An excerpt from Dayal’s recently published ebook ‘I Don’t Give a Fuck!’.
Excerpt from the chapter ‘…and Forgiveness’
A few years ago I began writing a book to share some things about meditation and consciousness according to my sense of humor and my delight in provocation. I did it in Spanish (even if I am… or better to say, I was Italian) and I thought I was going to write just a couple of jokes. But life was generous and it ended up being a book of more then 300 pages that became a bestseller in Mexico, where I live. Now I have decided to offer the book in English, adapting the narrative to the American cultural mark.
While reading this book extract, you’ll notice a strange character, and I feel I should explain who he is and why I created him. To be sure that people don’t take me too seriously and also to make the narration light and funny, I pretend to be channeling a “glorious” entity: Joe Cocozza, the last person you would associate with the classic idea of a spiritual master.
I hope you enjoy this excerpt and will want to read the entire book.
Prem Dayal
The golden American Mantras of Purification Fuck it! promise a transformation, not a change. Change means that your old you becomes a little better that it was. Change means that you were a criminal and now you are a little bit less criminal. If before you robbed millions, now you rob a few dollars. If all your misdeeds were worthy of the front page of the newspapers, now you find them written, at most, on the walls of your condo, if before you told big lies, now you tell “almost” truths.
No, to be transformed is a completely different phenomenon. “Transformation” is a phenomenon of discontinuity with your past. It means that you die and are reborn. This is the purpose of the Mantra Fuck It!
This isn’t about behaving a little better; it’s about being reborn. To transform oneself means to awaken and suddenly realize that while you were sleeping you did all those stupid things. It’s just that you appeared to be awake, when actually your consciousness was asleep: you stole, cheated, lied and killed in a sleepwalking state we already mentioned. You weren’t you.
This is the real meaning of the Bible when it says that God is always ready to forgive; that until the last moment of your life you have time to repent and enter into the kingdom of Heaven. It obviously doesn’t mean that God sits patiently beside your deathbed, leafing through a magazine, while you, left alone like a child in the desert, squirm on the mattress with bulging eyes, battling the pitiless Grim Reaper, looking for anything to grab on to and resist the vertigo that relentlessly sucks you into nothingness. He peers at you over the top of His reading glasses waiting to see if you repent or not. And if you do repent, He lifts his arms to Heaven like in a soccer stadium and yells: “Gooaal!!! and He hands you your ticket to go to Heaven. And if to the contrary you don’t repent, as you inhale your last breath of life, He gives you a little slap on the back and says: “You fucked up, buddy; now you’re going to rot in Hell for eternity”; and without wasting more time on you, He grabs the magazine and goes to sit at someone else’s bedside to see if he is more astute or fortunate that you.
No my friend, don’t you worry, our dear little God isn’t such a cynical S.O.B. as that and He isn’t so cheap. The repentance the Bible talks about is not a formal act of humiliation before God; it is alchemy that takes you to a state of awareness and its subsequent transformation. Repentance is like a frontier between who you were before and who you are after having realized what you did; a frontier between unconsciousness and consciousness, between Heaven and Hell, between living in a nightmare and awakening to the glory of God. And this awakening of consciousness that allows repentance is within anyone’s reach.
“Everyone is worthy of being rescued from their fuck-ups – Joe Cocozza continues to illuminate us while eating a couple of seafood tostadas from a traveling taco truck – How can you send to Hell a few imbeciles who have no idea what they’re doing? It’s just like my colleague Jesus said, looking up toward Heaven as they hung him on the cross: Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” […]
What makes the difference in the eyes of God (or for existence) is if your actions are the result of the full radiance of your consciousness or the blindness of your ignorance. Any conscious action, even the most seemingly bumbling action, is virtuous if done by a Buddha; and all actions taken by an unconscious being, even the most seemingly good actions, are blasphemous simply because the perpetrator acts as if in a state of somnambulism; and the actions of a sleepwalker cannot be judged as good or bad, because they belong to another category: unconscious actions. And, as you can’t punish a sleepwalker if he pees in the refrigerator at night, you also can’t reward him if he unconsciously waters the plants in your garden while you are asleep.
Joe Cocozza – tightrope walking on the edge of the curb and whistling a tune from his grandfather’s time – is not saying that whoever commits a crime must be freed of the consequences. I am saying that if in the tribunals of mankind there are those who are guilty or innocent, in God’s tribunal there is only one category: innocent.
There is no Paradise, Purgatory and Hell – continues Joe Cocozza, carefully tossing out the odds and ends that mysteriously accumulate in his pockets – and there isn’t even, as some believe, any type of Karma Bank: a credit institute where God’s accountant, a beer-bellied dude with not much hair and coke bottle-bottom glasses, sitting upon a square cloud (which the angels use as a meeting place, calling it “Karma Corner”), takes note of our actions in a gigantic book where all our names are recorded; noting in red, in the debit column, all our bad acts, and in blue in the credit column, the good ones. And at the end of your life you are sent an account statement with the balance, which is usually in red, which, depending on the bullshit you believe, you are reincarnated in whatever species of wretched animal or condemned to spend eons in Purgatory or the eternal flames of Hell or Heaven’s perennial air conditioning… which, for one who suffers from rheumatism, becomes a hideous Hell.
God’s forgiveness is not subject to conditions. God has already forgiven you even before you commit a “sin”, because God is not a businessman; He doesn’t get off on humiliating his children: God is pure Love. God is not sitting there with a magazine waiting for you to repent. Saying that up until the very last moment you have time to repent and earn your place in the Kingdom of Heaven simply means that it’s never too late to wake up and see that your awareness remained asleep all your life, dreaming of being victim and executioner in the most inhuman of all Hells.
It has nothing to do with being a repentant murderer, but converting oneself into a completely new being. And if you are not more than you were before… or rather, if you discover that you were never who you thought you were, not only the guilt but also the forgiveness lose significance. If, by means of the alchemy of repentance, the criminal has disappeared, there isn’t anyone who has to be forgiven.
So, don’t waste time feeling guilty in the hope of deserving forgiveness. Just have the courage to repent, to die to your past and end it there. Feeling guilty only means that the criminal is still hidden somewhere within you, afflicted by guilt, but ready to enter into action again, like a dying ember waiting for the Devil’s breath to re-ignite it and swallow you up in its blazing maw.
The path that Joe Cocozza shows us – while applying chalk to the tip of his billiard cue with the same deliberate languidness as a retired lady on social security would apply enamel to her nails – is the way of transformation, not the path of self-improvement. To improve is all right, but it’s nothing special. To improve means that the same old sleazy dude who has committed a multitude of misdeeds becomes a little bit better: that’s all. But, through the fervent practice of the American Mantras, the old sleazy dude simply disappears like a sinister shadow in the light of awareness, giving way to the radiance of God’s image.
So then chant, chant with zeal: Fuck It! Fuck It! Fuck It! Fuck It All To Hel-l-l! and the poison of your crimes will melt in the heat of your religious passion. Fuck It! Fuck It! Fuck It! and everything that your body has recorded from your past will be shattered under the powerful blows of your intensity. Fuck It! Fuck It! Fuck It! and all the energy that was blocked in the form of guilt within you will begin to flow again, jubilantly shouting its overwhelming desire for the Divine.
Read the presentation of the book
I Don’t Give a Fuck!
Available as ebook from www.lulu.com
and as paperback from www.lulu.com
Italian-born Prem Dayal met Osho in 1987 and spent most of the 90’s in Pune. He has been street artist, actor, choreographer, director and scriptwriter; he was the first assistant to Nobel Laureate Dario Fo, and taught mime and acting for many years. Since 2001 he has been living in Mexico where he founded the Osho Center Mexico and also edited and published the Spanish Osho Times. Once a week, he performs a one-man theatrical presentation based on his books and is also the author of ‘Tantra and Sausage, a Juicy Way to Sacred Sex’, and ‘This Year I Don’t Give a Fuck’, a collection of 365 original aphorisms in the form of an ‘eternal calendar’. premdayal.org – osho.com.mx
Comments are closed.