Absolute Tao

People come to me and they say that they have much anger in them and they would like not to have it any more. They have had enough of it and they have suffered much for it. Their whole life has become miserable. And they repent much, whenever they become angry they repent much. They try again and again not to be angry, they decide not to be angry, they put all their willpower into it, but after a few hours they have forgotten. Again something happens, a situation occurs, and they are angry. So what to do?

I tell them don’t repent, begin from there. Don’t repent, at least that much you can do. Be angry and be totally angry and don’t repent. And don’t feel sorry about it. You have been angry, accept the fact that you are a man with an angry nature. Okay. Be totally angry. Because that repentance is not allowing you to be totally angry, something is being withheld. That part which remains inside and has not been expressed becomes poisonous, a cancerous growth. It will color all your life, the whole of your life. Be angry, and when you are angry let the phenomenon be such that you can say, “I am anger, not angry.” Nobody is left behind to look at it – you are anger. It will become a fire, a hellfire.

I encourage you to ask – it is to bring your mind out. This will help you to calm down. My answering, in fact, is not any effort to answer your questions; it is an effort to kill them, to murder them. I am not a teacher. I may be a murderer but I am not a teacher. I am not teaching you anything, I am simply destroying your questions. Once all questions are destroyed your head is cut off – I have murdered you. Then you are completely silent, content, absolutely at home. No problem exists: you live life moment to moment, you enjoy, you delight in it moment to moment. No problem exists.

I am against metaphysics but I have to talk about metaphysics. My whole work is therapeutic. I am not a metaphysician. My work is like this: you have a thorn in your foot; I bring another thorn to take the first thorn out of your foot. The first thorn and the second thorn are similar, there exists no qualitative difference. When the first is out, helped by the second, we throw away both.

When I bring your questions out I’m not saying put my answers in the places left vacant by the questions – no. Throw away my answers also as you throw away your questions, otherwise my answers will create troubles for you. Don’t carry my answers, they are only therapeutic. They are like thorns: they can be used to bring other thorns out, then both have to be thrown away.

I would like you to come to a point where the mind stops questioning, but that you cannot do because you are full of questions. Release them, don’t suppress them. Be courageous. Even if you know that they are foolish, don’t hide them, because if you hide them you will never be able to get rid of them. Even if they are ridiculous – and all questions are – ask.

I’m not really answering your questions. Your questions cannot be answered. Your questions are like a person who is in a delirium, whose fever has gone very high. He is reaching one hundred eight, one hundred nine, one hundred ten, and he is in delirium. Then he says, “Everything is moving, the table is flying in the sky.” And he asks, “Where is this table going?” What to say to him? Whatsoever you say will be wrong, because the table is not going at all. And you cannot convince the man that the table is not going anywhere, it is just in the room, not moving at all. That will not convince him because you cannot convince anybody against his own experience.

And about spirituality Tao does not concern itself at all – if you ask Lao Tzu he will laugh. If you talk about spirituality he may slap your face, he may throw you out and say to you, “Go somewhere else. Don’t bring such stupid things to me.” Why? Because the moment you say spiritual you have divided life into the material and the spiritual – and he is for the total, the whole. The moment you say spiritual you have condemned something in the material, in the body, in the world. The very word spiritual carries a condemnation in it, a division.

You can see people who think they are spiritual; in their eyes you can see condemnation. Don’t go very near to them, they are poisonous; in their very breath there is danger and infection. Escape from them! Whenever you see a spiritual man coming towards you, run as fast as you can because he is ill. He is deeply neurotic, he is a schizophrenic because he has divided life into two, and life is an undivided whole; it cannot be divided.

Life is not soul, life is not body, life is both. You are not body and soul, you are bodysoul. That “and” is dangerous, drop it. I have seen people who have dropped the “and” but still when they think of bodysoul they cannot make it one word, they place a small hyphen instead of the “and” between the two. Even that hyphen is dangerous, drop that also. Make bodysoul one word. It is one. Make mattermind one; make this world and that world one. Let your godliness be here, down in the matter, and let your matter rise high and enter into your godliness. Then how can you talk about spirituality?

If you know how to live totally, you will also live the next moment totally. You will become more and more total every moment and growth will happen on its own. But if you are too concerned about growth, you miss this moment – and that is the only time one can grow in.

Scientists say that stars are also born and die. They live millions of years, but that is not the question. They are born – from where do they come? Right now many stars are being born. Just as many children are being born in maternity wards, many stars are being born. They are coming out of nothingness. No matter existed before; it was a vast space, then suddenly a nebula comes into being, smoke arises out of nothingness. The smoke starts gathering, condensing, starts becoming more and more solid. It takes millions of years. Just as it takes nine months for a child to be born, it takes millions of years for nothingness to become condensed and become a star. Then for millions of years the star remains alive, then it dies. Then again it disperses, by and by becomes less and less solid, becomes vapor, smoke. For millions of years it remains on its deathbed and then one day the star has disappeared. The place where the star once was now will be a black hole; it has become non-existential. Now, if you come across this black hole you will be simply absorbed. When the black hole absorbs a whole star – such a vast phenomenon!

Why is it called the nave of the wheel? – because it is just like the nave that exists in man. Just near your navel, the Japanese say there exists a point called hara. The hara is the black hole in your body. Japan has discovered, following Lao Tzu’s idea, that somewhere in the body death must have a home. Death doesn’t come from the outside, it is not an accident as people think. People say death is coming. No, death is not coming, death is growing within you; it is not that somewhere on life’s path you suddenly meet death. If it were so, then methods could have been devised to avoid death, to deceive it or not to go to that point where death waits for you, to bypass it or to send somebody else instead of you. There would be such a possibility if death were an outward phenomenon, happening to you from the outside. But death is carried within you like a seed. It comes into existence when you come into existence, in fact it existed even before you. You have come out of it.

Death must have a point within your body somewhere. So the Japanese searched the body to find out where the black hole exists. It is just below the navel. Two inches below the navel exists the point of death. It is a very subtle point. You must have heard the word hara-kiri; the word comes from hara. Hara means the black hole inside the body, and hara-kiri means suicide, to use that black hole.

The Japanese have become very efficient in killing themselves; nobody can kill themselves as easily as the Japanese, because they have found the exact point of death. With a small knife, they simply penetrate the hara; not even a single drop of blood comes out. The suicide is bloodless, and no pain at all is felt, no suffering – life just disappears. They have touched directly the black hole in the body, the point of death. If you cut your throat you will die, but there will be much suffering – because from the throat to the hara there is much distance; that distance death will have to travel. So if somebody’s head is cut off, the body remains alive for a few minutes; it goes on trembling and throbbing because you have not penetrated the hara directly. The Japanese can kill themselves so easily and so silently that when you see a man who has done hara-kiri, who has committed suicide, you will not see any sign of death on his face; his face will look as alive as ever. He has simply disappeared into the black hole with no struggle.

That hara in the body is non-being. It is absence, it is a nothingness. And the whole of Taoist practice is to be alert to the hara. They have created a different type of breathing for it; they call it belly breathing. You cannot find a more silent man than a Taoist who has been doing belly breathing and has become attuned to it.

Hindus say, “Aham brahmasmi”; Hindus say, “I am the God himself.” This saying comes from those who have reached the innermost point, who have passed the non-being part and who have come to the shrine where godliness is and you are not. But you are trying to escape from it, you don’t know how to use it. If you are empty and you have nothing to do you start doing something, anything. You put on the radio or the TV, you study the newspaper, you read a novel, you go to a hotel or you go to the club – you do many things. You can do anything whatsoever, but you cannot just do nothing. People have the idea that if you can’t do something relevant, then do something irrelevant, but don’t sit idle.

Sit empty. Just sitting empty one comes to the greatest encounter of life – one encounters one’s own death. If you can pass that, if you can pass that dancing, happy, enjoying it, if you can be nourished even by emptiness, then nothing can destroy you – you have attained to the eternal, the non-destructible, the deathless.

That’s why my insistence is always on a dancing meditation. It is not only an outward dance. The outward is nothing but a training for the inner. You dance outwardly, you go on dancing outwardly – by and by an inner dance arises and then you can dance inwardly and move toward the innermost center, the very core of being. Remember – death can be crossed only by dance, death can be won over only by a deep laughter. One can carry one’s cross only happily, blissfully, ecstatically. Sad, serious, it will become such a burden. Your own emptiness will become such a burden that you will want to escape from it, you will come out and move into the world.

Learn how to dance outwardly, just as a training, as a discipline, so that the inner dance becomes possible. It is a mood, a climate – dance is a climate, it has nothing to do with any activity of dancing. It is a climate, an inner bubbling of bliss, an inner throbbing of bliss. Only on that boat can the part which is very, very difficult for you to cross be crossed. Otherwise one escapes. The moment you face your inner emptiness you escape, you become scared to death. That’s why so many people never think about themselves. They think of the whole world, they worry for the whole world, but they never think about themselves, because that point seems to be touching a wound inside. They are afraid.

Don’t be afraid. The existence of things is good; you can profit by it, but it is not enough. Unless you learn now to be served by emptiness also, you have not learned the art, the total art. If you know only how to live, you know only half the art; if you know also how to die, then you know the whole art – and the whole art will make you whole.

The Upanishads say God is both far and near. Why? Because the nearer you go the farther away you feel he is. You almost touch him – and you feel far away. You almost penetrate him, you are almost in his heart, but still the mystery is not dissolved. On the contrary, the mystery has become more mysterious. And that is the beauty of it. Just think of a world where all mysteries are solved – how boring it would be. Just think of a world which is absolutely logical, rational, mathematical – how boring and monotonous it would be. Then there would be no possibility of poetry, there would be no possibility of romance, there would be no possibility of love, and there would be no possibility at all for any meditation.

Meditation is to enter into the mystery; love is to knock at the same door in a different way. Prayerfulness is also to allow the mystery, and not to struggle against it with the mind.

Everything is beautiful because everything is mysterious, and you cannot get to the bottom of it. Analyze if you want to analyze, but every analysis will create more problems, more mysteries; the answer, the final answer, cannot be found. And it is good that it cannot be found. If it is found then what? Then the very meaning and significance is lost.

I am not a philosopher, not in the least; I am just a poet at the most. I look at life and accept its facticity. If it makes two plus two four, okay. If it makes two plus two five, okay. If it makes two plus two three, okay. I have said yes to it. And this is what to be religious means to me – to say yes, it is so.

If you have been reading Gurdjieff’s books, particularly All and Everything, then you can become artful about how to find the true, how to sort out chaff from wheat. If you have not read All and Everything, it is a good beginning. First you should read All and Everything by George Gurdjieff and then you can read Carlos Castaneda’s books. It is a very difficult training to read Gurdjieff; in fact no more than a few dozen people exist in the world who have read his book All and Everything completely. It is difficult. It is a one thousand-page book and Gurdjieff is a master of hiding things. He goes on saying irrelevant things, useless things, spinning tales within tales – hundreds of pages and then one line of truth, but it is worth seeking, it is a diamond. A hundred pages of rubbish, but then comes a diamond – it is worth it.

If you can find the diamonds in Gurdjieff it will be a great training for you. And then you can find in Carlos Castaneda what is true and what is not true. Otherwise you can become a victim of a fiction. And I think many Americans particularly are roaming in Mexico in search of Don Juan. Foolish!