Tanzan and Ekido were once travelling together down a muddy road. A heavy rain was still falling.
Coming around a bend, they met a lovely girl in a silk kimono and sash, unable to cross the intersection.
“Come on, girl,” said Tanzan at once. Lifting her in his arms, he carried her over the mud.
Ekido did not speak again until that night when they reached a lodging temple. Then he no longer could restrain himself. “We monks don’t do near females,” he told Tanzan, “especially not young and lovely ones. It is dangerous. Why did you do that?”
“I left the girl there,” said Tanzan. “Are you still carrying her?”
Religion Really Means Your Spontaneity
Religion is not a question of practicing, it is a question of discovering. It is not a question of belief. Beliefs are all against truth, they make your mind prejudiced. Belief means you don’t know, still you pretend to know. Belief is a lie, it is hypocrisy.
So whether somebody is a practicing Catholic or a Hindu or a Mohammedan, all practicing people are dangerous. They are false, pseudo; they are not authentic, they are not real. The real person is a seeker.
Then the question will be what is the quality of a potential seeker?
These are the qualities of a seeker: first, he will not be a Christian, a Hindu, a Mohammedan, a communist; he will not be an atheist or a theist. To seek, this basic requirement has to be fulfilled – you have to put aside all your beliefs because if you carry your beliefs then your beliefs will distort your vision. Beliefs are like colored glasses, they will make the whole of existence the same color as your glasses. It will not be the true color of existence, it will be impaired by your glasses. You have to put aside all your glasses. You have to contact reality directly, immediately. There should be no idea between you and existence, no a priori conclusion.
A real seeker has to be in the state that Dionysius calls agnosia – a state of not-knowing. Socrates said at the very end of his life, “I know only one thing, that I know nothing.” This is the state of a true seeker.
In the East we call this state meditation: no belief, no thought, no desire, no prejudice, no conditioning – in fact, no mind at all. A state of no-mind is meditation. When you can look without any mind interfering, distorting, interpreting, then you see the truth. The truth is already all around, you just have to put your mind aside.
The seeker has to fulfill only one basic thing, he has to drop his mind. The moment the mind is dropped, a great silence arises because the mind carries your whole past; all the memories of the past go on hankering for your attention, they go on crowding upon you, they don’t leave any space within you.
The mind also means future. Out of the past you start fantasizing about the future. It is a projection out of the past. You have lived a certain life in the past, there have been a few moments of joy and many, many dark nights. You would not like to have those dark nights, you would have your future full of those joyous moments. So you sort out from your past, you choose a few things and you project them into the future, and you choose a few other things and you try to avoid them in the future. Your future is nothing but a refined past – a little bit modified here and there, but it is still the past because that’s all that you know.
Learning from the story Spontaneity: Religion Really Means Your Spontaneity
Experience Learning
One thing very significant to be remembered: those few moments of joy that you had in the past were basically part of those long dark nights, so if you choose those moments, those dark nights will come automatically, you cannot avoid them. The silver linings in the dark clouds cannot be chosen separately from the dark clouds. In the dark night you see the sky full of stars, in the day those stars disappear. Do you think they evaporate? They are still there, but the context is missing. They need darkness, only then can you see them. In the night, you will be able to see them again. The darker the night, the shinier are the stars.
In life everything is intertwined with each other. Your pleasures are intertwined with your pains, your ecstasies mixed inevitably, inseparably with your agonies. So your whole idea of the future is sheer nonsense. You cannot manage it, nobody has ever been able to manage it because you are trying to do something which cannot be done in the very nature of things. It will simply be a repetition of your past.
Whatsoever you desire is not going to make any difference. It will again and again be the repetition of your past, the same past, maybe a little bit different, but not because of your expectations – a little bit different because life goes on changing, people go on changing, existence goes on changing. So there will be a few differences but not basic differences, only in the nonessential parts. Essentially it will be the same tragedy.
Dropping the mind means dropping the past, and with it of course the future disappears. Dropping the mind means you are suddenly awakened into the present, and the present is the only reality there is. The past is non existential, so is the future. The past is no longer, the future is not yet, only the present is. It is always now – only now exists. The meditator starts merging and melting with the now.
When we are in the present, silence descends. You can hear the birds chirping, but they don’t disturb the silence; they enhance it, they beautify it.
For the potential seeker firstly: freedom is the ultimate goal. Secondly: nobody can practice religion. Religion really means your spontaneity, your nature; you cannot practice it, you have to allow it. You have to remove all the barriers that prevent the flow of your nature. It is like a stream prevented by rocks – remove the rocks. There is no question of practicing, it is already there. It is your nature. When the hindrances are no longer there you start flowing, just like a river moving toward the ocean.
Each consciousness moving toward God, toward the ultimate ocean, is religious. Religion is neither Christian, nor Hindu, nor Mohammedan. These are all political games played in the name of religion. A religious person is simply religious, natural, spontaneous, living out of his own light.
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