Question 1:
Satyadharma, there are things which cannot be said but can be heard. There are ways of saying those things other than in words; they reach deeper, their significance is immense. The most important of those are the tears. No prayer has ever risen higher than the tears of man. No love has ever gone deeper than the tears of man. No gratitude has been wider than the tears of man. A small tear contains infinite oceans of significance, meaning, expressions, feelings, emotions, moods, which words are impotent to express.
Your tears have said everything that you wanted to say and perhaps they have said more than you are conscious of. Your tears are not only the expressions of your conscious, they are expressions of your whole being. They have your silences, they have your sadnesses, they have your blissfulness; their magnitude is endless.
So it was perfectly right that when you found yourself expressionless and words failed you, tears came to help you. They are the last resort as far as expressing the inexpressible is concerned. Now you are asking from here to where? It will like look an odd expression in language but the truth is - and I have to say the truth without bothering about the language... listen carefully. My message is: from here to here. Your here has to become your only time, your only life, your only existence.
These two words contain my whole philosophy: here and now.
They are not separate in existence. Here represents the space, now represents the time. The mystics have always experienced that they are one, but nobody has listened to the mystics. Perhaps man was not mature enough to understand the depth of their declaration that here and now are one.
But modern physics, in the hands of Albert Einstein, has turned almost into mysticism. Nobody has noted the fact, because mystics don't understand modern physics and the physicists do not care about the mystics.
My concern is both, because I cannot see man as complete and whole unless science and religion are looked upon as one energy, experienced in a different way - science in the objective way and religion in the subjective way - but that which is experienced is one. It is neither matter nor God.
Friedrich Nietzsche has declared, "God is dead." I declare, matter is also dead. Between God and matter what has remained alive is just energy; and this energy is expressed in its purest forms as consciousness, and in its crudest forms as matter.
Modern physics has declared - without declaring the death of matter - that there is no matter at all.
With the disappearance of matter and with the death of God, only one energy remains in the whole cosmos. Now time and space cannot be two. They have to be expressions of one energy.
The mystics have simply expressed the oneness of all. Physicists go into detail. Albert Einstein, especially, was the first scientist to come to the conclusion that time is the fourth dimension of matter. Matter has three dimensions, the fourth dimension is invisible and that is time, but it is not separate from matter.
So, from here to here is the journey; from now to now is the pilgrimage. It means you are to learn not to move but to remain still. In movement you are not going to find yourself, but in total stillness and silence you have already found it. And whenever you find it, it will be always here and always now.
Your tears are, without your knowing, preparing the way for this mysterious experience of the unity of time and space. You are not doing it, it is happening on its own accord. All that is great only happens, and all that you can do cannot be greater than you.
If you are seeking the truth, if you are seeking the soul, then you are seeking something bigger than you. You cannot manufacture it, you cannot make it, you can only allow it to possess you, to overwhelm you. The tears are a good beginning... and a mad dance will be a good end.
During the second German occupation of France, a peasant was captured. Now and then he got a letter from his wife who complained she was having difficulty with the farm. She had plenty of seeds, she said, but she was not able to plough the fields herself.
He wrote back, "It is all for the best, my dear, leave the fields unploughed - that's where the guns are." Four days later, two truckloads of gestapo men descended on the farm and dug up all the acreage. Frantically, the wife wrote to her husband telling him what had happened and asked him what to do.
He wrote back a brief note, "Now plant the seeds."
You have just to allow existence; you need not put yourself to great trouble. Just be alert and wait.
Existence itself wants you to become enlightened; it is not your longing, it has nothing to do with you. It is existence itself, through you, which is trying to reach to the stars. Allow it, don't prevent it.
All that you can do, all that you are supposed to do, is not to prevent. Keep the doors open and let the breeze come in and let the sun come in. Allow the existence to use you as a vehicle, as a ladder to reach to the highest possibilities hidden within you.
All other desires are your desires. Desire for money and desire for power and desire for prestige are your desires; they are too small. Existence does not need money, what will existence do with money? Existence does not need power. It has all the power, infinite and eternal. Nothing more can be asked and nothing more can be added to it. What will it do with prestige, respectability, honor?
These are desires of the small mind of man.
But enlightenment is not your desire. It is not part of your mind, it is coming from some deeper source, some higher source, from somewhere beyond. Of course, it is coming through you, but it is not from you. Allow it, don't stand in the way of the passion and the longing to become enlightened and liberated.
If you can do only this much, not to stand in the way, you have done more than can be asked. All that you have not even dreamed of will start showering on you with tremendous benediction, grace, contentment. Then tears will change into a dance.
My whole work is how to transform your tears into a dance.
Question 2:
Mukta, Aristotle is the greatest misfortune that has fallen over the Western mind. I have renamed him, because I don't think Aristotle has been, in any way, a help in the evolution of human consciousness. On the contrary, he has been like a great disease. Hence I have named him Aristotelitis.
And you are thinking that this is a misfortune, that you have not trained yourself and your mind in Aristotelian logic! You are fortunate. It is unbelievable that being a Greek you could manage to escape from Aristotelitis, because it is so widespread. It is bound to be so, since Athens was the place from where Aristotle spread the disease his whole life.
He has made the whole Western mind, and if the West is going to destroy the entire world in a third world war, the whole credit will go to Aristotle, two thousand years ago; because he was the man who had sown the seeds which are now flowering, like nuclear weapons. The whole scientific approach is based on Aristotle's method.
Aristotle divides life into black and white. Either something is right or something is wrong. He does not allow any middle ground. He does not allow any other alternative. 'A' is 'A' and 'A' can never be 'B', that is his foundation. Either you are my friend or you are my enemy. Those who are not my friends are my enemies.
Aristotle's way of thinking is childish. Life is not so simple, life is like the whole spectrum of a rainbow - all the colors and also the negation of all the colors and also the combination of all the colors. It is more than the rainbow because in the rainbow two things are missing, the white and the black.
It is very strange that for Aristotle only white and black exist. In reality, only white and black don't exist - all other colors exist. Black is only the absence of all the colors and white is the presence of all the colors. Because all the colors are present, no color shows up.
You have to understand a little bit about the colors because they will help you to understand Aristotle and his fallacy. When you see the color white, it means all the rays that are falling on the object are being reflected. Nothing is left behind. You can try a small experiment: you can make a fan with seven wings with all the seven colors of the rainbow on it and connect it to electricity. Then let all the seven wings of the fan move fast and you will be surprised - all colors have disappeared, there is only a white wheel moving.
Small things in life... you don't think about them. Why do you always use a white umbrella in the sun? Because it returns all the rays outwards, it does not absorb. That's why in the hot summer under a white umbrella you feel cool, because the sun's rays don't enter. They are all reflected back.
These are the two colors which are not included in existence itself, and these are the two colors on which the whole of Aristotelian logic depends: black and white.
The East never fell victim to any kind of Aristotelian logic. In the East not a single person ever proposed a logic which simply divides existence into black and white. Gautam Buddha proposes a logic which divides life in four. The alternatives become more, the choices become more. If somebody is not your friend, it does not mean he has to be your enemy. He may be simply indifferent or he may be simply ignorant. He may not know anything about you and your enmity at all. Or he may know, but he has no interest in your enmity; hence, he does not have any participation.
Mahavira's logic is perhaps the most perfect in the whole world. He accepts seven alternatives, the whole rainbow. Naturally his logic becomes as complicated as life itself. If you ask Mahavira any question, you cannot hope to get a yes or no answer. If you ask the same question to Aristotle, he will be absolutely ready, either yes or no, because those are the only two alternatives.
Mahavira has used a certain word in a way that is unique in the whole history of mankind. He never uses yes or no, because that creates the fallacy that life is divided in two; it is too simplistic. Mahavira always answers everything with a 'perhaps' - he keeps open other alternatives.
That's why he could not gather a great following. The greatest teacher, the most logical man, could not get a great following. Even today, his followers are not more than three and a half million. After twenty-five centuries, even if he had converted thirty-five couples, they would have produced that many children by this time. Three and a half million... for the Indians it is not a big job.
But he could not attract the ordinary mind. The ordinary mind found that whatever Mahavira says simply goes above his head. You ask him about God and he says, "perhaps." You want some solid answer, whether God exists or not, and he says, "perhaps." Perhaps what? What should we understand by perhaps? It does not mean God exists, it does not mean God does not exist. It simply means: it depends on you, from what aspect you look at it.
There is an aspect from which it is significant to say God exists; there is another aspect from which to say, significantly, God does not exist. And there is also a third possibility: to say that God exists and does not exist, together.
There is also a fourth possibility... just to remain silent; not to answer, because the question is unanswerable. And in this way he goes on. By the time he has finished his discourse about the seven aspects of God, you return home more confused than you had ever been before. Who is going to follow this man? About everything he begins with "perhaps." But he was the most logical man.
Twenty-five centuries ago he talked about the theory of relativity. It took twenty-five centuries for the West to understand - when Albert Einstein brought the theory of relativity into the field of science.
This man, Mahavira, must have had a tremendous insight into existence. He had no lab, nothing to experiment with except his logical correctness.
So, Mukta, you should not think that it is a misfortune. It is a blessing that you never got trapped into Aristotelian thinking. That has destroyed half of the mind of all humanity. It has made everybody look at life in terms of either/or, and life is much more mysterious. It is closer to Mahavira's 'perhaps', than a simple yes and no.
I have heard about a great philosopher who had gone to challenge Mahavira about his philosophy of perhaps. And he said, "You give me any concrete example."
Mahavira said, "The whole of life is the example; but for your pleasure, just visualize in a court a judge asks you, 'Have you stopped beating your wife or not? Answer yes or no, choose. Have you stopped beating your wife or not?' If you say, 'Yes, I have stopped,' it means you were beating her.
If you say 'no,' it means you are still beating her. But it does not allow you any possibility to say, 'I have never beaten my wife.'"
Life cannot possibly be answered in simple ways of yes and no. And now even the scientists in the West are getting rid of Aristotle. Particularly modern physics, after Albert Einstein, has dropped Aristotle and his logic. They have moved closer to Mahavira without knowing anything about Mahavira; because they have penetrated energy fields and they have found life is so complex, you cannot say yes, you cannot say no. You have to find something different, a third alternative.
One logician has suggested a new word, which is being used and becoming more and more current, and that is 'po'. When you cannot say yes, when you cannot say no, say po. But po means 'perhaps', it cannot mean anything else.
With Aristotle's logic, Euclid created a certain geometry, Euclidean geometry. And as Aristotle's logic is falling down, losing its credibility, two-thousand-year-old Euclidean geometry - which is still being taught in the colleges and the universities - is also losing its credibility in the eyes of great scientists. Because it was based on Aristotle's logic, the base has proved false and now a thousand and one questions have arisen about Euclid's geometry.
For example, Euclid says that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. That is his definition of a straight line: the shortest distance between two points. Modern physics says that you cannot draw a straight line, because you are sitting on a globe. So though it may look like a straight line because it is so small, just go on increasing it from both the ends and finally you will meet again at the same point and you will say, "My God, it has become a circle."
If it becomes a circle when stretched from both the ends, that means that when you were thinking it was a straight line it was only a part, a small part, of a vast circle. No part of a circle can be straight.
It has to be an arc, but the arc is so small that it is almost invisible to the eyes.
All the definitions of Euclid have fallen flat. A line is that which always has length, but you cannot draw a line which has only length. A point is defined by Euclid as that which has neither breadth nor length; but you cannot draw a point in actuality. Euclid is absolutely fictitious.
Mukta, you are also fortunate that, although you have been born in Athens, in Greece, you remained out of the contagious disease of Aristotle and Euclid. It is not a misfortune, on the contrary it is a great blessing.
Dick took a civil service examination for a job as a rural mailman. His examiner asked him, "How far is it from the earth to the sun?"
He considered for a moment and then said, "If you are going to put me on that route, I resign."
It is perfectly good that you resigned from being an Aristotelian, because that is the route from the moon to the sun. Dick misunderstood; so have you misunderstood, otherwise listening to me for so long you could not have asked this question. I have always been against Aristotle because he is not a mystic. He is not a poet, he is not a creative artist, he is not a musician, he is not a dancer. He is not a scientist either.
He had two wives, and he writes in his book on logic that women have fewer teeth than men. Now this is sheer stupidity. Having two wives, he could have said to Mrs. Aristotle 'A', or Mrs. Aristotle 'B', "Just open your mouth and let me count the teeth." That is a simple experiment, it does not need an atomic energy commission or a nuclear lab.
In his own home he had two labs already there; or if he was afraid he could have counted their teeth while they were asleep, and he should have done so before he was going to write about it. But he simply wrote a superstition which was prevalent in Greece and is still prevalent. It is simply a corollary of the belief that women cannot have equality with men, in anything, in any way... how can they have an equal number of teeth?
It seems that for centuries nobody has bothered. Men can be forgiven because they are all male chauvinists, but what were the women doing? Standing for hours before mirrors, at least one woman could have counted her teeth. But not a single woman has even raised the question. They also accepted the idea. Such is the mental slavery of the world. Once an idea becomes accepted, you simply go on accepting it. You stop inquiring whether it has any validity or not.
And even a man like Aristotle, who is called the father of Western logic... I cannot consider him as having a logical mind. He is as superstitious as anybody else. He simply accepted the idea that women have fewer teeth than men. A scientific mind would have inquired into the fact.
In fact I may be the first man in the whole history of mankind who did count the teeth of a woman, because my professor of logic was still insisting that when Aristotle says... and Aristotle is no ordinary man - a great logician, the greatest the West has given birth to, and he must be right.
I said, "I don't bother about whether he is a great logician or not." And I stood up and asked the girls in the class whether any girl was courageous enough to come out? I wanted to count her teeth.
They looked at each other. I said, "This is significant not just as a logical question. It is a question of women's equality with men. Somebody must dare, and if you don't come up here then I am getting four persons ready, outside of the class, to catch hold of one of you and forcibly count your teeth, because I cannot accept this statement unless I have found it in truth, in reality."
Then, a girl, feeling very shy, stood up. The professor said, "What nonsense is this?"
I said, "This is not nonsense, you remain silent. If you want proof I will count your teeth also, otherwise keep quiet." And I counted her teeth. They were an equal number, there was no difference at all. And the professor became so angry with me that he threatened he would resign from the college. I said, "You can resign, but that does not mean that I have to accept some nonsense - even though the nonsense is very ancient and spoken and written by a great name." Stupidity remains stupidity.
Question 3:
Rafia, you are right. The so-called religions and their saints and sages have created much fuss, absolutely unnecessarily, about the art of life. There is no need to be serious about it. Seriousness is a sickness, and the true religion would not like you to be psychologically sick. It would like you to be physically healthy, to be psychologically healthy, because only in a healthy body, in a healthy mind, can a healthy soul be realized more easily.
Just remember the definition of health. When you don't feel your body at all, your body is healthy.
You feel your head only when you have a headache. When you don't have any headache, you don't have any head either - it is simply light, it has no weight. When your legs are hurting, you have them.
When they are not hurting, they are absent. When the body is healthy... my definition of health is that you are absolutely unaware of its existence, whether it is there or not makes no difference.
And the same is true about the healthy mind. It is only the insane mind which is felt. When the mind is sane, silent, it is not felt. When the body and mind both are in a stillness, your soul can be experienced more easily, with a laughter. There is no need to be serious at all.
Particularly here with me, laughter is the way, seriousness is the hindrance. There are situations in which one feels serious, but if one is alert enough, one can laugh even in those situations.
Then laughter becomes a tremendously helpful technique in transforming you, a great alchemy.
Hymie Goldberg went to his doctor, feeling very run down due to worry over money matters. "Relax,"
the doctor ordered, "just two weeks ago I had another fellow who was upset because he could not pay his tailor's bills. I told him to forget them and now he feels great."
"I know," said Goldberg, "I am his tailor."
Now, there are situations... but if you are a little alert, even in the situation of Hymie Goldberg, you would have laughed, "This is strange! This doctor has suggested to my customer, 'forget all about paying money,' and he is feeling great. And he is telling this to me and I am the tailor."
But such situations, such ridiculous situations, you will find everywhere. Life is full of such situations.
A man got on the bus with at least a dozen children. A little old lady asked him if they were all his.
"Of course not," the man snapped, "I am a contraceptive salesman and these are all complaints."
Just look around, you will find all kinds of situations. Learn the art of enjoying them.
Hymie Goldberg went to an art exhibition with Mrs. Goldberg. Hymie was gazing rapturously at a painting of a beautiful girl, dressed only in a fig leaf. The title of the painting was SPRING.
"Well," snapped Mrs. Goldberg, "are you waiting for autumn?"
Joe had been bitten by a dog. The wound was taking a long time to heal, so he went to see his doctor who ordered the dog to be brought in. Just as the doctor suspected, the dog had rabies. "I am afraid it is too late to give you serum," the doctor told Joe.
Joe sat down at the doctor's desk and begin to write fanatically. "Perhaps it won't be so bad,"
consoled the doctor, "there is no need to write your will right now."
"I am not making out my will," replied Joe, "I am just writing out a list of people I am going to bite."
If nothing can be done and I am going to be mad, then why not use the opportunity? Such a great opportunity....
Rafia, seriousness is not at all a part of my teachings. Enjoy life, laugh at the ridiculousness of things all around. Laugh the whole way to God's temple. Those who have laughed enough have reached; the serious people are still wandering with long faces.
Even God is not interested in serious faces. You just think of God. If all your serious saints have gathered in heaven for century after century, neither smiling nor laughing, not anybody cutting a joke... amongst those dead saints and all kinds of dodos, God must have committed suicide.
Because it has been a great theological problem - why God never created anything after he created man. And in the Middle Ages great theologians, particularly Christians, had written treatises upon treatises, pondering over the question of why he had not created anything more.
My simple answer is that after creating man he realized his mistake. Everything had been perfectly good, but with man everything became serious. Complaints, grumpy people, all kinds of fights, wars; and God must have realized, "If I had stopped before creating man, existence would have lived in peace and silence without any disturbance." But now, it is out of his hands.
Since then nothing has been heard about the fellow. Perhaps he may have survived a few days, a few months, a few years, a few centuries at the most... till the saints started arriving in heaven.
Seeing those saints covered with dust, sad faces, any creator would have committed suicide out of shame, realizing that "This is my creation."
Rafia, you need not be a serious saint. You have to be a laughing artist, a laughing musician, a laughing dancer. Do whatever you feel like doing, but never forget that laughter is one of the most essential human qualities, which raises man to the divineness.
Okay, Maneesha?
Yes, Beloved Master.