Love and Revolution

The revolution feels to be hot, heady and sharp. Whereas love feels to be soft, smooth and delicate. How do love and revolution go together?

JUST as man and woman go together. Just as the head and the heart go together in you, just as the body and the soul go together in you. The heart cannot exist without the head and the head cannot exist without the heart. They are the positive and the negative, yin and yang. Life consists of polar opposites -- and whenever you choose one against the other you will only be half, you will never be total. The totality has to be courageous. And the greatest courage is to accept the polar opposites, because those polar opposites are illogical -- it should not be so, but it is so. The roots move downwards in the earth and the tree moves upwards. And the upward movement of the tree depends on the downward movement of the roots. It should not be so, it is so illogical. Fried rich Nietzsche said…

The flower of consciousness opens up only when all the garbage that one has accumulated over many many lives is thrown out, otherwise there is no space for the one-thousand petalled lotus to open. It needs a space and we are so full of junk, useless junk, full of memories which are of no use any more. We go on piling up files and files of memories, not only of this life, of many many lives. They are all there, now absolutely useless, but the functioning of our mind is like the functioning of any bureaucracy. I have heard that in the White House the president was very worried because so many files had accumulated. He told his secretary to destroy all those files which were useless and to only keep those which had any use. The secretary immediately started working.

Revolution is political, rebellion is spiritual; revolution needs a crowd, rebellion is individual. And all revolutions without any exception, have failed because the crowd is so unconscious that whatsoever it does is going to fail. The crowd consists of the lowest intelligence. And how can anything beautiful come out of the lowest intelligence? Of course it takes revenge: it kills the czars and it kills the kings; it destroys property, it changes the government. But the people who are absolutely unconscious, whatsoever they do is going to be ultimately a failure. The French Revolution failed, the Russian Revolution failed, the Chinese Revolution failed. All revolutions have failed. And rebellion has always succeeded, but it is individual. A Jesus is a rebel, a Buddha is a rebel, a Lao Tzu is a rebel. We need more rebels in the world and less revolutionaries.

A friend has asked: What relationship can there be, and how, between peace and revolution? What relationship can there be, and how, between compassion and revolution? These two seem opposed. Another friend has asked the same.

Life, continuously, depends on opposition. But we never manage to accept this opposition; hence great difficulty. We say, we accept birth, but we do not accept death. This is sheer madness. Life stands on the opposition of birth and death. Life depends precisely on their polarity. We say, birth is blissful and death is painful. We accept birth; we do not want death. Then we are speaking madness. The day we can accept birth and death together, the flavor of life will be entirely different. If we accept peace and revolution together, life will be something else again. Within, there will be a point where no change is; and without, the ever-turning wheel of change, change, and change. Within, a pin where nothing changes. The divine abides where there is no change. The world abides where there is constant change. And that which is the divine—ever still, silent, mute, where…