Spiritually Incorrect
Absolutely Free to Be Funny
If I give you a name, perhaps you could give me one of your words of wisdom for each of these people:
Mahatma Gandhi.
He was the most cunning politician the world has ever known.
Adolf Hitler.
He was the most idiotic politician the world has ever known.
Pope Paul.
He should be behind bars.
Mother Teresa.
It is time for her to jump into a lake.
Your followers laugh and yet, with the kind of very unsettling
raw statement that you make,
you clearly disturb people who see that sort of statement as profane.
I love to disturb people,
because only by disturbing them can I make them think.
They have stopped thinking for centuries. Nobody has been there to disturb them,
people have been consoling them. I am not going to console anybody,
because the more you console them, the more retarded they remain.
Disturb them,
shock them
hit them hard, give them a challenge
That challenge will bring their capacities to the climax.
Reverend Jim Jones and his people
are really the logical conclusion of Jesus and the Christian theology.
Not the logical conclusion of the power of one man over a group of people?
That was exactly what Jesus was doing,
that is exactly what the popes have been doing
that is why I say he is the logical conclusion
from Jesus through all the popes and all the Christian theologians.
They have all been trying to prove the power,
the glory of Jesus,
his special-ness
and his special connection with God...
And if you follow him then you need not worry about the future,
he will take care of you. Here I teach people that nobody can take care of you.
I am not your savior.
I am not going to help you in any way to enter into the kingdom of God,
but I can explain to you how we can live here
in the kingdom of beauty, love, joy. To me God is a dead word.
It is a dirty word, a four-letter word.
It is trying to compress what you have been saying for
fifty-three years or fifty-three lifetimes
into a sixty-minute program, which is almost an impossible task.
But we think that we have caught for the sake of our film some of the magic and the tranquility of this experience
Good.
I hope you don't mind
my saying that I enjoyed the circus and the theater of it as much as
maybe that is close to a spiritual feeling,
but to me you are truly one of the funniest people that I have ever met.
That is right.
You have a wonderful sense of humor.
And where did you learn such timing?
I have never learned anything
I just go on doing naturally whatsoever
I feel to do.
Whatsoever I have to say,
I say because I don't have any obligation to anybody,
and I don't have any commitment to anybody.
I don't belong to any party line.
I am absolutely free to be funny,
to be shocking.
I don't even bother about contradicting myself,
because to me it seems that a man
who remains consistent his whole life
must be an idiot.
A growing person
has to contradict himself many times,
because who knows what tomorrow brings in?
Tomorrow
may cancel this day completely,
and I am ready to go with life
with no hesitation
Did you love those contradictions when you were a debater many years ago?
I have always loved the contradictions,
because for me contradictions have something of tremendous value.
They appear contradictions to the intellect,
but the deeper you go into them,
you will find they are compensatory, they are not contradictions.
They somehow depend on each other:
if one disappears, the other will not be there.
For example,
if there had been no British rule in India
there would have been no Mahatma Gandhi
no possibility.
If there had been no Adolf Hitler,
forget all about Churchill and Roosevelt and Stalin.
Life exists
in such a way
that it makes contradictions, complementaries.
I have always loved
Would you be happy then, if some of these people who now follow you wandered off
to some other sphere of discovering what is, to them, themselves?
I will be happy and I will bless them to go there,
because they have come here to seek some truth,
some tranquility,
some sanity.
If they feel they can get it better somewhere else,
I will be the first person to send them and help them to go.
I have been doing that for years.
In fact, I have had to do it in such a way that they don't feel they are leaving me.
Even against their will, I had to bless them and tell them to go.
I knew that they loved me,
but now their minds were in difficulty; they wanted to go somewhere else,
but their love for me had become an attachment
I had to destroy that attachment -- only then could they go
And I have been destroying many attachments.
for their sake, because I don't want anybody to be a slave.
Out of freedom they have come to me,
out of freedom they should go.
And if they want to remain here, out of freedom they should remain here.
This is not a concentration camp,
it is a meditation camp.
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