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| | | Book Name: The Discipline of Transcendence, Vol 4 | Previous Next | |
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your ordinary religions are based on fear and greed, just the ordinary trick of reward and punishment. Just as you do with your children your religions have been doing with you: if you do this you will go to heaven, if you do this you will go to hell -- fear and greed. They are playing on human fear and greed, and they say that one should not be afraid, and one should not be greedy, and their whole structure is based on the same fear and greed.
Buddha says: Have no fear and have no greed. Just look into things, and out of your awareness a responsibility arises. You start behaving gracefully. You don't do foolish things, that's all.
If you are doing things out of fear, you will never be able to be totally moral -- because deep down, beyond the fear, you will know.... And the desire to do the opposite, to be the opposite, will remain there.
It happened:
During a religious meeting an attractive young widow leaned too far over the balcony and fell. But her dress caught on a chandelier and held her suspended in mid air. The preacher, of course, immediately noticed the woman's predicament and called out to his congregation, "The first person who looks up there is in danger of being punished with blindness."
Mulla Nasrudin, who was in the congregation. whispered to the man next to him, "I think I will risk one eye."
An enforced morality cannot be total; one is always willing to risk one eye, at least. Who knows? It may be true, it may not be true....
And the so-called moral people will always need holidays, because it will be tiring. It is based on conflict: one part of your being says something and morality says something else. You are divided, you are split. Because of this split the whole humanity is a little schizophrenic -- one part going south, one part going north. And you are always in an ambiguity, and you are always undecided, wavering -- where to go? what to do? Your instincts say something and your conditioning says just the opposite. You can enforce anything upon yourself, but really, it will never be part of you.
An egoist can be told by the society to become humble, and he can try to become humble.
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