| |
of his most beautiful poems, in which he sings the song of himself: "There is no reason. It is my nature to be a celebration, to be a song, to be a festival." It is just healthy. It is just to be yourself.
While Walt Whitman was alive he was very much condemned, just because he was so happy for no reason at all -- just because he could dance alone, sing, not for anybody else but just for himself, or just as if he was the song, he was the celebration itself. Christian seriousness could not understand him. The ordinary humanity thought him either mad or drunk. But he was not drunk and he was not mad; he was one of the most intelligent men America has ever produced.
Intelligence is a celebration.
It is a festival of lights and it is a long series, a chain of songs, joys, festivities. It is only the unintelligent who remain sad and do nothing to remove it. It is the unintelligent who accept sadness, misery, suffering, behind beautiful names: fate, kismet, luck -- all these words are nonsense. But these words help people to remain miserable.
The man of awareness gets out of all that is unnatural and certainly finds sources of juice within himself. The mystics of the East have even defined God as raso vai saha; "he is just juice." There is no word in English to translate exactly the depth and the meaning of the word ras -- juice is a literal translation.
When you are happy for no reason at all you find a certain juiciness inside you -- you are not dry. Your saints cannot dance, they are so dry. You can dance only if you are full of juice. And the mystics who defined God as raso vai saha had a tremendous insight. They are removing the God of the theologians, the God of the philosophers, the God of the so-called religions. They are creating a totally new concept of God with which I can agree:
It is the juice of life.
It is the celebration of life.
It is the festivity of life.
It is the flower and the fragrance.
But people are living, even in their ordinary wakefulness, a kind of sleepy life. The whole of humanity seems to be under a spell, as if they are all walking in hypnosis, as if they are all suffering
|
|
|