LAST NIGHT a man breathed his last. Today people mourn at his door. At such moments a memory of an event in my childhood arises in my mind. It was my first visit to the burning ghats. The funeral pyre had been lit, and the people were chatting in small groups. The village poet said, "I am not afraid of death. Death is a friend." Since then I have heard this same assertion in different forms from different people. I have also looked into the eyes of those who say this and have found that these fearless words arise from fear.
Nothing changes just by giving death beautiful names. In fact, the fear is not of death, the fear is of the unfamiliar. What is unknown creates fear in us. It is necessary to become acquainted with death. This acquaintance brings one to fearlessness. Why? -- because it is through acquaintance that one comes to know that there is no death to what is.
It is only the personality, which we have taken to be our "I", that shatters, that dies. It shatters because it is not. It is only a combination, a union of a few elements. As this union disintegrates, the personality shatters. This is what death is. Hence, as long as personality is taken to be one and the same as the true self, there is death.
Move deeper from the personality, and as you arrive at the true self, the deathless is attained.
The path of this journey, the penetration from the surface of personality to the core of the self, is religion.
It is in samadhi, enlightenment, that acquaintance with death happens. Just as darkness ceases to exist the moment the sun rises, so does death when samadhi is attained.
Death is neither an enemy nor a friend, it simply does not exist. One needs neither to fear it nor not fear it. One has only to know it. Ignorance of it is fear, knowing it is fearlessness.
I went to a temple. The crowd of worshippers was engaged in worshipping the deity. The devotees were bowing down before the idols. An elderly man who had come with me said, "Nowadays people do not have faith in religion. So very few people visit the temples."
I said, "Where is the religion in a temple? What a self- deceiver man is! He deceives himself by taking as gods the idols created by his own hands. He satisfies himself by taking the scriptures -- the product of his own mind -- as truth." Whatsoever is the creation of man's own hands and mind is not religion. The idols sitting in the temples are not images of gods but of man himself. And what is written in the scriptures is but a reflection of man's own desires and thinking, not the truth seen within. It is not possible to express the truth in words.
It is not possible to have an idol of truth, because truth is boundless, infinite and formless. It has no form, no name, no attribute. The moment it is given a form it disappears.
In order to attain it, all idols and all physical conceptions have to be dropped; the whole cobweb of self-fabricated fallacies has to be swept away. That uncreated truth reveals itself only when man's consciousness is liberated from the prison which his own mind has created .
We should drop our obsession with the form so that the formless may enter. The moment the manifest leaves our minds, the unmanifest appears.
It was there already, but it was hidden beneath the idols and the tangible. Just as we cannot see the empty space in a room stuffed with things -- remove those things and the empty space is revealed; it has always been there.
Truth too is like this. Empty the mind and it is there.
I HEARD a discourse this morning. It happened unintentionally. A so-called saint was speaking and I was passing that way when I heard him say, "The way to be religious is to be God-fearing. Only one who fears God is religious. It is fear that brings one to love God. There is no loving without fear. Love is impossible in the absence of fear."
Usually, those who are called religious are religious because of fear. Those who are called moral are also bound to fear.
Kant has said, "Even if there is no God, still it is necessary to accept him." Perhaps that is because the fear of God makes people good.
When I hear such statements, I cannot help laughing. Perhaps nothing else is so mistaken and untrue.
Religion has nothing to do with fear. Religion is born out of fearlessness.
It is impossible for love to co-exist with fear. How can fear give birth to love? Out of fear, only the pretense of love can be born. And what else but non-love can exist behind a counterfeit love? Love born out of fear is an impossibility.
Hence, religiousness and morality based on fear are false, not true. They weigh down, rather than elevate, the energy of the soul. Religion and love cannot be imposed on oneself, they have to be kindled and aroused within.
Truth is not founded on fear. Fear does not support the truth, it is opposed to it. The foundation-stone of truth is fearlessness.
The true flowers of religion and love can be grown only in the soil of fearlessness. Those planted in the soil of fear can only be artificial.
The realization of God happens only in fearlessness. Or to put it more correctly, the realization of fearless consciousness is the realization of God. The moment all fear disappears from the mind, what happens in that moment is the encounter with truth.
