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Main Index
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| | | Book Name: The Dhammapada - The Way of the Buddha, Vol 3 | Previous Next | |
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His inquiry begins with a totally different angle, and that is the right angle to begin with. If you start as Buddha starts, you are bound to find God.
H.G. Wells is right when he says that Gautama the Buddha is the most godly man on the earth and yet the most godless. Yes, he is a paradox. He denies God, he says there is no God. He says there is no need to worship, he says there is no need to believe. Inquire, don't believe! Search and seek, but without any prejudice for or against. Start with a totally pure and open mind. Start like a small child, in utter innocence, who has not even heard of God. And he does not say that if you start this way you will find God, because he knows the cunningness of human mind. If he says, "If you start this way you will find God," your mind will say to you, "Then THIS is the way to find God -- start this way," but deep down your desire for God remains. The desire for God arises in your psychology; it is not a spiritual search.
Sigmund Freud is right that God is nothing but a search for a father or mother figure. Buddha would have agreed with him, Buddha would have blessed Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud's insight is very accurate about it. He does not go very far, but he begins rightly, though he becomes stuck in the middle because he was not aware of Buddha and he was not aware of Lao Tzu. He remained basically part of the Judaic-Christian tradition -- which is not very evolved, which is not yet a metaphysics in the true sense of the term.
Christianity and Judaism are very earthly religions, more rooted in man's psychology than in man's spiritual understanding. And because man's psychology is a chaos, whatsoever is rooted in his psychology is bound to remain a chaos.
Man needs a father figure, somebody to depend upon. In the name of God people are not searching for God but are only searching for excuses for their dependence -- beautiful excuses so that the dependence does not look like slavery, so the dependence also starts having a flavor of religiousness, spirituality. But to call God "the father" indicates what you have been searching for.
There are religions which call God "the mother"; it is
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