Silence shared in words
presents
The Only Alternative - Drop Your Whole Past
Do you see any possibility that the people who can really change the course of events in the world today
will ever listen to what you're saying,
understand it, and try to implement it?
They will have to.
There is no other alternative.
It is a very strange situation:
if they don't choose me,
if they don't choose the transformation I am talking about,
then they are choosing
death for all humanity
and all life.
It is not a question of choosing between two ideologies.
It is not a question of choosing between my philosophy
and Karl Marx's philosophy
or Bertrand Russell's philosophy.
It is not a philosophical question.
The question is existential.
On the other side,
if man decides not to listen to me,
not to change,
then he decides for committing suicide.
That's why I say they will have to listen,
they will have to understand,
and they will have to go through the transformation,
because nobody is ready
to choose an ultimate death for all life.
If it was a question of choosing between two ideologies,
it is just
intellectual gymnastics.
That's why they are so much afraid of me.
Slowly, slowly,
the intelligent people around the world are becoming aware
that it is necessary to do something
so that man
is
saved,
or be ready to die.
And what I am proposing is the only alternative;
no other alternative is proposed anywhere.
There is no other possibility.
Man has looked into all the alternatives,
has exhausted all the possibilities,
and has tried to remain
just the way he is,
only changing ideologies, religions,
scriptures,
but he himself remains the same.
What is the difficulty? You choose
the holy Koran instead of the Holy Bible;
you are the same person,
only the book has changed.
The question was not the change of the book, the question was the change of your
total being.
They have done everything up to now that was possible.
I am not giving you any ideology,
not another holy book.
I am giving you a simple alternative:
you have to drop your whole past
your hatred,
your distinctions of color and nation,
your fights
amongst religions,
political ideologies
you have to drop it in toto. There is no question of choosing something
from the past; you have to drop it completely.
You have to become discontinuous with the past,
and that discontinuity with the past will bring the transformation.
You have not to do anything else.
Just as the snake
slips out of his old skin,
leaving it aside completely – he does not even look back
man has to slip out of his past,
not even looking back.
It is difficult,
but
not as difficult as death for all of life.
The past is heavy,
the past is deep rooted,
but life and
desire to live is far stronger.
So on the one hand is
the whole
range of many alternatives,
but all life-denying.
If you choose them,
then you are choosing death.
I am the only person here
who is life-affirmative,
who does not want to reject anything from life,
who accepts life as it is,
with no grudge, no complaint,
with no desire that it should have been better
who relishes it as it is.
And there are no other life-affirmative ideologies around.
So on the one hand there are many ideologies which are life-denying,
life-negative.
All those ideologies have led man to this point,
where he is facing
a total death of the planet.
I am against all those ideologies for the simple reason that I affirm life
and I say that if you
go deeper into your desire for life, you will find the eternal source of life.
And if you choose life
instead of death,
then you will have to change all your other
ideologies – political, social, religious – because they are all life-denying.
They are
complementary to each other.
Choosing me you have to drop your whole past; that is the fear.
But there is no other way.
It has never happened before
that you had to choose
a certain way of life
or
total destruction
of all life from the planet.
That's why I emphasize that they will have to listen.
They will try not to listen, but
the situation is such
that ultimately they have to listen to me,
and they have to understand it also.
In fact they will listen only when they are ready to understand.
And when they are ready to understand they know perfectly well
that it is not a question of changing your idea,
it is a question of changing your whole life,
its attitudes, approaches, everything.
But they will have to,
because on the other side,
if they don't choose what I am saying,
then they have to choose a global suicide.
So in a way,
the nuclear weapons,
diseases like AIDS, are all helping me.
They will force humanity to understand me,
otherwise it was not possible for them
to listen to me or to understand or to transform.
But the alternative is such
that there is no way out.
I am the only way
out of this mess
that their religions and their political
philosophies have created in the world.
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