THE DHAMMAPADA: THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA, VOL. 9-12 The ...

THE DHAMMAPADA: THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA, VOL. 9-12 125
”No, it was not Shapiro, either.”
Feinberg glowered at his wife. ”What is the matter?” he barked. ”None of my friends are good enough for
you?”
People are living... not really living, just mechanically moving, victims of blind forces. When sex takes possession
of you, you are not your own master. Or when greed takes possession, or anger, or jealousy, you are not your
own master. You are being dragged. And it is very strange that you allow it to happen you don’t feel insulted
or humiliated! Each of your instincts makes you a slave. You not only tolerate this slavery; on the contrary, you
enjoy it. On the contrary, you think this is what life is supposed to be. This is not life that you are living. It is
biology, it is physiology, it is chemistry, but it is not life. To live under the influence of instincts is not to live at
all.
Life begins only when you rise above your instincts. And the way to rise is: REFLECT, WATCH, and you will
immediately know: NOTHING BINDS YOU. YOU ARE FREE. You are a master. In your watchfulness, slowly,
slowly passions disappear, because a watchful person cannot be hot.
Desires are always leading you into the future. Desire means future; it can only happen tomorrow. So you go
on looking at the tomorrow, and meanwhile the time is passing. And the tomorrow never comes; it can’t come, in
the very nature of things. So your whole life is just a waiting for nothing waiting for Godot! And Godot never
comes. In fact, nobody knows who this Godot is.
But we go on waiting for something to happen some day, and we know that it has not happened to anybody. It
didn’t happen to your father, to your father’s father. It has not happened to your neighbors. You can look around
people’s faces: it has not happened. You don’t see the glow, you don’t see in their eyes contentment, you don’t
see joy. You see only a desperate effort to achieve something which they are not really aware of, what exactly it
is and whether it is possible or not. But they go on running in hot pursuit and they go on destroying their life.
”Grandma, how long have you and grandpa been married?” asked the romantic young granddaughter.
”Forty-nine years,” replied the old lady.
”Ah, what a beautiful life you must have had,” sighed the girl. ”And I will bet you never even thought of a
divorce.”
”Well,” said grandma, ”divorce, no murder, yes!”
Just ask the old people what they have attained, what they have been doing. And if they are true and authentic,
if they are sincere, they will tell you nothing but that ”Life has been a tale told by an idiot, full of fury and noise,
signifying nothing. And now comes death, and all is finished.” But to a meditator, death is not the end but the
beginning of a new life.
Buddha says: THIS IS YOUR LAST BODY. If you have quietened the mind, if you have become free from
desire and passion: THIS IS YOUR LAST BODY. Now you will be born into a bodiless existence. Now you will
be part of the invisible life, the eternal life which knows no birth, no death.
The body is a limitation, the body confines you. You are unlimited consciousness, but your body forces you
into a small, dark hole. You live in a dark hole, in a dark cave. Of course, it is going to be miserable. You are
vast and somehow you have been forced to live in a small space. Nobody has done it to you; you yourself go on
doing it. Each time you die, you die with desires. Those desires bring you back into new wombs. Those desires
give you another body.
If you can die without desires, then there is no longer any birth. When there is no birth there is no old age, no
death. And when there is no birth there is no time. You go beyond time. You live in eternity, you become divine.
That’s what Buddha means by godliness bhagavata.
YOU ARE WISE.
Through silence you become wise, not through learning, not by becoming more informed but by becoming
absolutely silent. YOU ARE WISE... otherwise you will know only words hollow words, meaningless words. Yes,
you can accumulate much knowledge. You can know the Vedas and the Koran and the Bible and the Gita and
you can repeat them, but you will not understand anything. More is the possibility that you will misunderstand.
From where will you get the right perspective to understand them? With all your passions and desires and all
your confusion and clouded mind, how are you going to understand the Upanishads, the Koran? Impossible. They
come from people who had gone beyond the body. Unless you go beyond the body you will not understand them.
You can understand only that which you have experienced.
But the knowledgeable people not only deceive others, they start deceiving themselves maybe not knowingly,
not deliberately. If you go on deceiving others your whole life, pretending that you know, slowly, slowly you start
believing in your own pretensions. You forget that you don’t know; you don’t want to remember it. Who wants
to know that ”I am ignorant”? Everybody wants to feel that he knows.