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- Drugs, alcohol, or other sorts of
intoxicants, they have always been used by religious people. But
through them you never move into the reality. Through them you fall
into a torpor, into a coma. And in that coma you can have dreams.
- In Bali there is an old saying: If you are
happy you can always learn to dance. But basically man is not happy.
He is so unhappy that just to forget his unhappiness he goes on
drinking alcoholic beverages, uses drugs -- marijuana, hashish and
opium -- just to forget, at least for a few hours, his miserable
state. And there is no reason at all to be miserable. In fact,
misery should be very exceptional; happiness should be simply
natural.
- It is pure awareness which does the same
work that is expected by people through intoxicating drugs.
Intoxicating drugs remove symptoms; awareness removes the very
cause. Drugs simply give you a few hours of forgetfulness, and again
the misery is there -- and with a vengeance, because it has to wait
for six hours; it becomes more intense. Awareness cuts the very root
of being miserable, in anxiety, in anguish. And because it cuts the
very roots, after you have come down from the heights of awareness
you don't find misery -- you find a peace, a silence, a very mild
sweetness and a very subtle fragrance, left behind the tide, the
tidal wave that had come and overtaken you.
- All religions have been against drugs. The
reason is this: if you become an addict then the whole possibility
of your higher dimension, of your higher unity, of achieving
buddhahood, of becoming a christ, is lost. They are not against
drugs, in fact. They are not concerned with drugs, they are
concerned with your higher unity. If you start falling backwards in
your mind, and if you become attuned with the lower unity of nature,
then who will evolve? Then you have frustrated the very effort of
nature through you. It was going to achieve God -- and you are
satisfied with a drug.
- Take the question of drugs. I am not in
support of drugs, but I am not against them either. I am not in
support of Timothy Leary, I don't think that you can attain samadhi
by drugs -- about that I am absolutely certain. No one has ever
attained samadhi by- drugs, notwithstanding what Aldous Huxley and
others say. It is too cheap, and through chemicals there is no
possibility to attain the ultimate. But I am aware that drugs can
help in a certain way. They can give you a glimpse; they cannot give
you the reality, but they can give you a glimpse of the reality, and
that glimpse can become a breakthrough. That glimpse can uproot you
from your past and can send you on a search for the real. If you
have seen God, even in your dream, your whole life will be
transformed. Of course, the God in a dream is a dream, but the next
morning you will start looking into the world -- where can you find
this phenomenon that has happened in your dream?
Many people start their journey towards God, truth, samadhi, because
they have had a certain glimpse somewhere. Maybe through drugs,
maybe through sexual orgasm, maybe through music, or sometimes
accidentally. Sometimes a person falls from a train, is hit on the
head and he has a glimpse. I'm not saying make a method of that! But
I know this has happened. A certain centre in the head is hit by
accident and the person has a glimpse, an explosion of light. Never
again will he be the same; now he will start searching for it. This
is possible. The probable is no longer probable, it has become
possible. Now he has some inkling, some contact. He cannot rest now.
I am not for drugs, I am not against drugs. But still, in this
community, in my commune, drugs cannot be allowed. Politicians have
never been very intelligent and one should not expect too much from
them. In fact, only stupid people become interested in politics. If
they were intelligent they would not be in politics at all.
So just for some ordinary, small thing the whole movement cannot be
destroyed. That would be foolish. After a hundred years my attitude
that drugs cannot be allowed in the Ashram will be thought
anti-revolutionary. Naturally, I know it is anti-revolutionary. So
let it be here on the record.
- The modern mind is in much hurry. It wants
instant methods for stopping the mind. Hence, drugs have appeal. Mm?
-- you can force the mind to stop by using chemicals, drugs, but
again you are being violent with the mechanism. It is not good. It
is destructive. In this way you are not going to become a master.
You may be able to stop the mind through the drugs, but then drugs
will become your master -- you are not going to become the master.
You have simply changed your bosses, and you have changed for the
worse. Now the drugs will hold power over you, they will possess
you; without them you will be nowhere.
Meditation is not an effort against the mind. It is a way of
understanding the mind. It is a very loving way of witnessing the
mind -- but, of course, one has to be very patient. This mind that
you are carrying in your head has arisen over centuries, millennia.
Your small mind carries the whole experience of humanity -- and not
only of humanity: of animals, of birds, of plants, of rocks. You
have passed through all those experiences. All that has happened up
to now has happened in you also. In a very small nutshell, you carry
the whole experience of existence. That's what your mind is. In
fact, to say it is yours is not right: it is collective; it belongs
to us all.
- Yoga has been used to kill the mind;
breathing can be used to kill the mind. There are rhythms of breath,
subtle vibrations of breath, which can be very, very drastic to the
delicate mind. The mind can be destroyed through them. These are old
tricks. Now the latest tricks are supplied by science: LSD,
marijuana, and others. More and more sophisticated drugs will be
available sooner or later.
I am not in favour of stopping the mind. I am in favour of watching
it. It stops of its own accord -- and then it is beautiful When
something happens without any violence it has a beauty of its own,
it has a natural growth. You can force a flower and open it by
force; you can pull the petals of a bud and open it by force -- but
you have destroyed the beauty of the flower. Now it is almost dead.
It cannot stand your violence. The petals will be hanging loose,
limp, dying. When the bud opens by its own energy, when it opens of
its own accord, then those petals are alive.
- The really religious person is one who has
become aware of the futility of desiring, of the impossibility of
having anything here in this world or thereafter in the other world.
You can only possess yourself. You can only be the master of your
own being. If you are not trying for that.... It is hard work, there
is no shortcut to it; notwithstanding what Timothy Leary says, there
is no shortcut to it. Acid, drugs, are not going to help you there.
That is very cheap, it is very cunning. It is a chemical deception.
You want to get into the world of your innermost being without any
effort. It is a dishonesty. Without earning it you want to possess
it.
- Acid and drugs have always lured man. It
is nothing new. It is as old as man himself -- in the Vedas they
used to have SOMA. In India they have continued to use drugs down
the centuries -- charas and ganga and opium -- they have tried
everything. Now the madness is spreading all over the world. Now
people are trying to find a shortcut -- a very easy and cheap thing
-- that you can possess, that you can just swallow. Samadhi cannot
be swallowed. And God is not a chemical phenomenon; you have to earn
it, only then can you have it.
- intoxicating drugs proves only one thing:
man, in his ordinary personality, is living in despair. He wants for
a few hours at least to forget all about the worries and the
problems and the anxieties, and there seems to be no other way. What
do you want to protect your person for? Your person is your problem.
And if you are intelligent enough, and you can find some presence
where your person starts melting and disappearing -- without any
intoxication, without any drugs -- then can you conceive of a
greater blessing? Let the person disappear; it is simply a burden, a
torture, a pain in the neck for which there is no medicine.
- Unless you give them a higher
consciousness which can solve these problems -- then there is no
need to forget anything -- unless you give them such a deep
alertness and awareness that they can see the root cause of their
misery, and they don't want just to cover it with alcohol but want
to cut it from the roots... Except meditation there is no way that
intoxicant drugs can be prohibited.
- I am against all intoxicants, against all
drugs. They don't help; they only help you to postpone problems. I
would like to really solve your problems. I have solved mine, and
the problems are the same, more or less. I can bring you closer to
me so you can feel my heart and you can see through my eyes and you
can feel what has happened. And that feeling, that taste, will
become a magnetic pull on you.
- Drugs are a deception. They give you a
feeling which is imaginary, hallucinatory, they give you a feeling
that you are back, part of nature. People come to me; they say, "I
have been on a drug trip, and it was beautiful, and so many things
happened." Nothing happened! -- because after it you are again the
same, even worse. It only releases dreams in you, but you become so
unconscious that you take the dreams to be real. You are not aware,
so you cannot see whether this is a dream or a reality.
- Our meditations are nothing but drugs --
perfect drugs, without any chemicals in them. A man who can meditate
will not be able to enjoy the drug, any drug. Because, his
meditation gives him so much peace and the drug will disturb it.
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