|
Main Index
|
| |
| | | Book Name: Yoga - The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 4 | Previous Next | |
|
|
|
| |
is conscious; nothing is alive, nothing is dead. Everything is conscious, nothing is unconscious. With your sensitivity, the world changes. At the last moment, when the sensitivity reaches to its total, its ultimate climax, the world disappears; there is God. God is not to be found, really; sensitivity has to be found. Be sensitive so totally that nothing is left behind, no holding back; and suddenly, God is there. God has always been there, only you were not sensitive.
To me, austerity is a simple life, a life of understanding. You need not move into a hut, you need not go naked. You can live simply in life, with understanding. Poverty will not help but understanding will. You can force poverty on yourself, you can become dirty, but that won't help.
This is happening now in the West with hippies and other sorts of people. They are again making the same mistake that India has been making for a long time. India has known all sorts of hippies in the past. They have lived the dirtiest lives possible. Just in the name of austerity, they would not take baths because they felt, 'Why bother, and why decorate the body?'
Did you know that Jain monks don't take baths? You cannot sit near them; they stink. They don't brush their teeth. You cannot talk to them; there is a bad smell, a bad odor comes out of their mouths. And this is thought to be austerity, because they say, 'Even bathing or cleaning the body is to be a materialist. Then you are much too involved with the body, so why bother?' But this type of attitude is just moving to the other extreme, from one foolishness to another.
There are people who are engaged with the body for twenty-four hours. You can find women wasting hours before the mirror. This is one type of foolishness: just cleaning the part continuously, never noticing that it is only a part. Good, clean it, but don't clean it continuously the whole day, otherwise it is an obsession. A clean body is good, but a continuous obsession with cleaning it -- that is madness. There are people who are continuously decorating their bodies. Almost half of the industries of the world are devoted to body decorations: powders, soaps, perfumes.
Cleanliness
|
|
|
|
| |