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Main Index
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past. You cannot live it, you can only think about it.
That thinking can create a clinging to the past. That's how tradition is born. Buddha lived two thousand five hundred years ago; Jesus, two thousand years ago; Krishna, maybe five thousand years ago. Something happened in the moment Jesus was here on the earth. Now it is only a memory: the flower is gone, the fragrance gone. Only the emptiness is left. And you go on worshipping that emptiness; you create temples around it, churches around it. You worship that emptiness. It is just a memory.
What type of foolishness has settled in the human heart? When the flower is there, you avoid; and when only the emptiness is left, then you worship. You are afraid of real religion. That's why you become a Hindu, a Mohammedan, a Christian. This is a trick of the mind, a deception. This is a way to avoid religion, because religion will transform you. Religion will destroy you as you are, and religion will give a new birth to you. Something unknown will come into existence through religion and you are afraid of that -- of dying. of being reborn. So you belong to old traditions.
Jesus says: NO MAN PUTTETH A PIECE OF NEW CLOTH UNTO AN OLD GARMENT. The traditions are old, like old garments. Celebration is always new, it is never old. It is herenow. Religions which are dead go on fasting, they are ascetic. Religions which are new -- they are celebrating, they have a type of spiritual hedonism around them.
Have you read Kazantzakis' ZORBA THE GREEK: Read it! Jesus must have had something of the quality of Zorba the Greek -- a tremendous capacity to enjoy life, an infinite trust in life, a deep attunement with the present. Kazantzakis' novel, ZORBA THE GREEK, has some of the quality of Jesus in it.
Of course, the pope in the Vatican will be very much offended if he comes to know that I say Jesus has the quality of Zorba the Greek. But I say it. He has; I can't help it. A spiritual hedonism.
Allow me to coin the term'spiritual hedonism', because ordinarily you think of hedonism as very earthy. "Eat, drink, be merry" -- that is earthy hedonism. In spiritual hedonism that is there, and more
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