Sarmad

“All so-called great thinkers and philosophers and theologians are stargazers. they don’t see that which is close; their eyes are fixed far away on an imaginary God, a paradise beyond death.

I don’t care at all about your gods, and I don’t care at all what happens to you after your death. My concern is what happens to you right now, to your consciousness. Because that will always be with you, beyond death, wherever you are. Your consciousness will carry the light that divides the wrong from the right.

Anything that makes you more alert, more conscious, more peaceful, more silent, more celebrating, more festive, is good.

Anything that makes you unconscious, miserable, jealous, angry, destructive, is wrong.

It is true that the suffering and misery of the world are enormous and at the same time, the world is so beautiful, so divine. What is creating this contradiction? The contradiction does not exist in the world itself, the contradiction exists in man’s mind. Man has introduced misery and suffering in the world; otherwise, the world was absolutely innocent. And why does the mind introduce so much misery and suffering? There are reasons that need to be understood.

The mind has been trained for millenia to be more efficient, to be more competitive, to be more ambitious. These things look very innocent in themselves, but they have produced as a by-product the whole misery and suffering that you see around you. All our cultures, religions, political ideologies, and more important, our educational systems are based on a fundamental principle, and that is, how to be more successful than others.

A small child has no idea what will be the outcome of all this. But the moment you start struggling for success, which has almost become the very aim of life, you are creating suffering all around. Your ambitions are not so innocent - because they give you inclinations to be richer than others, to be more powerful than others, to be more prestigious than others... The whole thing is based on comparison with others.

And to be rich, you need an ocean of poverty around you; otherwise, you cannot be successful as a rich man. The poverty of millions is an absolute necessity. To be successful in gaining power, you have to destroy millions of people - their pride, their dignity, their very humanity. You have to reduce them to different kinds of slavery - economic, political, psychological, spiritual. Only then can you be in power...

Our education is immensely destructive. In the name of education, it is miseducation. It needs to be completely changed and transformed.

Things like ambition, success, comparison have to be completely taken out of the human mind - and it is possible. Rather than teaching these ugly things, education should give people better ways of life, how to live more totally and more intensely; better ways of loving, better ways of beautifying existence - without any comparison with others - just for your sheer contentment.

Love, sing, dance - not as a competitor, but as one who wants to share his joy, his songs, and his dances with his fellow human beings. Whatever you have - and every human being has something unique to contribute to the world...

But your education teaches you to imitate; your religions teach you to imitate. Nobody says to you: “Just be yourself - that’s where your paradise lies." They go on saying to you. “Follow this, imitate that.” They give you ideals: “Become a Gautam Buddha, or a Jesus Christ.” But never, even by mistake, do they say to you. “Just be yourself, relax, and enjoy your being, and bring your potential to its maximum unfoldment...

But the whole society condemns you. You are not worthy as you are; your work lies in betraying yourself. And the man who betrays himself is bound to suffer his whole life. He has committed the greatest sin, perhaps the only sin there is.

There is no God to betray, there is no religious doctrine to betray - these are all fictions. The only reality you can betray is your own being. By betraying yourself, you lose self-respect; and once a person loses self-respect, he lives like a wound that goes on hurting more and more as time passes.

The world is beautiful, the songs of the birds are beautiful, the trees and the flowers and the rain, the oceans and the mountains. They are all immensely beautiful for the simple reason they are themselves. Only man has brought an ugly state of affairs into the world by comparison, by competition, by the idea of success, by imitation, by condemning oneself and praising somebody else.”

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Sarmad, ZorbaTheBuddha.net