Geeta Darshan #11

In realization there is never any difference, but in expression there is much difference. And people who judge only by expression may even see opposition— not ordinary, but extraordinary enmity and antagonism. Because expression does not arise from realization; expression arises from the person. It is essential to understand this distinction.

I go into a garden. Flowers are in bloom; birds are singing; a rupee lies on the ground. If I am enamored of money, I won’t see the flowers. Even as the birds sing, I won’t hear them. Everything will be lost to me; emphatically, I will see only the rupee. If the coin comes into my pocket, perhaps then I’ll hear the birds’ song.

But if a poet enters, he won’t even notice the coin. If where birds are singing a coin catches someone’s eye, that person is no poet. His whole being will flow toward the birds’ song. If it is a painter, his whole being will flow toward color.

Then the three return from the same garden, and in the village we ask them, “What did you see?” The garden was one, but the expression will differ. Expression entails selection. What each saw, what each grasped, what each can reveal—that is how each will express.

Meera too has been to that realm of realization, but returning she began to dance. You cannot even imagine Mahavira dancing. You can’t even think it: Mahavira—and dancing? There is simply no place for dance in his personality. Mahavira also returned from that realm, but he does not dance. The news he brings from that realm will be revealed in his own way. His news begins to show through his ahimsa, his virtue, his character, his very way of sitting and standing—through the smallest things it is revealed that he has known advaita, nonduality.

At night Mahavira sleeps on one side only; he does not turn over. Someone asks him, “Why do you lie on one side all night?” He says, “If I turn, some insect might be crushed and suffer.” Therefore, the least that is possible—the absolutely minimal—he does: since one posture is unavoidable, he keeps to one posture. He won’t even move his legs at night, lest in the darkness something be crushed, something suffer.

Now the way his realization of nonduality expresses itself is through nonviolence. It says, “There is only one.” For unless the insect is also me, such concern would not arise. But this is Mahavira’s way; it comes from his personality.

Meera is dancing. What she has known is expressing within her as dance. She can only dance. The joy, the ecstasy that has filled her—no words can express it. It will be expressed by her anklets. She will bring news of that same nonduality by tying bells to her feet.

If we place Mahavira and Meera face to face, we will say their realizations must be different. Where Meera’s anklets are ringing, Mahavira is a man who won’t even turn over in his sleep! Where Meera’s feet strike the earth countless times, Mahavira places each foot as if blowing upon it, taking utmost care. If the rains come he will not travel; if the ground is wet he will not lift his foot, lest an insect be crushed. And where Meera’s feet are dancing! How utterly opposite! Mahavira would say, “Such violence is being done.” Meera would say, “If you didn’t dance, where could you have arrived? For one who has known and did not dance—where did he arrive at all?”

Then there is a person like Shankara—he too returns knowing from there. He says, “One Brahman alone is the truth; all else is maya.” And there is a person like Buddha who says, “There is no Brahman; there is nothing—everything is shunya, emptiness.” They say radically opposite things; so a dispute appears, great opposition appears.

It is hard to find two more opposed than Shankara and Buddha: one declares everything positive, affirmative; the other declares everything negative. But even that is the emphasis of personality, its accent. What they have known and returned with is very much like a glass left half full: two people look at it; one says, “The glass is half empty,” and the other says, “False—the glass is half full.” One stresses the empty, the other the full. A dispute is bound to arise, for “full” and “empty” are strongly opposite words. Inevitably so.

I have heard about Bernard Shaw. He went to America after many persistent invitations. Until then he kept saying, “America is a very witless, idiotic country; I won’t go. What will I do among such fools?” The more he abused, the more the attraction for him grew in America. We are always attracted to the one who abuses us. There were so many invitations that Bernard Shaw went. Where he was to land such a crowd gathered and there was such danger of a fracas that they secretly set him down earlier at another place and took him away.

In his very first talk he created an uproar. He said, “As far as I can see, at least fifty percent of the people present here are utter fools.” The chairman panicked and people shouted, “Shame! Shame! Withdraw your words!” The chairman said, “From the very start you have provoked trouble. Somehow appease the audience!”

Bernard Shaw said, “No, no—I must clarify; I made a great mistake. I meant that, as far as I can see, at least fifty percent of the people here appear very intelligent.” People applauded: “Now that is well said.” And Bernard Shaw bowed and whispered to the chairman, “Confirmed—fifty percent here are absolute donkeys.”

Yet between those two statements there seems a great difference. The point is the same. It is just like that between Shankara and Buddha.

Buddha favors negative words. There are reasons in his personality—psychological reasons. Buddha comes from a life of abundance: palace, kingdom, wealth, women—everything. So much of everything that for Buddha the positive word lost all savor. He was so overfilled that his taste now lay in emptiness.

Shankara is a poor Brahmin’s son, coming from a beggar’s home where there was nothing—where even the hut had nothing. Shankara’s taste cannot be in “no”; he has seen too much of “no.” His taste is in “is,” in the positive.

So when Brahman reveals itself to Shankara it comes as “all is.” And when Brahman reveals itself to Buddha it comes as “all is empty.” This is a difference of psychological type. There is not the slightest difference in realization.

Shankara and Buddha are very far apart in time; but right in Buddha’s time is Mahavira—contemporary, often in the same region, sometimes even in the same village. Once it so happened that they were both in one village, occupying two halves of the same dharmashala. Even then they did not converse; they did not meet.

And their words are sharply opposed. Mahavira says, “To know the soul is knowledge.” Buddha says, “There is no greater ignoramus than the one who believes in a soul.” What greater opposition could there be! Swords are drawn. Mahavira says, “To know the soul is knowledge,” and Buddha says, “Soul? There is none more ignorant than one who believes in a soul.”

Yet I tell you: both are saying the same thing. Their statements are opposed, their realization not in the least. Why then such statements?

Because at that ultimate depth, the meanings of words become highly personal and private. We have a common market language in which words are shared. If we say “house,” it means the same—enough for transactions—though deep down it differs. When I say “house,” my own house appears in my mind, and yours appears in yours. If we each draw our house, the difference shows.

When I say “dog,” my experience of dogs is in that word; yours is in yours. Perhaps my experience has been affectionate, while yours since childhood has been only fear: whenever you went down the lane, dogs barked. So when we both say “dog,” the word is common, but if we look within, your “dog” is one thing and mine another. In the workaday world of words, this passes.

But as we descend into deeper realization—no longer in the marketplace but in solitude—the difficulty mounts. When Mahavira says “soul,” he has his own private meaning. It is a private language. By “soul” Mahavira means that where ego is not—whatever remains when the ego is dropped—that is soul. And then he says: to know the soul is knowledge; the path to knowing the soul is the dissolution of ego. If we nullify ego within, what remains is the soul for Mahavira.

Buddha, by “soul,” means the ego itself. He says: as long as the tone of “I” is there—and “soul” means “I”—there is ego. The Pali word Buddha uses is atta. It is an excellent word; even “atma” doesn’t carry what atta carries in Pali. Atta means the enforced I, the insistence of “me.” In the very sound and pressure of “atta” there is that sense—“I.”

Buddha says: wherever there is atta, wherever there is “I,” there is ignorance. And he too says: when atta is abandoned, what remains is knowledge.

That is why people call Buddha a proponent of no-soul (anatta-vadi) and Mahavira a proponent of the soul (atma-vadi). Yet both are saying the same thing—there is no room for “-isms” there. “Isms” extend only up to words. “Ism” is expression, not experience.

But there is a great difficulty. We receive only words—and those too through pundits. Words come to us filtered through scholasticism. Only words remain. Rarely do we seek through experience itself. Mahavira says, “Drop the ego, and what remains is the soul”—we could try dropping ego and see. Buddha says, “Drop even the notion of soul, and what remains is samadhi”—we could try that too. Then you would discover what madness it was: both deliver you to the very same place! But almost no one has such an opportunity.

We hear from dictionaries, read in philosophy. There are Buddhist pundits, Jain pundits, Hindu pundits; they have nothing but words. They keep spinning interpretations of those words. Around each private word—private because Mahavira’s, Buddha’s, Shankara’s realizations were so solitary that the matter is private, not public—a web of exegesis is spun. The web grows so vast that the web around Mahavira, the web around Buddha, the web around Shankara, in one or two thousand years become such enemies that the original word—and beneath the word the realization—gets lost; there is no trace of it.

Hence the obstacle. Otherwise realization is never different. Expression can differ; it does differ; there is no possibility of uniformity. The day man understands this, there will be no quarrel between religions. And the sooner he understands, the better. For all the quarrel between religions is a quarrel of language, not of truth. Those who quarrel over language are at best word-scholars, linguists—not religious. But when such word-scholars take themselves to be religious, great difficulty arises.

sukha-duhkhe same krtva labhalabhau jayajayau
tato yuddhaya yujyasva naivam papam avapsyasi (2.38)

Regard pleasure and pain, gain and loss, and victory and defeat as equal; then engage in the battle. Doing so, you will not incur sin.

Krishna’s statement here is very categorical, very decisive. We will have to understand sin and virtue. Ordinarily we think sin is an act, and virtue too is an act. But here Krishna says sin and virtue are not acts—they are states of feeling. If sin and virtue are acts, what difference does it make whether I hold gain and loss to be equal? If I murder you, what difference does it make to the act of murder whether or not I view gain and loss as equal? If I steal from a house while holding gain and loss to be equal, will that not be sin—and if I don’t hold them equal, will it be sin? Then it follows that sin and virtue are not related to the act, but to the inner mood of the person. This deserves deep reflection.

All our ethics are tied to acts. We say, “That deed was bad; that deed was good. Do good deeds; don’t do bad deeds.” Which deed is bad? Which deed is good? For no deed is atomic; every deed is a chain. Consider an example.

You are walking down the road; a man is committing suicide. Should you save him or not? Instinctively you will say: saving a suicide is good. But you save him and tomorrow he murders fifteen people. Had you not saved him, those fifteen would have lived. Was your deed good or bad?

An act is an endless series. You will end, your deed will not; it will continue. You will die, and what you did will go on.

You beget a son. Is begetting a son good or bad? Tomorrow he may become a Hitler and kill a million people. But even then, was the deed good or bad? It all depends on what those million would have done had they lived. But this series is infinite.

A deed is not individual. It has no atomic boundary; it is one link in a vast chain. You cast a stone into a lake: the stone sinks, but the impact raises a ripple. The stone settles in silence, but the ripple rises and moves on, and that ripple raises more ripples, and more, touching endless shores. You are finished, but the deed continues.

Therefore, which deed is right cannot be determined until we have reached the very end of the world. Until the whole creation is summed up, it is difficult to decide whether what the saint did was good, or what the sinner did was good.

Those who think in terms of the act—and that is how almost all of us think, and how all ethical systems in the world think—insist that this is right and that is wrong.

Krishna says the very opposite. He says the question is not whether what you did is right or wrong. At depth the real question is different: Who are you? What are you? What is your inner state? Everything depends on that.

In my view too, any ethics based on the act is very childish. Yet that is how we all think. We all think like that.

Krishna is asking: What is the state of the person’s feeling and being? And he gives a formula: if gain and loss are equal, if pleasure and pain are the same, if victory and defeat make no difference, then whatever you do carries no sin. He sets no condition on what you will do; he says, then whatever you do, there is no sin in it.

It is a thought to ponder, and it goes deep. For Krishna is saying that the possibility of hurting another exists only so long as you differentiate between gain and loss. For one to whom gain and loss are the same—this is a very hard condition. Because to see no difference between gain and loss is a very deep attainment.

Can such a person, for whom gain and loss are the same, do anything we would call a sin? One to whom victory and defeat are equal, to whom failure and success are a play, who welcomes both alike, accepts both alike, who has the same indifference or the same acceptance toward both—can such a person do wrong?

Krishna’s emphasis is on the person, not the act. And the condition behind the person is immense: that the dualities appear equal to him, that light and darkness appear the same. This is possible only in a very deep state of samadhi.

So on the surface it looks as if Krishna is giving Arjuna a great license, because now he can do anything. It looks as if this would lead to license: do whatever you want. But Krishna is taking Arjuna into deeper and deeper transformation, not into licentiousness.

In fact, one to whom victory and defeat are equal can never be licentious. There is no way, no need, no motive. Man enters into sin only for the sake of gain; man enters into sin only to avoid loss.

A man tells a lie. No one in the world lies for the sake of lying; he lies for gain. If in this world speaking the truth began to bring gain, you would not find a liar. Then you would have to search hard. Perhaps some renunciant, some great ascetic might lie—by special resolve, that’s another matter. But if truth brought gain, there would be no liars. Which means no one lies for lying’s sake; it is gain that chooses the path of untruth. It is to avoid loss that one chooses untruth. No one steals for the sake of stealing; he steals for gain. No one steals simply for the love of theft.

No one in this world has ever committed a sin for any reason other than gain—or to avoid loss, which is the same thing. And what is amusing is that even virtue—punya—is also pursued for gain or to avoid loss.

Plato wrote a little story to raise a moral question. Suppose a man finds a device, a talisman, by which he can become invisible whenever he wishes. Plato asks: could such a man remain moral? He could walk into your shop and take diamonds and jewels; invisible, the police could not catch him, society could not call him immoral. He could enter someone’s house at night unseen. Plato asks: can we find a moral man whose hand holds the talisman of invisibility and who still remains moral? It seems very hard to find such a person.

If you reflect that you have gotten such a talisman—even for five minutes—what would you do? Your mind will instantly show you the routes: do this and that—run off with the neighbor’s wife, take that man’s car, slip into that shop. Instantly your mind will suggest everything. You do not yet have the talisman, but the very thought of getting it immediately tells you what you could do—which you are not doing only because immorality appears harmful. There is no other reason. In this world, what decides who appears moral and who immoral is simply gain and loss.

Krishna is taking ethics onto a completely different plane, an altogether different dimension. He is saying: that question is irrelevant. That is why the powerful do not care about morality or immorality. Ask Chanakya or Machiavelli and they will say morality has no meaning; it is merely the shield of the weak. The powerful do not care about morality because immorality does not harm them. Only the weak worry about morality because immorality can harm them. Machiavelli even advises: if you have power, then power itself means you are free to be immoral. If you are weak, that only means you are compelled to be moral.

At the root of morality and immorality one finds gain and loss.

We feel the world is becoming more immoral day by day. The sole reason is that never before have so many people been powerful as today. That’s all. The world appears more immoral because so much wealth has never been in the hands of so many. Those who had it were always immoral. The world appears more immoral because in the past power was concentrated in kings and emperors. The modern world is democratic; power is distributed into the hands of individuals. Now each person is more empowered than ever before. The world appears more immoral because never before were so many people educated; and education is a power. Even among the educated there was never any guarantee of morality.

As education grows, immorality will grow; as prosperity grows, immorality will grow; as power grows, immorality will grow. At the very root of morality and immorality sits gain and loss.

Therefore Krishna’s statement has very deep implications. He tells Arjuna: so long as you differentiate between gain and loss, whatever you do is sin. And the day gain and loss make no difference to you, be at ease: whatever you do that day will not be sin.

So the question is not to choose what ought to be done and what ought not to be done. The real question lies deeper: does gain and loss still affect my consciousness? If it does, then even if I build a temple it will be sin, because at the deepest level it will still be governed by gain and loss. Even if I perform a virtuous act, it will only appear as virtue; behind it will be sin. And to perform every virtue, first one has to commit sin. Even to build a temple, the wealth for building it has to be accumulated.

All virtues require sin, because no virtue can be without gain. Before giving in charity, one has to steal. In fact, the bigger the thief, the bigger a donor he can become. A great donor is only yesterday’s thief. Today’s thief is tomorrow’s philanthropist. For after stealing, what will he do? A saturation point comes where no further gain accrues from theft; after that, gain begins to flow from charity.

Krishna’s statement is astonishing. He says: as long as you are capable of discriminating between gain and loss, no matter how much you talk of virtue, whatever you do will be sin. And if you understand that there is no difference between gain and loss, victory and defeat, life and death, then whatever you do is virtue.

This is a very new dimension of sin and virtue: not of the act, but related to the revolution in the person’s inner being.

Calling something natural does not prove its inevitability. Whatever appears natural to us is natural only on a certain plane—but it changes with a change of plane. As man is now, anger is entirely natural for him. But man can also become a Buddha; then anger becomes utterly unnatural. What is natural or unnatural shifts with each level of consciousness.

A man walking down the road drunk—falling into the gutter is perfectly natural. But a man walking down the road sober—his falling into the gutter is utterly unnatural. Between the drunk and the sober there is no difference in their “man-ness.” The difference is in consciousness. The drunk is as much a man as the sober is.

Where is the difference then? It is the difference of consciousness. The drunk does not have enough consciousness to keep from falling into the gutter. The sober has enough consciousness to keep from falling in. If we fall into anger, it is because of our stupor. If a Buddha does not fall into anger, it is because of his non-stupor—his awareness. It is the same difference that operates with the drunkard. Yes, the difference is inner; that is why it is not immediately visible.

When you are angry, your adrenal glands release alcohol-like substances in you. When you are angry, many intoxicating juices gather in the body. If those glands were removed and then you tried to get angry—only then would we know what is what!

Pavlov did many experiments in Russia, cutting the glands in dogs because of which they keep barking and fighting. A very spirited dog, like an arrow—at the slightest provocation he will be at it. But after cutting that gland, provoke him as much as you like—he does nothing. He just sits.

There is a danger in this line of experiment. Because, if not today then tomorrow, some government will cut people’s glands too. Any government that wants to save itself from revolt and revolution will, sooner or later, take the help of biologists. It is not difficult. In a country like Russia, where every child is to be born in a nursery, those glands can be removed at birth, or an injection of their antidotes can be given.

Then you will see that what we call natural is not absolute. It has been “natural” because through an endless journey with the body it was necessary. And many things that were needed for the body in the past are no longer needed now, yet they keep dragging on.

If we take man’s present condition as the ultimate state, then of course it is all “natural.” But it is not the ultimate state; it can be changed. And change can happen in two ways.

Change can happen by manipulating the body too. But change through the body will be the downfall, not the evolution of the soul. If a man cannot get angry and therefore does not, that man will become impotent. There will be no glory in him. No radiance will arise in his personality. No dignity will come into his eyes. Even the peace of non-anger will not come—because he simply cannot get angry. If a man cannot be bad, there is no meaning in his being good. He is merely incapable, pitiable.

But when a man can be angry and does not, his consciousness is transformed. When he can be angry and does not, the very energy of anger begins to become the energy of non-anger. Then new doors of transformation open in his personality. Then he starts rising above the ordinary man. A superhuman begins to be born within him; he starts becoming beyond-man.

What is natural for man depends on the level of his consciousness. On each level the “nature” will differ. What is natural for a child is no longer natural for a youth. What is natural for a youth is no longer natural for an old man. What is natural for the sick is not natural for the healthy.

So “nature” is not a fixed entity. It is not something static. This is the beauty of man. A stone’s nature is fixed; water’s nature is fixed. That is why in a science book we can write: this is the nature of water, this is the nature of fire.

Man’s glory is precisely that his nature depends on himself. He can give his nature a thousand dimensions, he can evolve. Yes, one basic nature comes with birth. Some people stop right there and take that as the end of nature—that is another matter.

Perhaps you have never noticed: if you place a diamond and a lump of coal side by side, it will never occur to you that the diamond is coal. On the basis of their fundamental element there is no difference. In truth, coal, after being pressed in the earth for thousands, millions of years, becomes diamond. But is the nature of diamond and coal the same? Not at all. Where is coal, and where is diamond! And yet the diamond is made from coal; it is coal’s ultimate journey.

Where man finds himself today—he is like coal. And where people like Buddha, Mahavira, Krishna bring themselves—they are like diamond. The difference is not of nature; the difference is of development.

A primary nature is given to all of us: anger, sex, greed. But this is not the end; it is the beginning. And if we take the beginning to be the end, the journey stops. And it has stopped.

What has been the result? The result has been that the starting point became the final destination. And then each person said, “Of course I will be angry; it is my nature. Man will be angry—inevitably.” Naturally, this has borne fruit, and these fruits are visible in the West. The outcome is that today no one considers himself responsible for any act. He says, “It is my nature.”

A man is hurling abuses in the street; you cannot say to him, “What are you doing?” He will say, “It’s my nature.” A man is stealing; you cannot tell him he is doing wrong. He says, “What can I do? It’s my nature.” If Western psychology has brought the greatest danger, it is that it has freed man from responsibility. He says, “It is my nature,” whatever is happening.

Thus, with Marx and Freud together, a strange situation arose in the West. Marx said that whatever is happening, society is responsible. Freud said that whatever is happening, nature is responsible. Man himself dropped out. If a man steals, society is responsible. If a man murders, society is responsible. So said Marx: there is no personal responsibility, only social responsibility. Therefore, if you want to change the individual, change society; until society changes, the person will remain as he is—we license him as he is.

The individual felt greatly relieved. The heavy anxiety that Krishna, Mahavira, and Buddha had given man—“You are responsible”—fell from his mind. He relaxed. But in that relaxation he remained only what the coal is; the journey beyond it stopped. Certainly, if coal is to become a diamond, it must pass through the fires of anxiety; it is a long journey of millions of years.

Then Freud said: even if you change society, nothing is going to happen. Has anger decreased in Russia? Has ego decreased? Has the Russian citizen changed in any way at the level of true humanity? Nothing has changed. Freud said: the point is not to change society; what is responsible is nature. Until you change nature, nothing can happen.

But how will you change nature? How will you change what is innate? Therefore, man will remain as he is. With an easy mind he should remain as he is! This change, this revolution, this inner transformation—religion, yoga, samadhi—all nonsense. Freud said man will remain as he is. By insisting otherwise, man is unnecessarily thrown into worry. What he is, he is.

Freud’s assertion had an explosive effect in the West. Today there are hippies, beatniks, Provos, and all sorts of others; they are all saying, “This is nature.” And Freud has guaranteed that this is nature and that man will remain what he is. Man is an animal. He has a little intelligence, and through that intelligence he gets himself into trouble. Drop the intelligence and there will be no problem.

If you understand Freud, he is saying: your intelligence is your trouble. Because of it you get into entanglements. What is, is. Intelligence starts thinking, “This should not be; that should be,” and so you create anxiety and go mad. Drop this worrying! Consent to whatever is.

Fine—ease will come, but it will be the ease of coal. The animal is at ease. If one follows Freud completely, man will fall toward the animal—and he has fallen. What Freud says is true, but it is a half-truth. And half-truths are more dangerous than lies.

It is true that there is anger in man—and that it is natural. It is also true that man has the possibility to evolve out of anger—that too is his nature. It is true that there is anger. It is also true that there is a longing to be free of anger—that too is nature. It is hard to find a person in whom there is anger and no longing to be free of it. So anger is nature. And the longing to be free of anger—is that not nature? It is hard to find a person who does not want to transcend himself, who does not want to go beyond himself. What is, is nature. What one wants to become—that too is nature.

And certainly, for the sake of what one wants to become, what is must be transformed. There are methods for that, and the name of that method is religion. If man is only what he is, then religion has no meaning; it is meaningless.

Therefore, if in the West religion lost its entire value, the very deep reason is that Western psychology told man, “This is nature; it will inevitably be so.”

A friend came to me just the day before yesterday. He said, “I was very troubled; I couldn’t sleep—my sleep was lost, and I was anxious. I went to a psychologist. The psychologist said, ‘That’s perfectly fine.’ He asked about my sex life and then told me, ‘Start masturbating.’ I said, ‘What are you advising?’ He said, ‘It’s natural. A man has to do it!’ Since a psychologist was saying it, I agreed.

“Within two years I reached such a state that the same psychologist said, ‘Now you need electric shocks.’ So I took electroshock therapy. We are such fanatics about authority! When something becomes an authority—once the priest in the temple was the authority; whatever he said was truth—now that priesthood is passing into the hands of the psychologist. Whatever he says becomes truth. So I took the shocks. In every way, my personality became disordered.”

To shelter man’s animality in the name of “nature” is dangerous. Perhaps never before have such dark clouds gathered over man as have gathered from this assertion that “whatever is, is; it will be so; it is entirely natural.”

I want to tell you that I too say it is entirely natural. I have deep agreements with psychology—and disagreements as well. I accept that psychology is very right as far as it goes. But the path extends further. Up to where it goes—perfectly right. But where it denies, there it is utterly wrong. Up to where Freud goes—perfectly right; even Krishna and Buddha do not deny that. But Krishna and Buddha say: this is not the end; it is the very beginning. And we must use this beginning in such a way that the end may bear fruit.

Roots are natural, but one has to reach the flower as well. Otherwise, roots are ugly—dirty—buried in darkness—spreading along dark pathways under the ground. They are natural and absolutely necessary, but roots are not flowers. And if a tree were to stop at the roots, and some Freud were to persuade the tree, “Fool, this is your nature,” and the tree stopped and said, “Why rise into the sky? Roots are our nature,” then no flowers would come.

And the irony is that roots exist for the sake of flowers. How great the opposition between flower and root! The flower—blooming in the sky, dancing in the sunlight! The roots—buried in darkness! The contrast is immense, and the harmony is immense too, because without roots there can be no flowers.

Let me say one last thing: flowers cannot be without roots, although roots can be without flowers. It is a great misfortune of life that the lower can exist without the higher, but the higher cannot exist without the lower. If you want to place a golden spire on a temple, you must lay the foundation. Without the foundation there can be no golden spire; but a foundation without a spire can exist—you can lay the foundation and leave it.

What is lower can exist without the higher. But what is higher cannot exist without the lower. Therefore, if we take the lower to be nature, to be fate, to be destiny, then only the roots remain in our hands.

No—the roots are there precisely so that we may reach the flower. The nature of man as we see it today is there precisely so that he may reach the divine. There is anger so that one day the root of anger may become the flower of non-anger. There is lust, sex, so that one day the energy of sex may become the flower of brahmacharya. And until it happens, man ought to be restless; until it happens, he ought to be anxious; until it happens, he ought to be in distress, in pain, in struggle. Peace seized too soon is dangerous, because it can make the beginning into the end. Peace does come—but until the end has arrived, until the destination is reached, the journey must continue.

There are two kinds of peace. One: we sit where we are—the hardship of the journey stops. Another: the day the journey is complete and the destination arrives. If we sit down here and take this to be the destination, peace also comes. And if the destination arrives and we sit, peace also comes.

But there is a great difference between the two. One is the peace of the animal; the other is the peace of the divine.