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Chapter 9: Beyond and Beyond

You will always find that quality of sadness in religious people: cheerful, of course because they give, but sad because they cannot give more, cheerful because they share, but sad because it is not enough. Nothing will be enough.

So there are two types of miseries. The ordinary misery; you can find those miserable people all around, everywhere. The whole earth is filled with them because they ask for more and it cannot be fulfilled. Then there is another misery, which has the face of cheerfulness; you will find in the priests, monks, in the monasteries, the ashrams, people who seem to be always smiling, but their smile carries a certain sadness behind it. If you observe deeply you will find they are also miserable, because you cannot give infinitely, you don’t have it!

These are the two types of people easily met. This religious man is cultivated by Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism. It is better than the ordinary mind but cannot be the final word about consciousness. It is good to be miserable in a religious way, better to be miserable like an emperor, not like a beggar.

A very rich man was dying and he had called me to be near him when he died, so I was there. At the last moment he opened his eyes and he told his son. And it had been always in his mind, he had told me many times he was worried about his son because he was a spendthrift and he loved material things. And this old man was a religious man. The last word he said to his son was, “Listen, money is not everything and you cannot buy everything with money. There are things which are beyond money, and money alone cannot make anybody happy.”

The son listened and said, “You may be right, but with money a person can choose the sadness of his own liking.”

It may not purchase happiness but you can choose sadness of your own liking, you can be miserable in your own way.

A poor man has to be miserable with no choice; a rich man can be miserable with his own choice - that’s the only difference. He chooses his own misery; there is a certain freedom. The poor man’s misery simply happens to him like a fate, a destiny; he has no choice. The religious man has chosen his misery, that’s why he is a little cheerful; and the nonreligious man is suffering his misery because he has not chosen it. Both live in the same world of the “more,” but the religious man lives like an emperor, sharing, giving charity.

Buddhism, Jainism and Tao have created a third type of mind, which is neither ordinary nor extraordinary, in fact which is not a mind at all. To give it a name it will be good to call it a no-mind. So try to understand the classification. Ordinary mind, extraordinary mind - just the opposite of it, but still in the same dimension of more - then the no-mind that Buddhism, Jainism, Tao have created. What is this no-mind? It is the third approach towards reality.

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