Come Follow To You, Vol 2

When the bridegroom shall be taken away

Young religion is celebration; dead religion is renunciation. Society conditions children to feel guilty about happiness—saints are sad, sinners are happy. Jesus feasted, not fasted; he was crucified outside the town as an outcast. New wine needs new bottles: new consciousness cannot fit old traditions. Religion is play, not work.

'We still are Jewish'—Jesus failed. Being Jewish means calculating, law not love, arithmetic not poetry. Marx, Freud, Einstein—three Jews dominating this materialist century. Christ succeeds only when law is defeated by love. Religion is individual, not social. Mind is Jewish; beyond mind is mystery where the more you know, the less you know.

Your Names Are Written In Heaven.

The gardener parable: believers and skeptics both err by separating gardener from garden. God is not separate from creation—He IS the garden, visible as flowers. Don't rejoice in power over spirits but in your names written in heaven. God is hidden from the wise and revealed to babes—innocence, not scholarship, sees truth.

Are You The Greatest Master?

'Good' people are more dangerous than bad—their badness hides in goodness. Priests killed Jesus innocently, thinking they saved society. Jesus had to be uncompromising—diluting his message would have been self-murder. Crucifixion proves religion matters; indifference would be the saddest response. India was too sophisticated to crucify Buddha.

Everyone is born great and dies small—character kills. The child has no identity; society shrinks him with name, religion, nation. Jesus says 'hate' father and mother because family love makes you forget the whole. You are already free—guards and locks exist only in imagination. Character is frozenness; melt it to flow again as a white cloud.

Politics And Love

Helping others means helping them be themselves; trying to change them is violence and aggression. Don't sacrifice human beings for ideas like Christ, Buddha, or humanity. Each individual is unique—God never repeats. Love people as they are and they transform naturally. Politics is trying to change others; love is accepting them unconditionally.

He that heareth the word

Jesus speaks in parables to masses, directly to disciples. Three types: masses (curious), followers (impressed), disciples (committed totally). Parables are sutras—threads leading to the ultimate. The obvious is not the actual. The sower parable: seed on path (misunderstood), stone (no root), thorns (worldly cares choke), good ground (bears fruit hundredfold).

The fear of happiness

You will face reality first; knowledge follows as shadow. The Zen story: both host and guest had read about Zen but didn't actually know. Knowledge can precede and become a barrier. Religious experiences happen to everyone—in beauty, music, love—but go unrecognized. God is seeking you as much as you seek Him; He cannot forget you.

He that soweth the good seed

Man is a paradox between animal past and divine future. Prayer is not doing but becoming: a climate of gratitude, an unaddressed thank-you. Knowledge is sin—Adam ate from the tree of knowledge and was expelled. Not-knowing is ultimate knowledge, innocence. The wheat and tares grow together until harvest; good and evil coexist until the end.

Every moment god knocks

Humpty Dumpty is you—the fragmented mind, a crowd with no center. Each moment a different servant sits on the throne. You are not yet born as a soul. Psychoanalysis tries to put you together; the East says blessed is the fall—leave the fragments, don't reassemble. Ego sits on a wall; the higher it climbs, the greater the fall. Emptiness means empty of thoughts, full of yourself.

And come, follow me

Man is a paradox: past pulls back, future calls forward. The lost parable: the master himself sowed the weeds—the enemy is within, the beloved is within. Scientific truth is outside and transferable; religious truth is inside and must be individually experienced. The rich young ruler: 'Sell all and follow me'—he went away sorrowful. Attachment prevents the total jump into being.