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religious quality: obedience -- cut off the head of his mother. Now he is respected as an incarnation of God.
Do you want me to be included in such company? And it is not only the one case that he murdered his mother and proved his obedience, which in Hindu eyes is one of the most religious qualities.... All religions believe that you should be obedient. No religion has ever said to you that to be a rebel is to be authentically religious.
That's what I say to you: to be rebellious is to be religious.
Obedience is a strategy of the priest, of the politicians, to exploit you, to keep you in slavery, in mental slavery. All religions praise obedience.
... And when he committed this murder -- and to kill one's mother is not an ordinary murder, and without even asking why, because true obedience never asks why -- then his father made him a professional murderer. His father was a great priest, and there had been a conflict between the priest and the warrior, the priest and the politician. So his father said, "You destroy all the warriors in the country, all the politicians in the country" -- so brahmins, the priests, become both temporal heads and spiritual leaders. It is just like the pope in his tiny empire of the Vatican, which is only eight square miles -- our commune is far bigger; one hundred and twenty-six square miles -- but in that eight square miles of the Vatican the pope has two things together. He is the temporal head and he is the spiritual head.
That was the effort that Parasurama tried to make. Naturally, brahmins have awarded him the title of avatara, incarnation of God. If Parasurama is an incarnation of God, then what will be the incarnation of the devil? The story may be exaggerated as all religious stories are: it says that thirty-six times he destroyed all the warriors on the earth, singlehanded. Perhaps Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mussolini, Mao Zedong, all put together have not killed so many people as Parasurama has done; but still he is an avatara, an incarnation of God.
I am not an avatara. I would prefer just to be an ordinary man. And there is so much beauty in just being ordinary,
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