The Mystique of Enlightenment

( Compiled by James Brodsky from conversations in India and Switzerland 1973. )     I am not out to liberate anybody. You have to liberate yourself, and you are unable to do that. What I have to say will not do it. I am only interested in describing this state, in clearing away the occultation and mystification in which those people in the ‘holy business’ have shrouded the whole thing. Maybe I can convince you not to waste a lot of time and energy, looking for a state which does not exist except in your imagination. ____________     Get this straight, this is your state I am describing, your natural state, not my state or the state of a God-realized man or a mutant or any such thing. This is your natural state, but what prevents what is there from expressing itself in its own way is your reaching out for something, trying to be something other than what you are. ____________     You can never understand this; you can only experience this in terms of your past experience. This is outsid

( An Interview by Professor H. S. Krishnaswamy Iyengar , Mysore, India, 1980 .)     What is necessary for man is to free himself from the entire past of mankind, not only his individual past. That is to say, you have to free yourself from what every man before you has thought, felt and experienced — then only is it possible for you to be yourself. The whole purpose of my talking to people is to point out the uniqueness of every individual. Culture or civilization or whatever you might call it has always tried to fit us into a framework. Man is not man at all; I call him a ‘unique animal’ — and man will remain a unique animal as long as he's burdened by the culture. _________     Nature, in its own way, throws out, from time to time, some flower, the end-product of human evolution. This cannot be used by the evolutionary process as a model for creating another one — that is why I say this is the end-product of human evolution — if it throws out one flower, that's it, you see. Su