Our energy is limited by our actions, our education, our narrow nationalism, our beliefs, our gods, our religions. It is all canalised.” said J. Krishnamurti in one of his talks at Mumbai in 1980. And this is happening on a very large scale in India today. A large number of people in India today are being canalised by the rulers with a certain agenda, which is not essentially religious or Hindu. And the same is true about other religions too. All the religions are at war with each other. Our saints and sadhus have not been able to transform politicians into good humans, rather the politicians have transformed the saints and sadhus into aggressive and violent people.
Eternal India and its spirituality were not like this. The rulers sat at the feet of the rishis, just like King Janak sat at the feet of sage Ashtavakra. You cannot find such a sage today of the spiritual quality of Ashtvakra. Today, the saints are teaching a very superfluous kind of religion which is of a very poor quality — only ritualistic, and hypocritical.
In the time of sages like Ashtavakra, Narad, Shandllya, Shankaracharya, and other Upanishadic rishis, India was at the peak of its consciousness and could be called the Jagatguru. And now one cannot find any saint of that higher quality of consciousness. The Upanishads taught us Tattvamasi — That Art Thou — one of the four Mahakyas, since the time of Samaveda. We seem to have forgotten all such mahavakyas. We have also forgotten the art of listening. Osho reminds us: Only those can become enlightened by listening, whose totality is invested in listening, when not even a fraction of them is held back, when the listener does not exist at all and only the act of listening remains; when even that feeling does not remain that “I am listening”, even the feeling of “I am” is no longer there, when one has become only the listening... When only the process of listening has remained, when everything else within has become utterly silent — a nothingness — in that nothingness, just this much impact — Tattvamasi, “That Art Thou” — causes the explosion of the being... only this much impact!
And another spiritual insight given by the sages that takes us beyond violence is Vasudhaiv Kutumbakam.
The mystics have been, for thousands of years, talking about it, visualising it, but unfortunately, people worship the mystics but don’t allow the mystic to transform them. Worshipping is really a way of escaping from transformation; it is saying, in other words, “You are right, but it is not time for me yet. I respect you, I worship you, and I will remember what you are saying; but I cannot act accordingly right now. I am just an ordinary human being, you are a great realised soul — the distance is vast.”
Worshipping the mystics is not real respect. It is a strategy of the mind to avoid seeing the finger that is pointing towards the moon.
