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

194 THE DHAMMAPADA: THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA, VOL. 9-12
India all the poor people, very poor people have been converted. This is converting them by bribery. Now instead
of swords, a very subtle methodology is being used to convert them.
But I am not interested in converting anybody. I love Jesus as much as I love Buddha because I don’t see any
difference. Both are religious because both are awakened. There is no difference at all between the awakened
people. But the churches are not concerned with awakening or the awakened people; their concern is with numbers,
and they use every possible way, direct, indirect, gross and subtle to convert people.
Hence, Christina, the question has arisen in your mind: maybe I am doing something like the Christian
missionaries. I am not a missionary.
Mr. and Mrs. Chotnik had hoped that their son, Stanley, would follow in the path of their own orthodox
ways and pursue his higher education at Yeshiva University. Instead, despite their voluble concern, he entered a
Christian college. But when he returned home for summer vacation, they were vastly relieved to see that their
fears had been groundless. Stanley had not forsaken his ancestral faith, he had not been converted, he had not,
it was clear, been affected in the slightest way by his non-Jewish environment. In fact, on the very next Friday,
he readily agreed to accompany them to synagogue.
That evening, at the close of shabbes services, the rabbi, an old friend of the Chotnik family, greeted the young
student with a wide smile. ”It is good to see you here in the temple again, Stanley,” said the rabbi, shaking the
youth’s hand. ”Frankly, your parents and I were afraid you might be Catholicized there at South Bend.”
Stanley’s eyebrows lifted in surprise. ”Impossible!” he declared. ”No one will ever convert me, Father.”
There are subtle ways to convert. The person who is being converted does not become aware at all what is
happening. You go on conditioning him, slowly, slowly. You go on repeating the gospels and slowly, slowly without
his awareness, his mind becomes full of all that has been repeated. He is being conditioned. It is a process of
hypnosis.
My effort here is just the opposite: it is a process of dehypnosis, deconditioning. I decondition you, whosoever
you are, Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan. I simply decondition you and then I leave it to you so that you can be
yourself. I don’t recondition you again. I stop with deconditioning so that you are free from the old pattern, from
the old gestalt that has been imposed upon you. Once you are free then my work is finished. Then you can grow
on your own according to your own light, according to your own inner needs. Each individual has a birthright to
be himself.
The world does not need Christians, Hindus and Mohammedans; it needs certainly religious people. And what
do I mean when I use the words ’religious people’? I mean people who are aware that the world is not only matter,
that the world is something more, something plus. It is not finished with matter; matter is only the circumference:
consciousness is at the center. And this is possible only when you experience consciousness at your own center;
then you can experience consciousness everywhere. When you start feeling consciousness everywhere you have
come across godliness. This experience is religion.
I am certainly interested in introducing you into this vast experience, but you have to come to it on your own.
You have to come to it without any beliefs, prejudices open, vulnerable, ready to see that which is, rather than
to project what should be. I don’t give you any shoulds and should-nots, I don’t give you any commandments. I
simply help you like a gardener helps a seed. It is not an effort to make a lotus out of a rosebush or vice versa.
The gardener helps the rose to be a rose and the lotus to be a lotus. Whatsoever is your potential, you have to
be that.
I am not here to decide what you have to be; I can only give you hints how to grow into your own being. And
that’s how a person becomes a Jesus, a Buddha, a Zarathustra.
The second question:
Question 2
BELOVED MASTER, THE WEST IS OVERPOPULATED WITH PSYCHOTHERAPISTS AND THEIR
PATIENTS, BUT WHY DOES NO ONE SEEM TO BE HELPED?
Patrick, the help is possible only through a buddha. The help is possible only through the awakened one.
The psychotherapists are as asleep as you are; they are in the same boat. There is no qualitative difference
between you and them in fact they may be crazier than you are. They may be more in a mess than you are
because they constantly deal with mad people; day in, day out, they are surrounded by mad people. Rather than
helping the mad people to become sane, just the opposite happens: being constantly in contact with mad people,
slowly, slowly they become mad themselves.
This is natural. They don’t have yet that awareness which can remain aloof, unaffected. They don’t have that
distance, that coolness, that detachment. They are not living on sunlit peaks; they are groping in the same dark