Transcription
Why do you call your religion the first and the last religion?
It is a little difficult for me to speak again. It has been difficult always because I have been trying to speak the unspeakable. Now it is even more so after 1315 days of silence. It feels as if I am coming to you from a totally different world. In fact, it is so. The world of words, language, concepts, and the world of silence are so diametrically opposed to each other, they don't meet anywhere. They can't meet by their very nature. Silence means a state of wordlessness, and to speak now, it is as if to learn language again from ABC.
But this is not a new experience to me. It has happened before too. Thirty years I have been speaking continuously. It was such a tension because my whole being was pulled towards silence, and I was pulling myself towards words, language, concepts, philosophies. There was no other way to convey, and I had a tremendously important message to convey. There was no way to shirk the responsibility. I had tried it. The day I realized my own being, it was such a fulfillment that I became silent. There was nothing left to be asked.
One of my professors in the university, who was a world-renowned man, Dr. S. K. Saksena, he had been a professor of philosophy in America for many years. He again and again used to ask me to ask him some questions. And those were the days when I was so fulfilled and so content. There was no question, no quest left. So I used to say to him, "I have answers, I don't have any questions." He used to laugh and say that I am crazy. "How can you have answers without questions?" I insisted to him that till you have questions, you will never have answers. Unless your questioning drops away, you will not find the answer, and it does not come in the form of an answer, but it answers all, not answering any particular question, but simply answering all questions possible, impossible, probable, improbable.
After my enlightenment, exactly 1315 days, I tried to remain silent as much as it was possible in those conditions. For few things, I had to speak, but my speaking was telegraphic. My father was very angry with me. He loved me so much that he had every right to be angry. The day he had sent me to the university, he had taken a promise from me that I will write one letter every week, at least. And when I became silent, I wrote him the last letter and told him that I am happy, immensely happy, ultimately happy, and I know from my very depth of being that I will remain so now, forever, whether in the body or not in the body. This bliss is something of the eternal. So now, every week, if you insist, I can write the same again and again. That will not look okay, but because I have promised, so I will drop a card every week with the sign ditto. Please forgive me, and when you receive my letter with the sign ditto, you read this letter.
He thought I have gone completely mad. He immediately rushed from the village, came to the university, asked me, "What has happened to you? Seeing your letter and your idea of this ditto, I thought you are mad. But looking at you, it seems I am mad. The whole world is mad. I take my promise and the word that you have given to me. There is no need now to write every week. I will continue to read your last letter." And he kept it to the very last day he died. It was under his pillow.
The man who forced me to speak for 1315 days, I remained silent, was also a very strange man. He himself had remained silent his whole life. Nobody heard about him, nobody knew about him, and he was the most precious man I have come across in this life, any of my lives in the past. His name was Maghava. It is not much of a name. Magha simply means a jug. He used to carry a jug. That was his only possession, a plastic jug. In the same jug, he will drink, he will ask for food. People will drop anything in the jug, money, food, water, and that was all. And anybody who wanted to take out from his jug was also allowed. So people will take out the money or the food. Children, particularly beggars. Neither he prevented anybody from dropping, nor he prevented anybody from taking. And he was absolutely silent. So nobody had any idea even of his name because he had never told what is his name. They simply started calling him because of the jug.
But in deep nights, once in a while, when there was nobody, I used to visit him. It was very difficult to find a time when nobody was there because he attracted strange types of people. He was not speaking, so of course, intellectuals were not going to him. Simple people, and what you can do with him. In India, to go to a man who has realized is called seva, literally it means service, but it would not be justified because that word seva has a sacredness about it which service has not. When you go to a realized man, what else you can do then serve him. So people will come and massage his feet, and somebody will massage his head, and he will not say anything to anybody. Neither he will say yes, nor he will say no. Sometimes they won't allow him even to sleep because four or five people are massaging him, they are doing seva. Many times I had to throw people out. And he was just living in a porch of a bungalow, open from all sides.
Once in a while, particularly in winter cold nights, I used to find him alone. Then he will speak something to me. He forced me to speak. He said, "Look, I have remained silent my whole life, but they do not hear, they do not listen, they cannot understand it. It is beyond them. I have failed. I have not been able to convey what I have been carrying within me. And now there is not much time left for me. You are too young, you have a long life before you. Please don't stop speaking. Start. It is a difficult, almost impossible job to convey things into words because they are experienced into a wordless state of consciousness. How to convert that silence into sound? There seems to be no way, and there is none. But I understood Maghava's point. He was very old, and he was saying to me that you will be in the same position if you don't start soon. The inner silence, the vacuum, the innermost zero will go on pulling you inwards, and then there comes a time when you cannot come out. You are drowned in it. You are thoroughly blissful, but the whole world is full of misery. You could have shown the way. Perhaps somebody may have heard, perhaps somebody may have walked on the path. At least you would not feel that you have not done what was expected of you by the existence itself." Yes, it is a responsibility.