..Creativity is the greatest rebellion in existence. If you want to create you have to get rid of all conditionings; otherwise your creativity will be nothing but copying, it will be just a carbon copy. You can be creative only if you are an individual, you cannot create as part of the mob psychology. The mob psychology is uncreative; it lives a dragging life, it knows no dance, no song, no joy; it is mechanical. The creator cannot follow the well trodden path. He has to search out his own way, he has to inquire into the jungles of life. He has to go alone; he has to be a dropout from the mob mind, from the collective psychology. The collective mind is the lowest mind in the world - even so-called idiots are superior to the collective idiocy. But the collective has its own bribes: it respect people, honours people if they go on insisting that the way of the collective mind is the only right way. It was out of sheer necessity that in the past, creators of all kinds – the painters, the dancers, the musicians, the poets, the sculptors – had to renounce respectability. They had to live a kind of bohemian life, the life of a vagabond; that was the only possibility for them to be creative. This need not be so in the future. If you understand me, if you feel what I am saying has truth in it, then in the future everybody should live individually and there will be no need for a bohemian life. The bohemian life is the by-product of a fixed, orthodox, conventional, respectable life. My effort is to destroy the collective mind and to make each individual free to be himself or herself. Then there is no problem; then you can live as you want to live. In fact, humanity will really be born only the day the individual is respected in his rebellion. Humanity has still not been born; it is still in the womb. What you see as humanity is only a very hocus-pocus phenomenon. Unless we give individual freedom to each person, absolute freedom to each person to be himself, to exist in his own way…And of course, he has not to interfere with anybody – that is part of freedom. Nobody should interfere with anybody. But in the past, everybody has been poking his nose into everybody else’s affairs – even into things that are absolutely private, which have nothing to do with society. For example, you fall in love with a woman, what has that got to do with that society? It is purely a personal phenomenon, it is not of the marketplace. If two persons are agreeing to commune in love the society should not come into it. But the society comes into it with all its paraphernalia, in direct ways, in indirect ways. The policeman will stand between the lovers, the magistrate will stand between the lovers. And if that is not enough then the societies have created a super policeman, God, who will take care of you. The idea of God is that of a Peeping Tom who does not even allow you privacy in your bathroom, who goes on looking through the keyhole, watching what you are doing. This is ugly! All the religions of the word say God continuously watches you – this is ugly, what kind of God is this? Has he got no other business but to watch everybody, follow everybody? Seems to be the ultimate detective! Humanity needs new soil – the soil of freedom. Bohemianism was a reaction, a necessary reaction, but if my vision succeeds then there will be no bohemianism because there will be no so-called collective mind trying to dominate people. Then everybody will be at ease with himself. Of course, you have not to interfere with anybody – but as far as your life is concerned you have to live it on your own terms. Then only is there creativity. Creativity is the fragrance of individual freedom.Humanity has now come to a crossroads. We have lived the one-dimensional man, we have exhausted it. We need now a more enriched human being, three dimensional. I call them three C’s, just like three R’s – the first C is consciousness, the second C is compassion, the third C is creativity. Consciousness is being, compassion is feeling, creativity is action. My vision of the new human being has to be all the three simultaneously. I am giving you the greatest challenge ever given, the hardest task to be fulfilled. You have to be as meditative as a Buddha, as loving as a Krishna, as creative as Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci. You have to be all together, simultaneously. Only then your totality will be fulfilled; otherwise something will remain missing in you. And that which remains missing will keep you lopsided, unfulfilled. You can attain a very high peak if you are one-dimensional, but you will be only a peak. I would like you to become the whole range of the Himalayas, not just a peak, but peaks upon peaks. The one dimensional man has failed. It has not been able to create a beautiful earth, it has not been able to create paradise on the earth. It has failed, utterly failed! It created a few beautiful people but it could not transform the whole humanity, it could not raise the consciousness of the whole humanity. Only a few individuals here and there became enlightened. That is not going to help anymore. We need more enlightened people, and enlightened in a three dimensional way. That is my definition of the new man. Buddha was not a poet – but the new humanity, the people who will become buddhas now, are going to be poets. When I say “poets†I don’t mean that you have to write poetry – you have to be poetic. Your life has to be poetic, your approach has to be poetic. Logic is dry, poetry is alive. Logic cannot dance; it is impossible for logic to dance. To see logic dancing will be like Mahatma Gandhi dancing! It will look very ridiculous. Poetry can dance; poetry can love; poetry is a dance of your heart. Logic cannot love – it can talk about love but it cannot love; love seems to be illogical. Only poetry can love, only poetry can take the jump into the paradox of love. Logic is cold, very cold; it is good as far as mathematics is concerned but it is not good as far as humanity is concerned. If humanity becomes too logical, then humanity disappears; then there are only numbers, not human beings – replaceable numbers. Poetry, love and feeling give you a depth, a warmth. You become more melted. You lose your coldness. You become more human. Buddha is superhuman, about that there is no doubt, but he loses the human dimension. He is unearthly. He has a beauty of being unearthly, but he does not have the beauty that Zorba the Greek has. Zorba is so earthly. I would like you to be both together – Zorba the Buddha. One has to be meditative but not against feeling. One has to be meditative but full of feeling, overflowing with love. And one has to be creative. If your love is only a feeling and is not translated into action, it wont affect the larger humanity. You have to make it a reality, you have to materialize it. These are your three dimensions: being, feeling, action. Action contains creativity, all kinds of creativity – music, poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture, science, technology. Feeling contains all that is aesthetic – love, beauty. And being contains meditation, awareness, consciousness.RELAX IN ACTIONFirst, the nature of activity and the hidden currents in it have to be understood; otherwise no relaxation is possible. Even if you want to relax, it will be impossible if you have not observed, watched, realized, the nature of your activity, because activity is not a simple phenomenon. Many people would like to relax, but they cannot. Relaxation is like a flowering, you cannot force it. You have to understand the whole phenomenon – why you are so active, why so much occupation with activity, why you are so obsessed with it. Remember two words: one is ‘action’ another is ‘activity’. Action is not activity; activity is not action. Their natures are diametrically opposite. Acton is when the situation demands it and you act, you respond. Activity is when the situation doesn’t matter, it is not a response; you are so restless within the situation it is just an excuse to be active. Action comes from a silent mind – it is the most beautiful thing in the world. Activity comes out of a restless mind – it is the ugliest. Action is when it has relevance; activity is irrelevant. Action is moment to moment, spontaneous; activity is loaded with the past. It is not a response to the present moment, rather, it is pouring your restlessness which you have been carrying from the past, into the present. Action is creative. Activity is very destructive – it destroys you, it destroys others. Try to see the delicate distinction. For example, you are hungry, then you eat – this is action. But you are not hungry, you feel no hunger at all, and still you go on eating – this is activity. This eating is a kind of violence: you destroy food, you crush your teeth together and you destroy food; it gives you a little release of your inner restlessness. You are eating not because of hunger, you are simply eating because of an inner need, an urge to be violent. In the animal world violence is associated with the mouth and hands, the fingernails and teeth; these two are the violent things in the animal kingdom. While you are eating, both are joined together, with your hand you take the food and with your mouth you eat it – violence is released. But if there is no hunger it is not an action, it is a disease. This activity is an obsession. Of course you cannot go on eating like this because then you will burst, so people have invented tricks: they will chew tobacco or gum, they will smoke cigarettes. These are false foods, without any nutritious value in them, but they work well as far as violence is concerned. A man sitting and chewing gum, what is he doing? He is killin,g somebody. In the mind, if he becomes aware, he may have a fantasy of murdering, killing – and he is chewing gum, a very innocent activity in itself. You are not harming anybody – but very dangerous for you, because you seem to be completely unconscious of what you are doing. A man smoking, what is he doing? Very innocent in a way, just taking the smoke in and bringing it out, inhaling and exhaling – a sort of ill pranayama, and a sort of secular transcendental meditation. He is creating a mandala: he takes the smoke in, brings it out - mandala is created, a circle. Through smoking he is doing a sort of chanting, a rhythmic chanting. It soothes; his inner restlessness is relieved a little. If you are talking to a person, always remember – it is almost hundred percent accurate – if the person starts reaching for his cigarette, it means he is bored, you should leave him now. He would have wanted to throw you out; that cannot be done, that would be too impolite. He is finding his cigarette; he is saying “Now, finished! I am fed up.†In the animal kingdom he would have jumped on you, but he cannot – he is a human being, civilized. He jumps on the cigarette, he starts smoking. Now he is not worried about you, now he is enclosed in his own chanting of the smoke. It soothes. But this activity shows that you are obsessed. You cannot remain yourself; you cannot remain silent, you cannot remain inactive. Through activity you go on throwing out your madness, insanity. Action is beautiful, action comes as a spontaneous response. Life needs response, every moment you have to act, but the ‘activity’ comes through the present moment. You are hungry and you seek food, you are thirsty and you go to the well. You are feeling sleepy and you go to sleep. It is out of the total situation that you act. Action is spontaneous and total. Activity is never spontaneous, it comes from the past. You may have been accumulating it for many years, and then it explodes into the present – it is not relevant. But mind is cunning; the mind will always find rationalizations for the activity. The mind will always try to prove that this is not activity, this is action; it was needed. Suddenly you flare up in anger. Everybody else becomes aware that it was not needed, the situation never demanded it, it was simply irrelevant – only you cannot see. Everybody feels, “What are you doing? There was no need for it. Why are you so angry?†But you will find rationalizations, you will rationalize that it was needed. These rationalizations help you to remain unconscious about your madness. These are the things that George Gurdjieff used to call “buffers.†You create buffers of rationalization around you so you don’t come to realize what is the situation. Buffers are used in trains, between two compartments; buffers are used so if there is a sudden stopping there will not be too much shock to the passengers. The buffers will absorb the shock. Your activity is continuously irrelevant, but the buffers blind you, and this type of activity continues. If this activity is there, you cannot relax. How can you relax? – because it is an obsessive need, you want to do something, whatsoever it is. There are fools all over the world who go on saying, “Do something rather than nothing.†And there are perfect fools who have created a proverb all over the world, “An empty mind is the devil’s workshop.†It is not! An empty mind is Gods workshop. An empty mind is the most beautiful thing in the world, the purest. How can an empty mind be a workshop for the devil? The devil cannot enter into an empty mind, impossible! The devil can enter only into a mind which is obsessed with activity – then the devil can take charge of you, he can show you ways and means and methods to be more active. The devil never says, Relax!†He says, “Why are you wasting your time? Do something, man – move! Life is passing you by, do something!†And all the great teachers, teachers who have awakened to the truth of life, have come to realize that an empty mind gives space to the divine to enter in you. Activity can be used by the devil, not an empty mind. How can the devil use an empty mind? He will not dare to come near because the emptiness will simply kill him. But if you are filled with a deep urge, a mad urge to be active, then the devil will take charge. Then he will guide you – then he is your only guide. I would like to tell you that this proverb is absolutely wrong. The devil himself must have suggested it. This obsession to be active has to be watched. And you have to watch it in your own life, because whatsoever I say will not be of much meaning unless you see it in yourself that your activity is irrelevant, it is not needed. Why are you doing it? Travelling, I have seen people continuously doing the same thing again and again. For twenty-four hours I am with a passenger in the train. He will read the same newspaper again and again, not finding what else to do. Enclosed in a railway compartment there is not much possibility to be active, so he will read the same newspaper again and again. And I am watching… what is this man doing? A newspaper is not a Gita or a Bible. You can read the Gita many times because each time you come to it a new significance is revealed. But a newspaper is not a Gita; it is finished once you have seen it! It was not even worth reading once, and people go on reading it. Again and again, they will start again. What is the problem? Is it a need? No – they are obsessed; they cannot remain silent, inactive. That is impossible for them, that looks like death. Travelling for many years gave me many opportunities to watch people without their knowing, because sometimes only one person was with me in the compartment. And he would make all sorts of efforts to bring me to talk to him and I would say only yes or no; then he would drop the idea. Then I would simply watch – a beautiful experiment, and without any expense! I would watch him: he would open the suitcase – and I would see that he was not doing anything – then he would look in it, close it. Then he would open the window, and then he would close it. Then again he would go to the newspaper, then he would smoke, then again open the suitcase, rearrange it, go and open the window, look out of it. What is he doing? And why? An inner urge, something is trembling within him, a feverish state of mind. He has to do something, otherwise he will be lost. He must have been an active man in life; now there is a moment to relax – he cannot relax, the old habit persists. It is said that Aurangzeb, a Moghul emperor, imprisoned his father in his old age. Aurangzeb’s father, Shah Jehan, built the Taj Mahal. The son imprisoned him, dethroned him. It is said, and it is written in the autobiography of Aurangzeb, that after a few days Shah Jehan was not worried about imprisonment because every luxury was provided. It was a palace, and Shah Jehan was living as he was living before. It was not like a prison; absolutely everything he needed was there. Only one thing was missing and that was activity – he couldn’t do anything. So he asked his son Aurangzeb, “It is okay, you have provided everything for me and everything is beautiful. Just one thing I will be grateful forever and ever if you can do and that is, send 30 boys. I would like to teach them.†Aurangzeb could not believe it; “Why would my father like to teach thirty boys?†He had never shown any inclination to be a teacher, was never interested in any type of education, what has happened to him? But he fulfilled the desire. Thirty boys were sent to Shah Jehan, and everything was okay – he became again the emperor, thirty small boys. You go into a primary school, the teacher is almost the emperor. You can order them to sit and they will have to sit; you can order them to stand and they will have to stand. And he created in that room with thirty boys the whole situation of his court – just old habit and the old drug addiction to ordering people. Psychologists suspect that teachers are in fact politicians. Of course, not self-confident enough to go into politics – they move to the schools and they become presidents, prime ministers, emperors. Small children – and they order them and they force them. Psychologists also suspect that teachers have an inclination towards being sadistic, they would like to torture. And you cannot find a better place than a primary school. You can torture innocent children – and you can torture them for their own sake, for their own good! Go and watch! I have been in primary schools, and I have been watching teachers. Psychologists suspect – I am certain they are torturers! And you cannot find more innocent victims, unarmed completely, they cannot even resist. They are so week and helpless – and a teacher stands like an emperor. Aurangzeb writes in his autobiography: “My father, just because of old habits, still wants to pretend he is the emperor. So let him pretend and let him fool himself, there is nothing wrong. Send him thirty boys or three hundred, whatsoever he wants. Let him run a small school and be happy.†Activity is when the action has no relevance. Watch in yourself and see: ninety percent of your energy is wasted in activity. And because of this, when the moment for action comes you don’t have any energy. A relaxed person is simply non-obsessive, and the energy starts accumulating within him. He conserves his energy, it is conserved automatically, and when the moment for action comes his total being flows into it. That’s why action is total. Activity is always half-hearted, because how can you befool yourself absolutely? Even you know it is useless. Even if you are aware that you are doing it for certain feverish reasons within, which are not even clear to you, very vague. You can change activities, but unless activities are transformed into actions that won’t help. People come to me and they say, “I would like to give up smoking.†I say, “Why? This is such a beautiful trademark, continue.†And if you stop it, you will start something else – because the disease doesn’t change by changing the symptoms. Then you will bite your nails, then you will chew gum – and there are even more dangerous things. Theses are innocent, because if you are chewing gum, you are chewing gum yourself. You may be a fool but you are not a violent man, you are not destructive to anybody else. If you stop chewing gum, smoking, then what will you do? Your mouth needs activity, it is violent. Then you will talk. Then you will talk continuously – yakety-yakety-yak – and that’s more dangerous! Mulla Nasruddin’s wife came just the other day. She rarely comes to see me, but when she comes I immediately understand there must be some crisis. So I asked, “What’s the matter?†Thirty minutes she took, and thousands of words, to tell me, “Mulla Nasruddin talks in his sleep, so you suggest something – what should be done? He talks too much and it is difficult to sleep in the same room. And he shouts nasty things.†So I said, “Nothing is to be done. You simply give him a chance to talk while you are both awake.†People go on talking, they don’t give any chance to anybody else. Talking is the same as smoking. If you talk twenty-four hours…and you do talk! While you are awake, you talk then your body is tired, you fall into sleep, but the talk continues. Twenty-four hours, round the clock, you go on talking and talking and talking. This is like smoking, because the phenomenon is the same: the mouth needs movement. And the mouth is the basic activity because that is the first activity you started in your life. The child is born, he starts sucking the mothers breast – that is the first activity and the basic activity. Smoking is just like sucking the breast: warm milk flows in… in smoking, warm smoke flows in, and the cigarette in your lips feels just like the breast of the mother, the nipple. If you are not allowed to smoke, chew gum and this and that, then you will talk. And that is more dangerous because you are throwing your garbage on other peoples minds. Can you remain silent for a long time? Psychologists say that if you remain silent for three weeks you will start talking to yourself. Then you will be divided into two: you will talk and you will listen also. And if you try to remain silent for three months, you will be completely ready for the madhouse, because then you will not bother whether somebody is there or not. You will talk, and not only talk, you will answer also – now you are complete, now you don’t depend on anybody. That is what a lunatic is. A lunatic is a person whose whole world is confined within himself. He is the talker and he is the listener, he is the actor and he is the spectator – he is all, his whole life has become confined within himself. He has divided himself in many parts, and everything has become fragmentary. That’s why people are afraid of silence – they know they may crack up. And if you are afraid of silence that means you have an obsessive, feverish, diseased mind inside, which is continuously asking to be active. Activity is your escape from yourself. In action ‘you are’; in activity you have escaped yourself – it is a drug. In activity you forget yourself, and when you forget yourself there are no worries, no anguish, no anxiety. That’s why you need to be continuously active, doing something or other, but never in a state when non-doing flowers in you and blooms. Action is good. Activity is ill. Find the distinction within yourself: what is activity and what is action? This is the first step. The second step is to be more involved in action so that the energy moves into action; and whenever there is activity to be more watchful about it, more alert. If you are aware, activity ceases. Energy is preserved, and the same energy becomes action... ..
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