Everybody is on the wrong train

On a coast-bound train, Mieczyslaw was slumped in his seat, and every few moments he sighed and cried, “Ah my! Ah my!” Forbes, sitting nearby, heard him cry but did not butt in, thinking the fellow was troubled by some great personal tragedy.

The next day it was the same cry of, “Ah my! Ah my!” And again the same, the day after.

Finally, Forbes leaned over and whispered, “Anything seriously wrong?”

“Ah my, yes!” said the Polack. “For three days now I have been on the wrong train!”

This is exactly the situation of humanity: everybody, almost everybody, is on the wrong train; hence there is so much misery. Misery simply indicates that you are not where you are supposed to be; that you are not moving towards your own destiny; that you are not flowering into your own potential; that you have been diverted, distracted by others.

Every adult distracts the child from his essential being. Nobody respects the individual. They have already decided what is right and what is wrong, and for all.
Each individual is a unique phenomenon. Hence no law, no morality can be applicable to all. Of course, we have to agree on a few minimums just to exist together, but those minimums have to be the nonessentials.

About the essentials, there should be no compromise at all, with no one, not even with God, because you don’t know anything about God. The priest goes on speaking on behalf of a God which nobody knows. It is the priest, who pretends that his voice is God’s voice.

Religion means one is trying to transcend the mundane; otherwise, religion loses all its meaning. … And this is not only the case with Hindus: this is the case with Buddhists, Jainas, Christians, Jews, with almost all organised religions. They have all gone off-track. I mean they have become entangled with the nonessential.

There cannot be myriad rules about the essential; it is about the very nonessential: while you are walking, how much you should see of the road? – only four feet, not more than that, not even four feet six inches. If you go beyond the limit of four feet, you fall from grace. Now what does it have to do with religion? You have to have only a certain number of clothing, not more, and you have to be very strict about it. You have to beg in a certain way, from certain people, not otherwise. You have to eat only at a certain time; if you are feeling hungry again you cannot eat, you have to remain hungry.

These rules have been propagated in the name of religion, and once something takes the colour of religion, it starts looking important to people.

Character has been very much emphasised; in fact, character is a peripheral phenomenon. The real thing is not character but consciousness, but consciousness happens inside and is not available for others to observe; others can only observe your character. And it is always the others who are deciding for you, hence they decide something that they can observe: they decide about your behaviour. And of course man is capable of conducting himself in a certain way; he can force himself to do all kinds of contortions, but that does not change his consciousness at all.