Chapter 5: That State Is Awakening
It almost always happens whenever you are repeating rituals; you need not be aware. Every Sunday suddenly you feel the urge to go to the church - for no reason at all. If you don’t go you will feel as if you have missed something; if you go you don’t gain anything at all.
It is just like smoking: if you smoke the cigarette you don’t get anything, or perhaps you get something - cancer, et cetera - but if you don’t smoke, the idea of smoking haunts you. You feel something is missing, you feel disturbed; the routine has not been fulfilled. You have to do it, otherwise your program inside goes on knocking, “Do it!” Unless you do it, it will not leave you alone. Whether it is smoking or prayer does not matter, it is all the same. If it is out of your programming there is no difference in it at all.
You don’t feel like bowing down before a Mohammedan mosque if you are a Hindu or before a church if you are a Mohammedan or before a temple if you are a Christian. Why? Those are also places devoted to God dedicated to God, but no desire arises because that is not YOUR programming, that is not your conditioning.
Your so-called waking state is full of mechanical habits; you simply go on repeating them - and each generation goes on giving its mechanical habits to the new generation. That’s why progress seems to be so impossible, because parents go on imprinting their children with their programming, and that programming has been coming for centuries, maybe thousands-of-years-old programming. Their parents programmed them and their parents and their parents, and it has been going on since Adam and Eve, perhaps even before that, because God programmed Adam and Eve. “Not to eat from this tree” is a program, is a conditioning. “You should do this, you should not do this..” He behaved just like any other stupid father, no difference at all, and he punished like any father - he threw Adam and Eve out of the garden of Eden.
This waking state is not a real waking state. The real waking state happens only when you are completely deprogrammed, unconditioned.
Two drunks, Moe and Harry, meet. “How ya, Harry? Did we kill a bottle together last night?”
“No,” replies Harry.
“Oh,” says Moe, “must have been two other guys!”
Even the drunkard believes that he can reason!
The punch-drunk prize-fighter, having dropped to the mat from a crushing blow, was about to get up.
“Stay down until eight!” yelled his manager.
The fighter mumbled in a daze, “What time is it now?”
The honeymoon is over when she starts wondering what happened to the man she married, and he starts wondering what happened to the girl he didn’t.
