LIKE KRISHNA AND BUDDHA AND NANAK AND JESUS, YOUR MESSAGE IS
LOVE. HOW ARE YOUR MISUNDERSTOOD SANNYASINS VEHICLES FOR
YOUR MESSAGE OF LOVE TO THE WORLD?
Krishna Prem, Krishna has talked about love, Buddha too, Jesus, Nanak and Kabir, they
all have talked about love. But nobody has talked about love like me. Their love is very
ethereal, abstract; their love is not of this world at all. Their love is philosophical. The
way they define their love and the way I define my love are totally different. I accept love
in its whole spectrum, all the colors of it, the whole rainbow of it. They are choosers; they
say, "Only the color blue is love, all other colors are not love." Or somebody says, "Only
the color green is love, all others are not love."
They condemn earthly love, they condemn sensuous love, they condemn the body. And
that's where the difference is. To me, love is a ladder. One part of the ladder is resting on
the earth -- not only resting but really rooted in the earth -- and the other end is touching
heaven.
They talk only of the other end. And because they talk only of the other end, it becomes
humanly impossible to reach it, because the lower part is denied, and the higher can be
reached only through the lower. You will have to pass over the lower rungs of the ladder,
otherwise how are you going to reach the higher part?
There have been people like Charvaka in India, and Epicurus in Greece, who believe only
in the lower part of the ladder and deny the higher part.
I accept the totality of it. I accept the mud, I accept the lotus, and I accept all that is in
between. Hence I am bound to be misunderstood by everybody. The spiritual people will
misunderstand me because they will think I am a materialist -- that I don't believe in the
soul, that my preaching of love is nothing but a preaching of sex, that in the name of love
I am only teaching people sexuality. And the materialists, the Epicureans, the Charvakas,
they are also going to misunderstand me, obviously. They will say that my talk of sex and
earthly love is only a trap to take you to those non-existential abstractions -- ecstasy,
samadhi, God.
I am going to be misunderstood by both the materialists and the spiritualists. And the
same is going to be the case with my sannyasins. You are going to be misunderstood
everywhere -- in every culture, in every society, by every religion, by every ideology. To
be with me is risky; you will have to be misunderstood. You will have to accept it as a
fact of your existence.
And the reason is clear; it is because nobody in the past has accepted the whole spectrum.
I accept the whole spectrum because to me, the lower and the higher are not separate,
they are one. The lower contains the higher, and the higher contains the lower. The mud
is unmanifest lotus, and the lotus is manifest mud. I don't condemn the mud, because in
condemning the mud the lotus is condemned. And I don't condemn the lotus, because if
you condemn the lotus the mud loses all meaning; then it is simply mud and nothing else.
I accept this earth and I accept this heaven. I accept both the body and the soul, the outer
and the inner. My teaching is that of total acceptance.
You will be misunderstood. And it is not only that you will be misunderstood -- there is
every possibility that you will misunderstand me too, because many of you will think that
sex is all. And you can find quotes from my books easily supporting your standpoint.
And many of you will misunderstand that sex has to be transcended, that only samadhi is
the truth and that sex is just something to be bypassed, transcended and surpassed. Both
these things are going to happen. Those who really understand me will see the point, and
will see what I am doing here. I am creating a materialist spirituality, or a spiritualist
materialism. It has never been done before. And whenever something is done for the first
time, it is natural that it will be misunderstood.
A middle-aged American lady whose husband had recently died went to a spiritualist to
get in touch with him as she was feeling lonely. Contact having been established, she
said, "Hello, honey! How you doin'?"
Honey: "Fine. In fact I'm a hell of a lot better off than I was before."
Lady: "How do you pass the time, honey?"
Honey: "Well, I wake up, make love, have breakfast, make love, have lunch, make love,
have supper, make love, sleep, make love, wake up, make love -- day in and day out."
Lady: "Where are you, honey? In heaven?"
Honey: "No, I'm a bull in Koregaon Park, Poona."
That possibility is there, you can misunderstand me. And there are also others at the other
extreme. Anybody who chooses one part of my teaching is bound to misunderstand me.
You have to take me in toto, in my totality. Of course the totality is very confusing,
because it contains the polar opposite. It is easier to choose one part -- the materialist or
the spiritualist; it is easier, you feel consistent. To choose me in my totality you will have
to live a very inconsistent life -- one moment this, another moment that. But that is my
whole message.
If one really wants to live life in all its richness, one has to learn how to be inconsistent,
how to be consistently inconsistent, how to be able to move from one extreme to another
-- sometimes rooted deep in the earth and sometimes flying high in heaven, sometimes
making love and sometimes meditating.
And then, slowly slowly, your heaven and your earth will come closer and closer, and
you will become the horizon where they meet.
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