Life is constantly changing. Only one thing is unchanging: that is your
witnessing capacity. You can see the anger flash by, you can see the
compassion flash by; but the mirror before which they flash remains
always unaffected—and that is your transcendence
Theatre is just entertainment, and who needs entertainment? The
people who are in despair. For a few hours they can forget their despair
and become identified with the theatre.
Who needs literature? A
man who is really living, his life is poetry itself. A man who is really
loving, his life itself is literature.
You will be surprised to
know that the people who have written poetry about love are the people
who have never known love. Writing poetry about love is a substitute.
But writing about food will not help a hungry person; and only hungry
people think of food.
When you are well fed, you don’t think of
food. When you are thirsty, you think of water. But when you are not
thirsty, it will be simply insane to go on thinking about water. It is
impossible.
The people who have created great literature lived in
tremendous tragedy; for example, Dostoyevsky [Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 19th
century Russian novelist], who is perhaps the best novelist the world
has yet produced. But he himself was utterly sad, suicidal, always in
misery, always in despair.
This man could not live his life, but
one has to do something; he projected everything in his literature,
which he had not been able to live. Listening to his literature, reading
his literature you will think, “What a great man!” But if you happen to
meet him, you will feel great pity for him.
Kahlil Gibran must be recognised as one of the best writers of this age. Just read his books: The Prophet, The Garden Of The Prophet, Jesus The Son Of Man,
and you will be thrilled, what kind of a man he is! He talks like the
old prophets—the same language, the same sharpness, the same
meaningfulness. But he himself lived just in an opposite way.
In The Prophet
he talks about love, and perhaps he has written the best lines about
love, but in his own life there was no love, only anger. About anger he
does not write; there is no need, he has enough of it. Love is missing;
he writes about love.
The people who have known Kahlil Gibran were
surprised—how did he manage to create such great books like The
Prophet? The man was almost insane in many ways.
He would throw
things around; he would break things when he was angry; that was his
daily practice. And after that he would write The Prophet. That was a
substitute. Theatre and literature are not life.
Life itself
depends on polar opposites. But it is better not to call them polar
opposites, because really they are complementaries. They look like polar
opposites: the night and the day, life and death—they look like polar
opposites, but it is not true.
There are animals that can see only
in the night. They have better eyes than you have, and they don’t even
need glasses. For them, there is no darkness in the night.
In
fact, their darkness starts with the sunrise, because their eyes are so
delicate that they can see only in darkness. As the sun rises they
cannot open their eyes; the sun is too much. So for the owl, your day is
his night, your night is his day.
This can give you the idea of
complementariness. Darkness simply means less light. And when you say
less light, immediately the opposite polarity disappears. And light
simply means less darkness. Light and darkness are one energy.
It
is just like cold and hot. They are not polar opposites. The same
thermometer can show you, this is cold, how much cold; this is hot, how
hot. The difference is of degrees, not of opposition. They are one
phenomenon, absolutely joined together.
Coldness and hotness are
just degrees of the same phenomenon. There is only one thing beyond the
polar opposites, and that’s what I call enlightenment. Otherwise
everything has its polar opposite.
Enlightenment has no polar
opposite. You may feel the question arising in you, “Then what about
unenlightenment?” That is not a reality; it is only an absence of
enlightenment. And anybody who can be unenlightened has the capacity to
become enlightened. It is good that you can be unenlightened; otherwise,
there would be no way to become enlightened.
Unenlightenment is
simply an absence. Your potential has not grown, has not blossomed, has
not released its fragrance—that’s all. You have remained just a closed
seed; your possibilities have remained possibilities. You never allowed
them to become actualities, realisations.
But there is no such
thing as unenlightenment—only in language. Otherwise everybody has
reached different degrees of enlightenment. Somebody may be just a seed;
that is a degree, the lowest degree. Somebody may be a sprout, somebody
may have grown into a big tree. Somebody may have come to flower, to
fruition.
If you want to transcend the polar opposites of life,
first you have to understand that they are not polar opposites but
complementaries. Second, you have to understand there is certainly
something, which is beyond duality. But to go beyond duality, you have
to become a witness of all that passes, moves, in your being: despair,
ecstasy, a feeling of well-being or sickness, feeling love or hate.
Simply
be a witness, don’t get identified with anything that passes in your
mind. Remember, everything passes, only the witness remains. So why
unnecessarily get identified and in trouble?
Today you were sad,
but you could not keep yourself separate. You could have said, “It is
perfectly good. Let sadness pass. It is a cloud; soon the cloud will
pass and there will be sunlight.” But don’t get identified with the
sunlight either, because there are clouds coming again.
Life is
constantly changing. Only one thing is unchanging: that is your
witnessing capacity. You can see the anger flash by, you can see the
compassion flash by; but the mirror before which they flash remains
always unaffected—and that is your transcendence. And that’s what I call
meditativeness.
Meditate on every state of mind so you can
achieve the witness. Meditation is the way of detaching your witness
from moods, which go on passing.
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