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

184 THE DHAMMAPADA: THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA, VOL. 9-12
The day was tiring and by the evening we were utterly tired. Then they started cooking food. The food was
ready in the night. Tired, hungry... and the delicious food that they were preparing... and the aroma! And I was
the only one who was in such suffering! I could not eat because just one night’s wavering and you suffer in hell
for eternity. But I was wavering naturally. On the surface I was keeping calm and cool as I was supposed to, but
they were persuading me and deep down I was ready to be persuaded. In fact, I was hoping that they would be
able to persuade me! Finally they persuaded me and I ate. But I have never suffered so much. The whole night I
was sick and vomiting. Nobody else was vomiting, nobody else was sick. It was just my conditioning.
Now, this kind of vegetarianism is not good. It does not come out of your consciousness it is mechanical.
Mechanical goodness is not real goodness; it is just a facade. Intelligence is needed to be good, awareness is
needed to be good.
The unshaven and booze-smelling Polack was arrested for public drunkenness, and now he stood in front of the
judge.
”Your honor,” he pleaded, ”I honestly didn’t mean to drink a whole quart of vodka at one time.”
”Then why did you do it?” demanded the judge.
”I lost the cork.”
A contractor working for the U.S. government in Vietnam submitted a bill for the tiling of a roof. The
government office was astonished at the total of over twenty thousand dollars, most of it for medical expenses
incurred on the job. A lieutenant was dispatched to the hospital to investigate.
Gina Goyt, there is nothing like mechanical goodness. Goodness cannot be mechanical and anything mechanical
cannot be good. It is a contradiction in terms. Goodness can only be conscious, nonmechanical; and evil can only
be unconscious, mechanical.
But I understand your question. It is relevant, because for centuries something like mechanical goodness has
been taught to people because it is easy. People are mechanical. To bring real goodness in their lives, real virtue,
you will have to transform their unconsciousness into consciousness, you will have to change their darkness into
light. That is an arduous effort, and the society, moreover, is not interested in it at all. In fact, it is afraid of it
because whenever a really good person has happened in the world he has created trouble for the society.
A Jesus, a Lao Tzu, a Buddha, a Kabir, these are the greatest rebels for the simple reason that they were so
conscious that they could see through the whole stupid game that we go on playing. They could see through our
lies, they could see through our deceptions. It was impossible to deceive them and it was impossible to exploit
them and it was impossible to enslave them. Not only was it impossible to enslave them, but they created great
movements of consciousness in the world. They created chains, they triggered chains. Many, many people became
enlightened through their efforts. Their efforts were thought to be antisocial. That’s why Jesus was crucified.
Where can you find a man who is more good than Jesus? What was his crime? His crime was that he was
really good. If he had been only mechanically good there would have been no trouble. There were many rabbis
who were mechanically good. The society is not afraid of mechanical people; they are manageable. They are
dependent on the society. They always live with the collective, they are always following the crowd. The crowd
is very happy with these people. And it is easy to create mechanical goodness because, in the first place, people
are mechanical. You have just to replace their evil ideas with good ideas, not changing at all their beings.
For example, hell was created the idea of hell to create mechanical goodness. People are afraid, people live
in fear; priests became aware of it in the very beginning of humanity, that it can be exploited: make them more
afraid. They depicted hell in such detail, they created so much fear in people, that people became conditioned
out of fear.
It is the same type of conditioning that can be done now in easier ways because we have more developed
technology. There is no need to teach for twenty-five years the idea of hell; then a person becomes mechanically
good. Now you can ask Pavlov, Skinner and other behaviorists: they will teach you some methods. Just electric
shocks will do.
Somebody smokes and you don’t want him to smoke just give him electric shocks. Whenever he smokes let
him have an electric shock. Within three days he will drop smoking because the moment he takes a cigarette in
his hand he will start trembling. He will become so much afraid that now the shock is coming. That’s how they
teach rats, they teach monkeys and chimpanzees. And that’s how they are trying to teach human beings.
Religious people created hell, politicians created prisons just to torture people. If you torture them enough,
people become accustomed. Pavlov calls it ”conditioned reflex.” He worked his whole life with dogs; he conditioned
his dogs.
If you bring food before a dog, of course, it affects his saliva. He starts salivating, his tongue starts hanging
out, saliva starts dripping. Seeing delicious food, it is natural. But if you ring a bell it won’t happen. There is