Time, Color, God and other such lies

Can you see Satan standing outside the window? Can you? No? Damn you! You need to stop listening to lies music feeds your ears. You absolutely need to. You need to understand that time springs to life when the clock stops working. When clock runs, time is dead…so damn dead. Now, that was William Faulkner in Sound and Fury elaborating on clock’s music.

         What do you want to know about time? It’s a lie. A lie that has been tricked upon you and has made you a diabolical giant, with your left hand holding gloom and your right hand holding joy.what do you hold when your hands are holding something? Nothing Sir, absolutely nothing. What a matter of great tragedy it is that your heart holds nothing now. It can only be burdened now-burdened by joy, burdened by gloom, burdened by burdens but only burdened not hold. Come to think of it, the whole heart is a myth, a lie that has passed on for centuries.
       What do you want to know about colors? It’s a lie told to you for centuries that has bestowed you with bags of despair in Van Gogh. Poor soul who lived in hunger for being obsessed with a lie. The color, the lie. The time, the lie. Color, lie, time. 

      Now, both time and color are despicable and crude manifestations of the heart? Now, people say time to be manifestation of mind but I think its heart because when you disconnect heart then you see the irrationality of the perceived time. Till then, there is a veil. What about heart? An organ that deceives you with fluctuating, fleeting emotions? Can you put your belief in an organ as vagabond as that? Even if you do put your belief, what is belief? A fabrication, an illusory concept of heart? If some part of you wants to contradict the aforementioned sentence, and then let me tell you that even the tiny source of your contradiction is based on some belief. A belief that made you think that earth is held by turtles all the way down. Man is the mystified, discombobulated specie among the totality of species. Isn’t that a terrific sense of humor the creator has? Oh, come on! Even your God is a dead, hollow concept. It’s a belief, a lie. I am ridiculing you and me with that outrageous word – Creator. You should be polite and humble and ask the authorities to remove that sacrosanct word from the dictionary.  

        So, now all you want to ask is what is the truth? Well, Nothing….Nothing is the only truth. Rather, nothingness is a better word. When you understand this truth, the lies transform to truth in a beautiful way. In a way, that there is a merger of truth and lies and you can’t distinguish.

        All the religions believe that God created the world and also mankind. But if you are created by someone, you are only a puppet, you don't have your own soul. And if you are created by somebody, he can uncreate you any moment. He neither asked you whether you wanted to be created, nor is he going to ask you: "Do you want to be uncreated?"

        God is the greatest dictator, if you accept the fiction that he created the world and also created mankind. If God is a reality, then man is a slave, a puppet. All the strings are in his hands, even your life. Then there is no question of any enlightenment. Then there is no question of there being any Gautam the Buddha, because there is no freedom at all. Then there is no question of sin or virtue, no question of sinners and saints. A puppet cannot be responsible for its actions. Responsibility belongs to someone who has the freedom to act.

   That is the basic implication of Friedrich Nietzsche's statement: God is dead, therefore man is free.  
         But Nietzsche's statement is bound to be only one side of the coin. He is perfectly right, but only about one side of the coin. He has made a very significant and meaningful statement, but he has forgotten one thing, which was bound to happen because his statement is based on rationality, logic and intellect. Man is free, but free for what? If there is no God and man is free, that will simply mean man is now capable of doing anything, good or bad; there is nobody to judge him, nobody to forgive him. This freedom will be simply licentiousness. There comes the other side. You remove God and you leave man utterly empty. Of course, you declare his freedom, but to what purpose? How is he going to use his freedom creatively, responsibly? How is he going to avoid freedom being reduced to licentiousness? Remove God – that is perfectly okay, he has been the greatest danger to human freedom – but give man also some meaning and significance, some creativity, some receptivity, some path to find his eternal existence. 

             Zen is the other side of the coin. Zen does not have any God, that's its beauty. 

            Friedrich Nietzsche in his last phase of life became almost insane. He was hospitalized, kept in a mad asylum. Such a great giant, what happened to him? He had concluded: "God is dead," but it is a negative conclusion. He became empty, but his freedom was meaningless. There was no joy in it because it was only freedom from God, but for what? Freedom has two sides: from and for. The other side was missing. That drove him insane. 

         Emptiness always drives people insane. You need some grounding, you need some centering, you need some relationship with existence. God being dead, all your relationship with existence was finished. God being dead, you were left alone without roots. God was non-existential, but it was a good consolation. It used to fill people's interior, although it was a lie. But even a lie, repeated thousands and thousands of times for millennia, becomes almost a truth. God has been a great consolation to people in their fear, in their dread, in their awareness of old age and death, and beyond – the unknown darkness. Lies can console you, you have to understand it. In fact lies are sweeter than the truth. Gautam Buddha is reported to have said: "Truth is bitter in the beginning, sweet in the end, and lies are sweet in the beginning, bitter in the end" – when they are exposed. Then comes a tremendous bitterness, that you have been deceived by all your parents, by all your teachers, by all your priests, by all your so-called leaders. You have been continuously deceived. That frustration brings up a great distrust in everybody. "Nobody is worthy of trust...." It creates a vacuum. 

      And it is not only Friedrich Nietzsche, so it cannot be said that it was just an accident. Many intellectual giants find themselves in mad asylums or commit suicide, because nobody can live in a negative darkness. One needs light and a positive, affirmative experience of truth. Nietzsche demolished the light and created a vacuum in himself and in others who followed him. 

       A whole philosophy has grown in the West: Nietzsche is the founder of this very negative approach to life. Soren Kierkegaard, and Jean-Paul Sartre, and Marcel, and Jaspers, and Martin Heidegger – all the great giants of the first half of the 20th century – were talking only about meaninglessness, anguish, suffering, anxiety, dread, fear, angst. And this philosophy has been called in the West existentialism. 

        I agree with the destruction because what was consoling man was only lies. God, heaven, hell – all were fictions created to console man. It is good they are destroyed, but you are leaving man in an utter vacuum. 

       It is one extreme to believe in God; it is another extreme not to believe in God, and you have to be just in the middle, absolutely balanced. Atheism becomes irrelevant, theism becomes irrelevant. But your balancing brings a new light, a new joy, a new blissfulness to you, a new intelligence which is not of the mind. That intelligence which is not of the mind makes you aware that the whole existence is tremendously intelligent. It is not only alive, it has sensitivity, it has intelligence. 

     You are not accidental. Existence needs you. Without you something will be missing in existence and nobody can replace it. That's what gives you dignity, that the whole existence will miss you.

When you see the rose flowers blossoming, have you ever thought that all this color, all this softness, all this beauty was hidden somewhere in the seed? But the seed alone was not enough to become a rose; it needed the support of existence – the soil, the water, the sun. Then the seed disappeared into the soil and the rosebush started growing. Now it needs air, it needs water, it needs the earth, it needs the sun, it needs the moon. All these together transform the seed which was almost like a dead piece of stone. Suddenly a transformation, a metamorphosis. These roses, these colors, this beauty, this fragrance, cannot come from it unless existence has it already. It all may be hidden; it may be covered in the seed. But anything that happens means it was there already – maybe as a potential.