| |
there will be no need to govern -- people will be so good, so nice. There will be no need for any government at all. Now that too is a dream. It is as much a dream as the old paradise and old heaven and old firdaus; there is nothing much different in it.
You can change the Bible with Das Kapital or with Gita or with Koran, but you are the same person. Zen insists that unless your consciousness goes through a radical transformation, nothing changes. You will remain mechanical, your life will remain mechanical.
One night Stalin is walking in front of the Russian Hotel in Moscow. Suddenly he hears a thud, looks down and sees at his feet the dead body of a young Russian. He looks up and sees a light coming from a room on the tenth floor. He runs up, bursts open the door and sees an Englishman.
"Did you throw him out of the window?" asks Stalin.
"No," answers the Englishman. "We took this room together. Before going to bed I hung my jacket on the hanger, as is the English habit; he put his on the chair, as is the Russian habit. I put my trousers in the closet as is the English habit; he put his under the mattress, as is the Russian habit. At midnight someone knocked furiously at the door. I went to open it, as is the English habit, and he jumped out of the window, as is the Russian habit!"
Habits differ, and sometimes some habits can prove dangerous, but people live through habits not through consciousness; people live mechanically. And you can tell them to renounce the world and they will renounce the world -- as mechanically as they were living in the world. You can tell them to be naked, to renounce even clothes; they will renounce it as mechanically as they were every day putting their clothes on.
The question is how this mechanicalness can be dropped. The question is far more deeper than outer symptoms -- the root has to be changed.
On his return to earth an astronaut described Mars and its men and women inhabitants. "The Martian women have an amazing peculiarity: their asses are at the front and their tits are at the back," he stated seriously.
"But that is horrible!" exclaimed the reporter.
"To look
|
|
|