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Book Name: From Unconciousness to ConsciousnessPrevious     Next
 

have to pull your hair out. So Jaina monks every year pull out their hair. This is so stupid, so ugly, so unnatural... and for what?

The whole reasoning is that if you do these things you earn virtue and you will be in heaven. On the one hand he says, "Don't be greedy, greed is sin." And on the other hand, he is teaching nothing but greed, greed in the other world. That seems to be far more greedy even than the ordinary greed of this world: having money or a good house seems to be nothing compared to eternal pleasures in heaven. And Jainas have seven heavens, so the more you torture yourself the higher you reach. So it seems there is certainly an element of masochism in Mahavira. But I could not say this to the Jainas.

So I have been carrying a heavy weight on me, on my heart. My health has been destroyed for many reasons; the most important is this, that I have been speaking on people with whom I do not agree at all. I disagree -- not only disagree, but I find them basically psychotic, neurotic, schizophrenic, anti-life. All these religions in the past are anti-life. Nobody is for life, nobody is for living, nobody is for laughter. No religion has accepted a sense of humor as a quality of religiousness.

Hence, I say my religion is the first religion which takes man in his totality, in his naturalness, accepts man's whole, as he is. And that's what holy means to me -- not something sacred, but something accepted in its wholeness. Perhaps things are a little bit upside down and you have to put them in place; just like a jigsaw puzzle, you have to put them in place. And then out of that wholeness arises religious consciousness

I have spoken more on Buddha than on anybody else. But he is as much anti-life as anyone else: "This life has to be used just to reach the real life which is after death." Now, nobody has returned after death. Not a single proof exists of anybody returning after death and telling you that there is life there. And all these religions are based on this assumption, that there is a life after death; sacrifice this for that. And I am saying, "Sacrifice that for this!" -- because this is all that you have got: herenow.

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