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mind you, not in despair but in deep understanding, and is grateful for it, grateful to the existence, grateful to the whole -- he is the highest.
Jesus says it: Blessed are those who are the last in this world because they shall be the first in my kingdom of God. He was speaking a different language because he was speaking to a different kind of people, but the statement has the quality of Zen in it. Those who are the last... But if you are trying to be the last you are not the last, remember.
That's what Christians have been doing for hundreds of years: trying to be the last in order to be the first in the kingdom of God. They have missed the whole point. To be the last -- not by effort, not by striving, but just by simple understanding that "Whatsoever I am, I am; there is no other way for me to be. I cannot be anybody else, I need not be anybody else. This is how the whole wants me to be and I relax in it. I surrender to the will of the whole..."
A Zen Master will not say that "You shall be the first." That is because Jesus was talking to people who were not at all acquainted with Zen. Jesus had known what Zen is. He has been to India, to Ladakh, to Tibet, and there are stories that he had even been to Japan. There is a place in Japan where people think he came and visited. It is possible, because for eighteen years he was traveling, moving from one mystery school to another mystery school. But he had to speak in a Jewish way.
The Jews are very goal-oriented people, always trying to reach somewhere. Even Hindus are very goal-oriented people; that's why they could not understand Gautam the Buddha, they misunderstood him. Buddha was better understood by the Chinese, and even fat more better by the Japanese, for the simple reason that the Chinese are not so spiritualistic -- because whenever somebody is spiritualistic he has a goal, the other-worldly goal. He wants to be special somewhere, if not in this life then in the next, if not here then after death if not on the earth then in paradise.
The paradise is just the imagination of the people who live a goal-oriented life. They cannot be religious unless there is a goal beyond
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