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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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not at all. When death will knock at your door you will know your beliefs have all disappeared. The belief in the immortality of the soul will not help you when death will knock at your door -- you will cry and weep and you will cling to life. When death comes you will forget all about God; when death comes you will not be able to remember the theory -- and the complicated implications of it -- about reincarnation. When death knocks you, it knocks down all the structure of knowledge that you had built around yourself -- it leaves you absolutely empty... and with the awareness that the whole life has been a wastage.
Wisdom is a totally different phenomenon: it is experience, not belief. It is existential experience, it is not "about." You don't believe in God -- you know. You don't believe in the immortality of the soul -- you have tasted it. You don't believe in reincarnation -- you remember it; you remember that you have been here many times. And if this has been so in the past, this is going to be so in the future. You remember you have been in many bodies: you have been a rock, you have been a tree, you have been animals, birds, you have been man, woman... you have lived in so many forms. You see the forms changing but the inner consciousness remaining the same; so you see only the superficial changes but the essential is eternal.
This is seeing, not believing. And all the real masters are interested to help you to see, not to believe. To believe, you become a Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan. Belief is the profession of the priest.
The master first has to destroy all your belief -- theist, atheist, Catholic, communist. The master has to dismantle all your structure of belief so that you are left again as a small child -- innocent, open, ready to inquire, ready to plunge into the adventure of truth.
Wisdom arises within you, it is not a scripture. You start reading your own consciousness -- and THERE are hidden all the Bibles and all the Gitas and all the Dhammapadas.
A great scholar once bought a parrot. When he got it home he told it, "I am going to teach you to talk."
"Don't bother," answered the bird. "I can talk already."
He
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