Come Follow To You Vol 3.doc

come follow to you, vol 3reflections on jesus of nazarethtalks given from 11/12/75 am to 20/12/75 amenglish discourse series10 chaptersyear published:originally the series was published as come follow me, vols 1 + 2. later in 1991 republished as four volumes titled come follow to you.come follow to you, vol 3chapter #1chapter title: jesus is like a wilderness: raw, but alive,11 december 1975 am in buddha hallarchive code: 7512110shorttitle: foll301audio: yesvideo: nolength: 87 minsmatthew 1354 and when he was come into his own country, he taught them in their synagogue, insomuch that they were astonished, and said, whence hath this man this wisdom, and these mighty works?55 is not this the carpenters son? is not his mother called mary? and his brethren, james, and joses, and simon, and judas?56 and his sisters, are they not all with us? whence then hath this man all these things?57 and they were offended in him. but jesus said unto them, a prophet is not without honour, save in his own country, and in his own house.matthew i422. jesus constrained his disciples to get into a ship, and to go before him unto the other side.23 and. he went up into a mountain apart to pray: and when the evening was come, he was there alone.24 but the ship was now in the midst of the sea, tossed with waves: for the wind was contrary.25 and in the fourth watch of the night jesus went unto them, walking on the sea.26 and when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were troubled, saying, it is a spirit; and they cried out for fear.27 but straightway jesus spake unto them, saying, be of good cheer; it is i; be not afraid.28 and peter answered him and said, lord, if it be thou, bid me come unto thee on the water.29 and he said, come. and when peter was come down out of the ship, he walked on the water, to go to jesus.30 but when he saw the wind boisterous, he was afraid; and beginning to sink, he cried, saying, lord, save me.31 and immediately jesus stretched forth his hand, and caught him, and said unto him, o thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?i am a drunkard. you may believe it or not, but i am a drunkard. you can look into my eyes and you can see it - i. am drunk with jesus. and jesus is a wine; he is not a man, hes an intoxication. and once you have tasted of him, then nothing of this world will ever be meaningful to you. once the meaning from the beyond enters into your life, this whole world becomes futile, immaterial, insignificant.religion is a sort of intoxication. this has to be understood because without a deep intoxication, your life will never have any meaning. it will remain superficial prose and will never become a poem. you will walk but you will never be able to dance, and unless you dance you have missed. unless you dance with such abundance, with such forgetfulness that you disappear in it, that the dancer is lost and only the dance remains. only then. and only then will you be able to know what life is.i remember: once alexander the great asked diogenes, you are so learned, you know so much. cant you tell me something about god, what god is?diogenes waited for a moment and then said, give me one days time.alexander came the next day but again diogenes said, give me two days time. and it happened again, and he said, give me three days time, and then four days and then five days, and then six days and the whole week was gone.alexander was annoyed and said, what do you mean? if you dont know the answer you should have told me before. if you know, then what is the explanation for the delay?diogenes said, that moment you asked me, i thought that i knew. but the more i tried to catch hold of it, the more it became elusive. the more i thought about it, the farther away it was. right now, i dont know anything, and the only thing i can say to you, said diogenes, is that those who think they know god, they know not.god can be known only when you are not. this is the meaning when i say, until you become a drunkard - so that your ego is lost. i am a drunkard, drunk with jesus. and when i will be talking to you about jesus, it is not about jesus. i am not a theologian, not a christian, not a scholar. theologians talk about, they go round and round, they beat around the bush. i am not going to talk about jesus, i am going to talk jesus. and when i talk about jesus, it is not that i am talking about him, rather, he talks himself. i give him way, i become a passage. all that i do is that i dont hinder him. that is the only way to talk about jesus or buddha or krishna. and when i will be talking jesus i will not talk about christ. jesus is real, christ is a principle. jesus is concrete, christ is abstract. jesus is a man like you and me, of blood and bone. his heart beats. he laughs, he cries, he loves, he lives.christ is a dead concept, bloodless; there is no heart beating there. christianity is concerned with christ, i am not concerned with christ. the wordchrist is beautiful, but corrupted, contaminated, polluted. the whole beauty of it has been destroyed. whenever a word is used by theologians it loses meaning and purity and innocence - then it is no more virgin. jesus is still virgin, christ is corrupted. christ is a concept, jesus is reality, concrete reality.look! i love human beings, but not humanity. humanity does not exist. only concrete human beings exist - someone here, someone there, but it is always someone. humanity is an empty word. and just like that is christ. jesus exists, sometimes in gautam the buddha, sometimes in mohammed the prophet, sometimes in krishna the fluteplayer - somewhere here, somewhere there, but it is always a concrete phenomenon. christ is abstract. it exists only in the books of philosophy and theology. christ has never walked on the earth. or, we can say it another way: christ is the son of god, jesus the son of man.let me talk about jesus the son of man, because only the son of man is real, and only the son of man can grow and become the son of god. only man can grow and become god, because man is the seed, the source; god is the flowering. god does not exist anywhere. when you flower, god comes into existence - it comes into existence and disappears. it comes into existence and disappears. when buddha was here, god existed. when jesus was here, god existed. when jesus disappears, god disappears - just as when a flower disappears, it disappears. god is not somewhere, always existing, otherwise god will never be fresh and young - it will gather too much dust, it will become dirty. it comes into existence whenever a man realises his sins, whenever a man really exists. whenever a man exists in totality, god exists in those rare moments. so when you come and ask me, where is god? i cannot show you. unless you have proof of him in your own being, he will not be there. until you become him he is not. everybody has to realise him in his own innermost shrine, in his own being. you carry him as a seed. it is up to you to allow it to grow and become a great tree.so i will not be talking about christ, but about jesus. let christ be imprisoned in the churches - that is the right place for christ to exist. i would like jesus to enter your hearts. forget christ, remember jesus. but just the opposite has happened. people have forgotten jesus and their minds have been hammered continuously for two thousand years, hammered to remember christ. christ cannot transform you, because there exists no bridge between you and christ. then there exists an unbridgeable abyss. but with jesus you are close. you can call jesus brother, but you cannot call christ brother. and until you feel a deep brotherhood, a bridge, how can jesus be of any help to you? jesus is tremendously beautiful his beauty has a dimension of its own. buddha is beautiful, but jesus is totally different from buddha. in buddha a different type of silence was incarnated.l have heard about a chinese emperor. he had two great painters in his court, and there was always rivalry. they were always fighting and competing, and it was almost impossible to decide who was the greater. both were masters of their art. one day the emperor said, now you do one thing: you both paint on one theme so that it can be decided who is the greater, and the theme isrest. the first painter, of course, chose a very obvious subject: he painted a very silent lake, far away in the mountains, lone, still, not even a ripple on the surface. just looking at that painting you would feel sleepy. the other painter tried something absolutely opposite: he painted a thundering waterfall. for miles the white foam of it. and just near the waterfall a very fragile, delicate birch tree, the branches bowing down, touching the foam, and on the birch the small nest of a robin, and the robin sitting on the nest, with closed eyes, almost wet. the first is a non-dynamic silence: more like death, less like life. the opposite doesnt exist in it. the rest has no tension in it; the rest is more like absence than like presence. the second is a dynamic concept:rest, but not dead. it is alive, throbbing. the thunder, the waterfall, the tremendous activity, and the nest, and the robin sitting there, silent.jesus is like the second painting, buddha comes closer to the first painting. of course it is very silent, but the opposite is missing - and without the opposite, music cannot be created. buddha has a single note, he is not an orchestra.jesus has opposite notes meeting, merging and creating a harmony, a symphony. buddha is silent, without revolution. jesus is silent, with a deep rebellion around him. this has to be remembered. only then you will understand how to penetrate into his very heart. why did jesus become so significant, why did he appeal to so many people all through these centuries? - he has something of the wild in him. he is not a garden, he is a wilderness. he is raw, not refined. you touch him and you will know. you feel him and you will know. buddha is very cultured, very refined. he has something of the court of a king. jesus comes from a village, a carpenters son, uneducated, uncultured. he is like a wilderness: raw, but alive, rebellious. hence, the appeal; hence he has touched millions of peoples hearts. you can understand him. he is more than you but you are in him. you cannot understand buddha. he is more than you but you are not there. with jesus a bridge exists.now these sutras.and when he was come into his own country, he taught them in their synagogue, insomuch that they were astonished, and said, whence hath this man this wisdom and these mighty works?is not this the carpenters son? is not his mother called mary? and his brethren, james, and joses, and simon, and judas? and his sisters, are they not all with us? whence then hath this man all these things? and they were offended in him.nobody was so much offended in buddha, ever; nobody was so much offended in lao tzu, ever; nobody was offended, as people were offended with jesus. why? a buddha is a faraway peak. if you cannot understand him, how can you be offended with him? if you cannot understand him, how can you argue with him? - he is so far away, so beyond. at the most, all you can do is to worship him. so buddha was worshipped and jesus crucified. wherever buddha moved nobody was offended in him. either people could not understand him - but then you could not be offended - or people could understand him, but then they understood that he was the very essence of the upanishads, the very incarnation of the vedas. he is all essential tradition. there was no question of being offended in him.with jesus people were offended, he was just like them. they could not understand him. they said, is not this the carpenters son? buddha was a son of a great emperor, mahavir also, krishna also, ram also. all the great indian incarnations came from royal families. jesus is the first man who comes from a poor house. nobody had ever known him. and if jesus had not been born, nobody would ever have heard about the family. buddha was already established with the family name, with a long tradition and heritage, a long lineage of prestige and power. jesus comes from a powerless poor family, almost a beggar. people could not understand - from where comes his power? from where comes this wisdom? is not this the carpenters son? is not his mother called mary? the people wondered - he belongs to us and talks about god. he belongs to us and says,i am the son of god. he belongs to us, he was working in his fathers workshop and suddenly, what has happened to him? they were offended in him, the ego was offended.buddha was always great. even if he had not become enlightened, he would have been worshipped like an emperor. people had always touched his feet. he was always great and beyond them. when he moved amidst the people and renounced his kingdom, he became even greater because he had renounced his kingdom. people can understand the language of money and they cannot understand any other language. they worship you if you have money, they worship you if you renounce money. but they understand only one language the language of money. if you dont have anything, they dont bother about you. and if you dont have anything how can you renounce, what can you renounce?this is one of the most important things to understand about the indian mind, the so-called indian religious mind. even that mind can understand only the language of money. mahavir renounced. the jain scriptures go on relating how much he renounced: how many elephants, how many horses, how many chariots, how much gold, how many diamonds. they go on and on and on. why? why have these accounts been kept? and the reality is that he was never a very great king. the kingdom was very small, not more than a small district. and his father was not more than a collector of a district, not more than that. because in mahavirs time india was divided into two thousand kingdoms, so it could not be very great. and it is almost impossible that he had so many elephants and so many chariots and so much gold, it is exaggeration. but people understand only the language of money. they exaggerate, because that is the only way to prove that mahavir was very great. had he been the son of a carpenter, nobody would have ever bothered about him.jesus is a revolution in the world of religion. he is the first poor man who declared, i am the son of god. he is the first poor man who dared to declare, i am a prophet, a teerthankera, an avatar. never before had such a thing happened in the history of man. he opened the way for many others to follow. then mohammed could declare, and then came kabir, and sena, and nanak, and dadu, and many more. jesus opened the gate - that even a poor man who had nothing to renounce, can renounce, because the real renunciation is not of wealth, but of the ego. the real renunciation is not of wealth, let me repeat it, but of the ego. it is not a question of renouncing what you have, it is a question of renouncing what you are. you can have much and you can renounce that. but if the ego continues - and it can continue - it can be fulfilled by having much, it can be fulfiled by renouncing much. and if the ego is there, you remain ordinary, you remain superficial.and they were offended in him. had he been an emperors son, they would have fallen at his feet. but he was just an ordinary carpenters son and everybody in the village knew about him.but jesus said unto them, a prophet is not without honour, save in his own country, and in his own house.a great insight. why has it happened so many times, that people who are closest always misunderstand? we should have expected just the contrary, that the people of jesus village would understand him first. before anyone else would understand him, the people of jesus house, family, relatives, would understand him first. but it doesnt happen. why? a deep insight into the human ego is needed to understand it. with those who are close to you, it is very difficult to believe that they had gone beyond and above you. if somebody else who is not close to you goes beyond you, maybe you are not bothered - he is so far away, the competitive ego does not arise. but if your own brother goes and you are left behind - and you were born to the same parents, you lived in the same house, and you were educated in the same school; and your own brother goes so far away - your ego is hurt. then what have you been doing? you feel defeated, you feel a loser. then the easiest way is to deny that he has gone beyond, then the easiest way is to prove that he is just as ordinary as you are ordinary. the easiest way is to disprove his claim, to deny.a prophet is not without honour, save in his own country, and in his own house. i would like to add one thing more: and in his own time.you worship buddha now, very easily. no problem arises because there is a distance of twenty-five centuries. you worship mahavir. all over the world millions go on praying to jesus. these same people crucified him. they are the same people who were offended in him, who denied him. what has happened? - a distance of two thousand years. now, your ego doesnt feel offended, you dont have any competition with him; maybe he was really a son of god. but he offended his own contemporaries. he was talking one day in a village and somebody asked do you believe in abraham, the founder of judaism? jesus said something which has been offending jews since then. jesus said, abraham? before abraham was, i am. let me repeat it in another way: if christians come to me and ask, do you believe in jesus? and i tell them, before jesus was, i am, they will be offended. they will never be able to forgiv