The Natural State

In the words of U.G. Krishnamurti
Peter Maverick    1  ·  2  ·  3  ·  4  ·  5  

1990: Various Place



There is no process to go through to reach anywhere. It looks like I went through some process. No, I did not. I wasted so many years of my life in pursuit of the goals that I had set for myself. If it had dawned on me during the early stages of my life that there is nothing to understand, I wouldn't have wasted all that time. But I don't see any way of comparing what I did with what I stumbled into.

The fundamental mistake that humanity made somewhere along the line was to experience this separateness from the totality of life. At that time, there occurred in people this self-consciousness which separated them from the life around. They were so isolated that it frightened them. The demand to be part of the totality of life created this tremendous demand for the ultimate. We thought that the spiritual goals of God, truth or reality would help us to become part of the whole again but the very attempt to become one or integrated with the totality of life has kept us only more separate.

Isolated functioning is not part of nature. This isolation has created a demand for finding out ways and means of becoming a part of nature. But thought, in its very nature, can only create problems and cannot help us solve them. We don't seem to realize that it is thought that is separating us from the totality of things. The belief that this can help us to keep in tune with the totality is not going to materialize. So it has come up with all kinds of ingenious, if I may use that word, ideas of insight and intuition.

What we are concerned about is living, our relationship with our fellow beings, with the life around. By understanding the meaning of life and the purpose of life we are not going to improve, change, modify or alter our behavior patterns in any way. But there is a hope that by understanding the meaning of life we can bring about a change. There may not be any meaning of life. If it has a meaning it is already in operation there. Wanting to understand the meaning of life seems to be a futile attempt on our part.

We have been for centuries told what to do. Why are we asking the same question, “What to do?” What to do in relation to what? What I am emphasizing is that the demand to bring about a change in ourselves is the cause of our suffering.

I may say that there is nothing to be changed but the revolutionary teachers come and tell us that there is something there in which you have to bring about a radical revolution then we assume there is such a thing as soul, spirit or the self. What I assert all the time is that I haven't found anything like the self or soul there.

This question haunted me all my life and suddenly it hit me, “There is no self to realize. What the hell have I been doing all this time?” You see, that hits you like lightning. Once that hits you, the whole mechanism of the body that is controlled by this thought is shattered. What is left is the tremendous living organism with an intelligence of its own. What you are left with is the pulse, the beat and the throb of life.

“There must be something more and we have to do something to become part of the whole thing.” Such demands have arisen because of our assumption that we have been created for a grander purpose than that for which other species on this planet have been created. That's the fundamental mistake we have made. Culture is responsible for our assuming this. We thus come to believe that the whole creation is for the benefit of man. The demand to use nature for our purposes has created all the ecological problems. It is not such an easy thing for us to deal with these problems.

The point is we have probably arrived at a place where there is no going back. What is the fate of mankind and what is one to do? Anything that is born out of thought is destructive in its nature. That is why I very often say in my conversations and interviews that thought—in its birth, in its nature, in its expression and in its action—is fascist.
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I do not see any meaning or purpose in life. A living thing, a living organism, is not interested in such questions. Don't superimpose varieties of religious experience on nature. Your doing something to go back to your natural state is what is taking you away from it. The natural state is already there and is expressing itself in an extraordinarily intelligent way. The acquired intellect is no match to the intelligence that is there.
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I was surrounded by all kinds of religious people. I felt that there was something funny in their behavior. There was a wide gap between what they believed and how they lived. This always bothered me but I could not call all of them hypocrites. I said to myself, “There is something wrong with what they believe. Maybe their source is wrong. All the teachers of mankind, particularly the spiritual teachers, conned themselves and conned the whole of mankind. So I have to find out for myself and I have no way of finding out anything for myself as long as I depend upon anyone.”

I found that whatever I wanted was what they wanted me to want. Whatever I thought was whatever they wanted me to think. So there was no way out of this. Somewhere along the line something hit me, “There is nothing there to be transformed, nothing there to be changed. There is no mind there nor is there any self to realize. What the hell am I doing?”

That spark hit me like a shaft of lightning, like an earthquake. It shattered the whole structure of my thought and destroyed everything that was there, all the cultural input. It hit me in a very strange way. Everything that every man had ever thought, felt and experienced before was drained out of my system. In a way, it totally destroyed my mind which is nothing but the totality of man's experiences and thoughts. It destroyed even my identity.
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You want to become something other than what you are. That creates this neurotic situation. The neurosis in the human species is absolutely essential. We have to maintain this neurosis in order to function in this society. There is no other way that we can function in this society except to live in hope and die in hope. There are some people who have given up but we force them to become functional in this value system which we have created. We even push them to commit suicide lest they become manic-depressive individuals. We are solely responsible for driving all these people into a situation where they have to put an end to themselves. They don't want to be functional here, they have given up. That is the reason why I say that the psychiatrist is the enemy of this culture because he is forcing all those people who have given up to fit into this value system.

Nature is trying to create something extraordinary, a perfect species. That is why each individual is unique. Because of this input of culture it has become impossible for this organism to show uniqueness. We have destroyed the possibility of what nature can do. You only use this paradise that nature has created including not only mankind but all the species that exist on this planet. We are solely and fully responsible for the chaos that mankind has created and there seems to be no way out of it.

Every time a so-called savior comes along he says that he is an avatar and that he is the answer to all our problems. This very thing, his claim that he is the answer, adds momentum to the existing chaos and that situation makes it impossible for us to create something new. That is not the way we can resolve our problems.

If they are looking for answers they should not look to Vedanta or Zen Buddhism. Those sects don't have any answers for their problems. The scientists and psychologists have to find their answers, if there are any answers, within their own framework. Only then will they be able to help mankind to look at things differently. But there is no way you can go back and revive anything.
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Once a holy man came to see me. He was claiming that denial of sex is so essential for the spiritual future of man. I said, “It's a crime against nature. Nature has not intended you to deny sex.” Then he got up and left. How can that abnormal situation be made a model for all spiritual aspirants and why torture them? Why has denial of sex been made the foundation of spiritual enlightenment? As a reaction or a revolt against that, what you call the tantric system appeared in this country.

To be attracted is natural. If you are not attracted you are a stone. The body, with its senses, is not a stone. It has to respond to what is happening around it. What touches this body is not your piety or your silence but your anger, your lust and everything that is happening there. That is the response I am talking about.

The actions of life are outside the field of thought. Life is simply a process of stimulus and response, and stimulus and response are one unitary movement. But it is thought that separates them and says that this is the response and that is the stimulus. Any action that is born out of thinking is destructive in its nature because thought is a self-perpetuating mechanism. Any action that is outside the field of thought is one continuous movement, it is one with the movement of life. It is that flow of things that I am referring to, you see.

To sidestep the complexities of life is one of the biggest mistakes that we are making. But there is nothing out there, you see. All these godmen, gurus and the flunkies (the most wicked word to use) are offering us a new oasis. You will find out that it is no different from other mirages. We are leaving everything for some mythical certainty offered to us. But this is the only reality, there is no other reality.

What I am emphasizing is if your energy is not wasted in pursuit of some mythical certainties offered to us, life becomes very simple. But we end up being wasted, misled and misspent individuals. If that energy is released, what is it that we can't do to survive in the midst of these complexities of the world created by our culture? It is very simple. The attempt to sidestep these complexities is the very thing that is causing us all these problems.

What I am saying is not what the mainstream of population is interested in. They hear what they want to hear. What I say is of no interest to them. If you say that God is redundant it is not a rebellion against anything. You know religious thinking is outdated and outmoded. But I go one step further and say that all political ideologies are nothing but the outgrowth of the same religious thinking of man. What I am suggesting is that the very demand to understand the mystery of existence is destructive. Just leave the mystery alone.
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There was this makeup within me, from the very beginning, of rejecting everything totally. I lived amongst masterminds. They were not ordinary people. I have traveled everywhere and, as I say, I was not born yesterday. I did not come into town in a turnip truck. What I am saying is that this is something that you cannot totally reject through any volition or effort of yours. Somehow it happened to me. It is just a happening. The whole thing drained out of my system. The parameters that mankind has evolved, the thoughts, feelings and experiences throughout the ages, all this was thrown out of my system.

It's a miracle. What I am emphasizing is that whatever has happened to me has happened despite everything I did. In fact, everything I did only blocked it. It prevented the possibility of whatever was there to express itself. Not that I have gained anything, only that what is there is able to express itself without any hindrance, without any constraints or restraints imposed on it by society for its own reasons, for its own continuity and stability.

The search is inevitable and is an integral part of it. That is why it has turned us all into neurotics and has created this duality for us. You see, ambition is a reality, competition is a reality, but you have superimposed on that reality the idea that you should not be ambitious. It has turned us all into neurotic individuals. We want two things at the same time. The demands for pleasure and happiness have created the whole religious thinking—God, truth or reality.

We demand that there must be something permanent. That is what these religious teachers are peddling. They claim to offer you eternal happiness. Are they ready to accept the fact that bliss, love and compassion are also sensual? This certainty that I have is something that I cannot transmit to you. It does not mean that I will go and burn all the churches and temples or bury all the scriptures (that's all too silly) or that I will become a terrorist and mindlessly kill everyone.
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You are only trying to fit me into a framework by calling me an enlightened man but you have not arrived anywhere. Even the claimants have not arrived anywhere. There is no other way I can point out the danger that is involved in your seeking whatever you are seeking. You see, there is this pleasure movement. I am not against the pleasure movement. I am neither preaching hedonism nor advocating any “-ism” or anything. What I am saying is a threat to you as you know yourself and experience yourself so you necessarily have to fit me into that framework. Or else, you put it another way and say that the content of whatever has happened to U.G. and to them is the same but his expression is different.

The natural state is the functioning of this living organism. It is not a synonymous term for enlightenment or God-realization or self-realization. What is left here is this pulsating, living organism. It is outside the field of experience, so it cannot be shared with anyone. That's the reason why I am saying that he, you or it is the medium through which whatever I am saying is expressing itself but you are distorting, correlating and garbling it. Thought cannot help doing that.

From then on, understanding is not through the instrument which we are using all the time to understand, the intellect. We have developed and sharpened the intellect through years. So it understood in its own way that it is not the instrument, that there is no other instrument and that there is nothing to understand.

My problem was how to use this intellect to understand whatever I was looking for but it didn't help me to understand a thing. So I was searching for some other instrument to understand, that is, intuition, this, that and the other. But I realized that this is the only instrument I have and the hope that I would understand something through some other instrument, on some other level and some other way, disappeared. It dawned on me, “There is nothing to understand.” When this happened it hit me like a shaft of lightning.

From then on, the very demand to understand anything was finished. That understanding is the one that is expressing itself now and it cannot be used as an instrument to understand anything. It cannot be used as an instrument to guide, direct or help me, you or anybody. That explosion that occurred is happening all the time. It is all the time exploding.

Any attempt on my part to understand anything at any given moment is exploded because that is the only instrument I have and there is no other instrument. This instrument cannot invent a thing called hope anymore. There is no hope of understanding. The moment it is forming something there it is exploded, not through any volition, not through any effort, but that's exactly the way it happens. It is continuously happening all the time.

That is the way life is moving along. It has no direction. The body has no need to understand anything. The body does not have to learn anything because anything you learn, anything you do, is attempting to change, alter, shape or mold yourself into something better. This is a perfect piece that has been created by nature.
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There is nothing to die here. The body cannot be afraid of death. The movement that is created by society or culture is what does not want to come to an end. How it came to an end I really don't know. What you are afraid of is not death. In fact, you don't want to be free from fear because when the fear comes to an end you will drop dead. That is its nature. It is the fear that makes you believe that you are living and that you will be dead. What you call yourself is fear. The you is born out of fear, lives in fear, functions in fear and dies in fear.

When the body encounters a cobra it steps back and then you take a walk. The cobra is a marvelous creature. If you hurt it you are hurting yourself. I mean it physically hurts you, not psychologically or romantically, because it is all one movement of life. What I am saying is that you will never hurt that. The cooperation there springs from the total selfishness of mutual survival. It is that total interdependence for survival on the physical level that can bring about unity.

The intelligence that is necessary for survival is already there in the physical organism, you don't have to learn a thing. You need to be taught, you need to learn things, only to survive in this world which we have created, the world of ideas. You have to fight for your piece of the pie. Some joker comes along and says that you should fight without expecting any results. What the hell are you talking about? How can you act without expecting any results?

As long as you live in this world you have to fight for your fair share. That is why they teach you, send you to a school and give you some tools. That is what society has done to you but religion comes along and tells you that you should fight for your share without expecting anything in return. That is why you are turned into a neurotic individual. Otherwise, you will fight only for your share. You don't grab the whole thing. You grab the whole thing because you have been taught by religion, culture or something else to do so. Animals kill only for their survival and leave the rest of their game. Every other thing survives on that. When one takes only what is really needed, the rest is there for everyone else, there's plenty.
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Man has created religion because it gives him a cover. You see, good and bad, right and wrong are like the two ends of the spectrum, one cannot exist independent of the other. When once you are finished with this duality (I am using the word with much caution although I don't like to use it), when you are no longer caught up in the dichotomy of right and wrong or good and bad, you can never do anything wrong. As long as you are caught up in it the danger is that you will always do wrong and if you don't do wrong it is because you are a frightened chicken. It is out of this cowardice that the whole religious thinking is born.
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Nothing has happened to me. You and I are functioning in exactly the same way and I am not anything that you are not. You think that I am different from you. I know for certain that you are functioning in exactly the same way that I am functioning but you are trying to channel the activity or movement of life both to get something and to maintain that continuity of what is put in there by culture. That is not the case here.
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What has created the space between creation and destruction or the time between the two is thought. In nature, there is no death or destruction at all. What occurs is the reshuffling of atoms. If there is a need or necessity to maintain the balance of energy in this universe, death occurs. You may not like it. Earthquakes may be condemned by us. Surely they cause misery to so many thousands and thousands of people. And all this humanitarian activity around the world to send supplies is really a commendable act. It helps those who are suffering. But it is the same kind of activity that is responsible for killing millions of people. What I am saying is that war and humanitarianism are born from the same source.
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The self-consciousness that occurred in the human species may be a necessary thing, I don't know. I am not claiming that I have a special insight into the workings of nature. You see for yourself. That's why I say that the very foundation of the human culture is to kill and to be killed. It has happened so. If one is interested in looking at history right from the beginning, the whole foundation of humanity is built on the idea that those who are not with us are against us. That's what is operating in human thinking. So to kill and to be killed in the name of God, represented by the church in the West and all the other religious thinking here in the East, was the order of the day. That's why there is fundamentalism.
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The body is not interested in your techniques of meditation which actually are destroying the peace that is already there. It is an extraordinarily peaceful organism. It does not have to do anything to be in a peaceful state. By introducing this idea of a peaceful mind we set in motion a sort of battle that goes on and on. What you regard as peaceful is in actuality nothing more than a war-weary state of mind.
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Every insight you have is born out of your thinking. Your so-called insights merely strengthen and fortify the very thing you are trying to be free from. All insights, however extraordinary they may be, are worthless. You can create a tremendous structure of thought from your own discovery which you call insight but that insight is nothing but the result of your own thinking, the permutations and combinations of thought. Actually, there is no way you can come up with anything original there.

There is no thought which you can call your own. I don't have any thoughts which I can call my own—not one thought, not one word, not one experience. To experience anything you have to depend upon outside knowledge.

The recognition of yourself as an entity is possible only through the help of the knowledge. We start this process with children. We do not want that identity to come to an end. We do everything possible to maintain it but the effort to maintain your identity is wearing you out. The constant use of memory to maintain our identity eventually puts us in a state where we are forced to give up yet when someone gives up the attempt to fit themself into the value system they are scorned.

Even when we discover the laws of nature, for whatever reason we are interested in doing so, ultimately they are used to destroy everything that nature has created. This propaganda that the planet is in danger is media hype. Everybody has in fact forgotten about it. We are not ready to face this situation squarely. We must not look for answers in the past or in the great heritage of this or that nation and we must not look to the religious thinkers. They don't have any answers.

I am not prophesying that there is going to be a paradise on earth, nothing of the sort. There is not going to be any paradise. It is the idea of a paradise, the idea of creating a heaven on earth that has turned this beautiful paradise that we already have on this planet into a hell. We are solely responsible for what is happening and the answers for our problems cannot come from the past and its glory or from the great religious teachers of mankind. Those teachers will naturally claim that you all have failed and that they have the answers for the problems that we are confronted with today. I don't think that they have any answers. We have to find out the answers if there are any for ourselves and by ourselves.

It is amazing that we have tremendous faith in all these religious people who cannot deliver the goods. In a business deal, if your partner refuses or fails to deliver the goods, that is the end of the business relationship but in the area of religion they can get away with just promising something. They don't deliver the goods at all. How we can fall for that kind of a thing is beyond me. The whole con game has gone on for centuries. Why do we allow ourselves to be conned by those con men?

There is not a single exception—all these spiritual teachers of mankind from the very beginning have conned themselves into the belief that they have the answers, the solutions for mankind. They cannot deliver the goods. They only give us hope.

When once the demand to change yourself into something better, something other than what you actually are ceases, the demand to change the world also comes to an end. The world can't be anything different from what we are. If there is a war going on within us we cannot expect a peaceful world around us, we will certainly create war.

This instrument is only interested in perpetuating itself through what it calls understanding which in reality is its own machinations. Nature creates something then it destroys it and creates something else. The comparative process characteristic of thinking seems to be absent. The whole ethical culture that is built by us to shape the actions of man has totally failed.

I don't want many people. I am trying to avoid all the seekers and if there are any finders they don't need my help. By allowing myself to be surrounded by those people I am inadvertently participating in the illusion that by carrying on a dialogue or a conversation with me they are getting something. So I discourage people. Even if they just come and sit around me I try to point out the ridiculous nature of this get together. I try to finish it by saying, “Nice meeting you all,” but still they don't go. They would sit with me for hours and hours. Even if I get up and go away they would be still there sitting and talking. They would be talking about what I did or did not say or what they thought I had said.

Still they keep coming back. Most of those who come to see me are religious buffs of all shapes, sizes and colors. Unless they have some sort of background in all this they can't be interested in this kind of thing. They only come to receive some confirmation from me about what they are interested in but they find that they are not getting anything from me. Still they continue to come. You have no idea of how many thousands of people have passed through the precincts of my homes.

Some of them are intelligent enough to realize that they are not going to get anything from me and that there is no point in hanging around. Others are not ready to accept what I emphasize, overemphasize and assert all the time, that whatever has happened to me has happened despite everything I did. Some friends who have been with me for years say that they still have the hope that they are going to get something from me. This, in short, is the story of my life. If you destroy the authority of others, you in your own way become an authority.

The whole structure of religious thought is built on the foundation of discipline. Discipline to me means a sort of masochism. We are all masochists. We torture ourselves because we think that suffering is a means to achieve our spiritual goals. That's unfortunate. Life is difficult so discipline sounds very attractive to people. We admire those who have suffered a lot to achieve their goals. As a matter of fact, the whole religious thinking is built on the foundation of suffering. Those who impose that kind of discipline on us are sadists and we are all being masochists in accepting that. We torture ourselves in the hope of achieving something.

We are slaves to our ideas and beliefs. We are not ready to throw them out. If we succeed in throwing them out we replace them with another set of beliefs, another body of discipline. Those who are marching into the battlefield and are ready to be killed today—in the name of democracy, in the name of freedom, in the name of communism—are no different from those who threw themselves to the lions in the arenas. The Romans watched that fun with great joy. How are we different from them? Not a bit. We love it. To kill and to be killed is the foundation of our culture.
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We are not honest, decorous and decent enough to admit that all relationships are built on the foundation of, “What do I get out of this relationship?” It is nothing but mutual gratification. If that is absent no relationship is possible. You keep the relationship going for social reasons or for reasons of children, property and security. All this is part and parcel of the relationship business but when it fails and does not give us what we really want we superimpose on it what we call love. So it is just not possible to have any relationship on any basis except on the level of mutual gratification.

The whole culture has created this situation for us through its value system. The value system demands that relationships be based on love, but the most important elements are security and possessiveness. When your hold on the other weakens, the relationship wears out. You cannot maintain this lovey-dovey relationship all the time.

The relationship between a man and a woman is based on the images that the two create for themselves of each other. So the actual relationship between the two individuals is a relationship between the two images. But your image keeps changing and so does the other person's. To keep the image constant is just not possible. So when everything else fails we use this final, last card in the pack, love, with all the marvelous and romantic ideations around it.

To me, love implies two. Wherever there is a division, whether it is within you or without you, there is conflict. That relationship cannot last long. As far as I am concerned, relationships are formed and then they are dissolved immediately. Both these things happen in the same frame, if I may use that word. That is really the problem. You may think that I am a very crude man but if anybody talks to me about love, to me it is a four letter word. That is the only basic relationship between man and woman, but it is a social problem for us as to what kind of a relationship you should have.

Unfortunately, we have blown this business of sex out of proportion. It is just a simple biological need of the living organism. But sex has become a tremendous problem for us because we have turned the basic biological functioning of the body into a pleasure movement. You see, if there is no thought, there is no sex at all. It is not just the sex act that is important but the build-up that is there, the romantic structure that we have built around the love play.

Here, the build-up is totally absent because there is no way to focus on any particular object continuously. So you see, that has moved from there to here and again from here to something else, as perhaps, to her movements. It is constantly changing its focus and there is no way that you can maintain this build-up. What is there is only the physical attraction. That you can never be free from, ever. All those people, these saints, are tortured with the idea of controlling that natural attraction, but that natural attraction is something which should not be condemned.

You don't tell yourself that you are a god man, realized or enlightened, and that you should not think these thoughts. Why the religious thinking of man has emphasized denial of sex as a means to his spiritual attainment is something that I cannot understand. Maybe because that is the way you can control people.

Sex is the most powerful drive. After all, the sex glands have to function. We cannot accept the fact that we are just biological beings and nothing more. It is something like saying that in the field of economics you are not controlled by the laws of supply and demand. But we are not ready to accept the basic, fundamental fact that we are just biological beings and all that is happening within the body is a result of hormonal activity. It is pure and simple chemistry. Problems in that area cannot be solved in any other way than by trying to change the chemistry of the body. I think our whole thinking has to be put on a different track. It is all chemical. If, as they say, desires are hormones, then the whole ethical code and culture that we have created through centuries to control the behavior of human beings are false.

So desire cannot be false. Anything that is happening within the organism cannot be false. There is no sex at all without thought. Thought is memory. These experts make fun of me when I say that one of the most important of all glands is the thymus gland. When I discussed this subject with some physiologists and doctors they made fun of me. Naturally so, because according to them the gland is inactive. If it is activated through any external means it would be an abnormal situation. But the thymus is one of the most important glands and feelings operate there without the element of thought.

You see, medical technology has ignored that for a very long time. They considered any unusual condition of the gland to be an abnormality and tried to treat it. It is true that when you reach adolescence it becomes inactive and then your feelings are controlled by your ideas. When once this kind of disturbance takes place in the hormonal balance of the human body through this catastrophe, through this calamity, through whatever you want to call it, not only is the thymus activated but also all other glands such as the pineal and the pituitary are activated.

What I have against medical technology is that you want to understand the functioning of these things with a motive. When once you have some idea of how these glands function, how the activation of these things will help mankind, you are not going to use it for the benefit of mankind. What I am trying to say is that the feelings felt at the thymus are quite different from the feelings induced by thoughts.

Sex has to be put in its proper place as one of the natural functionings of the body. It is solely, mainly and wholly for the purpose of reproducing or procreating something like this. It has no other place in the functioning of the body. Thought always interferes with sex. It has become a pleasure movement. I am not saying anything against it. After that it goes. Thereafter, what you are left with is the natural functioning of the glands.

So we have to revise all our ideas about this whole business of sex. We give a tremendous importance to sex and so the denial of it becomes such an obsession with people. In India, they even moved away from that denial and created what is called tantric sex. It was the highest pleasure that human beings could have, sex through tantra was considered the highest.

The fact is that the person is very much there even at the moment when there is peak sex experience. The experience has already been captured by your memory. Otherwise, you have no way of experiencing that as a peak moment. If that peak moment remained as a peak moment that would be just the end of sex. That would be the end of everything. The fact that you remember it as a peak moment and want to repeat it over and over again implies that it has already become part of your experiencing structure. You want it always and then want to extend it for longer and longer periods of time.

All these things I observed myself. I did not learn about them from anyone. I saw them happen in my own life. I denied myself sex for twenty-five years pursuing spiritual goals. Then I suddenly realized, “Look, this is ridiculous. Celibacy has nothing to do with it. Sex is burning inside of me. Why the hell am I denying myself sex? Why the hell am I torturing myself?” That did not mean that I moved to the other extreme and practiced promiscuity as my way of life. Sex is violence but it is a necessary pain for this body.

All creative things are painful. The birth of a child is a very natural thing but to call it a traumatic experience and build up a tremendous structure of theories around it is something I am not concerned with. It cannot be a traumatic experience. To continue with what I was saying, that is why after all this violence you go to sleep. You feel tired. That is how nature functions. All creations in nature are like that. Volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, storms and floods are all part of nature. You cannot say that there is only chaos or that there is only order. Chaos and order, like birth and death, are simultaneous processes.

What I want to say is that, unfortunately, society, culture or whatever you want to call it has separated the sex activity and put it on a different level instead of treating it as a simple functioning of the living organism. It is a basic thing in nature. Survival and reproduction are basic things in the living organisms.

Look, anything we touch we turn into a problem and sex even more so because this is the most powerful drive there is. If you translate it and push it into an area where it does not really belong, namely the pleasure movement, we will then create problems. When once you create a problem, the demand to deal with that problem within that framework is bound to arise. That problem has to be solved by people, otherwise they become neurotic. They don't know what to do with themselves. Not only that but everything—God, truth, reality, liberation—is ultimate pleasure. We are not ready to accept that.

Sex has become a very powerful factor in our lives. That is why there is also a demand to put limitations on it by culture, first in the name of religion and then in the name of the family, law, war and a hundred other things. You talk of the sacredness of life and condemn abortion and then you go and kill millions of people in the name of your flag, in the name of patriotism. That is the way things are. You first create a tension. All this fantasy, all this romantic nonsense, is building up tension.
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It's really unfortunate that man got away with everything for centuries while society ignored women. Half the population of this planet was neglected, humiliated and treated as doormats. Even the Bible story tells you that the woman is made out of the rib of man. What preposterous nonsense! The other party is also responsible for that. You are praising the woman as a darling and she accepts that minor role. The woman is also to be blamed for it. I am not overly enthusiastic about all these feminist movements today. It is a revolt that really has no basis. It's more of a reaction.

One of the leaders of the feminist movement visited me and asked, “What do you have to say of our movement?” I said, “I am on your side but you have to realize one very fundamental thing. As long as you depend on man for your sexual needs, so long you are not a free person. If you use a vibrator for your sexual satisfaction, that is a different matter.” “You are very crude,” she said. I am not crude. What I am saying is a fact. As long as you depend upon something or somebody there is scope for exploitation.

There was a time when I believed that if women were to rule this world it would be a different story. We had a woman prime minister in India and a woman prime minister in Sri Lanka. There was a lady prime minister in England. But I tell you they are as ruthless as any others; in fact, more ruthless. This dream of mine was shattered when I saw that woman there in Jerusalem. So it is not a question of a man running the show or a woman running the show. It is the system that corrupts.

Now they are talking of hormones. They say that it is the hormones that are responsible for the violence. If that is so what do we do? Assuming for a moment that the advantage that we have had for centuries is not a culturally instigated thing but a hormonal phenomenon, you have to deal with it in a different way and not put that person on the couch, analyze him and say that his mother or his great-grandmother was responsible for his aggression. That is too absurd and silly. So we have to find some way.

The basic question which we have to ask for ourselves is, “What kind of a human being do you want?” Unfortunately, we have placed before ourselves the model of a perfect being. The perfect being is a god man or a spiritual man or an avatar or some such being. But forcing everyone to fit into that mold is the cause of our tragedy. It is just not possible for us all to be like that.

Once upon a time, the scepter and the crown, the church and the pontiffs, were all worshiped. Later, the kings revolted against that and then the royal family came to be admired and worshiped. Where are they now? Others have eliminated royalty and have created the office of the president. We are told that you should not insult the head of the state. Until yesterday he was your neighbor and now he becomes the president of your republic. Why do you have to worship a king or a president? The whole hierarchical structure, whether of the past or of the present, is exactly the same.

This has no value in the sense that whatever I am cannot be fitted into any value system. It is of no use for the world. It has no value for me and it has no value for the world. You may very well ask me the question, “Why the hell are we talking about all this?” Because you had some questions to throw at me and what I am doing is to put them in a proper perspective. I only say, “Look at it this way.”

I am not interested in winning you over to my point of view because I have no point of view and there is no way you can win me over to your point of view. It is not that I am dogmatic or any such thing. During a conversation like this somebody throws at me words like, “Oh, you are very this and very that.” “Alright,” I say, “This is my point of view. What the hell is yours?” It is also a point of view.

So how do you think these two points of view can be reconciled and for what purpose do you want to reconcile them? You feel good because you have won someone to your point of view. You use your logic and your rationality because you are more intelligent than I am. All this is nothing but a power play. You feel good like the people who claim to render service to mankind. That is the do-gooder's high. It is a self-centered activity. You shamelessly tell others that you are doing a social turn. It is just like any other high. If I admit this, living becomes very simple. You are doing it for yourself and you tell others and yourself that you are doing it for the benefit of others.

I believe that the problems of this planet can be solved through the help of the tremendous technology at our disposal. But the benefits that we have accrued through these advancements have not yet percolated to the level of all the people living on this planet. Technology has benefited only a microscopic number of people. When nature has provided us with such bounty, why is it that people are underfed? Why are they starving?

How do we change a human being and for what purpose? If any changes are necessary in human beings and if you want them to function differently by freeing them from all the things that the ethical, cultural, legal structure is failing to free them from and thereby create a different kind of people then probably only genetic engineering could come to our aid. Codes of ethics, morals and the legal structure are not going to help. They have not helped so far. They have not achieved anything.

Our pushing people into a value system is a very undesirable thing, you know. You want to push everybody into a value system. We never question that this value system which we have cherished for centuries may be the very thing that is responsible for our misery. But through the help of genetic engineering we may be able to free individuals from thieving tendencies, from violence, greed and jealousy.

If you are lucky enough to find yourself where there is no attempt on your part to get out of the trap then it may be a different story. But the fact of the matter is that the more you try to get out of the trap the more deeply you are entrenched in it. This is very difficult to understand. I tell all those who want to discuss with me the question of how to decondition yourself, how to live with an unconditioned mind, that the very thing that they are doing is conditioning them, conditioning them in a different way. You are just picking up a new lingo instead of using the usual one. You begin to use the new lingo and feel good, that's all. But this is conditioning you in exactly the same way. That's all it can do. The physical body is conditioned in such a way that it acts as intelligence. Conditioning is intelligence here. There is no need for you to think.

The conditioning of the body is its intelligence. That is the native intelligence of the body. I am not talking about instinct. The intelligence of the body is necessary for its survival. That intelligence is quite different from the intellect which we have developed. Our intellect is no match for that intelligence. If you don't think, the body can take care of itself in a situation where it finds itself in danger. Whenever the body is faced with danger it relies upon itself and not your thinking or your intellect. If, on the other hand, you just think then you are frightened. The fear makes it difficult for you to act.

People ask me, “How come you take walks with the cobras?” I have never done it with a tiger or any other wild animal but I don't think I would be frightened of them either. If there is no fear in you then you can take walks with them. Fear emits certain odors which the cobra senses. The cobra senses that you are a dangerous thing. Naturally, the cobra has to take the first step. It is one of the most beautiful creatures that nature has created. They are the most lovable creatures. You can take a walk with them and you can talk to them.

I don't know, once a friend of mine, a movie star, visited me in an ashram that I was staying in. She asked me whether it was all an exaggeration that cobras visited me and that I took walks with them. I said, “You wait till the evening or night and you will be surprised.” Later when we went for a walk at dusk not just one cobra but its wife, children and grandchildren, about fifteen of them, appeared out of nowhere. My guest ran away. If you try to play with it you are in trouble. It is your fear that is responsible for the situation you find yourself in. It is your fear that creates a problem for the cobra. Then it has to take the first step.

If the cobra kills you, you are only one person whereas we kill hundreds and thousands of cobras for no reason. If you destroy these cobras then the field mice will have a field day and you will find that they destroy the crops. If I find a cobra trying to harm a child or somebody I would tell him or tell the cobra to go away. You know, the cobra will go away. But you on the other hand have to kill. Why do you have to kill for no reason? The fear that they will harm us in the future is what is responsible for such acts but we are creating an imbalance in nature.

Because of the constant use of memory, which is thought, to maintain identity, many of the glands which are very essential for the functioning of the living organism have remained dormant, inert and inactive. The pineal gland is, like the thymus, one of the most important glands. That is why they called it the ajña chakra. If it is activated in a natural way it will take over and give directions to the functioning of this body without thought interfering all the time.

When I use the term natural state it is not a synonym for enlightenment, freedom or God-realization and so forth, not at all. When the totality of mankind's knowledge and experience loses its stranglehold on the body, the physical organism, then the body is allowed to function in its own harmonious way. Your natural state is a biological, neurological and physical state.

We function in a thought sphere and not in our biology. The separative thought structure which is the totality of man's thoughts, feelings, experiences and so on—what we call psyche or soul or self—is creating the disturbance. That is what is responsible for our misery. That's what continues the battle that is going on there all the time. This interloper, the thought sphere, has created your entire value system.

The body is not in the least interested in values, much less a value system. It is only concerned with intelligent, moment to moment survival and nothing else. Spiritual values have no meaning to it. When through some miracle or chance you are freed from the hold of thought and culture you are left with the body's natural functions and nothing else. It then functions without the interference of thought.

Nature does not use models. No two leaves are the same. No two faces are the same. No two human beings are the same. I say that no change is necessary, period. Your corrupt society has put into you this notion of change, that you are this and you must be that. Anything that insists that you be something other than what you in fact are is the very thing that is falsifying you and the world.

I somehow stumbled into this natural state on my own and I cannot under any circumstances transmit it to others. It has no social, political, commercial or transformational value to anyone. I do not sit upon platforms haranguing you, demanding that you change the world. As things are, you and the world, which are not two separate things, cannot be any different.

All these attempts on the part of man to change himself go entirely against the way nature is operating. That is why I am not interested. Sorry! Take it or leave it, it's up to you. Whether you praise me or insult me I am not in the least interested. It is your affair. I don't fit into the picture at all. I am only talking about it in response to your questions. You throw the ball and it bounces back. There is no urge in me to express myself to you or anyone else.

You want to make something of what I am saying, to use it somehow to further your own aims. You may say that it is for humanity's sake but really you don't give a damn about society at all. What I am saying cannot possibly be of any use to you or your society. It can only put an end to you as you know yourself. Neither is what I am saying of any use to me because I cannot set up any holy business and make money, it is just impossible for me. I have no interest in freeing you at all. I don't believe in altering you in any way or saving or reforming society or doing anything for mankind.

Society cannot be interested in what I am talking about. Because I am a direct threat to you individually as you know and experience yourself, I am also a threat to society. How can society possibly be interested in this sort of thing? Not a chance. Society is the sum of relationships and, despite what you may find agreeable to believe, all these relationships are sordid and horrible. This is the unsavory fact, take it or leave it. You cannot help but superimpose over these ugly relationships a soothing, fictitious veneer of loving, compassionate and harmonious relationships.

All you know is separateness and duration, space and time, which is the frame superimposed by the mind over the flow of life. But anything that happens in space and time is limiting the energy of life. What life is I don't know nor will I ever. You can say that life is this, that or the other and give hundreds of definitions but the definitions do not capture life. It's like a flowing river. It is only your fear of something coming to an end that is the problem. The ending of fear is the ending of you as you know yourself.

To me the question of whether God exists or not is irrelevant and immaterial. We have no use for God. We have used God to justify the killing of millions and millions of people. We exploit God. You don't want to read your own history. It's full of violence from the beginning to the end.
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