Living on Your Own Terms: What Is Real Rebellion?

First thing: There is no need to survive in this world. This world is a madhouse. There is no need to survive in it. There is no need to survive in the world of ambition, politics, ego. It is the disease. But there is another way to be, and the whole religious standpoint is: You can be in this world and not be of it. “When I listen to my feelings, my inner voice, they tell me to do nothing.…” Then don’t do anything. There is nobody higher than you, and God speaks to you directly. Start trusting your inner feelings. Then don’t do anything. If you feel just to sleep, eat, and play on the beach, perfect. Let that be your religion. Don’t be afraid then. You will have to drop fear. And if it is a question of choosing between the inner feeling and the fear, choose the inner feeling. Don’t choose the fear. So many people have chosen their path out of fear, so they live in a limbo, they live in indecision. Fear is not going to help. Fear always means the fear of the unknown. Fear always means the fear of death. Fear always means the fear of being lost—but if you really want to be alive, you have to accept the possibility of being lost. You have to accept the insecurity of the unknown, the discomfort and the inconvenience of the unfamiliar, the strange. That is the price one has to pay for the blessing that follows it, and nothing can be achieved without paying for it. You have to pay for it: Otherwise you will remain fear-paralyzed. Your whole life will be lost. Enjoy whatsoever your inner feeling is.

Life is beautiful because it is insecure. Life is beautiful because there is death. Life is beautiful because it can be missed. If you cannot miss it, everything is forced upon you, then even life becomes an imprisonment. You will not be able to enjoy it. Even if you are ordered to be blissful, commanded to be free, then bliss and freedom both are gone. “Will existence protect me when I allow myself to let go?” Try! Only one thing I can say to you.… I am not talking to your fear, remember. Only one thing I can say to you—all those who have tried have found that it protects. But I am not talking to your fear. I am simply encouraging your adventure, that’s all. I am persuading, seducing you toward adventure. I am not talking to your fear. All those who have tried have found that infinite is the protection.

There are always problems in the world, and the world has always been there, and the world will remain there. If you start trying to work it out—changing circumstances, changing people, thinking of a utopian world, changing the government, the structure, the economy, the politics, the education—you will be lost. That is the trap known as politics. That’s how many people waste their own lives. Be very clear about it: The only person you can help right now is you yourself. Right now you cannot help anybody. This may be just a distraction, just a trick of the mind. See your own problems, see your own anxieties, see your own mind, and first try to change that. It happens to many people: The moment they become interested in some sort of religion, meditation, prayer, immediately the mind tells them, “What are you doing sitting here silently? The world needs you; there are so many poor people. There is much conflict, violence, aggression. What are you doing praying in the temple? Go and help people.” How can you help those people? You are just like them. You may create even more problems for them, but you cannot help. That’s how all the revolutions have always failed. No revolution has yet succeeded because the revolutionaries are in the same boat. The religious person is one who understands that “I am very tiny, I am very limited. If with this limited energy, even if I can change myself, that will be a miracle.” And if you can change yourself, if you are a totally different being with new life shining in your eyes and a new song in your heart, then maybe you can be helpful to others also, because then you will have something to share.

Buddha used to say to his disciples: Take each step watchfully. He used to say: Watch your breath. And that is one of the most significant practices for watching because the breath is there, continuously available for twenty-four hours a day wherever you are. The birds may be singing one day, they may not be singing some other day, but breathing is always there. Sitting, walking, lying down, it is always there. Go on watching the breath coming in, the breath going out. Not that watching the breath is the point, the point is learning how to watch. Go to the river and watch the river. Sit in the marketplace and watch people passing by. Watch anything, just remember that you are a watcher. Don’t become judgmental, don’t be a judge. Once you start judging you have forgotten that you are a watcher, you have become involved, you have taken sides, you have chosen: “I am in favor of this thought and I am against that thought.” Once you choose, you become identified. Watchfulness is the method of destroying all identification. Hence Gurdjieff called his process the process of nonidentification. It is the same, his word is different. Don’t identify yourself with anything, and slowly one learns the ultimate art of watchfulness. That’s what meditation is all about. Through meditation one discovers one’s own light. That light you can call your soul, your self, your God, whatever word you choose—or you can remain just silent, because it has no name. It is a nameless experience, tremendously beautiful, ecstatic, utterly silent, but it gives you the taste of eternity, of timelessness, of something beyond death.

I don’t want you to be free from something, I simply want you to be free. See the difference: Freedom from is never total; that “from” keeps it entrapped with the past. Freedom from can never be real freedom. Neither can freedom for ever be real freedom; that is a search for a new slavery.

But this is only in the beginning. Just a little patience, just a little awaiting … If you go on looking, watching these thoughts silently, with no judgment, with no antagonism, with no desire even to stop them—as if you have no concern with them—unconcerned … Just as one watches the traffic on the road, or one watches the clouds in the sky, or one watches a river flow by, you simply watch your thoughts. You are not those thoughts, you are the watcher, remembering that “I am the watcher, not the watched.” You cannot be the watched, you cannot be the object of your own subjectivity. You are your subjectivity, you are the witness, you are consciousness. Remembering it. It takes a little time. Slowly, slowly the old habit dies. It dies hard but it dies, certainly. And the day the traffic stops, suddenly you are full of light. You have always been full of light, just those thoughts were not allowing you to see that which you are. When all objects have disappeared, there is nothing else to see, you recognize yourself for the first time. You realize yourself for the first time.

To be a parent is a great art. To give birth to children is nothing—any animal can do it; it is a natural, biological, instinctive process. To give birth to a child is nothing great, it is nothing special; it is very ordinary. But to be a parent is something extraordinary; very few people are really capable of being parents.

The qualities of a rebel are multidimensional. The first thing: The rebel does not believe in anything except his own experience. His truth is his only truth; no prophet, no messiah, no savior, no holy scripture, no ancient tradition can give him his truth. They can talk about truth, they can make much ado about truth, but to know about truth is not to know truth. The word about means around—to know about truth means to go around and around it. But by going around and around you never reach to the center. The rebel has no belief system—theist or atheist, Hindu or Christian, he is an inquirer, a seeker. But a very subtle thing has to be understood: That is, the rebel is not an egoist. The egoist also does not want to belong to any church, to any ideology, to any belief system, but his reason for not belonging is totally different from that of the rebel. He does not want to belong because he thinks too much of himself. He is too much of an egoist; he can only stand alone. The rebel is not an egoist; he is utterly innocent. His nonbelieving is not an arrogant attitude but a humble approach. He is simply saying, “Unless I find my own truth, all borrowed truths are only burdening me; they are not going to unburden me. I can become knowledgeable, but I will not be knowing anything with my own being; I will not be an eyewitness to any experience.” The

Do not destroy the dignity of the other person. That person is as valuable in existence as you are. There is no need to impose your ideas on anybody. Who are you? What authority have you got to impose your ideas on others? You can share, you can tell, you can expose your heart. And if the other feels that something falls in tune with him, and chooses it, it is their decision, not your imposition. Revolutionaries

If you take a mental case into a Zen monastery, they put him in isolation for three weeks; nobody talks to him—just the opposite of psychoanalysis—nobody talks to him, nobody listens to him. They just keep him isolated; somebody goes, absolutely silently, and puts the food there, comes back. He has to live with himself for three weeks … and miracles have been happening down the ages. Just putting him there for three weeks in isolation, slowly he cools down—no psychoanalysis, no therapy, just isolation. In fact, he was suffering too much from people, from the stress of being in a crowd continually.

The third dimension is that the rebel is not interested in domination over others. He has no lust for power, because that is the ugliest thing in the world. The lust for power has destroyed humanity and has not allowed it to be more creative, to be more beautiful, to be more healthy, to be more wholesome. And it is this lust for power that ultimately leads to conflicts, competitions, jealousies, and finally to wars. Lust for power is the foundation of all wars. If you look at human history, the whole of it is nothing but a history of wars, man killing man. Reasons have changed, but the killing continues.

It is a very strange world! You don’t know people’s real lives; all that you know are their masks. You see them in the churches, you see them in the clubs, in the hotels, in the dancing halls, and it seems everybody is rejoicing, everybody is living a heavenly life, except you—of course, because you know how miserable you are within. And the same is the case with everybody else! They are all wearing masks, deceiving everybody, but how can you deceive yourself? You know that the mask is not your original face. But

In existence there is no inferiority complex anywhere, and as a corollary there is no superiority complex either.

Vincent van Gogh committed suicide when he was only thirty-three. It was impossible to live; he could not earn a single cent. His brother used to give him money, but just enough to exist, to survive. He needed money to paint—for the canvas and the colors and the brushes. So this was his arrangement: He used to get money every Sunday for one week, so every week for three days he would eat and for four days he would fast, so that money could be saved to purchase canvases, colors, and other things that he needed. To me, van Gogh’s fasting is far more significant than all the fasts that have been done by your so-called saints. This fasting has something beautiful in it, something spiritual in it. When your so-called saints go on a fast, it is a means; they are fasting so that they can reach heaven and enjoy all the heavenly joys. But van Gogh’s fasting has a totally different quality to it: It is his love to create. And

You say: “Is it enough for us to just be? But my gut feeling is that I need to do something to be worthy, to contribute, to give…” It is not a gut feeling, it is just what has been conditioned in you by the society. The society has been telling you continuously, persistently, day in, day out, from your very childhood—in the school, in the college, in the university, in the church, the priest, the politician, the parent, the professor—they are all joined together in one single conspiracy to give you the idea that as you are, you are unworthy. You have to do something, you have to prove yourself, then only will you be worthy. This is the strategy of the society to exploit you; this is the society’s ugly way to make slaves of you—not creators but slaves. But in beautiful, sophisticated ways you have been conditioned. Beautiful words cover very ugly realities. The ugly reality is that the society wants to use you as a slave, the society wants to manipulate you, the society wants to control you. It manages it in two ways. On