THE UNDERSTANDING

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I never use the word renunciation at all. I say: Rejoice in life, in love, in meditation, in the beauties of the world, in the ecstasy of existence — rejoice in everything! Transform the mundane into the sacred. Transform this shore into the other shore, transform the earth into paradise.

And then indirectly a certain renunciation starts happening. But that happens, you don't do it. It is not a doing, it is a happening. You start renouncing your foolishnesses; you start renouncing rubbish. You start renouncing meaningless relationships. You start renouncing jobs that were not fulfilling to your being. You start renouncing places where growth was not possible. But I don't call it renunciation, I call it understanding, awareness.

If you are carrying stones in your hand thinking that they are diamonds, I will not tell you to renounce those stones. I will simply say, "Be alert and have another look!" If you yourself see that they are not diamonds, is there any need to renounce them? They will fall from your hands of their own accord. In fact, if you still want to carry them, you will have to make a great effort, you will have to bring great will, to still carry them. But you cannot carry them for long; once you have seen that they are useless, meaningless, you are bound to throw them away.

And once your hands are empty, you can search for the real treasures. And the real treasures are not in the future. The real treasures are right now, here.

OF MEN AND RATS

Wakefulness is the way to life.

The fool sleeps as if he were already dead, but the master is awake and he lives forever.

He watches. He is clear.

How happy he is! For he sees that wakefulness is life.

How happy he is, following the path of the awakened.

With great perseverance he meditates, seeking freedom and happiness.

— from the Dhammapada of Gautama the Buddha

We go on living absolutely inattentive to what is happening around us. Yes, we have become very efficient in doing things. What we are doing, we have become so efficient in doing that we don't need any awareness to do it. It has become mechanical, automatic. We function like robots. We are not men yet; we are machines.

That's what George Gurdjieff used to say again and again, that man as he exists is a machine. He offended many people, because nobody likes to be called a machine. Machines like to be called gods; then they feel very happy, puffed up. Gurdjieff used to call people machines, and he was right. If you watch yourself, you will know how mechanically you behave.

The Russian physiologist Pavlov, and the American psychologist Skinner, are 99.9 percent right about man: they believe that man is a beautiful machine, that's all. There is no soul in him. I say 99.9 percent they are right; they only miss by a small margin. In that small margin are the buddhas, the awakened ones. But they can be forgiven, because Pavlov never came across a buddha — he came across millions of people like you.

Skinner has been studying men and rats and finds no difference. Rats are simple beings, that's all; man is a little more complicated.

Man is a highly sophisticated machine, rats are simple machines. It is easier to study rats; that's why psychologists go on studying rats. They study rats and they conclude about man — and their conclusions are almost right. I say "almost," mind you, because that one-tenth of one percent is the most important phenomenon that has happened. A Buddha, a Jesus, a Mohammed — these few awakened people are the real men. But where can B. F. Skinner find a buddha? Certainly not in America. ...

I have heard:

A man asked a rabbi, "Why didn't Jesus choose to be born in twentieth-century America?"

The rabbi shrugged his shoulders and said, "In America? It would have been impossible. Where can you find a virgin, firstly? And secondly, where will you find three wise men?"

Where is B. F. Skinner going to find a buddha? And even if he can find a buddha, his preconceived prejudices, ideas, will not allow him to see. He will go on seeing his rats. He cannot understand anything that rats cannot do. Now, rats don't meditate, rats don't become enlightened. And he conceives of man only as a magnified form of a rat. And still I say that he is right about the greater majority of people; his conclusions are not wrong, and buddhas will agree with him about the so-called normal humanity. The normal humanity is utterly asleep. Even animals are not so asleep.

Have you seen a deer in the forest — how alert he looks, how watchfully he walks? Have you seen a bird sitting on the tree — how intelligently he goes on watching what is happening all around? You move toward the bird — there is a certain space he allows. Beyond that, one step more, and he flies away. He has a certain alertness about his territory. If somebody enters into that territory, then it is dangerous.

If you look around, you will be surprised: man seems to be the most asleep animal on the earth.

A woman buys a parrot at an auction of the furnishings of a fancy whorehouse and keeps the parrot's cage covered for two weeks, hoping to make it forget its profane vocabulary. When the cage is finally uncovered, the parrot looks around and remarks, "Awrrk! New house. New madam." When the woman's daughters come in, he adds, "Awrrk! New girls."

When her husband comes home that night, the parrot says, "Awrrk! Awrrk! Same old customers!"

Man is in a fallen state. In fact, that is the meaning of the Christian parable of the fall of Adam, his expulsion. Why were Adam and Eve expelled from paradise? They were expelled because they had eaten the fruit of knowledge. They were expelled because they had become minds, and they had lost their consciousness. If you become a mind, you lose consciousness — mind means sleep, mind means noise, mind means mechanicalness. If you become a mind, you lose consciousness.

Hence, the whole work that has to be done is to become consciousness again and lose the mind. You have to throw out of your system all that you have gathered as knowledge. It is knowledge that keeps you asleep; hence, the more knowledgeable a person is, the more asleep.

That has been my own observation too. Innocent villagers are far more alert and awake than the professors in the universities and the pundits in the temples. The pundits are nothing but parrots; the academicians in the universities are full of nothing but holy cow dung, full of absolutely meaningless noise — just minds and no consciousness.

People who work with nature — farmers, gardeners, woodcutters, carpenters, painters — they are far more alert than the people who function in the universities as deans and vice-chancellors and chancellors. Because when you work with nature, nature is alert. Trees are alert; their form of alertness is certainly different, but they are very alert.

Now there are scientific proofs of their alertness. If the woodcutter comes with an...