Why do you feel disgusted?

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This you have to remember and then try to understand Tilopa. His final words:

THE SUPREME UNDERSTANDING TRANSCENDS ALL THIS AND THAT. THE SUPREME ACTION EMBRACES GREAT RESOURCEFULNESS WITHOUT ATTACHMENT. THE SUPREME ACCOMPLISHMENT IS TO REALIZE IMMANENCE WITHOUT HOPE.

Very very significant words.

THE SUPREME UNDERSTANDING TRANSCENDS ALL THIS AND THAT.

Knowledge is always either of this or of that. Understanding is neither. Knowledge is always of duality: a man is good, he knows what good is; another man is bad, he knows what bad is – but both are fragmentary, half. Neither the good man is whole because he does not know what bad is; his goodness is poor, it lacks the insight that badness gives.... The bad man is also half; his badness is poor, it is not rich because he does not know what goodness is. And life is both together.

A man of real understanding is neither good nor bad, he understands both. And in that very understanding he transcends both. A sage is neither a good man nor a bad man. You cannot confine him to any category; there exists no pigeon-hole for him, you cannot categorize him.

He is elusive, you cannot catch hold of him. And whatsoever you say about him will be half, it can never be total. A sage may have friends and followers, and they will think he is God because they see only the good part. And the sage may have enemies and foes, and they will think that he is the devil incarnate because they know only the bad part. But if you know a sage he is neither – or both together; and both mean the same.

If you are both together, good and bad, you are neither – because they annihilate each other, negate each other, and a void is left.

This concept is very difficult for the Western mind to understand, because the Western mind has divided God and the devil absolutely. Whatsoever is bad belongs to the devil and whatsoever is good belongs to God; their territories are demarked, hell and heaven are apart... set apart.

That’s why Christian saints look a little poor before tantric sages, very poor; just good, simple – they don’t know the other side of life. And that’s why they are always afraid of the other side, always trembling with fear. A Christian saint is always praying for God to protect him from the evil. The evil is always by the corner; he has avoided it and when you avoid something, continuously it is in the mind. He is afraid, trembling.

A Tilopa knows no trembling, no fear, and he never goes to pray to God, ”Protect me”; he is protected. What is his protection? Understanding is his protection. He has lived all, he has moved to the farthest corner into evil, and he has lived the divine, and now he knows both are two aspects of the same. And now he is neither worried about good nor worried about bad; now he lives a loose and natural, simple life, he has no predetermined concepts. And he is unpredictable.

You cannot predict a Tilopa. You can predict Saint Augustine, you can predict other saints, but you cannot predict a tantra sage. You cannot – simply unpredictable, because in each moment he will respond and nobody knows in what way, nobody knows; even he himself does not know. That’s the beauty of it, because if you know your future then you are not a free man, then you are moving according to certain rules, then you have a prefabricated character; then somehow you have to react, not respond.

Nobody can say what a Tilopa will do in a certain situation. It will depend; the whole situation will bring the response. And he has no likings, no dislikings – neither this nor that. He will act, he will not react; he will not react out of his past, he will not react according to his future concepts, of his own ideals. No. He will not react, he will act here and now, the response will be total; nobody can say what will happen.

Understanding transcends duality.

It is said that once Tilopa was staying in a cave and a passer-by, a seeker of a certain type, came to visit him. He was taking his food and he was using a human skull as a pot. The traveler became afraid. It was weird! – he had come to see a sage and this man seemed to be something of the world of black magicians. A human skull... and he was enjoying; and a dog was sitting by the side of Tilopa and the dog was also eating from the same pot. When this man came Tilopa invited him to participate. ”Come here,” he said, ”so beautiful you reached in time because this is all that I have got. Once it is finished then for twenty-four hours there is nothing. Only tomorrow somebody may bring something. So you come and join in and participate.”

The man felt very much disgusted – a human skull, food in it, and a dog also a participant! The man said, ”I feel disgusted.”

Tilopa said, ”Then you escape as soon as possible from here and run fast and never look back, because then Tilopa is not for you. Why are you disgusted with this human skull? You have been carrying it for so long and what is wrong if I am taking my food in it? It is one of the cleanest things. You are not disgusted with your own skull inside – and your whole mind, your beautiful thoughts and your morality and your goodness and your saintliness, all are in the skull. I am taking only my food in it; and your heaven and your hell and your gods and your BRAHMA, all are in your skull. They must have become absolutely dirty by now – you should be disgusted about that. And you yourself are there in the skull. Why do you feel disgusted?”

The man tried to avoid and rationalize; he said, ”Not because of the skull but because of this dog.”

Tilopa laughed and said, ”You have been a dog in your past life and everybody has to pass through all the stages. And what is wrong in being a dog? And what is the difference between you and a dog? The same greed, the same sex, the same anger, the same violence, aggressiveness, the same fear – why do you pretend that you are superior?”

Tilopa is difficult to understand because ugly and beautiful make no sense to him; purity, impurity make no sense to him; good and bad make no sense to him. He has an understanding of the total. Partial is knowledge, understanding is total. And when you look at the total, all distinctions drop: What is ugly and what is beautiful? What is good and what is bad?

All distinctions simply drop if you have a bird’s-eye view of the total, then all boundaries disappear. It is just like looking down from an airplane. Then where is Pakistan and where is India? And where is England and where is Germany? All boundaries are lost, the whole earth becomes one.

And if you go still higher in a spaceship and look at it from the moon, the whole earth becomes so small – where is Russia and where is America? And who is a communist and who is a capitalist? Who is a Hindu and who is a Mohammedan? The higher you go, the less are the distinctions – and understanding is the highest thing, there is no more beyond it. From that highest peak everything becomes everything else. Things meet and merge and become one, boundaries are lost... an unbounded ocean with no source to it... infinity.                                          

                                        

            

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