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| | | Book Name: Yoga - The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 10 | Previous Next | |
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life. And each conditioning of the mind is self-perpetuating: it goes on creating itself more and more skillfully. Then you are given ideas about God. In Soviet Russia, you are given the idea that there is no God.
Stalin's daughter, Svetlana, has written in her memoirs that from the very beginning, of course, since she was Stalin's daughter, she was taught very strictly to be an atheist. But by and by, she started feeling, "Why? If there is no God, why is there so much propaganda against Him? What is the point? There is no point in it; if God is not there, finished. Why be worried? Why create anti-God propaganda, literature, this and that; why try to prove? The very effort shows that something seems to be there, something may be there." She became suspicious, and when Stalin died she revolted. She became a religious person, but her mind was narrowed down. She must be a very rare human being, because to be a theist in Soviet Russia is as difficult as to be an atheist in India.
These things are not taught, these things are caught -- with the blood of the mother, with the milk of the mother, with the breathing of the mother. Your whole atmosphere surrounds you as a subtle conditioning. These things are not taught. Nobody is teaching you these things in particular; you catch them. The first thing a Hindu child hears when he opens his eyes and his ears here, the first thing is going to be a mantra, or something from the Bhagavad-Gita. He does not understand anything, but the first impact is of Sanskrit, the first impact is of some religious scripture. Then he starts growing; he sees his mother praying, the statues of gods, and flowers and incense, and he goes on crawling there, watches and sees what is happening. He can see that the mother is crying, tears are coming, and she looks so happy and so graceful. Something tremendously great is happening; he cannot know what it is, but something is happening. He is catching. Then the temple, then the priest, then the flamboyant robes, and the whole atmosphere; he goes on drinking the atmosphere. It becomes part of his being. Either from the mother's breast or from the state's breast, but these things are just
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