Awareness - 15

Awareness - 15

     All right. But you see, you are cheating a bit because you brought religion into this. It’s legitimate. It’s valid. But how would it be if I deal with the gospels, with the Bible, with Jesus, toward the end of this retreat. I will say this much now to complicate it even more. “I was hungry, and you gave me to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me to drink,” and what do they reply? “When? When did we do it? We didn’t know it.” They were unconscious! I sometimes have a horrid fantasy where the king says, “I was hungry and you gave me to eat,” and the people on the right side say, “That’s right, Lord, we know.” “I wasn’t talking to you,” the king tells them. “It doesn’t follow the script; you’re not supposed to have known.” Isn’t that interesting? But you know. You know the inner pleasure you have while doing acts of charity. Aha! That’s right! It’s the opposite of someone who says, “What’s so great about what I did? I did something, I got something. I had no notion I was doing anything good. My left hand had no idea what my right hand was doing.” You know, a good is never so good as when you have no awareness that you’re doing good. You are never so good as when you have no consciousness that you’re good. Or as the great Sufi would say, “A saint is one until he or she knows it.” Unselfconscious! Unselfconscious!

Some of you object to this. You say, “Isn’t the pleasure I receive in giving, isn’t that eternal life right here and now?” I wouldn’t know. I call pleasure, pleasure, and nothing more. For the time being, at least until we get into religion later on. But I want you to understand something right at the beginning, that religion is not—I repeat: not—necessarily connected with spirituality. Please keep religion out of this for the time being.

All right, you ask, what about the soldier who falls on a grenade to keep it from hurting others? And what about the man who got into a truck full of dynamite and drove into the American camp in Beirut? How about him? “Greater love than this no one has.” But the Americans don’t think so. He did it deliberately. He was terrible, wasn’t he? But he wouldn’t think so, I assure you. He thought he was going to heaven. That’s right. Just like your soldier falling on the grenade.

I’m trying to get at a picture of an action where there is not self, where you’re awake and what you do is done through you. Your deed in that case becomes a happening. “Let it be done to me.” I’m not excluding that. But when you do it, I’m searching for the selfishness. Even if it is only “I’ll be remembered as a great hero,” or “I’d never be able to live if I didn’t do this. I’d never be able to live with the thought if I ran away.” But remember, I’m not excluding the other kind of act. I didn’t say that there never is any act where there is not self. Maybe there is. We’ll have to explore that. A mother saving a child—saving her child, you say. But how come she’s not saving the neighbor’s child? It’s the hers. It’s the soldier dying for his country. Many such deaths bother me. I ask myself, “Are they the result of brainwashing?” Martyrs bother me. I think they’re often brainwashed. Muslim martyrs, Hindu martyrs, Buddhist martyrs, Christian martyrs, they are brainwashed!

They’ve got an idea in their heads that they must die, that death is a great thing.