The World as Self, Part 15: Fear of Enlightenment

Anyway, what is important, you see—quite radically here—supposing that I say to you, Each one of you is really the great Self—you know, the Brahman?—and you say, Well, all you’ve said up until now makes me fairly sympathetic to this intellectually. But I don’t really feel it. What must I do to feel it really? My answer to you is this: You ask me that question because you don’t want to feel it, really. You’re frightened of it. And therefore, what you’re going to do is: you’re going to get a method of practice so that you can put it off. So that I can say, Well, I can be a long time on the way getting this thing, and then, maybe, I’ll be worthy of it. After I have suffered enough.

See? Because we are brought up in a social scheme whereby we have to deserve what we get. And the price that one pays for all good things is suffering. But all of that is precisely postponement, because one is afraid, here and now, to see it. If you have the nerve—you know, real nerve—you would see it right away. Only that would be—when one feels—you shouldn’t have nerve like that. Why, that would be awful, that would be—that wouldn’t do at all! Because, after all, I’m supposed to be poor little me. And I’m not really much of a muchness, and I’m playing the role of being poor little me. And therefore—in order to be something great like a Buddha, or a Jivamukta; one liberated in this life—I ought to suffer for it. So you can suffer for it.

There are all kinds of ways invented for you to do this. And you can discipline yourself, and you can gain control of your mind, and you can do all sorts of extraordinary things. I mean, you can drink water in through your rectum and do the most fantastic things. But that’s just like being able to run the hundred yards in nine seconds, or push a peanut up Mount Tamalpais with your nose, or any other kind of accomplishment you want to engage in. [It has] absolutely nothing to do with the realization of the Self.

The realization of the Self fundamentally depends on coming off it. You know this sort of—when we say to people who put on some kind of an act, we say, Oh, come off it! And some people can come off it. They laugh and say they suddenly realize, you know, they were making fools of themselves, and they laugh at themselves, and they come off it. So in exactly the same way, the guru—the teacher—is trying to make you come off it. Now, if he finds he can’t make you come off it, he’s going to put you through all these exercises so that you—at the last time, when you got enough discipline, and enough suffering, and enough frustration—you’ll give it all up and realize you were there for the beginning, and there was nothing to realize.

But the guru is very clever. He says, Alright, if this is the way you have to go, this is the way you have to go. You asked for it! You came to me; I didn’t invite you. You see? The guru says, You came to me and said, ‘I want to learn yoga.’ Well, he said, Yoga is union. You’re tat tvam asi, you know? You’re that. Well, no, you say, I’m sorry, I don’t understand that because I only get it intellectually; I don’t feel it. Oh, he says, you’re one of those? So. I see. I’ve got to satisfy you. The customer is always right. You know? I’ve got to give you all this work to do, because you can’t see directly that this is so. But he’s looking at you in a funny way, you see? The guru is always saying to you, you know, What are you doing? What’s your game?

Imagine, for example, a father confessor. And you feel terribly guilty that you’ve committed murders, and robberies, and adulteries, and fornications, and all kinds of arson and injury to people, and financial shenanigans. And you go to this man and say, I am a terrible sinner.

He says, Really?

He says, I have murdered somebody.

He says, How many times?

And you think, Oh, good Lord! This man doesn’t realize how awful I am. And you recite all these things. He’s perfectly calm. And then you say to him, Well, you don’t seem to be very shocked.

He said, You haven’t confessed any serious sins.

He said, What do you mean by serious sin?

Well, he said, what do you think?

Well, I don’t know! I... I just feel wrong! I just feel there’s something in the basis of me that feels, that tells me, that I am not what I ought to be. Could it be that I am spiritually proud? That I am egocentric?

He says, No, that’s very usual. This is quite ordinary sin. But he says, You are guilty of something. Something really terrible.

And what could that be? Well, I have no idea.

Now, he says, come on! Come on! Go deeper. What is the real sin you committed?

And you think, What, me? I, little me, could do something worse than murder? Worse than spiritual pride? Just little me? I mean, I’m a reasonably well-intentioned person. What could that be?

And he looks at you in a funny way. You know.

You know; gets kind of a Kafka-esque situation where you’re accused of a crime that’s not specified, and yet the accuser says you jolly well know what you’ve done. Of course, we can’t mention it because, you know, it’s like those laws that are on the books in the state of California and several other states, where people are accused of the abominable crime against nature and nobody knows what it—I mean... it can’t be mentioned, it’s too dreadful to be talked about. This guy does the same thing, but it’s in a different dimension. You’ve done it. Now what did you do?

See, the real crime is that you won’t admit you’re God. That’s false modesty. So the guru challenges you, you see? He challenges you. If you raise the question. He doesn’t go out and preach in the streets and say, Come on, everybody. You ought to be converted. He sits down under a tree and waits. And people start coming around and they offer him propositions. He answers back. And he challenges you in any way that he thinks is appropriate to your situation.

Now, if you’ve got a thin shell and your mask is easily dispatched with, he simply uses what we might call an easy method. He says, Listen, Shiva, come off it! Don’t pretend you’re this guy here! I know who you are. And the guy sort of twinkles a bit and says, Well, I guess you’re right. But people aren’t like that. They have very thick shells, and so he has to invent ways of cracking them.

So here is how it goes.