/lit/ - Literature

One professor had asked the question, “Can you define Indian philosophy?” And I simply answered him that “There is no such thing as Indian philosophy so the question of defining it does not arise. There is Western philosophy because the very word philosophy means a search for knowledge, a search for wisdom, a love for wisdom.” In India we don’t have any word which can be translated as philosophy….

The Indian word is darshan and its approach is totally different. It means an inquiry to see the truth. Darshan means seeing. It is not a question of thinking. A blind man can think about the light and can be a great philosopher, can propose hypotheses about light. In India there has never existed anything like philosophy. What has existed is seeing. We want to see the light, we don’t want to philosophize about it.

Religions of meditation have not had a single war. They have not even tried to convert anybody for the simple reason that there is no point; the other person is as divine as they are, he is just asleep and it is his right to sleep as long as he wants, and whenever he wants to wake up he will wake up.

Being awake themselves, they have found tremendous treasures of blissfulness, of ecstasy. They would like to share it, so they go on sharing it but there is no question of conversion.

Jainism, Buddhism, Taoism - these three religions are the religions of meditation. Their history is simply clean, no bloodshed.

Judaism, Christianity, Islam are the religions of prayer. Their whole history is full of blood and so ugly that to call it religious and to call these people religious looks like a mockery.

Only one religion, Hinduism, is left. Hinduism is a totally strange phenomenon, different from both the religions I have described. Hinduism is many religions together, it is not one religion. So you cannot characterize Hinduism with other religions which have a certain personality. Hinduism is a chaos. There are hundreds of religions under the umbrella of Hinduism, different from each other. Even the word Hinduism was not given by Hindus themselves.

There was no name in India. People were free to follow whatsoever they wanted to follow. That's why hundreds of small paths, having their own uniqueness, developed. There was no singular name for the whole complex, it was a crowd; but as India was invaded, the invaders gave it a name. And by coincidence, when you enter India you have to pass one of the biggest rivers of India, Sindhu, and the first invaders had no letter for s, the closest letter was h. So Sindhu became Hindu and they called the people who lived beyond the Hindu river "Hindus." They had to call them something - these people who are living beyond the Hindu river.

And you will be surprised that from Hindu the word traveled to other tribes, became Indu, became India; but it is the same Sindhu river which created all these names - Hindu, Indu, India.

Otherwise, India was totally a free country. Everybody was accepted, whatever he was doing and whatever he wanted to do. It was his right.

Just a few days ago I saw a film, a beautiful film on a Jewish family, a very orthodox Hasid family. The Jews don't accept Hasids as really equal to them, they are outcasts. The Hasids even today don't accept the nation of Israel, because they say, "Israel will be established when the messiah comes - but where is he?"

Their logic is perfect. This Israel is created by the politicians, not by the messiah. They don't accept this nation - and I agree with them that this is just a creation, a forced creation. It is not a nation that grew naturally; hence the Jews in Israel are going to be in trouble forever.

The Jews think that the Americans have done them a great favor by creating Israel; it is not so. They have done something worse than Adolf Hitler did, because this is going to be a constant problem. Israel had not existed for centuries; it was a Mohammedan country, Palestine, surrounded by Mohammedan countries.

Now just because you won the Second World War and you happened to be in control of the land of Palestine, you forced the creation of a nation. It is arbitrary. The people are Mohammedans, it is their country. Israel may have been, thousands of years before, the country of the Jews. But for thousands of years it has been a country of the Mohammedans, and suddenly you simply change the map. And surrounded by the whole Mohammedan world_ In the Middle East all the countries are Mohammedan.

This small country, Israel, is going to continuously suffer; and how long can America help it? And how long are American Jews going to pour their money into Israel? Sooner or later the truth of history will have to be accepted. If America had been really compassionate toward Jews, they should have given them an Israel in America. Oregon would have been perfectly good! I propose it: let Oregon be Israel. But what kind of compassion is this? - putting Jews there. They will never be able to live at ease, never.

So when I saw in this film the rejection of Israel by the Hasids_ Of course their reason is different. I have always been against the creation of Israel. I was a child when it was created but even then my first reaction was that this was absolutely idiotic.

>>15006311
The superman is a fascist idea. A new man is not superior in any way; a new man is really the most ordinary and simple man. Just try to understand one thing: that I want man to live naturally, ordinarily, without trying to become superior, without going into a pilgrimage toward paradise. Just here and now, and enjoy whatsoever life gives to you. Be creative, be intelligent - but this is not making you a superman. Nietzsche's superman created Adolf Hitler and the whole stupidity that followed. The new man is not the superman.

>>14939639
The next seven years are the maturing of sex energy. At the age of fourteen, one is sexually mature - the mind starts functioning in a totally different way; the body starts functioning in a totally different way. Fourteen is the biological age for man: he is now able to produce children. As far as biology is concerned, man has come of age.

That's why the psychological age of humanity remains at fourteen: because now biology takes no interest in your psychological development unless you yourself are interested. Nature has brought you up to that point for its own purposes, for reproduction; its work is done. It is now only up to you if you want to be a seeker, to grow psychologically, to grow in your awareness. If you want a spiritual experience then everything is left to you; now it is up to you. Nature has ended its work. And because nature has stopped, ninety-nine point nine percent of people stop with nature. They were not evolving, it was the push of nature that brought them up to the age of fourteen.

From fourteen to twenty-one man has the greatest sexual power, he reaches to the climax. And the problem society has created is that nature brings the climax of sexuality between fourteen and twenty-one, but the society wants you to study in the university up to the age of twenty-five, or twenty-seven if you are going to become a PhD. But by that time, after the twenty-first year, sexuality starts declining. People get married nearabout the age of thirty in the advanced countries. That is the wrong time to be married - your energy is declining. Marriage gives no satisfaction and it creates a thousand and one complexities, conflicts.

By the age of twenty-eight, you have come to a point where your sexual energies are at their lowest. At this age, and afterward, you cannot have sexual orgasm, you can have only sexual ejaculation - and those two things are totally different. Ejaculation is just like a sneeze: you were full of a certain quantity of semen that has to be thrown out of the body. Because the body is creating new semen and you have only a certain capacity to contain it, it has to be thrown out, but you don't have any orgasmic experience.

So your scriptures and your monks and your saints appear to be right, that you are unnecessarily wasting your energy. You feel weak, you feel the hangover the next day. You feel that it is unnecessary, and for this unnecessary thing you have to go through so much trouble - earning a livelihood for yourself, your wife, your children, because children are produced even without orgasmic experiences.

By the time you are thirty-five, if you have not been repressive you are finished; you are completely fed up. You start withdrawing all your desires, longings, ambitions.

Forty-two is the time_ It is as important as fourteen.