Sunday 10 March 2013

IS NOT THE WAY OF THE BIRDS BEYOND MORALITY?



IS NOT THE WAY OF THE BIRDS BEYOND MORALITY?

It is. Morality is only for mediocre people. Morality is a strategy of the priest to exploit the masses.
And it differs from place to place. What is moral to a Hindu may not be moral to a Christian, what is moral to a Christian may not be moral to a Jaina.
A Jaina saint was asking me, "Do you consider Jesus in the same category as Mahavira? Because he used to eat meat, drink wine - how can you say that he was a saint, or even a good man?"
But the Christian would ask, "How many orphanages did Mahavira open? How many poor people did he manage to help survive? How many schools for the aboriginals did he open? What kind of goodness, what kind of morality did he have? Standing naked, that's all that he did!"
For the Christian, Mahavira cannot be considered a saint. For the Jainas, Mohammed cannot be considered to be a saint - he had sixteen wives! Now this is not right for a gentleman, what to say about a saint. Only Hindus will be a little less disturbed, because Krishna had sixteen thousand wives; Mohammed is just a poor fellow.
And Mohammed at least married those sixteen women. Krishna had married only one woman; the rest were other people's wives. Whoever he found to be beautiful, his soldiers would force her into his palace. He never considered whether they had children, a husband, old parents to look after - it did not matter. Anything that he liked ... And Hindus say that he is the perfect incarnation of God. Of course he must be perfect, because I don't think anybody else can defeat him. People have tried. The Nizam of Hyderabad, just forty years ago when he died, had five hundred wives. But five hundred is not much compared to sixteen thousand.
Who is going to decide what is moral and what is immoral? The Bird's Way does not divide into morality and immorality, into goodness and badness. It simply says that the decisive factor is your awareness: if your awareness acts in a certain way, that is moral for you; it does not matter what others say. You should be satisfied that you are acting out of awareness. Then whatever you do is right - right for you. But if you are unconscious, as people are, and go on doing things which others are doing, copying, imitating ... They may become saints, but deep down they are simply actors.
They may do good, but their goodness is just a practice. Not their awareness, not their intrinsic being, blossoming into their acts.
The Birds' Way is beyond good, beyond bad. And the way of Buddha is the Way of the Birds. It does not leave any footprints behind. Every bird is free in the sky to move in any direction. No bird leaves any footprints for other birds. It is only the human beings who write scriptures for others to follow. They not only become decisive for themselves, they become slave-creators. Everybody has to follow them; they don't want you to be conscious of what you are doing. They want you to do it because they have decided what is right.
But remember, in every disease the same medicine will not do. And in every time, in every age, the same criterion will not do. And with every individual, other than his own consciousness there is no criterion. Nobody can decide for anybody else.
This is simply the meaning of freedom. The Bird's Way is the way of freedom. It is the individual as the ultimate value.
Before we enter into our daily meditation, just to take away your seriousness ... and the bamboos are waiting so silently for your laughter.
Nurse Ratchett notices a mental patient with his ear close to the wall, listening intently.
As she approaches, the looney holds up a warning finger and says, "SHHHH! Be quiet!" Then he beckons Nurse Ratchett to come closer. "Listen here," says the mad guy, pointing to a spot on the wall.
Ratchett listens for some time and then says, "I can't hear anything."
"I know," says the patient, "and it has been like this all day!"
Paddy decides to go and visit his old friend, Fergus MacDuffy, who owns a pub in the woods called The Old Log Inn. But when Paddy arrives, Fergus is shocked to see that he has been beaten up.
His eyes are swollen and he has a bloody nose and mouth. "My god!" cries Fergus, "what happened to you?"
"Well," replies Paddy, "on my way here I got lost in the woods, I did not know where I was going.
Then I saw a couple making love under a tree. So I went over to them, and all I asked was, 'How far is The Old Log Inn?'" Chuck Farley goes out carousing and gambling all night. He drinks a few too many bottles of rum and simply never makes it home. At dawn the next morning, Chuck is aching with a hangover and has no idea where he is or how he got there. He looks over at a man and a woman sleeping in his bed. The woman looks something like his wife and he wonders how he is going to get out of this.
Finally, after stumbling out of the building exhausted, he hits upon an idea and grabs a nearby pay phone. When his wife answers, Chuck shouts, "Don't pay the ransom, honey. I have escaped!"
osho

1 comment:

  1. Regarding the details mentioned about Lord Krishna, what nonsensical propaganda/misrepresentation of facts are you engaging in. Krishna did not marry anyone else's wife.

    He had 8 of His own wives, & the rest 16,100 were those women who were pure but would have been left unacceptable & unsheltered by anyone & everyone in society, had Lord Krishna not given them refuge under Himself - that too on being asked/beseeched by them only, for they were kidnapped & held under captivity of a certain demon from whom Lord Krishna only had saved them & objections to them on the question of their purity were an absolute possibility to be faced by them, esp. in the society of those times.

    So just for the sake of drawing comparisons between the Prophets of the different religions that helps you prove a minor point - about your essay, such distortions of facts should not be portrayed which can be so misguiding, esp for those unacquainted with the relevant facts.

    It has been rightly said that religion is far beyond just an academic exercise. Once you try to go beyond the mere facts of Lord Krishna's life & activities & realize the symbolism & representations of deeper realities of the psychology of the soul (microcosm) & the cosmic reality (macrocosm) you'll appreciate them to no end.

    Meanwhile, i invite you to search for the facts yourself - there are enough resources available online - to be able to realize the folly of your own expression, rather distortion of facts, & rectify them asap. If editing your essay is not possible then pls take it down & publish a fresh one in its place but pls don't distort facts in such terrible proportions - only to enable it to suit a mere intellectual argument even if it intends to support a relevant, or a correct, issue.

    Pls justify truths with truths, don't use un-truths to justify your small issues. They may contradict much larger truths in the process that even the author of this piece, apart from the wider world at large, might just become too uncomfortable to rest easy with.

    I hope good sense prevails.

    ReplyDelete