The first thing to understand is that I have no teachings. I am not teaching you anything at all, because teaching simply means conditioning your mind -- in other words, programming you in a certain way. What I am doing here is just the opposite of teaching you: I am creating a space where you can unlearn whatsoever you have been taught up to now. I am not a teacher! That's the difference between a teacher and a Master: the teacher teaches, the Master helps you to undo whatsoever the teachers have done. The function of the Master is just the opposite of that of the teacher. The teacher serves the society, the establishment; he is the agent of the past. He works for the older generation: he tries to condition the minds of the new generation so they can be subservient, obedient to the past, to all that is old -- to their parents, to the society, to the state, to the church. The function of the teacher is anti-revolutionary, it is reactionary The Master is basically a rebel. He is not in the service of the past, he is not an agent of all that you can think of as 'the establishment' -- religious, political, social, economic -- his whole effort is to help you to discover your individuality. It has nothing to do with tradition, convention. You have to go within, not backwards. He is not in any way interested in forcing you into a certain pattern; he makes you free. So what I am doing here is not teaching, that is a misunderstanding on your part. But it happens because you have lived with teachers, all kinds of teachers. It is rare to come across a Master, because the society does not allow the Master to happen. The society is very afraid of the Master, otherwise why did society poison Socrates? For what? He is the Master par excellence, has never been surpassed by any other. His crime was that he was a Master, and the society wanted him to be a teacher He was helping people to discover the truth. And society is not interested in discovering the truth, it is interested in covering it more and more, because it lives through lies -- it calls them beliefs. All beliefs are lies; howsoever beautifully presented, they are lies. Truth cannot be given by one person to another, only lies can be transferred, they are transferable. Truth is untransferable. The Master cannot hand over the truth to you, he can only create devices so that you can discover your own truth. The truth is always your own authenticity, your own being. Who can give it to you? The teacher pretends to give you truth, but what he gives is just a decorated lie -- although it may be very ancient, repeated for millions of years, so it appears like truth. A Christian believes, because Jesus says, "Believe. Have faith," so for two thousands years they are believing and having faith, and what they have gained? What is their achievement? Just two thousand years of bloodshed -- murdering, killing, wars, burning alive people -- and that all in the name of God, in the name of Jesus Christ.... But the responsibility is of Jesus Christ himself. He was telling people to believe. That means he was telling people to be hypocrites. That's what belief means: you don't know and yet you pretend that you know. You worship God -- you don't know -- and yet you are praying to something that you don't know. Is this the way of intelligence? Is this the way to grow, mature? This is the way of remaining retarded. Jesus is responsible for millions of people who have remained retarded, because he taught belief. But this is true also of Mohammed, this is true also of other religious leaders -- the whole past is based on belief systems. And the result you can see: the whole mess in the world. My approach is based on doubt, on agnosticism, on skepticism, because these are the ways to eliminate anything that is not true. Q:* WHAT'S THE MAJOR BELIEF THAT YOU THINK NEEDS TO BE ELIMINATED? A:* God is the major belief that has to be eliminated, because every other thing hangs with God. God eliminated means prophets, messiahs, saviors, messengers -- all are eliminated. Heaven, hell -- all are eliminated. With God eliminated, we can clean the whole mind of man. All rubbish will simply disappear. It can exist only with God. He is the center of the madness of man. He is the greatest block against human intelligence and its evolution. Just think if there is no God -- then there are no holy scriptures, then there are no popes, no prophets. Then you cannot depend on anybody; you have to depend on yourself. In the beginning it is a little scary, but soon you will start finding strength in yourself, in your independence. How long man has been moving like blind people, following somebody who himself is blind? Blinds are leading blind people for millions of years. Jesus Christ has no experience of God, because there is no God, so how he can have the experience of God? He may have hallucinated. He may have imagined, he may have dreamt, but there is no God anywhere. Existence is all. And the very idea of God creates a split in existence: the creator and the creation -- and that is the root cause of all other splits. All the people who are suffering from schizophrenia may never know that the basic schizophrenia comes from the split between God and existence. Then you are continuously in split: your body wants to do one thing, your mind says that is wrong. Because your religion teaches you celibacy and your body wants to make love. You are torn apart. If you listen to the body you will feel guilty. If you listen to the mind you will become a pervert sexual. In both the cases you are going to be a loser. So emphatically and absolutely I say, "God is the greatest lie that has to be removed from human consciousness. And once man is free from God, hell and heaven, sin and virtue, his intelligence is free to grow. All the barriers have been removed. And it is his intelligence will be now decisive -- about his actions -- and he will be himself responsible. And each act brings its own punishment or its own reward, so there is no need to wait for the last judgement day! Each act: if you are compassionate to someone, you feel a joy of being compassionate -- that is its reward. If you are angry at someone, you are first burning inside yourself. Even before you have acted on your anger, you have suffered the punishment. In my vision every action has its intrinsic reward or punishment. So a man of intelligence soon starts finding what are the acts which bring you happiness, joy, blissfulness, and what are the actions which create misery, suffering. There is no need to wait for the last judgement day, there is no need to wait after death -- you will be thrown into hell or into heaven. Each moment completes itself. And if you are the person who is responsible, totally responsible, then certainly each of your action will show that responsibility. Right now you can dump everything on God, everything on past life, everything on devil. But if God is removed, devil is gone. Devil is God's shadow. They cannot exist separate from each other. God needs the devil, the devil needs the God. You will be surprised to know that the world devil and the word divine come from the same Sanskrit root. Divine and devil from the same Sanskrit root, which is very significant. It means they are just two branches of one tree and they can exist only together, perhaps like two sides of a coin: you cannot separate them. Once man feels free from god and devil and all nonsense, he is free from churches, free from temples, free from mosques, synagogues -- a tremendous sense of freedom. And to act responsibly, because you are going to suffer from your act or to rejoice from your act. Your act is decisive itself. Nobody else is going to decide for you. Then easily a intelligent person will sort out -- perhaps he will fall once in a while into the wrong place -- but he will not fall twice in the same place. And that is the way of learning: commit as many mistakes you can, but don't commit the same mistake again. That's how one matures, one becomes more understanding, becomes more clear. And all this ultimately leads to enlightenment, because you cannot depend on praying, you have to find something else. Prayer is addressed to a God. If there is no God, all prayers are meaningless. Meditation is not addressed to anybody. It is an inner journey of being silent, of being more and more peaceful, of being more and more alert and aware. A moment comes when your consciousness is so clear, so luminous, that time stops, that thoughts stop -- simply you are, in your utter purity -- and that experience I call religiousness. For it you need not go to any church, you need not belong to any crowd, you need not have any holy scripture; for that, all that is needed is an inward journey. And that's what I am teaching my people. BELOVED MASTER, WHAT IS UNAWARENESS? Shivananda, yes, the question arises and is significant too.