. But then, if you are successful in avoiding love, you have succeeded in avoiding a certain depth that only love can bring to your life.
Grow in knowledge, you will grow in suffering. Grow in love, you will grow more in suffering, because love is a deeper knowledge. Richness will be there, but this is the paradox, and to be understood deeply: whenever you become more rich, you become aware of more poverty. Whenever you feel richness, you will also feel yourself more poor. Really, a poor man, a really poor man, never feels himself to be poor. Only a rich man begins to feel a deeper poverty. If you look at a beggar, he is happy with his small coins, very happy. You cannot even conceive how he is happy. He gathers a few coins in the whole day, but he is so happy.
Look at a rich man: he has gathered so much – he cannot use it even – but he is not happy. What has happened? The greater your riches, the more you begin to feel yourself poor. And this happens in every direction. When you know more, you feel more that you are ignorant. A person who doesn’t know anything never feels that he is ignorant; never feels. It is impossible, because that feeling is part of knowing. The more you know, the more you become aware that much is to be known. The more you know, the more you feel that whatsoever you have known is nothing.
Newton is reported to have said: “I have been just standing on the seashore, and whatsoever I have gathered is sand in my fist, nothing more. And this is a great, infinite expanse. Whatsoever I know is just a few particles of sand in my hand, and what I don’t know is this infinite expanse of the ocean.” So Newton feels more ignorant than you can feel, because that feeling is part of knowledge.
If you can love, then you will feel the impossibility of love. Then you will feel that it is virtually impossible to love someone. But if you don’t love anyone, you will never become aware that love is a very arduous journey. Because when you go into something, only then do you become aware of your finite capacity and the infinite encounter. When I move out of my house, then I encounter the sky. If I go on remaining in my house, there is no encounter, and I may finally come to believe that this is the whole universe.
The less you know, the more confident you are. The more you know, the less is your confidence. The greater the knowledge, the more hesitant the mind will be even to assert, even to say, what is right, what is wrong. The less the knowledge, the more you are totally certain.
Just fifty years ago, science was totally certain, absolutely certain. Everything was clear and categorized. And then came Einstein, perhaps the first mind who encountered the whole expanse of the world, of the universe. Then everything became uncertain.
Einstein said, “To be certain about anything shows that you are ignorant. If you know, you can at the most be relatively certain.” “Relatively certain” is just another name for uncertainty. “When everything is relative,” Einstein says, “then science can never again be absolute. Because now we have come to know so much, because of so much knowledge, everything is disturbed and shattered. The old certainties have gone.”
Mahavira, one of the most penetrating minds in the whole history of man, will not assert any statement without using perhaps in the beginning. If you ask him, “Is there God?” he will say, “Perhaps God is and perhaps he is not.”
Even if you ask him, “Are you real?” he will say, “Perhaps I am real and perhaps I am not real, because in a certain sense I am real and in a certain sense I am not real. When I am going to die, how can I say that I am real? When one day I will just evaporate, and you will not even be able to find out where I have disappeared to, how can I say that I am real?
“I will disappear one day just as a dream disappears in the morning. But even that I cannot say certainly, that I am unreal – because even to assert that I am unreal, a reality is needed. Even to dream, someone is needed who dreams and who is real.” So he will say, “Perhaps I am real and perhaps I am not real.”
Because of this, Mahavira could not gather many followers. How can you gather followers if you are yourself so uncertain in a way? Followers need certainty, absolute dogmatism. Say: “This is right and that is wrong.” Whether it is or not, that is another thing – but be confident, then you create confidence in your followers, because they have come to know, not to inquire. They have come to feel certainties. They have come for dogmas, not for real inquiry. So a lesser mind than Mahavira will gather more followers. Really, the lesser the mind, the easier it is to become a leader, because everyone is in need of certainty so one can feel secure.
With Mahavira everything will look uncertain. And he was so emphatic that if you asked him one question he would answer with seven; he would give you seven answers, each answer contradicting the previous one. And the whole thing would become so complex that you would return more ignorant than you had come.
With Einstein, for the first time the genius of Mahavira has been introduced to science. Relativity is Mahavira’s concept. He says everything is relative, nothing is absolute. And even the diametrically opposite is also true in a certain sense. But then his statements become so qualified, so bracketed, that you cannot feel certainty with him.
That’s why in India only twenty-five lakh Jainas exist, two and a half million. If Mahavira was able to convert only twenty-five families, by now they would have become twenty-five lakhs just by reproduction. Twenty-five lakhs after twenty-five centuries? What happened? Mahavira couldn’t convert really. Such a keen mind cannot convert. It needs lesser minds to create a following. The more stupid the leader the better, because he can say yes, he can say no, with such confidence – without knowing anything.
What happens really? When you gain knowledge, you become aware of ignorance. And, really, richness means this polarity. You cannot be rich if you know only one part of it. When you know both the polar opposites, when you move in both the extremes, then you become rich.
For example, if you know only beauty and you are not aware of ugliness, your sense of beauty cannot be very deep. How can it be? It is always proportionate. The more you begin to feel beauty, the more you will begin to feel ugliness. They are not two things but a movement of one sense in two directions. But the sense is one. You cannot say, “I am aware only of beauty.” How can you be? With the sense, with this aesthetic sense, the feeling of beauty, the feeling of ugliness will come in. The world will become more beautiful and at the same time more ugly. That is the paradox.
You will begin to feel the beauty of the sunset, but then you will also begin to feel the ugliness of poverty all around. If a person says, “I feel the beauty of a sunset and I don’t feel the ugliness of poverty and the slums,” he is just deceiving either himself or others. It is impossible. When a sunset becomes beautiful, slums will become ugly. And, against a sunset, when you look at the slums, you will be in heaven and hell simultaneously. Everything is this way and everything is bound to be this way. One thing will create its opposite.
So if you are not aware of beauty, you will not be aware of ugliness. If you are aware of beauty, you have become aware of ugliness. You will enjoy and you will feel the bliss of beauty, and then you will suffer. This is part of growth. Growth always means the knowledge of the extremes which constitute life. So when man becomes aware, he also becomes aware that he is not aware of many things, and because of that he suffers.
Many times I have seen, observed: someone comes to me to meditate. He says, “I am very much disturbed, tense inside, suffering. Somehow help me to still my mind.” I suggest to him something to do. Then he comes within a week and says, “What have you done? I have become more disturbed.”
Why does it happen? Because when he begins to meditate, when he begins to feel a certain silence, he begins to feel the disturbance more. Against that silence, now this disturbance is felt more keenly. He was simply disturbed before, with no silence inside. Now he has something to judge against, to compare with. Now he says, “I am going mad!”
So whenever someone begins meditation, he will become aware of many things he was not aware of before. And because of that awareness he will suffer. But this is how things are, and one has to pass through them.
So if you start meditation and you don’t suffer, it means it is not meditation but just a hypnosis. That means you are just drugging yourself. You are becoming more unconscious. With a real, authentic meditation you will suffer more, because you will become more aware. You will see the ugliness of your anger, you will feel the cruelty of your jealousy, you will now know the violence of your behavior. Now, in every gesture, you will begin to feel somewhere a hidden animal in you. You will suffer, but this is how one grows. Growth is a painful birth. The child suffers when it comes out of the womb, but that is part and parcel of growth.
So it is right: “…awareness and knowledge give more richness, growth and depth to man’s life” – not because man doesn’t suffer, but because man suffers.
If someone has led just a smug existence – as it happens with rich families – you will feel, you will observe, that if a person is born rich and he has lived without knowing sufferings, without knowing the pain of living, without knowing anything… Whenever there is a demand, even before the demand, the supply is there. He has not suffered hunger, he has not suffered love, he has not suffered anything. Whatsoever is demanded is supplied; rather, it is supplied even before the demand is there. Then look in the eyes of that man: you will not find any depth. It is as if he has not lived. He has not struggled, he doesn’t know what life is.
That’s why it is always very difficult to find any depth in such men. They are superficial. If they laugh, the laugh is superficial. It just comes from the lips, never from the heart. If they weep, that weeping is superficial. It is not from the depths of their being; it is just a formal thing. More struggle, more depth.
This depth, this richness, this knowledge, will create such a complexity that you would like to escape from it. When you suffer, you want to escape from it. If you want to escape from a suffering, then alcohol can become appealing or LSD or marijuana or something else.
Religion consists in not escaping from suffering but living with it – living with it, not escaping. And if you live with it, you will become more and more aware. If you live with it you will become more aware. If you want to escape, then you will have to lose awareness. Then somehow you will have to become unconscious.
There are many methods. Alcohol is the easiest – not the only method and not even the worst. You can go and listen to music, be absorbed in it; then you are using music as alcohol. Then, for the time being, your mind is diverted to music and you have forgotten everything else. So music is working as alcohol for everything else. Or you can go to a temple, or you can do japa, and can use these things as alcohol, as intoxicants.
Anything which makes you less aware of your suffering is anti-religious. Anything that makes you more aware of your suffering, and helps you to encounter it without escaping, is religious. That is what tapas, austerity, means. Tapas, austerity, means this: not escaping from any suffering, but remaining there and living with it with full awareness. If you don’t escape, if you remain there with your suffering, one day suffering will disappear and you will have grown into more awareness.
Suffering disappears in two ways. Become unconscious, then suffering disappears for you. Suffering remains there, it cannot disappear; it remains there. Really, your consciousness has disappeared, so you cannot feel it, you cannot be aware of it. If you become more conscious, in the meantime you will have to suffer more. But accept suffering as part of growth, part of training, just as a discipline. And then one day, when your consciousness has gone above your suffering, suffering disappears. Not for you: it disappears objectively.
Use suffering as a stepping-stone. Don’t escape from it. If you escape from it, you are escaping from your destiny, from the possibility of going beyond knowledge. Use suffering as a device.
Mahavira has said, “Sometimes it happens that there is no suffering. Then create suffering, but don’t lose any moment to create more awareness.” Mahavira would go on long fasts. That is creating suffering to encounter it, because through encounter awareness grows. He would live naked. Let it be summer, let it be winter, let it be rains, he would live naked, he would move naked. In every village, when he would move naked, everyone would become his enemy, and they would create many sufferings for him. And he would not speak; for twelve years he was totally silent. You could beat him, he would not speak. You could do whatsoever you liked, he would not react. These were consciously created sufferings.
Buddha was not in agreement with Mahavira’s ideology, but even then Buddha has called him mahatapaswi, the great ascetic. Really, no one is comparable to Mahavira in creating conscious suffering for himself. Why? When you can live with suffering consciously, you grow, you transcend it. Really, whenever you are in suffering you have an opportunity – use it. Whenever you are not in suffering, ultimately this time will prove to be just a wastage. Only the moments when you are in suffering can be used. But, unfortunately, we try to escape suffering. We have been doing that for lives and lives.
Make an experiment, any experiment, and see what happens. The night is cold and you are on your terrace standing naked. Feel the coldness. Don’t escape from it; let it be there and you remain there. Feel it, move with it, live with it, and see what happens. Beyond a certain point, coldness will be there, you will be there, but there will be a gap between you and the coldness. Now the coldness cannot penetrate to you. You have transcended.
You are hungry. Remain there, and beyond a certain point you will know you are not hungry. Hunger is somewhere else, and there is a gap between you and the hunger. When you begin to feel the gap, you will transcend.
But there is no need to create suffering because there is already so much suffering. There is no need. Every day there is suffering. Suffer it consciously, don’t try to escape. Then you have a key, a secret key, to transform your suffering into a blessing.
This is what tapas means. It is an alchemical process. Then you transform the lower into the higher, the baser metal into gold. But the baser metal has to pass through fire, and the false must burn. Only then can the authentic emerge out of it. So knowledge is a fire. The ignorant soul must pass through this fire, and only then will the pure gold come out of it.
That pure gold is enlightenment. When you have faced every suffering with consciousness, suffering will dissolve, disappear, because the very reason for it has disappeared. You go on and on, and suffering is left behind, and you become a peak. This peak has gone beyond. This is enlightenment.
There are three states: ignorance, knowledge, enlightenment. Go beyond ignorance, but don’t forget that knowledge is not the end. It is only the means. You have to go beyond it also. And when someone goes beyond knowledge, he becomes a buddha. Then he is wise, not learned; wise, not more informed, not more knowledgeable; simply wise, simply more aware.
So knowledge is good because it brings you out of ignorance, and knowledge is bad if you begin to cling to it. If it becomes a clinging, it is bad. Use knowledge to go beyond ignorance, and then through knowledge to go beyond it.
Buddha tells a story. He liked it very much. He has repeated this story thousands and thousands of times. He says knowledge is like a raft. You cross a river on a raft, and then you leave the raft and the river, and move. Buddha says:

There were five very learned men. They crossed the stream on a raft, and then they thought and pondered, “Because this raft has helped us to cross the stream, we must carry this raft on our heads. Now how can we be ungrateful? This is simple gratitude.”
So those five learned men carried the raft on their heads into the market. Then the whole village gathered and they asked, “What are you doing? This is something new.”
They said, “Now we cannot leave this raft. This raft has helped us to cross the stream. And these are the days of rains and the river is flooded – it would have been impossible without this raft. This raft is a friend and we are just being grateful.”
The whole village laughed. They said. “Yes, this raft was a friend, but now this raft is an enemy. Now you will suffer because of this raft, now it will be a bondage. Now you cannot move anywhere, now you cannot do anything else.”

Knowledge is a raft to go beyond ignorance. But then if you begin to carry it on your head, as learned persons carry it… Really, it is not right to say “carry it,” because the burden becomes so much they cannot even move. Throw away this raft. Difficult – difficult to throw because it has saved you. You have come across a stream with it.
And your logic may run in this way: “If we throw this raft, then we will be again in the same situation in which we were before – before the raft was used.” This looks logical. It is not, because when there was no raft you were on one bank of the stream. When you used the raft you came to the other bank of the stream. And if you throw it you will not be in the same situation again.
Man is afraid of throwing knowledge because he fears, “Then again we will become ignorant.” You cannot become ignorant again. A person who has known cannot fall back into ignorance. Now, if he clings to this knowledge, he cannot go beyond either. Throw it away. You are not going to fall back into ignorance. You will rise into enlightenment.
One rises into knowledge by throwing ignorance, and then one rises into enlightenment by throwing knowledge. So it is good to teach knowledge to the ignorant, and it is good to teach again a different kind of ignorance to the knowledgeable ones. One has to become ignorant in a different dimension, with a different quality, just by throwing knowledge.
So it is inevitable that one must come to knowledge, but then it is not inevitable that one must remain there. You must pass through it. That’s a must, it cannot be avoided; but you need not remain there. You can move – move from knowledge. This is what is meant.
How to transcend this knowledge? As I said: if you become aware of suffering, you transcend suffering. If you become aware of your knowledge, you transcend knowledge. Awareness is the only technique of transcendence, whatsoever may be the problem. Awareness is the only technique of transcendence.
You know many things; then you become identified with your knowledge. Then if someone denies your knowledge or contradicts it, you feel hurt, as if someone has denied you or someone has contradicted you. Your knowledge is something different from you. Feel the gap! You are not your knowledge. The moment you can feel this, that “I am not my knowledge,” then try to be aware of it, that “This I know, this I don’t know, and that which I know may be right, may not be right.” Don’t get mad in it, don’t get involved.
Socrates used to say, always he would say, “As far as my knowledge goes, this seems to be true – only seems to be true. And that, too, as far as my knowledge goes. It may not be true, because knowledge can go further. It may not be true, because it only appears to be true to me.” Then if someone contradicts him, he cannot feel hurt. Rather, that person is helping him. Why should he feel hurt?
If someone says, “You are wrong,” he is giving you more knowledge, something more, something different. If you are not identified, you will feel grateful, if you are identified, you are hurt. Then it is not a question of knowledge, it is a question of egos fighting. Then it is not that he has said, “Whatsoever you say is wrong.” Really, he has said, “You are wrong.” You feel it that way. If you feel it that way, then you can never be aware of your knowledge. Be aware. It is an accumulation. It has helped. It has utility.
The Buddhist, the Zen Buddhist word for knowledge is upaya. They say it is just an instrument. Use it, but don’t be mad, don’t get obsessed with it, don’t be identified with it. Remain aloof, remain detached. This aloofness, this remaining detached, is the first necessity. And then be aware, whenever you are saying something, say it with clear awareness that it is not you, it is only your knowledge. This awareness will lead you beyond it.
So whatsoever may be the problem, being identified with it will create unconsciousness – you will fall back. Being aware of it will create consciousness – you will go beyond.

Osho,
One night you said that Christianity has remained incomplete because, for Christians, Jesus died at the age of thirty-three, when he was fiery, rebellious and active, with sunlike consciousness as his inner center. Does it mean that Jesus could not achieve total spiritual growth, inner silence, inner peace, and an inner full-moon stage of consciousness like Buddha and Mahavira?
Please enlighten us on this point.
Many things will have to be considered. One, Jesus died, for Christianity, at the age of thirty-three. Remember, “for Christianity” because actually he didn’t die – he lived to be one hundred and twelve. But that’s another story, not related with Christianity at all. And he died a fully enlightened man, like Buddha, Mahavira, Krishna. So this is the first thing to be understood.
Christianity has only this much to say, that he was seen resurrected after his crucifixion. For three days he was seen somewhere by some disciples, and somewhere else by some other disciples, and then he disappeared. So one thing is certain: even Christianity thinks that whether he died or not on the cross, he was seen after the crucifixion for three days.
They think that he died on the cross, then resurrected, but then they don’t have anything to tell about what happened to this resurrected Jesus. The Bible is silent. What happened to this man who was seen? When did he die again? He must have died again because on the cross he didn’t die. So what happened to this man Jesus? The Bible is incomplete, because Jesus disappeared from Israel.
In Kashmir, there is a shrine which is believed to be that of Jesus Christ, his tomb. He lived in Kashmir, in India. He died when he was one hundred and twelve. At the time of the crucifixion he was just entering the moon center, so to speak. But on that very day he entered – on the very day of the crucifixion he entered. So that is the second thing to understand.
Jesus in the Bible is not like Buddha, Mahavira or Lao Tzu. He is not. You cannot conceive of Buddha going into a temple and beating the moneylenders – you cannot conceive of it. Jesus did it. He went into the temple. The annual festival was on, and many things were connected with this great temple of Jerusalem. There was a great moneylending business associated with the temple. Those moneylenders of this temple exploited the whole country.
People would come for the annual gathering and for other gatherings during the year, and they would obtain money at a high interest, but it was impossible to repay it. They would lose everything, and this temple was becoming richer and richer. It was a religious imperialism. The whole country was poor and suffering, and the money would come automatically to this temple.
Jesus entered one day with a whip in his hand. He overturned the moneylenders’ boards, he began to beat them, and he created a chaos in the temple. You cannot conceive of Buddha doing this – impossible!
Jesus was the first communist, and really that’s why Christianity could give birth to communism. Hinduism cannot give birth to it, no other religion can give birth to a Marx – impossible. Only Christianity. With Jesus it has a relevance: he was the first communist.
And he is fiery, rebellious. The very language he uses is totally different. He gets angry at such things that we cannot even believe. A fig tree: he destroyed it because they were hungry, he and his disciples, and the tree would not yield any fruit. He destroyed it! He has threatened in such language that Buddha cannot utter. Those who are not going to believe in him and his Kingdom of God will be thrown into the fires of hell –eternal fires of hell – and they cannot come back.
Only the Christian hell is eternal. Every other hell is just a temporary punishment. You go there, you suffer, you come back. But Jesus’ hell is eternal. This looks unjust, absolutely unjust. Whatsoever the sin may be, eternal punishment cannot be justified. Whatsoever the sin may be, eternal punishment cannot be justified. And what are the sins?
Bertrand Russell has written a book, Why I Am Not A Christian. In that book one of the reasons he has told is this, that Jesus looks absurd. Bertrand Russell says, “If I confess all the sins that I have committed, and all those sins also which I have thought but never committed, then too you cannot give me more than five years’ imprisonment. So eternal, nonending punishment…?”
Jesus speaks the language of a revolutionary. Revolutionaries always move to the other end, to the extremes. He says to a rich man – you cannot conceive Buddha saying it or Mahavira saying it – that “A camel can pass through a needle’s eye, but a rich man cannot pass through the gates of my Father to the Kingdom of God. He cannot pass!” This is the seed of communism, the basic seed.
Jesus was a revolutionary. He was concerned not only with spirituality, but with economics, with politics and everything. Really, had he been only a spiritual man he would not have been crucified. He was crucified because he became a danger to everything, to the whole social structure, to the status quo.
But he was not just a revolutionary like Lenin or Mao. Of course, Marx and Mao are inconceivable without there having been a Jesus in history. They belong to this same Jesus, the early Jesus, the Jesus who was crucified. He was a fiery man, rebellious, ready to destroy and change everything. But he was not simply a revolutionary: he was also a spiritual man. He was somehow a mixture of Mahavira and Mao. But the Mao was crucified and the Mahavira remained in the end.
The day Jesus was crucified was not only the day of crucifixion: it was a day of deep inner transformation also. The day he is crucified, Pilate, the Roman governor, asks him, “What is truth?”
Jesus remains silent. This was not Jesus-like at all. It is more like a Zen master. If you see the previous whole life of Jesus, this remaining silent when someone has asked, “What is truth?” was not Jesus-like at all. He was not that type of master who would remain silent.
But why did he remain silent? What has happened? Why is he not speaking? Why is he at a loss? Why is he incapable of speaking? He was one of the greatest orators the world has ever produced – I may say, even without any exaggeration, the greatest even. His words are so penetrating. He was a man of words, not a man of silence. Why did he remain silent suddenly?
Just as he is stepping, going to the cross, Pilate asks him, “What is truth?” And his whole life he was defining only that, and his whole life he was talking about the truth. And that’s why Pilate asked him.
He remained silent. What has happened? What has happened to the inner world of Jesus? It has never been reported, because it is difficult to report what has happened. And Christian theology has remained shallow, because the inner world of Jesus can only be interpreted in India and nowhere else. Because only India knows the inner changes, the inner transformation, what happens.
What has happened suddenly? Jesus is on the verge of death. He is to be crucified. Now the whole revolution is meaningless. Whatsoever he has been saying is futile; whatsoever he has lived for is just going to end, finish. Everything is finished. And because death is so near, now he must move in. Time cannot be lost now, not a single moment. Not a single moment can be lost now. He must move in before he is crucified. He must complete the inner journey.
He has been on the inner journey, but also entangled with outer problems. And because of those outer problems, he couldn’t move to that cool point this Upanishad calls “the moon point.” He has remained fiery, hot. In a way, he might have done it consciously.
There is a story:

Vivekananda achieved his first satori, his first glimpse of samadhi, and Ramakrishna said, “Now I will keep the key with me. I am not going to give it to you. It will be given to you only three days before your death. Before you die, only three days before, this key will be given back to you. Now no more samadhi.”
Vivekananda began to weep and he said, “Why? I don’t want anything. I don’t want the whole kingdom of the world. Give me my samadhi. One glimpse was so beautiful! I don’t want to do anything.”
Ramakrishna said, “But the world needs you and something has to be done. And if you move into samadhi, then you will not be able to do it. So don’t be in a hurry. The samadhi will wait for you. Move into the world, give my message. And when the message is delivered, the key will be given back to you.”
Ramakrishna died…but these are not visible keys. And only three days before his death, Vivekananda could achieve samadhi – only three days before.

So it may have been a very conscious thing, not moving to the moon center, because once you move there you become absolutely inactive.
One story more:

Jesus was initiated by John the Baptist. He was the disciple of John the Baptist, who himself was a great revolutionary and a great spiritual man. He waited for Jesus for years together, and the day he initiated Jesus in the river Jordan, he said to Jesus, “Now take over my work and I will disappear. Enough!”
And from that day he was never seen again. He disappeared in the forest. In the inner language, he disappeared from the sun point to the moon point. He became silent. He has done the work, and he has given the work to someone else who will complete it.
Just on the day of the crucifixion, Jesus must have become aware that now the work that he was doing is finished: “There is no more possibility. I cannot do anything more now. I must move in. This opportunity must not be lost.”
That’s why when Pilate asked him, “What is truth?” he remained silent. This is not Jesus-like. This is like a Zen master, this is more like Buddha. And because of this, the miracle happened which has remained an enigma for Christianity to explain. Because of this, the miracle happened.
When he was moving to his cooler, coldest point, the moon point, he was crucified. And when for the first time someone comes to the moon point, his breathing stops, because that breathing, too, is the activity of the sun point. Everything becomes silent, everything is as if dead.
He moved inward to the moon point and he was being crucified. Then they thought that he was dead, and he was not. This was a misconception, a misunderstanding. Those who were crucifying him, they thought he was dead. But he was simply in the moon point where breathing stops: no outgoing, no ingoing – in the gap I have discussed with you. One remains in the gap. It is such a deep balance that it is virtually death, but it was not death.
The crucifiers, the murderers of Jesus, they thought he was dead, so they allowed the disciples to bring the body down. As was the custom in the Jewish land, his body was to be preserved just in a nearby cave for three days and then delivered to the family. It is reported – again Christianity has fragments – it is reported that when his body was being carried into the cave, it clashed against some stone and there was blood. If he was really dead, blood would have been impossible. He was not dead.
And when after three days the cave was opened, he was not there. The dead body had disappeared. And in these three days he was seen. Four or five people had seen him, but no one would believe them. They went to the village and said, “He has resurrected!” but no one would believe it.
He escaped from Jerusalem. He came to Kashmir and remained there. But then this life was not the life of Jesus but the life of Christ. Jesus was the sun point and Christ the moon point. And he remained totally silent: that’s why there is no record. He would not talk, he would not give any message, he would not preach. He remained then totally silent. He was not then a revolutionary, he was just a master living in his own silence.
So very few people would travel to him. Those who became aware without any outward information about him, they would travel to him. And they were not few but many – few in comparison to the world, but many in a way. And a whole village came to be established around him. The village is still called Bethlehem. In Kashmir, the village is still called Bethlehem, after the birthplace of Jesus, and a tomb is preserved which is Jesus’ tomb.
I said that Christianity is incomplete because it knows only the early Jesus and, because of that, Christianity could give birth to communism. But Jesus died a fully enlightened man – a full moon.

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