Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
something was would have preceded the word; ergo, the word
couldn't have been in the beginning at all, could it? What's more,
who or what existed to speak that word must have been preceded by
who or what created him, her, or it.
Rajneesh let this logical tour de force sink in. That Creator,
naturally, turned out to be the Great Nothing he was so fond of. And
what a perfect partner the Great Nothing seemed to be for the Great
Silence. But, and there's always a
but
, before the Great Nothing
there had existed the cause of the Great Nothing. This cause, this
parent, turned out to be Silence.
'Dead religion,' Bhagwan pronounced, referring to Christianity.
After all, Jesus only had a paltry
twelve
'initiates' - what could anyone
possibly hope to achieve with such a bantam staff? The bhagwan
slyly noted that he himself had forty thousand initiates, and would
soon have many millions more. Jesus had failed miserably.
Transforming this obdurate planet was an epic task, requiring the
services of some spiritual superhero - a man like himself, the
bhagwan.
Hinduism received a severe drubbing, too. It believed in
aum
as
a first cause. Wrong again. These ancients were such fools. Unlike
the bhagwan, they had no scientific approach. Our speaker was all
science. Now we finally knew the truth.
I looked around. Every face simply soaked in this sparkling tide
of undiluted Wisdom.
Somehow, the bhagwan had now got around to the topic of
language he had originally promised to illuminate nearly an hour
before. Ancient sages thought words held power in their vibrations,
their sounds. This was preposterous, said the bhagwan, laughing
heartily. Everyone else laughed heartily, too. Words had no more
power than farts - he used this old noun - since both were simply
noises produced by the body. Jesus was also called Emmanuel,
Rajneesh informed us, pointing out that this was really 'I Am in
You All,' and thus a word with real meaning. Abraham and Sarah in
the Old Testament, he stated, were clearly Brahma and Saraswati of
the Hindu pantheon. Possibly, Rajneesh mused, the whole Bible was
just snatches of Indian mythology some travelling merchant had
picked up and then regurgitated for friends, a compulsive diarist then
